The Books of My Life: Hollywood Cinema (Maltby)

 

In Hitchcock’s Films, Robin Wood's seminal study of several of the American films of director Alfred Hitchcock, Wood opens the book by asking what at the time, was a very important question, why should we, he asks, take Hitchcock seriously? Richard Maltby opens his book on  Hollywood cinema, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 2003) by asking a similar question. Why should we take Hollywood seriously? While Wood argued for taking Hitchcock seriously to sceptics for whom Hitchcock could not be taken seriously because he worked in a commercial medium, 

Maltby, giving us a preview of coming historical, commercial, cultural, and theoretical attractions in the book, answers his own question about why we should take Hollywood seriously in his introduction to Hollywood Cinema. We should take it seriously because Hollywood is an industry, a corporation, an industry and corporation that sells dreams to willing consumers who wish to “purchase" its product.  In the rest of the book, which is divided into four parts,  "The Commercial Aesthetic", “Histories", “Conventions", and “Approaches", Maltby tells us what Hollywood is, a  dream factory which sells its commodity. It uses, Maltby argues, technological and cultural strategies to sell willing consumers pleasure. 

Hollywood, as Maltby notes in part one of the book, “The Commercial Aesthetic", was and largely still is, much like any other corporation that arose in the corporate era of American capitalism. It was and is a vertically integrated (capitalist pop linguists call this synergy today) managed corporation which is structured hierarchically and whose goal it is to turn a profit and make monies for its stockholders. It does this like any other modern corporation, it sells a commodity, pleasure, dreams, utopian fantasies. Genres, Maltby argues, such as the Western, with their conventions, stereotypes, and repetitive visual motifs, is one of the things Hollywood uses to sell pleasure and to essentially pre-sell films to waiting audiences who were familiar with genre repetitions and enjoy them and also enjoy the novelties Hollywood seeds into these genre repetitions.

In the “Histories” section of the book Maltby  takes readers on a journey from the Hollywood of the Classic era of 1910 to 1948 with its vertically integrated studios that produced, at least in its big studios, A pictures, B pictures, shorts, newsreels, cartoons, and distributed and exhibited their product, to the Paramount decision by the US Supreme Court, a decision that marks the end of the classic Hollywood era since it forced Hollywood to divest of its theatres and made it easier for other companies to distribute product. Next Maltby takes us to the era of the New Hollywood from 1948 to the 1980, a period characterised by roadshow films and spectaculars like Ben Hur and Jaws, and an increasing reliance on expensive advertising. Finally Maltby takes us to the era of the conglomerate Hollywood since 1980, with its, studios as distributors of largely high stake big budget spectacles, its big and spectacular advertising budgets, and its horizontal integration or “synergies”, an era that also brings us full circle back to the age of vertical integration. 

In the technology chapter of the “Histories” section Maltby takes aim at a prominent theoretical approach to film and Hollywood cinema since the 1950s, Bazinian realism. While Bazin argued that technological changes were the product of Hollywood’s seeking after increasing realism, Maltby instead argues that Hollywood realism, such as it was (movies cannot, as Maltby notes, be fully realistic given their manipulations of time, space, narrative, and performance) and is, was the product of technological developments that were not teleological but piecemeal and which ebbed and flowed. These technological innovations, Maltby argues, had to do one thing, they had to fit into the dominant industrial, hierarchical, and aesthetic practises of Hollywood. Technological changes such as sound, colour, widescreen, and digital forms, the four case studies Maltby offers, had, in other words, to intersect with preexisting and standardised, routinised, rationalised, and bureaucratised (all these, as Max Weber notes, were was central to mass business and American mass corporate capitalism) Hollywood genres, styles, and editing strategies. The moral of this story seems to be that the more Hollywood changed the more it had to stay the same. 

