Midway through Gina Arnold’s incisive volume on Liz Phair’s seminal LP Exile in Guyville, the author quotes Oscar Wilde: “all criticism is a form of autobiography.” Throughout the book, Arnold, formerly a professional music critic, stays very much in the picture as she leads us on a tour of mythic Guyville, circa 1993. Like the peripatetic narrator of W.G. Sebald’s novel/memoir/travelogue The Rings of Saturn, Arnold draws on a variety of texts to illuminate the way: the Marxist theory of Louis Althusser, the Terry Z...
Exile In Guyville By Gina Arnold - The Rumpus.net
9 years
...ity, a special kind of ardor. If you are a person who spends a good deal of time around things like art, or books, or songs, you are likely to recognize in yourself some resonant echo of the feeling: I just mean the desire to bring an unflattened attentiveness, a suppler articulacy, to the scene of works you find provoking, captivating, involving in ways that fracture the terms of address that surround them. Hold It Against Me is a revelatory book of art criticism and politically astute theory. But I think it may also be a book about a certain mode of love — critical love — as counterhegemonic practice.
Difficult Love | The Los Angeles Review of Books
9 years
The public digital humanities starts with humans, not technologies or tools, and its terrain must be continuously co-constructed. There is no place within the public digital humanities for exclusion or anti-intellectualism. No place for hierarchies...
The Public Digital Humanities | Disrupting the Digital Humanities
9 years
... to Washington’s strategy of compromise was running aground on the shoals of brute reality. The murderous race riots that followed World War I were a jolt, as was the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan. “Why in America, more than any other country, do we have race riots, mobs, lynchings, burnings, and manhunts generally?” the sociologist Robert E. Park asked in 1923. Throughout the ’20s, the magazine slowly adopted Du Bois’s call for full civil rights. The 1931 Scottsboro case, where nine black teenagers were falsely accused of rape and eight of them were initiall...
The New Republic's Legacy on Race: From Du Bois to the Bell Curve | The New Republic
9 years
... less than a year—they didn’t have to, was generous by the standards of my industry, positively luxurious by the standards of this country. But it was meager in comparison to international practices, and, increasingly, in comparison to what is offered by high-end tech companies. In the past year, places like Google, Apple, Reddit, and Facebook have elicited mixed responses to their ample benefits packages, which include not just twelve weeks (and more, in some cases) of paid ...
Maternity Leave Policies in America Hurt Working Moms | The New Republic
9 years
The New Republic is a venerable institution long dedicated to progressive politics. Back in the 1980s, two of its female editors, Dorothy Wickenden and Ann Hulbert, had babies. They asked then-editor and owner Marty Peretz for three months of paid leave and received it. But their cla...
Maternity Leave Policies in America Hurt Working Moms | The New Republic
9 years