"This style—let’s call it 'Faulknerian,' after its other Nobel-winning master—is heady and clause-dense."

"Long associated with the South, Faulkner’s great theme, it eddies and circles, with an often maddening indirection. The Faulknerian style’s weakest imitators simply view it as a license to slather adjectives and metaphors all over the page. Morrison, who hated seeing her fiction described as 'lyrical' or 'poetic,' had a deeper understanding of Faulkner’s stratagems. In her Paris Review interview (a must for any appreciator of Morrison’s genius), she delivers a brilliant dissection of Absalom, Absalom, a novel that fascinated her: Faulkner, she says, 'spends the entire book tracing race and you can’t find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can’t see it. … Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? … So the structure is the argument.' The elliptical nature of Faulkner’s style epitomizes the paralyzed condition of Southern culture: Everything in it gestures toward the one thing it can’t bring itself to talk about. This paradox gives Faulkner’s fiction its power, but for any writer seeking to follow in his footsteps, it leads to a dead end."

From an article at Slate by Laura Miller that I clicked on because of the teaser "How Toni Morrison’s Revolutionary Novels Broke Open American Literature." I wondered what this "breaking open" consisted of. For these words to make sense it would need to be that many other writers followed along. The headline at the article is more modest "Toni Morrison Reshaped the Landscape of Literature/Her novels made moves that no other novelist, black or white, attempted." There's no revolution, no breaking open, no implication that other writers followed on, only that she did something alone. She reshaped, she didn't break. And it's not a military metaphor — revolution. It's a landscape. From front page to inside page, it seems we moved from masculine to feminine. Is that analogous to the difference between Faulkner and Morrison?

Let me read the thing I would not have read without that overheated teaser. Okay. I read it. There's no mention of other writers! I see no argument that Morrison reshaped the literary landscape (or led a revolution). All I'm seeing here is that Morrison put some things on the surface that Faulker "pushed below the surface."

Feminist anxiety when a supposedly feminist TV show leans into the torture of women.

Lisa Miller (at The Cut) decides to stop watching "The Handmaid’s Tale."

There was Episode 1 of Season 2, where "our favorite characters are unrelentingly tortured — electrocuted with cattle prods, kicked, threatened with dogs, chained to a gas stove and burned, left alive on a gallows covered with urine."

And Episode 2: "[A] vast army of female slaves, barely alive, forced to dig all day in toxic waste until they die.... ]T]he soundtrack is mostly a constant, minor-key moan, like the wind through a cracked window, punctuated by the wailing and coughing of women, and screams."

Miller wonders:

Why am I watching this? It all feels so gratuitous... For season one, I agreed with the critical consensus. This is Important Television. A feminist parable, adapted from a novel by a woman, which was awarded eight Emmys — mostly to women — about the potential excesses of patriarchy, not so unimaginable now in the era of Pence and Trump.....

So you went along with the crowd that seemed like the right crowd. Why didn't you think for yourself? Why would the excesses of patriarchy take that form in the United States? Physically cruel, enforced captivity? That's not how we get people to submit to limited sex roles. So what if a woman dreamed up the idea? It's not an aptly imagined vision of how the subordination of women would be accomplished in American in our time. It's a sadistic, titillating fantasy, and it distracts the viewer from the way the real America tempts you into a cage with an open door. How lamely self-soothing to think that the problem is over there with Pence and Trump.

After one season and 2 episodes, Miller has a glimmer:

It’s feminist to watch women enslaved, degraded, beaten, amputated, and raped? How exactly am I participating in a women’s revolution by sitting on my comfy cozy bed and consuming this?...

The idea crosses her mind: Am I watching... porn? I'm paraphrasing. She puts it ditheringly. I mean, it's dithering just to put it in question form. To be straightforward, to talk like my idea of a feminist, you should say: I am watching porn! But Miller goes like this:

This question of porn in particular preoccupies me. There are many definitions of porn, many varieties, and the dilemma of whether pornography is a freedom or a tool of oppression continues to divide feminists. My concern in this case is fairly clear: that the violence against women in season 2 is indulgent, operatic, and designed to rouse if not pleasure then a visceral, physical response, that The Handmaid’s Tale has devolved from feminist horror into very conventional misogynistic entertainment. It’s a fantasia of women being debased and dehumanized, individually and en masse but disingenuously packaged as virtuous dystopian prophesy.

It's devolved. And only in Season 2. Please challenge yourself to critique Season 1 and the Atwood novel itself. If you're this slow picking up clues, how the hell will you notice when subtle, insidious cultural trends are subordinating you?!

Is the positioning of Handmaid’s Tale as smart, leftist political commentary protective against charges that it exploits women?...

It is if you let that sort of thing work on you. But you could put real feminism first.