Next in the Politics chapters in the "Histories" section Maltby argues that Hollywood has generally preached the gospel of political neutrality. He also notes, however, that at certain times the social problem film, for example, has been significant in Hollywood. It was significant, as Maltby notes, during the New Deal and the post-World War II era, despite the McCarthy witch hunt. It was also important, as Maltby tells us, during World War II when Hollywood, just like the US, went to war with its allies including the USSR against the evil Axis nations. Finally, Maltby rightly notes that though Hollywood has typically sought the widest possible audiences for its films in order to maximise profits Hollywood is also embedded within a culture in which ideology, the fetishisation and universalisation of capitalist economic notions and notions of American exceptionalism, are present and universalised. 

Something else Maltby takes aim at in the “Histories” section of the book is auteur theory, the notion that there are film authors, mostly directors, who have worked within the Hollywood industrial and profit making machine. Emphasisng that Hollywood is a dream factory, Maltby raises questions about the auteurist theory that has dominated film theory into the 1970s and which has continued to prove a useful way of organising the study of Hollywood ever since. 

In the “Conventions’ section of Hollywood Cinema Maltby explores how Hollywood uses space, time, performance, and narrative to produce the product it wishes to sell to consumers. Maltby argues that Hollywood strategies like camera placement, the centring of shots, “invisible” editing, star personas, the emphasis on action, self-censorship, and reading movies between the lines, to note a few examples, are means that Hollywood uses to manipulate audiences into purchasing and watching their product often a second time. Along the way Maltby argues against the crystal ball textualist approach to film, one that assumes everything you need to know about a text is in the text (an odd kind of contextualism) noting that film is not a text; it moves.

In the final section of the book Maltby explores the history of criticism and scholarly analysis of Hollywood product. He divides this section of the book, Approaches, into two parts: Criticism and Theory. 

I was quite impressed with Malby’s book on Hollywood cinema. That said, and in the critical spirit of F.R. Leavis and Robin Wood I had several buts. I would like to have seen more discussion by Maltby of tone (melodrama, drama, tragedy, comedy, satire, parody) in Hollywood movies, aspects of the movies that are just as important as genre. In fact, I think many of what are thought of as genre forms are actually tonal forms. 

I did not find Maltby’s argument against auteurism, an old argument, by the way, one which parallels the main criticisms of auteurism during the 1950s and 1960s, namely, that Hollywood was too commercial to have an author, compelling. Hollywood, as Robin Wood notes, can be both a commercially oriented medium engaged in commerce and still have a few authors, like Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra, working within it. 

Maltby could have done a better job of exploring how Hollywood’s economies of scale have helped it become successful in overseas markets and how its restoration of control over exhibition in the United States has squeezed not only foreign movies out of the domestic market but domestic “independent” films out of the marketplace. Remaking foreign movies, of course, was and is also a strategy Hollywood has used to squeeze foreign movies out of the market (something Hollywood TV has sometimes done). 

I liked Maltby’s contention that different groups of spectators read Hollywood films differently, some read them more literally and fundamentalist like while others read them, as Hollywood also intended, between between the lines. Reading between the lines, however, requires a degree of cultural capital and different caches of cultural capital exist leading to different readings of these between the lines. Some spectators pay attention to mise-en-scene (cultural capital acquired via schooling) others pay almost exclusive attention to special effects (the effect of socialisation to the popcorn spectacle movie). Maltby could and should have paid more attention to the issue of cultural capital and the different degrees of cultural capital readers have.

Maltby could have done more exploration of qualitative and quantitative studies of how audiences actually read film texts. Speaking of how audiences “read” texts, while I liked Maltby’s discussion of the literal and “sophisticated” readings of the film Casablanca his reading of the readings of the film is too simplistic. Many readers of Casablanca today on YouTube, self proclaimed reactors, don’t know enough about World War II to grasp the propaganda, Rick as a metaphor for the US, in the film, while others literally hate Ilsa through much of the film because they do not pay attention to her gestures and her mention that she thought her husband Laszlo was dead. I should also note that many “readers” of Bringing Up Baby read the film literally and not between the lines and criticise it for being ‘unrealistic”. Many readers of the film, in other words, are embedded within ideologies of realism, something prominent in amateur film “criticism” these days, and aren’t “entertained” by Bringing up Baby's comic and intentional unrealism. Additionally, given the historical amnesia of many “readers” they don’t really comprehend how Hollywood movies were made for maximum consumption and could and were sometimes read against the Code since they aren’t really aware of the Code.

