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this entire article bummed me out and as far as i can tell the author is wasting her entire life its a depressing but clarifying microcosm of whats become of americas intellectual life and so i shall elaborate https://t.co/w02DcNDSmA
the piece is a criticism, really not a critique, of a one-off story called _Ramadan_ in neil gaiman's _Sandman_. its a story about stories using elements of a story about stories to tell its story i found it beautiful brief excerpts are here https://t.co/DsOPHDg1gH
_Ramadan_ is a love letter to the Thousand Nights and a Night i wont give the entire history here but note it was most famously translated to English by Richard "Ruffian Dick" Burton, a Victorian adventurer (whose life was a story in itself) he deserves his own thread https://t.co/GREUgyWwrB
in _Ramadan_, Harun al-Rashid's Baghdad is filled with all the wonders of the Nights: flying carpets, vast wealth, unearthly poetry, imprisoned djinni, sotadic sensuality arabesque motif are lovingly, and respectfully, attended and rendered so what is the critic's complaint? https://t.co/DBYpEkVvrE
now its true that Scheherazade is absent and i think her inclusion would have been a delight if it could be managed our critic's protests acknowledged, *no one* loves Scheherazade more than i do if i had the money and if she werent banned id play four of her in all my decks https://t.co/4IoGHalQ61
unfortunately Scheherazade doesnt particularly work for this story because (1) Ramadan is set in Baghdad, (2) Ramadan is not just about stories; it is also about Baghdad in the wake of Desert Storm, and (3) Scheherazade is not an Arab https://t.co/RCqx3ABDFf
moreover the *actual* narrator is not some imperialist! it's not even Harun al-Rashid! on the last page of the comic, we zoom out once more, to an even more devastated modern Baghdad and what's this? https://t.co/OBDs5kKOZU
it seems that Scheherazade is not so absent after all just as the Baghdad of the Nights is replaced by a mundane Baghdad, then vanishes in turn to bombed out ruins, so when the veil is lifted the ravishing and desperate Queen replaced by a mean beggar taking coin from an urchin
i hate this paragraph from the linked essay immensely as you have seen, the story ends with Baghdad destroyed. any contemporary reader would know the reason for this as you have seen, a poor and lame boy still dreams of another baghdad so im not sure what comic the author read https://t.co/oecr5TwKy9
i feel at this point i have sufficiently refuted the author's complaints to have earned the right to deliver my own in turn Rev has done so more incisively than i could have. but i will elaborate https://t.co/1p3vbzbYR3
the author is not wrong about american exploitation. but she is wrong about its form while her advisors seem happy to take her tuition, none of them has taken the time to explain that she is wasting her life https://t.co/HPiqbpiocA
by the time she graduates--if she graduates on time, if she graduates--she will have wasted nearly a decade and a half of her life paying the salaries of the old white men she despises and teaching their courses either way, she'll be unemployable in her early 30s
in pursuit of this imagined glory she will have learned absolutely nothing of value to herself or to anyone else as ive demonstrated any idiot can argue about comics online. and apparently a decade of coursework does not guarantee competence in this field
she was just a kid who liked comics once, and they took that from her. and that's the worst thing anyone could have done https://t.co/T7Wc6ApQRo
