I Thought, I Fanced, That

I Suppose There Is Something Appealing About A Word That Everyone Uses With Absolute Confidence But On Whose Exact Meaning No Two People Can Agree. The Word That I'm Thinking Of Right Now Is Genre, One Of Those French Words, Like Crêpe, That No One Can Pronounce Both Correctly And Without Sounding Pretentious.

As For Comics, One Has Only To Turn To The Characteristic Output Of Marvel Comics, For The Period From About 1961 To About 1975, To Find Not An Expression Of Base And Cynical Impulses But Of Good, Old-fashioned Liberal Humanism Of A Kind That May Strike Us Today, God Help Us, As Quaint, But Which Nevertheless Appealed, In Story After Story, To Ideals Such As Tolerance, Technological Optimism, And Self-sacrifice For The Benefit Of Others.

Every Time Another Review Comes Out I Let Out A Deep Breath.

[my Dad] Didn't Do Much Apart From The Traditional Winning Of Bread. He Didn't Take Me To Get My Hair Cut Or My Teeth Cleaned; He Didn't Make The Appointments. He Didn't Shop For My Clothes. He Didn't Make My Breakfast, Lunch, Or Dinner. My Mom Did All Of Those Things, And Nobody Ever Told Her When She Did Them That It Made Her A Good Mother.

Misogyny Comes Naturally To A Young Man In His Late Teens; It Is A Function Of The Powerful Homosocial Impulses That Flower Along Fraternity Row, That Drove The Mod Movements Of The Middle Sixties And Late Seventies, That Lie At The Heart Of Every Rock Band Formed By Men Of That Age.