All that said Hollywood Cinema is one of, it not, the best English language introduction to Hollywood I have ever read. I agree wholeheartedly with Maltby that academic criticism has generally become not only too focused on aesthetics and dominated far too often by notions of political and ideological correctness. I wholeheartedly applaud Maltby for doing something too many of these academic critics don’t do; focusing on the industry, the dream factory, that produces films in order to make profits and the means (genre, narrative strategies, use of space, manipulation of time, performance strategies) it uses to produce films that appeal to audiences, mostly 14 to 25 year olds in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era. I agree with Maltby that Hollywood has tried to insulate itself from governmental interference in its affairs not only through lobbying efforts and through self-regulation but by making its films ambiguous enough to be appreciated and read in multiple ways by those who go to see see Hollywood films. And, as I said earlier, I liked, really liked, how Maltby argued that spectators were central to Hollywood’s strategies and that movies were made to be “read” literarily, akin to how religious fundamentalists read the Bible (if selectively) and more complexly by readers with more expansive degrees of cultural capital. I appreciate Maltby’s contention that Hollywood has sold the American dream and the notion of American exceptionalism to audiences at home and abroad. In general, I think Maltby deserves praise for his descriptive approach, his sociological, ethnological, historical, physiological, anatomical, and cognitive science approach to Hollywood cinema, something often lacking from both film criticism and film scholarship these days and, therefore, something which is much needed. Kudos. Very, very, highly recommended despite its sometimes too reductionist economic approach. It must always be remembered that the infrastructure that undergirds economic ideologies is cultural.

Life as Crisis Management: The Costco Kiada (aka, the Costco Muck-up)

 

I recently decided to join the Costco Club. I did it for several reasons. First, Costco is coming to where I live and I wanted to have a membership before it opens. Second, Costco had a bed I wanted, a bed brand the New York Times’s Wirecutter liked, and I needed a new twin instead of a full bed for myself. Third, if you joined and used a code you got a $45 dollar credit toward future purchases.

Anyway, I ordered the bed, got it, put it on my new Zinus bed frame and liked it (it is quite comfortable) and liked the experience I had with Costco. So I decided to use my $45 dollar credit and order two items amounting to over $800 dollars. 

I looked forward to receiving these items then I learned there was a problem. My order was cancelled. It took me 40 minutes with the chat associates to learn why. That, by the way, was an experience in and of itself. The first associate was going to transfer me to his supervisor but transferred me instead to a private home telephone number. The person who answered was not amused. The second associate eventually said that my shipping and billing addresses were different and that was why the order was cancelled. She said the latter had the address and the apartment number on the same line while the former had the exact same address with the apartment number on a second line instead. How horrible! No wonder the computer could not make sense of it. Computers we should always remember, thanks to their literalism, cannot see that two same addresses with a slight variation are the same.

So, I went to change my addresses. To go back a bit I do recall that when I ordered the two items that were cancelled that I noticed that the shipping address, according to the Costco website had a New England zip code. That was odd since I did not live in New England and Costco had sent my bed to the right address and billed the order to the correct credit card. So, I changed my shipping address before I ordered. When I went back to look at the addresses again after my forty minute chat and call with Costco customer service agents, I found that both the shipping and the billing were exactly the same. Still I changed them to the same address Costco, using USPS data no doubt, suggested. Will it work? Who knows.

Will I be ordering from Costco again? I don’t know. Possibly not. I can get the items I wanted locally and will likely do so within a few months. At least then I won’t have to screw around with stupid computers and stupid websites not to mention customer service agents.

Postscript: So, I chatted with a Costco representative to try to ascertain if my billing and shipping addresses were the same. This turned out, not surprisingly, to be Kafkaesque. Chat sent me to member services on the phone. Member services sent me to online. Online sent me to orders. All in all I spent an hour on the phone being passed from one customer service person to another who told me they could not help but someone else could. Could that someone else help me? Perhaps. Only time and ordering something will tell. Stay tuned.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Musings on Movies, Evaluating Movies, and Cultural Capital

 

Last night I watched two movies on the over the air Movie channel: Prime Cut (1972) and End of the Game (1976). I had seen both films before, the former just a few weeks ago also on the Movie channel (with blurring of nudity and cleansing of language, both of which one can easily figure out), the latter fifty years ago with my dear friend Duane Stigen at a cinema in Middletown itself, Muncie, Indiana. Both Duane and I were students at Ball State University at the time.

