Cathy Davidson has some questions. Via Bérubé. Just a taste:

If the Frankfurt School's idea of critique is rooted in a horrific historical moment, one in which intellectuals were not just derided but jailed and killed, if the major theorists of the late twentieth century, virtually all of whom consider critique to be foundational to their method, came of age in the 1960s in the midst of struggles, riots, assassinations, unjust wars, and radicalism generated by a sense of political urgency and agentive hopelessness, what will the cultural criticism of the future look like for eighteen year-olds who voted for the first time for an utterly improbable and historically unlikely president who won. In other words, in the gross world of power politics and partisan politics in the U.S., what happens if what no one could have predicted was even possible a year ago could, through concerted collective effort, become possible?

Guernica interviews Ursula K. Le Guin. Via Enter the Octopus.

Guernica: Do you ever feel that the way your work has been cordoned at times as science fiction is a deflection by the mainstream of the very serious critiques these novels contain of our society?

Ursula K. Le Guin: Yes. I do.

Guernica: Or is it sexism?

Ursula K. Le Guin: Yes. It is.

Guernica: Was there a moment when you realized the shift in the way you were being treated, when you became taken more seriously by the literary establishment, and do you remember it precisely? To an outsider, it appears recent.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Actually, I haven’t felt a major shift. I am still mostly referred to (dismissed) as a “sci fi writer.” When Margaret Atwood writes a serious review of one of my books for the New York Times, it is printed under the title “The Queen of Quinkdom,” to make sure nobody takes it seriously. I am shortlisted for major awards, but the awards go to people like De Lillo and MacCarthy who also write science fiction, using the tropes and loci and metaphors of science fiction, but fastidiously keep their literary skirts from being defiled by the name of genre.

I admire Doris Lessing for calling her science-fiction books science fiction; I only wish I liked the books. Atwood herself has walked a very fine and sometimes wavering line trying to keep her science fiction books out of the genre ghetto without trashing the people who live in the ghetto. I can’t wait for people like Michael Chabon to finish chainsawing that damn thorn hedge and knocking down all the genre walls. Now, there’s a man with courage, Chabon. He just joined the Science Fiction Writers Association. He steps over the walls in both directions.

Most recently, my three books of the Annals of the Western Shore have been ignored by both the science fiction community and the literary critics, because they are published as “young adult.” The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration. The walls of disdain around any book perceived as being “for children” are much higher than they were when I began publishing the Earthsea books, forty years ago. Oh, Joshua, won’t you blow your horn?

Design Observer pays homage to AMC's excellent Mad Men, the first season of which Jaimee and I finished up watching on DVD last night. This particular homage is all about Mad Men's depiction of the advertising business—which I suppose is something it's rather good at—but it's really the subdued dystopianism of the show's 1960 Manhattan setting that grabs me. Matthew Weiner (who as Design Observer informs us earned a job on The Sopranos on the basis of his spec script for Mad Men) has a very keen eye for cultural critique, and in accordance with something I once wrote of Terry Gilliam never allows his 1960 to become so reified that we forget the different ways in which we're also talking about the present. There's a nice cartoonishness to the satire that's fun, but also necessary: it functions as a kind of critical prophylactic so that we're never allowed to understand Mad Men as mere history.

The critique of American consumerism is as subtle as a sledgehammer, but it's solid, and I can't think of any other show that's ever been more focused or forceful on the realities of misogyny. This is very good stuff.