Liberal websites absorb/process the Al Franken news, part 4: Slate.

I think this one will be my favorite. I've been saving this up as I slogged through some other things. Here's the Franken-related material as situated on the front page of Slate:



You've got, first, most prominently, "Al Franken Should Resign Immediately / Democrats’ credibility on sexual harassment is at stake," by Mark Joseph Stern. That went up very quickly (at 12:11 p.m.), and you don't even need to click through to get the message, with is impressively forthright. Stern cares about principle, perhaps on the theory that it's the most effective strategy for the Democrats. Don't waffle! Stern is hardcore:

The Democratic Party now has a chance to set the proper example and prove that absolute intolerance for sexual harassment crosses party lines. Democrats should not hedge or wring their hands or await more accusations. The path forward is simple: If the party wishes to retain an ounce of credibility, it must demand Franken’s swift resignation.

Absolute intolerance. There are those in Congress who know more about what secrets have been hidden and therefore where an absolute-intolerance policy may lead. A Franken resignation won't affect the number of Democrats in the Senate. (Minnesota has the Governor fill an opened Senate seat, and it stays that way until the next election.) But will the Democrats insist on the resignation of all sexual harassers? And once they lock into that track, what will count as sexual harassment? If you go with feminist analysis, it could be quite a lot. Consider the next article:

"Al Franken's Humor Always Had a Mean Streak," by Laura Miller. If you click through, the headline tames down to "Comedians Know to Play to the Room. Al Franken Should’ve Known Better." Miller is pretty sympathetic to Franken, offering him the padding of context, but she says something I'm going to make a big deal about. I'll put it in boldface:

It doesn’t matter—as Franken, to his credit, now seems to realize—whether the photo portrays an actual grope or a near-grope. The joke was at Tweeden’s expense, a tedious unfunny entry in the long, long catalog of humor based on the idea that sex in any form is an advantage men seize over women, at women’s expense. That seems to have been a theme of Franken’s USO appearances with Tweeden, as well: him leering at her in order to win laughs from servicemen. It looks like the servicemen found this antique, Bob Hope-style shtick funny, but humor is notoriously dependent on context....

Every joke is meant for one room or another, some group of people with a particular set of values whose approval the joker hopes to gain....

As I've said a few times, we may be entering the era of That's Not Funny. If everything is going to get out, through social media, open microphones, and digital cameras everywhere, then maybe nobody should dare to be a comedian or at least comedians need to confine themselves to comedy shows and stay out of politics.

But let's look at that boldface and think about the burgeoning potential of the idea that you might not be able to safely express anymore. The whole "Bob Hope-style shtick" is off limits. All the jokes (and all the serious statements) about sexual transactions may become suspect, and any statement about unequal sex may turn you into a social pariah. In this new template, Trump could be denounced without any credible stories about groping a woman and without regarding the Access Hollywood remarks as a confession that he actually did go up to women and just start kissing them. Just the idea that he thought of kissing women as taking an advantage is enough to condemn him — even if it's true that the women want that kind of sexual domination when it comes from a star.

Here's something I wrote in 2005, when the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin died:

[T]his is a classic problem in American feminism: do you want to describe one big system that applies to all women or should you concentrate on the truly oppressed?.... In the area of sexuality, I can see why people like Dworkin wanted to say to all the women who were smug about their own lucky lives and proud of their mates to say look closely at what you've got and start identifying with women at other levels of sexual happiness: empathize with them and see the problems. Dworkin and MacKinnon said that women had eroticized domination. That's not absolutely accurate, but it is one of the most powerful ideas I have ever encountered in my life. It's a truly scary, unsettling insight and a lot of the intense reaction to them is an unwillingness to lose what you want to believe is good.

The feminism of the 1980s may be reviving, and I see it right there in Laura Miller's hostility to "the idea that sex in any form is an advantage men seize over women, at women’s expense." This is just one product that might emerge from the manufacturing process that takes in Al Franken as its raw material. And I do want to scare you! Soylent Green is people!

The third article from the front page in Slate is "Today in Conservative Media: Let’s Be Frank About Franken" by Osita Nwanevu, and I like this because it looks as though it might be the same as the idea I'm applying to liberal media, just doing it to conservative media. But it's just collecting quotes. No real commentary.

The headline on the front page has more analysis than anything in the article: "Conservative Media Sounds Gleeful About Al Franken." I guess that means it's wrong to be gleeful. You should be somber and empathetic toward the women who come forward to speak about sexual harassment, so if you let it show that you're enjoying taking down a political enemy, you're committing an offense, the offense of glee. But if you're going to crack down on that offense, you'll have to restrain yourself over Roy Moore and Donald Trump. So quit smirking and put on that face you're going to need to avoid disaster in the era of That's Not Funny.