My initial reaction to Prime Cut, a film directed by Michael Ritchie, was that I liked it. I am a dark comedy or black comedy kind of guy after all and Prime Cut is definitely a dark comedy. Prime Cut is a film which reflects American films increasing adventurousness in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In fact, I am still amazed and stunned that a film this dark could have been made in the United States even outside of Hollywood, as this film was. 

Christ Petit, who did the entry for the Prime Cut in the Time Out Film Guide, describes the film, and rightly so, as a mash up of pulp gangster fiction and fairy tale with Lee Marvin as Nick Devlin, playing the white knight to Gene Hackman’s Mary Ann, the dark knight. It is a noirish fairy tale which reveals the darkness at the heart of America including middle America. The film is set in Kansas City and rural Kansas where Mary Ann's meat packing plant is. Mary Ann is not only selling cattle and pig meat at his meat factory. He is also selling female flesh to the rich. (Hello Jeffrey Epstein). There is no difference between selling cattle and pigs and female flesh, female commodities raised from youth in nearby orphanages, Mary Ann tells Devlin when hit man Devlin raises moral questions about what Mary Ann is doing.

Devlin and his fully armed crew, have been sent by his bosses—gangster capitalists—from Chicago to collect the dues ($500 grand) Mary Ann owes the Company. One of his first acts (Devlin as White Knight) after arriving at Mary Ann’s meat plant—he arrives as the sale of female flesh is in progress—is to save Poppy (Sissy Spacek), who asks for his help, from the clutches of Mary Ann, his hired gun hands, and the rich sellers checking out the female flesh for sale in the pens (Mary Ann as Black Knight). By the way, all the female flesh for sale in the pens, it appears, are named after flowers (a reference to their soon to be deflowering after purchase?).

Chris Petit also notes in his entry in the Time Out Film Guide that a couple of set pieces in Prime Cut mirror the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly his North by Northwest (1959), something that is certainly intentional. The first finds Devlin and his crew running for their lives through a busy all-American fair complete with the Lawrence, Kansas marching band and a mannequin cow filled with milk which can be put into cups by pressing on the simulated teat of the cow. The second finds Devlin and Poppy running for their lives as a terrifying and horrifying combine bears down on them. Both set pieces point up the fact that the White All-American types who are at the county fair are blissfully ignorant about not only what is happening at the fair but are largely blissfully ignorant about the darkness—the violence, the misogyny, the imperialism, the collateral damage, the forced prostitution, the heroin—at the heart of the US and, thanks to the US, around the world, including in Southeast Asia.

The second film, End of the Game (Der Richter und sein Henten), which was directed by Maximilian Schell and written by Frederich Durrenmatt and Schell, I did not like when I first saw it. In fact, I hated the film. I thought it was the worst film I had ever seen at the time. Looking back on it, one has to take my “evaluation” of the film with a very large grain of salt. There were a lot of things in the film which went right by my head. I was, after all, only a sophomore in college and most of the movies I had seen up to that point were mainstream Hollywood films. I had yet to see films made in Europe or Japan, though that would soon would thanks to my move to Indiana University, and I had yet to take film classes which introduced me to the workings of narrative in film, mise-en-scene in film, the use of music in film, editing in film, and the various styles of acting in film. That too would soon change thanks to film course offerings at IU.

Between 1976, when I first saw End of the Game, and 2026, when I saw it for the second time, I had changed a lot. I was, thanks to the cultural capital that comes with age, education, and experience, better able to get the references, some satirical, in the film, a detective movie that explores the darkness at the heart of German Switzerland. I was also able grasp and to better appreciate the several styles of acting in the film, the way the film was cut, the films limited Brechtianism, and the films' dark humour in the film. For all these reasons and more I quite liked End of the Game on second viewing.

