Two Links
Roxane Gay Says "Cancel Culture" Does Not Exist
snip:
[on the term "culture wars"] It doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. I think it’s the kind of thing that people say when they’re too lazy to engage with the world as it is, and they want to dismiss the very material realities of most people’s lives. I get really frustrated when people are like, “Oh, it’s the culture wars.” What precisely does that mean?
This bit was super interesting to me since "culture wars" was the term of choice from the 90s and 00s that was used to encapsulate grappling with all the isms. I'm not sure that a better term ever came along, but the old one is certainly passe. (Will still keep the tag tho since I've got, yikes, nearly two decades worth of stuff there.)
Cancel culture is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior and when their faves experience consequences. I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake-and we all do, by the way-there should be consequences. The problem is that we haven’t figured out what consequences should be. So it’s all or nothing. Either there are no consequences, or people lose their jobs, or other sort of sweeping grand gestures that don’t actually solve the problem at hand.
All this. At some point I need to write up something on the shenanigans and intellectual laziness inherent in that reaction, especially in terms of scholarship.
How Crying on TikTok Sells Books
snip:
Many Barnes & Noble locations around the United States have set up BookTok tables displaying titles like “They Both Die at the End,” “The Cruel Prince,” “A Little Life” and others that have gone viral. There is no corresponding Instagram or Twitter table, however, because no other social-media platform seems to move copies the way TikTok does.
“These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about the books that make them cry and sob or scream or become so angry they throw it across the room, and it becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people immediately connect with,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble. “We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales - I mean tens of thousands of copies a month - with other social media formats.”
I'm baffled at the notion of purposefully reading something that will make you cry, but at the same time I feel like there's something heckin' Enlightenment about it. Something something culture of sentiment and performance of reading. Also, it would be super interesting if the reporter had connected the video for The Song of Achilles with how that book has been adopted in transformative fandom. Shades of Crush.