Quick Hits: Parenthood, Nostalgia, Academic Summer, and Spiders
A bunch of small items, personal and pop-cultural
— As happens in about 15% of all years, my birthday fell on a Sunday, which was also Father’s Day. I’m in the weird in-between zone where I’m neither young enough for every birthday to feel like a milestone, nor old enough for every birthday to feel like a miracle, so the latter was probably the more significant of the two occasions. There’s not a huge difference between 51 and 52, but things are changing very rapidly for the kids, with corresponding impacts on my life as a parent. They’re both more independent, able to coordinate a lot of their own social lives, and more demanding, in that their various activities are more time-consuming (and somewhat more expensive).
Fittingly, I ended up spending a whole lot of the day doing baseball stuff with The Pip: helping him take practice swings before his baseball game, watching him play (1-2 with an RBI, made a nice play at third to help secure a 5-2 win), and then helping him with more practice swings after dinner. (He cranked one over the net into the back yard of a neighbor whose older son plays minor-league ball, which a nice little irony…) We also took one of SteelyKid’s friends to a movie on Saturday (about which more later); everything is kid-centric around here these days.
And I’m pretty much good with that. I don’t have a whole lot of exciting stuff going on at the moment, so it’s nice to live vicariously through them. And also that The Pip’s sport of choice is baseball, which I was never good enough at to feel like I have Important Advice to give him. (He also enjoys basketball, but doesn’t play as seriously, so I’m not faced with too much temptation to offer excessive coaching.)
— Also in the “Wibbling About Getting Old” vein, I spent the previous weekend at my 30th Williams reunion:
I’ve been very active with the alumni association— I’m the secretary for my class, which means that a few times a year I write up little reports about information people send me. It also means I was on the organizing committee for the reunion, which was a big production— we got north of 120 classmates, on the high side of the pre-pandemic average— and I was on a LOT of Zoom calls about caterers and DJs and all that kind of thing.
(I’m sort of well suited to the secretary role, not just because I enjoy writing. I was a core member of the rugby team and that social scene, but also kind of a peripheral member of a lot of other social groups. As I put it to one classmate, there were a lot of parties on campus where I could randomly turn up and people would be happy to see me, even though they wouldn’t’ve been sad if I didn’t show up. That makes it a tiny bit easier to hit people up for gossip, and to contextualize what I hear.)
I will admit to feeling a little bit of liberal guilt about investing this effort in an institution that’s as wealthy and elite as Williams. If you want to get effectively altruistic about this, the same amount of time and money would have a lot more impact just about anywhere else. Williams has several billion dollars in the bank, they’d be fine.
At the same time, though, going back reminded me that this is a place and a collection of people that are incredibly meaningful to me. It’s mind-boggling how much more relaxed I feel in that town, and among that crowd, even after three decades away. For a weekend, at least, it was easy to pick back up with people I haven’t seen in years (including one retiring professor who I ran into at lunch and talked shop with for half an hour). That did wonders for my state of mind at the end of an academic year that’s been pretty brutal.
The 72-hour hangover that come from spending three nights acting like I did when I was 20, on the other hand…
—We are now officially into the summer session, which means a lot of fellow parents and other non-academics saying things like “Oh, so you’re on break for the next couple of months? Got anything fun planned?” Sigh.
In fact, I have three research students starting today, which will keep me pretty busy. I’m very hands-off with them, on the whole, but even doing the check-in-once-a-day-and-offer-suggestions level of supervision is a lot of time and energy, and ties me to Schenectady.
This is one of the few occasions when I envy my colleagues on the arts and literature side of academia, whose scholarship legitimately requires them to travel to cool places over the summer. Or at least justifies not coming to the office on Monday mornings in late July at the same time they do in October…
— As noted above, we went to a movie on Saturday. Specifically, Across the Spider-Verse, the sequel to the animated Spider-Man movie from a few years back.
This was a pretty mixed bag for me. The animation is genuinely lovely, especially the way that it shifts between characters and universes. Visually, it’s amazing.
It’s also about half an hour too long, and a big chunk of the third act is devoted to explaining comic-book “science,” which, ugh. Multiverse stories tend to be stupid in direct proportion to the amount of exposition devoted to How It All Works, and this was way on the high end of what I can tolerate.
In some ways, the problem comes down to Spider-Man being fundamentally kind of a silly concept in the first place, with a set of powers and problems that are kind of weird and contingent. The idea that this dopey collection of tropes is some kind of multiversal constant that recurs everywhere with only small tweaks is just kind of dumb. The first one played it for zany fun, and worked pretty well as a result, but this one treats it as Serious Business, and I just can’t really ride with that. Even before you get into the many and manifest problems of the “Canon Event” business.
I have a half-formed theory about the current problems of superhero movies, prompted in part by the very good observation Van Lathan made in a recent Big Picture podcast that most comics end up with multiverses more or less by accident: they need to change writers for business reasons, and the new writers shake things up, but the model requires them to run under the same title. And at some point, somebody decided to retcon all of these as being real in their own universes, followed by making them connect up in ways that require some familiarity with other threads of the story.
I think at some level, the willingness to roll with that form, more than the fundamental silliness of the subject matter, is what’s always kept superhero comics as a niche thing. In much the same way that soap operas were always a niche thing— the need to endlessly prolong the story, keeping it under the same banner throughout, at some point limits the appeal. The people who like that kind of thing really like it, but there are only so many of them; most people can tolerate the accumulation of retcons and background lore for only so long before they say “OK, this is getting silly…” and tune out.
I suspect that the post-Endgame tail-off of the MCU in part reflects a reaching of that limit. Large numbers of people were happy to carry on through a large-ish number of movies while they were telling a single unified story, but once that reached a conclusion, that was that. There’s not the same mass audience for the kind of large-scale rebooting that moving to a “next phase” requires.
But this is, as I said, half-formed at best. So I’ll throw it out here, at the tail end of a holiday blog post, and maybe come back to it later, maybe not.
So, yeah, that’s some stuff. I hope to do more regular blogging here over the next few months, which would mean fewer of these mash-up posts. Here’s a button to click if you want to see whether that comes off:
And if you feel moved to respond to any of that, the comments will be open:
Enjoy Pip in this moment!!
He will be all grown up and gone in a flash.
We made the mistake of sending our daughter off to college out of state.
We hardly see her or her family now.
She has made the same mistake sending her daughter off to Smith.
Now her daughter has a job in Boston. Sad.