I guess the moral of the story is that we humans can, though we often don't, change. Some of this change comes from growing up and opening ourselves up to learning. Thank the lord Beezus for universities, teachers, and books. Amen.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Southernbelle Reacts Reacts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The theory of human devolution, the notion that humans are deeply flawed, that humans have devolved rather than evolved or that devolution and evolution occur simultaneously in the human community has been around for a long time. One can, of course, trace aspects of it back to the Christian notion that Adam and Eve fell into original sin when Eve, in the second mythic tale of creation in the Tanakh, offered the willing Adam a bite from the proverbial apple which made both of them realise they were naked (note that this has, in actuality, no relation to sex though later puritanical Christians did tie original sin to sex at least before marriage). Apparently, god preferred to keep his human creations innocent and naive kind of like the gatekeepers of 1950s and 1960s American television who made the presence of toilets and talk of pregnancy, at least in English, verboten (apparently they did not understand Spanish as in "Lucy in Enceinte"). Christian Calvinism, of course, really picked up and ran with the notion of original sin. For hardcore Calvinism humans were and are, to put it nicely, fallible.

In the nineteenth century, sources tell us, an era when science was deeply wedded to a unilinear and progressive notion of evolution, science got into the devolution game as well. In 1857, for example, the French physician Benedict Morel argued that drug and alcohol use could lead to social degeneration or devolution in the offspring of those taking drugs and alcohol. In 1880 English zoologist Ray Lankester argued in his book Degeneration that degeneration or devolution was one of three paths Darwinian evolution might take. In 1909 the Baden born American ichthyologist Carl Eigenmann, who taught at my alma mater Indiana University and for whom a hall of accommodation for graduate students is named, argued that devolution occurred amongst those species who took to living in caves.

Devolution was also, according to sources, applied to human beings during these years by some. Thuringian physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon opined that races of humanity could devolve from higher forms into primitive forms. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were White and that all other races of man,who came from them, other than the Caucasian race, of course, had devolved thanks to environmental factors such as too much or too little sun and poor and poorer diets. Leclerc like Blumenbach, believed in the devolution of species from higher forms due to environment, climate, and diet, while also arguing that such devolution could potentially be reversed. 

The notion of human devolution was also something that interested many writers and musicians from the late eighteenth century on. Jonathan Swift, for example, played with the notion of human devolution in his satirical book Gulliver’s Travels of 1726. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine of 1895 portrayed a future world in which the human race had devolved into two forms: the Morlocks and Eloi. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story “The Rats in the Wall” starred a group of devoluted humans. Cyril Kornbluth's 1951 satirical short story (satire, of course, is also generally deadly serious as well as being darkly humorous) “The Marching Morons” portrayed a future where dysgenic or anti-social and maladaptive evolutionary pressures led to the rise of massive numbers of morons who a small group of geniuses had to assure did no damage to both others or to themselves. The satirical and parodic Kent, Ohio rock band Devo, who formed in 1973 and who rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, made devolution a part of their very name, a name they took in shortened form from a Christian pamphlet on which a devil with the word D-EVOLUTION was portrayed (see their song "Jocko Home", in particular, a song title that comes from the same pamphlet). What was originally a joke, says a source, became much more serious after the murder of four students at Kent State University, which some members of Devo attendted) by the Ohio National Guard and the subsequent realisation by members of the band that responses to that murder—specifically that this murder was not murder—could be explained by a a devoluted human herd clone mentality that functioned automatically in cognitive terms thanks to the disciplining or socialised enforcement (political and ideological correctness).

I mention all of this if briefly and selectively because it seems to me that anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the wasteland that is social media like YouTube must conclude that not only is devolution a general human condition (social media seemingly has replaced American television as the vast wasteland, as the even vaster wasteland) but that with each new group of reactors to, for example, the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer human devolution seems to be increasing compared to earlier crops of reactors, reactors (each social media generation a degeneration?) like SoFie REacts, The Lexie Crowd, and Domi.e all of whom were all slightly above average with SoFie being the most above average. (The same thing, by the way, holds true for reactors to Firefly, Sherlock, and Doctor Who).

