For sure. I mean, it was a blockbuster, and then, who, Johnson?, started a total war on it. I guess that's what happens when it makes no obvious claims about "the human". I still don't understand why there aren't more movie versions of it though. It's built for a post-Game of Thrones world.

Hmmm yes, I meant Ovid as a metonym for a copy of Metamorphoses. BUT LEST YOU THINK IT HAS BECOME LESS INTERESTING a character whose arms and tongue have been cut off brings out the book to point out that her story resembles a story in Ovid, but because she has no arms she can't turn the pages, so her father and uncle…

Agreed, esp with The Tempest. That has so much great stuff in it.

Big fan of both, but Titus Andronicus is bananas in ways that are, I think, underappreciated because of all the, you know, rape and mutilation. Like, the story is based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and then all the characters are like, "Hey, this is like Metamorphoses…" THEN THEY BRING OVID ONSTAGE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO…

I don't have a good answer to this, because I have the compulsive obsession with "minor" works and larks and stuff. They're just so much more interesting to me. Titus Andronicus (the shakespeare one) is the most obvious to me. It's clearly his most interesting play.

I watched this so many times it high school. It was my favorite movie.

This is one of the first pieces of writing about DFW ever that doesn't make the writer sound like a complete wiener. I love DFW but everyone thinks they've unlocked the secret to reading him, or knowing him, or whatever, and that everyone else has been wrong this whole time. That Dowd doesn't even become subject to…

I agree! Somebody said he was just naturally at the level of artistic inexplicability james franco had been trying to get to for years, and that clarified why I like him.

ow ow ow my heart

So a quick reply to a thing you said to lectroid: "But by the very nature of that clubhouse sign, by openly heralding it's a black show, you're ensuring that message isn't getting to anybody else." This is performative, isn't it? Like, it doesn't have to be true, but saying it sort of makes it true by contributing to…

You're welcome!

Wurp I guess I should have clarified "The Daily Show" under Stewart (and I guess Kilborn, though we're not supposed to talk about that time, right?), which is what I thought SnarkySkunk was referring to.

So quick thing in reference to your reply to daria below: white supremacists (and I mean everybody upholding racist thought, not just neo-nazis. that is to say i'm including like all white people, even myself) always harp on this line about "racial divisions" like how white feminists talk about "splitting the…

Yeah, there's a weird, popular sort of racial-justice aspiration that confuses the process of justice with what would be its effect. Wanting a black host that doesn't feel the need to address race all the time is a weird fake-it-till-you-make-it idea of fighting for racial equality that doesn't make sense to me.

This is an… ahistorical-at-best argument. Whiteness was made normative at the moment of racialization, because white people immediately thought abut the relationship in terms of colonization. "Normativity" is a goal of whiteness, not a side effect.

This comment is important.