Martin Lund > Recent Status Updates

Having a cop upgrade his weapons to hyper-militarized levels and then having him use them to fire on those protesting what they see as their oppression is a bit on the nose, no?

As is so

"[S]idelining these practices by putting them into a separate category is to extend the ideology of the polis into modern scholarship [...] to turn an evaluative term from within Greek religion into a descriptive one."

But the exact same critique applies to using "religion" and "the religious" to talk about ancient Greece. It's a modern evalutive term projected back into the mists of time.

This page does consider the lack of a sense/notion of belief in ancient Greece but brushes it aside right away in a distinctly un- or even antihistoricist manner.

Describing approaches to the past as ”anti-historicist” is sometimes necessary and accurate, but it’s not a good look in a book where no effort is spent to consider whether a modern, historically rooted term (”religion”) is applicable to an ancient Greek context and if so, in what ways.

If I’m understanding the argument being built here right, the rethinking is not about whether it is constructive or useful to impose the modern concept of ”religion” on ancient Greece, but about whether scholars have been too focused on politics and not seen Greek ”religion” as a personal, internal, apolitical affair.

”Apparently,everyone is religious-much as everyone apparently undersrands English if spoken slowly enough-whether they know it or not, and whether or not ’religion’ is part of their conceptual tool box.”

”Each of these covers is an exercise in nostalgia, an active violent attempt to move time backwards.” Yup, this sure sounds like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, it does. This is exactly what the founders of a fanzine subtitled ”The Advance Guard of Future Civilization” would do. Good thing there are no other clues on the covers that suggest Superman and Captain Marvel would smash these cars.

The whole posing dramatically in the rain for days bit feels a bit too on the nose. It just sums up the series so far in all its self-indulgent posing and esthetic of difficulty too perfectly.

”The core idea of sustainability, then, is that each generationshoul try to sustain enough if what matters to pass on to the next generation” seems like a framework for killing the planet just that teensy bit slower.

”[A]s a matter of justice, what level and/or kind of resources _must we bequeath_ to future generations?” Or maybe the perspective here is kinda not great and treating everything as ”ours” to ”bequeath” is part of what got us into this mess in the first place?

Among the most depressing things about rwading this book is that all the examples of racist discourse from the 1980s and 1990s used could just as easily have been ripped from the headlines today. The exact same strategies and codes in play.

”[T]here is probably no greater threat to relious conviction than the practice of historiography.”

So, the title of this chapter should be ”The Golem in Those Marvel Comics I’ve Read”?

I wish I had the confidence to claim, matter-of-fact that a visual use mushroom clouds is a means of drawing connections to Berlin in/after WWII.

”This artist doesn’t talk about what I want to then to talk about, so they’re self-centered” is not a terribly scholarly argument.

Much of this book has been descriptive but this is particularly telling - it’s just a recap in broad outline of the comic under ”analysis.”

”The reader” is an overly complicatedqay of writing ”I,” as in: ”The reader cheers Harvey [Pekar] on and hopes for the best for him.”

This is flirting with some pretty racist discourse.

Describing Dreamer as ”the second story in Life, in Pictures,” while technically correct, does not suggest that much research into publication history and context has been done.

Introducing Kafka isn’t a comic...

Magneto: Testament can be treated as a stad-alone work is a novel take.

Insistently and repeatedly pushing against a Holocaust survivor’s atheism because you really think God was in the good people isn’t a great look.

This is twice now the author has completely disregarded the self-identifications of authors as not religious now, because he feels that their works give evidence of God’s intervention.

Since when is Watchmen a ”Holocaust graphic novel”?