Perhaps the poster child for this further devolution of what is already devolved is Southernbelle Racts. I had seen and heard Southernbelle Reacts reactions before she began to react to Buffy recently. I had perused her reactions to a later Joss Whedon created television show Firefly. In Southernbelle Reacts reactions to Firefly I noticed what seems to be her modus operandi: she gabs and gabs over each episode of Firefly she reacts to missing important plot and character points in the process. In her reactions to Buffy Southernbelle Reacts has compounded this attention deficit disorder (talking rapidly over television shows that require attention because they are unfolding texts (unattending, of course, is a common malady among YouTube reactors though often not to the degree it is with SoBelle) who even misses the rather obvious clues laid down about Angel from episode one to seven, season one...wow) with the questionable assumption that Buffy is a show for teens and tweens, an assumption grounded in nothing more than, presumably, the name of the show and/or the television channel it was on (initially the WB, later UPN). It is certainly not grounded in research either on what the author of the series said. (For Whedon, by the way, the title of the show was both parodic and satirical and explanatory. Nor was it based on data research, research shows that in the middle of the shows run the average age of the Buffy watcher was 27 or wandering why so many academics had written about Buffy (who are hardly tweens or teens. (Research, by the way is not a strong point for most of the reactors to Buffy though some do have more cultural capital to draw on than others). One would think that after watching Firefly Southernbelle Reacts would make the connection that Whedon shows are not only unfolding texts but are deadly serious amidst all the fun and tonal play and that they share several common themes (e.g., existentialism, chosen families). One wonders if she even realises that Whedon was deeply involved in both shows.

Southernbelle Reacts may be amongst the worst, in attention deficit terms and cultural capital terms, of the new crop of Buffy reactors. If we delineate three mediocre ideal types—mediocre highbrow, mediocre middlebrow, and mediocre lowbrow or mediocre plus, mediocre in between, and mediocre negative (SoFie Reacts is above mediocre but below excellent for comparative purposes)—one can easily argue that Watch This! With Kevin and Joe are mediocre highbrow or plus though their reactions to Buffy aren't as incisive as their reactions to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, a thriller that is in their wheelhouse since they appear to be fans of the James Bond films. North by Northwest, of course, is a Bond film before Bond films and Kevin and Joe view it exclusively in those terms and actually do a good job of talking about each scene of the movie. Chance's House of Horror, Shadowcat (a Canadian), and Nythical Reacts are decent in a mediocre middlebrow or mediocre in between sort of way. RolyPolyOllie Reactions, JayPerView, and JerBear Reacts are mediocre lowbrow or negative. Anna Alexander and 2 Girls 1 Episode, both of whom are below the gentleman's C average, and rival Southernbelle Reacts in attention deficit. Like her they also try desperately, too desperately, to be witty but are clearly unable to do so (perhaps proving in the process that the English are often right about Americans and wit) and lack the cultural capital in which to analyse the show in intellectual and scholarly terms. Tyler Alexander, who does have a degree if cultural capital thanks to his days studying creative writing at the University of Hull, is in a politically and ideologically correct world all his own. He makes even me, who makes use of critical theory regularly, cringe at his use of crystal ball textualist representational theories of writing and filmmaking.

I can hear the Beatles's song "You Never Give Me Your Money" as I type. How apropos when thinking about social media in this everybody wants to be a star postmodernist age.

Musings on Capitalist Free Enterprise...Again...

 

The profitic prophets of free enterprise capitalism, cheerleaders and demagogues that they inherently are, like to claim that nobody does it better than free enterprise capitalism. Every month, however, free enterprise capitalism reminds me that bullshit, including capitalist free enterprise bullshit, to often makes the world go round.

This month I was reminded that much of the rhetoric of capitalist demagoguery is bullshit in a couple of instances. First let’s talk garbage. Our garbage and recycling is picked up by the private company County Waste and Recycling on Monday morning's thanks to a deal our landlord cut with this company. They don’t, however, always pick up our garbage and recycling on time. This week they picked up the garbage. The recycling, however, remains sitting on Caroline waiting for them to pick,. As I type it is Thursday, four days after it is supposed to be collected, and there is no sign of County Waste and Recyclling.

