Austen and Arrogance and Exploitation

I am less than thrilled to see that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen/gore flick mashup novel that came out earlier this year, is receiving sequel treatment in the form of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

"Whaaaaat? But it's about clever Regency ladies fighting zombies! Why the hate?" you may ask.

Hey, I love clever ladies kicking ass, too! But I love clever ladies kicking ass in the real world. The "Austen & Male Rewriter & Monsters" formula is no way empowering. Quirk Books, a male-edited and owned publishing line, is hiring male authors to co-opt women's fiction and marginalise women's voices to achieve press, visibility and shitloads of money. And I mean shitloads of money. New York Times-bestseller-list, movie-deal shitloads of money.

And they do it by stomping all over women's genre fiction. The authors handwave a bit about how Austen is a "brilliant" writer and blah blah blah, but far more frequent are comments such as:

"Traditionally, men tend to avoid Austen, dismissing it as chick-lit. Certainly, the BBC's acclaimed adaptation in the 1990s did nothing to counter this with its almost gratuitous shots of Colin Firth in his britches, designed to draw in the oestrogen-fuelled female audiences."

(Anthony Harvison, some idiot reviewer)

NOW WE KNOW: Colin Firth diving into a lake in old-fashioned trousers = sop to the hysterical underpants-flinging girls. Halle Berry's boobs in Monster's Ball, Mena Suvari's boobs in American Beauty, Brenda Vaccaro's boobs in Midnight Cowboy = Oscar-winning art. Got it.

"Most people have a great sense of humour about it, particularly the 'Jane-ites', who must prefer this to the 60th or 70th Mr Darcy's private thoughts collection that seems to come out every year."

(Seth Grahame-Smith, co-author, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies)

He is referring to the female authors have been writing derivative fiction based on the works of Jane Austen for at least 160 years. Pemberly.com, a Jane Austen fansite, has a list of 68 sequels and continuations, 61 of which were written by women. The first was published in 1850. Re-envisioning and rewriting Austen's novels is not some new edgy trend; it's just that the media has only started to pay attention to it now that male authors are co-opting it and putting it into traditionally male frameworks. "I think we've started a mini-trend of literary mash-ups," Grahame-Smith said in a BBC interview. No you haven't! And you know you haven't, because you were talking about all those other lady-penned reworkings like five seconds ago!

Solution
So ladies, I think we need to do some co-opting right back.

Presenting...

Saving Private Ryan From Her Dead-End Desk Career
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Tailored Trousersuits
Full Metal Jacket and Cubic Zirconia Earrings
Gladiator Sandals are Actually Really Uncomfortable
Dye Hard: One Knitter's Craft Fair Struggle
The Great Escape out of a Lower Salary Band
Blade Runner, Speed-Skating Ice Dancing Champion

Let's go, big movie houses! I can knock out a few spec scripts by Monday.

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An American Fourth of July in London

The Fourth of July is great. Really great. It's a Great American Holiday (tm). It is a celebration of strongly-worded letters and moral imperative. It commemorates an allegory of democracy, when a brave band of thinkers created a truly republican government that represents the interests of all the people, and Stood Up For What They Believed In in the face of a big hefty global empire. It is about smashing through the steel ceiling of economic oppression and giving white guys everywhere the freedom to make their own futures. (That said, many of the white guys were, for the time, fairly excited about equal rights for everybody, including ladies and non-white people [except for the non-white people who were already there], but theoretically they were in favor of universal civil rights. Mostly.)

So that's good! But there's a problem with the allegory, and that is that it's the national myth and it needs a bad guy. To prove how free, equal and good the United States is, the myth has to set up another country as the antithetical Bad Guys, to represent tyranny, oppression, and general dickishness. In the American founding myth, that's the Brits. And that's awkward.

In 1776



That black-and-white allegorical underpinning of the holiday is why there is only one way to describe the tone of the citywide American barbecue I attended in Battersea Park: sheepish.

As I walked through the west gate, a couple was looking over their shoulders as they read the map, as if a south London mob were about to turn up and yell at them for generalizing about their ancestors.

