an article on articles

i've read a couple of articles in the last couple of days which i've been folding and unfolding in my head, so i thought i might share them here.

first is After “Barbie,” Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox. this is full of information which, when cut up into headlines, as @DiscussingFilm and @PopBase and other such important cultural critics keep doing, sounds awful. 45 mattel films. a24 barney the dinosaur. he-man cinematic universe. even the greta gerwig chronicles of narnia revelation (although i swear i'd heard whispers of this before), which i should be warm to (i like gerwig's films, and i like narnia) fills me with a profound sense of apathy. 1) it's for netflix, 2) it's another adaption/remake; i thought we, the culturally minded on the internet, hated the latter especially, 2b) there's already a good narnia film that came out at the perfect age for me to be deeply into it, 3) i'm hesitant about what her perspective will add (although i do think little women works as a new adaption so maybe it's just the netflix/existing adaption stuff making me reluctant to care).

and yet this mattel article is really, really exciting. i don't think the mattel movie complex going to work, but the article conjures a world in which it might, and that's something to look forward to. it's written with a profound eye to detail, and an embracing of the mattel view that really works. like these ideas do sound interesting. in a world where "IP is king", then surely a cool take on an IP is the best case scenario! and these takes do sound interesting, and i will be watching barbie, and isn't it nice that they're giving people opportunities, and those people are the kind who are interested in film and culture beyond IP.

and yet the article feels like it forgets that there is a world beyond IP, for all that it includes other people's references to powell & pressburger and close encounters of the third kind. it's a really exciting article, for a world where there isn't anything better, but there is. there's been a lot of really fantastic films not based on brands. the only IP film from the last couple of films got more than 3.5 stars from me was batman. and i think it's a blueprint for the kind of reinvention mattel wants to do, which is cool because it is good, but i only gave in 4 stars. the films that have really got me, stayed inside of me, have been original, personal: nope and aftersun and rye lane and even turning red.
the fact is, this article is interesting because it's an astounding plan to read about, but also because it's a perfect piece of marketing. it really gets you caught up in this fantasy world that's being made inside mattel hq, where the only option is IP, but they're going to do it really well. the headlines can't compare, because it's all in the rhetoric. the journalist pulled off something amazing here, although i also want to know if mattel paid for this, and how much say they got over what went into the final piece.


i also read How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City. the article is a profile of delany, who clearly was interviewed by and met with the writer several times in order to put it together. it generally functions best, imo, as an overview of his career. i've not read any delany, although i was vaguely aware of his position in scifi canon (as a prominent black, gay writer in the 20th century) and i've had a collection of his short stories for a while, which i will now be prioritising. but he's clearly written a lot of fascinating stuff that i've just not come across, both within scifi and outwith it, and now i have a list of titles to track down. i think the article is particularly strong with showing how his interests grew, changed, and reacted to culture over the years.
there were some quotes and moments that really struck me, and i want to make a note of here:

• 'apprentice novels, quick and colorful but occasionally spiralling into jejune moral grandiosity'
• 'There were so many thousands of books, Rickett told me, that he made Delany buy fire extinguishers. (“Not to put out any fires,” he clarified, “but just so we could fight our way out.”)'
• 'Academic life, though, bored him to tears. “I thought the university was a place where a lot of intelligent people spent a lot of time talking intelligently,” he told me, but colleagues seemed uninterested in discussing ideas outside the classroom. He preferred Manhattan, where neighborhood booksellers were always available for an intellectual quickie.'
• 'Gayatri Spivak, the deconstructionist scholar, was so impressed with Delany’s work that she asked him to sire her baby'
• 'He describes Afrofuturism as a “well-intentioned, if confusing marketing tool.”'
• 'I observed that he was an encyclopedia of the city. “An encyclopedia of failed attempts by the city,” Delany corrected me'
• also, and this is from a different article which i came across whilst trying to refind this one, but i really like it: 'he does not believe that science fiction is the right genre for his concerns any more or less than another genre would be. “Nothing about the sonnet is perfect for the love poem, either,” he said. “Genre simply provides a way for the reader to look for things that have been done. A form is a useful thing to use. It has history and resonance. It informs you as to the way things have been done in the past.”'

one thing i found really interesting about the profile was how little delany is quoted, relatively. this is something the profiler notes early on: delany is 'a man willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance'. which brought to mind that brandon sanderson article from a couple of months ago, where the writer makes the whole point sanderson's inability to talk about his work properly, whatever that means. i think it's got to be impossible to properly explain writing, especially for something like a magazine profile, which isn't guaranteed a literary audience. i will say that the sanderson article feels a lot more informed by the writer's time with his subject. the article would not look like that if the two hadn't met, and had their weird hangouts and chats. whereas in someways, delany feels almost irrelevant in his article, when compared with his career. but what i'm sure is obscured here is the hours of interviews and discussions which inform the writer's understanding of what matters from that career. and that's so valuable, even if it feels a little like the source of chat gpt's data: for people keen to know or study delany, it's going to be frustratingly hard to identify or work back through the research hidden behind the writing. what is an exclusive interview with delaney, what comes from his essays, what's extrapolated from reading his work or just being around him? what's interviewer bias?

it's funny, because profiles are so often predicated on a claim by the writer of having got to know the subject. yet that doesn't always come through. i was astounded by the fact that the profiler and caroline calloway had been talking for a year and a half for her vanity fair profile, because the resulting piece read as very short and slight. that might actually be part of calloway's mystery/lying, and a need to save something for the memoir(s). but it's also the way it's kept in: how much do you quote the subject, how much do you simply describe their surroundings, how much do you linger on their past versus their present? it's all decisions. the profiler themselves is easy to overlook in these things - the reaction to the sanderson article, if you saw it, was unusual, and entirely based on the way the profiler's biases came through. it's notable that i've named only celebrity names here. but they are part of the story too, even if they are also totally unwilling to discuss their own literary significance.

for what it's worth, i like an oral history more than a profile. the clickhole ones always make me laugh, but more seriously, i think about the bennington college piece at least once every couple of weeks. it's obviously also mediated and assembled, but i like that narratorial biases are the point, and that the story absolutely wouldn't exist without the subject speaking.


just to add: i finished+posted this, and then read Did This Writer Actually Know Tennessee Williams? (btw i am not much of a new yorker peruser normally, the fact that all the main articles mentioned here are from there is a weird coincidence.) and speaking of interviewers, profilers, interviews and profiling, this is a doozy of a piece. it's got something of the allure of the msscribe story too.