just water dressed in brown

[lotesse]

Last week, my Victorianist reading group came to the happy realization that the Big Name Victorian Sages acronym out to CRAMP (Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, John Stuart Mill, Pater). Never has an acronym been more apt - lord can these men bloviate. I mean, I like Mill as much as the next girl, and Ruskin's stupidity can be sort of appallingly cute in an OH JOHN RINGO NO kind of way, but being in the middle of Arnold's Culture and Anarchy I feel quite solid in my opinion: go fuck yourself, sir. I'm reminded of Atrios' Wanker of the Decade entry on Will Saletan - the bleating superior pundit thing is the last holdout of the Victorian Sage, and they're every bit as appalling in present as in past.

Other links of interest:

[tumblr]The Silent Tarot: oooh, pretty!

[alternet]The Heroine With a Thousand Faces: the rise of the female savior: I'm not quite convinced by this use of Campbell - maybe better to jettison rather than transform - but points to an interesting trend.

[io9]even in this 1870s humans were obsessed with ridiculous photos of cats: Victorian cat macros!

Comments

[laughingrat]

Yeah, I love me some Campbell (I mean really, I love the guy), but he's grounded in a very gender-essentialist system. Works great for describing what has gone before and why it holds power emotionally and socially, maybe less great for moving forward? And yet some of the stuff might well be universal...I'm reminded of those "new" German fairy tales, the ones collected pre-Grimm, which are being tantalizingly described as a lot less strict, gender-wise. Hmm.

[lotesse]

I had my Campbell phase the same as any mythology-oriented kid, but the kind of universalism he trades in is becoming really anathema to me, that sort of "we're all the same underneath" thing, because it inevitably seems to lead to "we're all European/white/male underneath."