Picnickers at tables were hunched over, elbows tucked in to protect their internal organs. Rather than spread out by the lake, attendees clustered under the trees, seeking shelter and protection from the changing, threatening sky.

We knew the Independence Myth about the Big Bad Briton wasn't true, and we knew they knew we knew.

That's the problem with making other people the supervillains in your mythology: you have to actually deal with them the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, because of globalization, and how it turns out there really isn't such a thing as a nation of Bad People.*

If, however, we refit the national myth so it focuses on Bad Ideas (economic interests trumping humanist ones, disinterested or oppressive governments) versus Good Ideas (equality, voting, strongly-worded letters), not only do we stop vilifying perfectly nice other nations, but we are better equipped to stop ourselves when we are in danger of committing Bad Ideas.

For example!

Bad Idea: Lying signs



(there was in fact a nice big picnic, as I said)

Good Idea: Barbecue





Great Idea: These shoes



Those are my good-luck Patriot Shoes. I wore them on election night with a Michelle Obama-style Carolina blue sheath dress, and look what happened! Freedom happened, y'all.

Happy Good Idea Day.

*There can still be groups of ideologically-linked bad people, of course. Like Al-Qaeda, and Duke fans.

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Inclusive patriotism in America

Hello, the Fourth of July is tomorrow! I'm going to a picnic in Battersea Park. I'm looking forward to being conflicted (and also drunk). America is a cultural empire, and the whole point of the holiday is "Fuck you, giant English-speaking capitalist empire who controls most of the world's trade routes!", which is ironic and uncomfortable! On the other hand, it is also about "stodgy older-generation Europeans versus brash young vigorous New Worlders" which is kind of still applicable?

America, circa 1775

...Nah.

Anyway, for me it is a holiday about ideas more than anything else, and it's really excited that you get to marry the ideals of "personal liberty" and "governmental accountability" and "all people are created equal" with "drinking beer on the lawn" and "blowing harmless yet loud stuff up" and "bombastic marching-band music".

And edgy patriotic songs, which I love most of all.

America, the Beautiful

America, America, God mend thine every flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law

The first verse, which everyone knows, is pretty and inoffensive, but in the later ones, man, this song gets down to it. This one is my favorite because it implies that America has flaws, a shitload of them. Like how it lacks self-control and doesn't have laws that confirm liberty for everybody. Which, oh, wait, it still doesn't! Oh my god! It is especially awesome because the lyrics were written by Katherine Lee Bates, a "literary spinster" living in a "Boston marriage" with her "lesbian girlfriend".

This Land is Your Land

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple
By the welfare office, I saw my people
And some were stumbling, and some stood wondering
If this land was made for you and me

POOR PEOPLE ARE CITIZENS TOO?! I just, I love all imagery where the nation is acknowledged as a community of disparate origin, means and gender. And Woody Guthrie is so optimistic. He tells you about these problems, introduces this tension and that uncertainty, asks the question of whether it's going to change, and then rolls you into the affirmative chorus of "yes! This land is your land!" The inclusiveness of "my people" is just lovely.

The Ghost of Tom Joad

Tom said, Where there's somebody fighting for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody's struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Ma, you'll see me.

Less optimistic, and also more explicitly patriarchal, with Tom Joad as the breadwinning social justice champion and Bruce Springsteen hanging around the campfire listening to him. But. It's still hopeful, and it puts the onus on the individual to take action against social injustice, instead of describing how things should be and hoping they'll get there eventually.

Here, have a manifesto: Let America be America again, Langston Hughes.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Hughes is probably my favorite writer of all time, and this poem. I used to cry over it in university because I didn't think it was true, or possible. I do now, though. In January I went to Barack Obama's inauguration and it was just so fucking special, you guys. I remember sitting in a Tex-Mex bar around the corner from the Lincoln Memorial with one of my best friends, drinking El Cheapo margaritas and singing the above "This Land Is Your Land" with the other young people in the bar, and the million people out on the grass, and we were all crying and laughing and cautiously hopeful and impoverished and tipsy and that, folks, I think is what America is all about.

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