Now let’s talk satellite digital television. As I have said on these “pages” previously I have all sorts of problems with digital television. I live on a busy street and when a car goes by at speed (30 mph is the speed limit) my over the air signal disappears for a few seconds and, on rarer occasions, for longer. That is not the only problem with my over the air digital signal, however. The last couple of weeks the signal has disappeared twice on the Minnesota based Hubbard Broadcasting owned Albany broadcaster WNYT's sub-channels 51.2, 51.3, and 51.4 right in the middle of the movie on the Movies channel which, to say the least, rather annoying. Is it the satellite going out? Or is it something else? Presumably WNYT knows.

The Books of My Life: Racism, Sexism, and the University

 

In June of 1992 twelve graduate students in the Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver sent an anonymous letter to the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UBC accusing several White male professors in the Department of being racist and sexist. A few months later in November of 1993 six more students joined the chorus of voices claiming that UBC’s Political Science department was sexist and racist. 

Instead of investigating these accusations internally through UBC’s administrative officers tasked with investigating harassment and multiculturalism or by the recently appointed vice-president of Equity, an outsider was tasked with investigating the accusations, the Vancouver lawyer Joan McEwen. The McEwen report, which was finally issued in 1995, found the accusations of the graduate students credible. Even the president of UBC, David W. Strangway, believed the accusations though most of the administrators at UBC did what university administrators usually do, they sat with one leg on one side of the fence and the other on the other side. What the administrative bureaucrats at UBC did do was mandate that no further graduate students would be admitted to the Department of Political Science for a time. 

UBC sociologist Patricia Marchak in her analytical and ethnographic study of this battle in the culture wars being fought all across the English settler society world, finds the conclusions of the McEwen Report less than credible in her book Racism, Sexism, and the University: The Political Science Affair at the University of British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). To Marchak, who was the Dean of Arts in the Faculty of the Arts when the affair began, the evidence, in the McEwen Report was not only anaemic. It was grounded in ideological correctness. In fact, according to Marchak, it was McEwen, who introduced racism and sexism into the report by repeatedly using terms like “white”, “female”, and “Jewish" in her final report, a report that sounds from its description more like a prosecutorial brief than an investigation of the facts of the case.

While racism and sexism seemed to be, on the surface, what the UBC Political Science affair was about Marchak argues that this battle in a long standing culture war was really about power. It was about, Marchak argues, who had the power to determine the Political Science curriculum at UBC, who had the power within the hierarchical Political Science Department at UBC, whether the Political Science Department at UBC would be one in which truth grounded in empirical evidence was pursued or good causes were promoted, and whether academic freedom and Enlightenment rationality (empirical facts and empirical context as evidence) or postmodern relativism (perceptions as facts) would prevail in the UBC Department of Political Science. As Marchak notes, this battle for the soul of the university was hardly singular to UBC or Canada. There were battles like this in other universities across the English settler society world in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US, where Trump and his comrades are trying to remake universities and colleges in their own political and ideological correct image.

In 1995 the dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies ended the ban on the admission of graduate students to the Department of Political Science. In 1998 then UBC president Martha Piper apologised for how UBC’s administrative bureaucrats had treated Department of Political Science during the affair (these apologies seem to always come after time has passed and the damage is already done, don't they?). As is so often the case with these after the fact apologies, however, it could not erase memories of the damage caused by vigilante like attacks on the Department between 1992 and 1995. 

