A linear review of the best posts from the Full Stop blog this year
Look for Part 2 tomorrow
Axlotl: Floating Phantom — Laura Bliss, February 5
The keeper leads us to a corner of grimy aquariums. There is my axolotl, drifting along the bottom of a tank. It is as Cortázar describes: rose-colored, translucent, like a glass figurine. A weird, haunting beauty. I crouch in front of the glass. Its little red eyes stare back. “Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression and nonetheless terribly shining, went through me like a message: ‘Save us, save us.’”
Notes on the Firebombing of the Freedom Press Bookshop — Meagan Day, February 6
Several people I spoke to turned up last Saturday to help salvage a resource they use regularly. Others, like me, had never been to Freedom but came out because we don’t want to see autonomous community spaces bullied out of existence, whether by rising rents, corporate competitors, state intervention or direct demolition. It’s important to have physical spaces where politically marginal literature is readily available, where people can acquaint themselves with heterodox histories and intellectual traditions outside the academy, and where a well-informed subversive politics can flourish without repression. Beyond the matter of literature, it’s crucial to defend collectively run, non-hierarchical community spaces, if only to prove to ourselves that they’re possible in a world of increasing privatization and bureaucratic regulation.
Whose England? — Max Strasser, February 11
The essentialist description of Englishness in George Orwell’s “England Your England” is nationalistic and tinged with chauvinism even if many people find it accurate. But it’s that proprietary sense of what it means to be English that has people upset about the changing character of their country. If Orwell were alive today, what side of the immigration debate would he come down on? His commitment to democratic and egalitarian politics is well known. So is his patriotism. Would George Orwell’s defence of Britishness put him into the same camp as the right-wing British National Party?
The End of the Booty Call — Eric Jett, March 19
“What are you up to?” read many a late-night text message during my years at Oberlin College. The text was a feeler, a thin, transparent antenna, projecting out into the night. While during the day, such an innocuous message could be followed up by any number of requests or offers, at two o’clock in the morning, it could mean only one thing.
But unlike the analogue booty call of yore, which required at least a semblance of tact and care — “How have you been?” — the booty text is a Boolean expression, a true or false question, a gambit to be either declined or accepted. It is the ring — in that awkward moment between the caller ID and SMS — not the call. They know who it is. They know what it’s about. The only question is: do they reply? The rest is just booty logistics.
The Art of Exploitation — Eric Van Hoose, April 2
Amanda Palmer is a born performer. Even people who watched her recent and widely discussed TED talk/performance without having already heard of her or her bands should be able to notice this. The way she’s dressed, the way she struts confidently across the stage with her shoulders wide — she isn’t your average TED type; she’s used to being looked at and being onstage.
So it’s not surprising that she begins her talk with a short anecdote about the time she spent working as a street performer, accepting whatever donations people would give her — donations, she notes, that were pretty predictable in amount. Once her band signed to a label but had trouble making the companies’ suggested sales figures, she took to the streets (more figuratively this time) and launched a Kickstarter campaign that ended up making over a million dollars. The lesson? Don’t make people pay for music. You should “let them.”
Searching for Calvin’s Dad — Liv Combe, April 4
There comes a time in the dogged search for such a private person that the focus of the quest turns away from the sought and back to the seeker — the goal isn’t to find the person for the sake of listening to what they have to say, so much as finding them to gain the glory that comes along with that. For all the journalists rejected, it’s easy for new ones to imagine that there must be someone able to break through Watterson’s solid exterior; it could be anyone! But Watterson, for one, has said most of what he seems to ever want to say. Pushing any farther, at least when it comes to personal details, is asking for a slap on the wrist — or, worse, anger from an idol.
A Fisher King in the White House — Meagan Day, July 9
Didion suggests that the real character and legacy of the Reagan White House “had to do less with the absence at the center” — Reagan’s politically effective but ideologically hollow pageantry — “than with the amount of centrifugal energy this absence left spinning free at the edges.” Reagan was the Trojan horse in which a regiment of eager strategists hid, peering through its eye-holes as they wheeled it surreptitiously into the White House. The people at the helm had their sights set on a total overhaul of the relationship between state, government and capital. They were activists, people with a vision, steeped in emergent neoliberal economic theory and intent on revising the agenda.
America’s Most Wanted Great American Novelist — Jesse Montgomery, July 17
Somewhat mystified by the exchange, I followed the Pulitzer Prize finalist who had just attempted to fleece a young desk attendant at a remove. But I think he tried to ditch me because when I reached the landing of the library’s main level, I spotted Franzen creeping onto the stairs from the floor below, where I assume he had hidden, knowing I had spied him like a circling hawk. Playing it cool, I walked back to the computer lab where Leigh was working, gave her the heads up, and triangulated our observation in order to achieve maximum facial recognition. The time was 2:45; the culprit was Jonathan Franzen.
Divination Tech in the Twenty-First Century — Hestia Peppe, August 6
Convention dictates I should be quoting Viegener here, but to lift any one individual entry as illustrative seems to deprive the potential reader forever of a moment of exquisite surprise. Every fragment retains some of the intimate suspense lent from disclosure between friends. On first reading, it is the randomness the reader experiences, a tumble and flow of brilliant disorder and then gradually a coalescence into coherence, a tangled thread untangling into a skein. Beginning to write about it, approaching it a second time, it’s different—I open the book where I’ve turned down corners of pages. It’s not that I look back and find the thread’s tangled again, it’s that the thread is gone and the view is now of constellations or galaxies, bright points of meaning that I can enter and be surrounded by.
Fifty Shades of Wave: Godard’s Alphaville as Fan Fiction — Rachel Baron Singer, August 7
Now, the fanboy origins of the French New Wave auteurs are well-documented. Disenchanted with the staid, theatrical “Tradition of Quality” films being produced in postwar France, cinéphiles like Godard and François Truffaut turned their attentions to the pulp thrillers and cowboy Westerns coming out of Hollywood. Their obsessions with directors such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks, prompted them to engage with film professionally, first by writing criticism for André Bazin’s Cahiers du cinéma, and then ultimately, by making movies themselves.
Even after becoming established filmmakers, the New Wave directors remained deeply entrenched in fan culture, blending their own styles with homages to their idols.