I enjoyed Racism, Sexism, and the University quite a lot. Marchak was spot on about the impact of consumer capitalism with its mantra that the customer is always right on North American universities (one of the original sins of the modern North American university). I personally experienced this culture of consumer feelings when I received a visit from the college lawyer and the college equity officer at the college in which I worked when one student in a class of 34 complained about a joke i told which apparently offended her or him. She is right about the impact of managerial corporate capitalism with its mantra that professionals, well non-academic professionals, know best how to run the institutions of higher education (another of the original sins of the modern North American university). She is spot on in her contention that the anti-hierarchal attitudes of postmoderns undermines the notion of professionalism and professional training and its accumulated cultural capital and that the cultural war between moderns and postmoderns is a battle for power in the North American university. She is spot on that illiberal intolerance can be found among many postmodernist sects. The radical right hardly has a monopoly on illiberalism. She is right that many varieties of postmodernism have a radical democratic aspect to them. This makes some postmoderns close cousins to religious fundamentalism with its ideology of every man a Bible interpreter regardless of educational level and cultural capital accrued. She is spot on about the need for a middle way, a middle way that respects the seeking after truth, natural justice or due process, and merit (even if this is unequally distributed for class, race, and gender reasons), and respect and equity for all.

Finally, I do agree with Max Weber that value, what someone values, does impact what academics and fan boys and girls study but that does not mean that we have to throw out the scientific method with its dispassion with the everything is about power ideologically correct water. One can and should be trained in the fine art of dispassionate analysis grounded in an understanding that every human thing is grounded in economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities, even if many of those realities are nothing more than social and cultural constructs.

Anne of Windy Willows, Anne of Windy Poplars, and the Fine Art of Being Sparing With the Truth

 

I think I was around five years old when my mother started buying books for me to read. It was strange because neither my mum, who came from a working class English family, nor my dad, who was middle class and came from a Swiss family, really read many books or at least I never saw them read many books.

Thanks to my mum I became an inveterate reader. When I got intense asthma when I was twelve I became an even more inveterate reader (and movie watcher I might add). Most of what I read as a teenager was fiction. I read Shakespeare. I read Mark Twain. I read George Orwell. I read Moby Dick. I read Dickens. I even read Ethan Frome (which was not one of my favourite reads by any stretch of the imagination). And I read all of the Anne books by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery save Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythe’s Are Quoted, which wasn’t published at the time save in excerpts in The Road to Yesterday.

My love of the Anne books has not changed over the years. The books remain amongst my favourites and I have, as a consequence, even collected Anne and L. M. Montgomery books over the years. What did change is that I went to college and I learned how to do research. 

One of the things that has interested me is the fascinating textual history of one of the Anne books, Anne of Windy Willows also known as Anne of Windy Poplars first published in 1938. I learned that Anne of Windy Poplars was not fully the book Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote. Montgomery, of course, had several different publishers. Frederick A Stokes was her publisher for the US market. Harrap was her publisher in Great Britain. Angus and Robertson was her publisher in Australia. McClelland and Stewart was her publisher for the Canadian market.  

Another thing I learned was that that Anne of Windy Willows was the original title of the book and that the American publisher was unhappy with that title and was unhappy with some of the darker parts of the text. For these reasons Montgomery changed the title of the book and excised and changed some of the text.

I note all this because I recently bought the Anne of Windy Populars Sourcebooks edition. Sourcebooks, which is based in Illinois and which has the imprimatur of the of the relatives of Lucy Maud, claims, on the back of the book, that this edition of Anne of Windy Poplars, has the original restored unabridged text of the novel. This, along with the fact that I wanted one Sourcebooks edition of the Anne books, was why I bought this edition.

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Populars is not the original text of the novel. First off, it does not have the original title, the title Lucy Maud preferred, Anne of Windy Willows, a title Stokes apparently disliked because it was close to Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Second, it does not contain the passages excised and changed by Montgomery because the American publisher and McClelland and Stewart which apparently followed the American leader, wanted. So, to sum up, this the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Willows is not the “original, unabridged text” Sourcebooks and the relatives of Montgomery make it out to be. Sourcebooks and the relatives, in other words, are being sparing with the truth. 

Wouldn't it be nice if all concerned could admit the truth, namely that Anne of Windy Willows is the text as Montgomery wanted? And wouldn't it be nice if all the Anne books could be standardised and that Anne of Windy Willows, the fourth in the series (though not the fourth published), could be published in the North American market as part of this standardisation?

A Note: Another thing the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Poplars has done is to renumber the chapters. In the original edition of the book the chapters for each of the three books begins with 1. In this reworked edition the chapters are numbered consecutively.