And We Shall March

Housekeeping / Golliwogg / Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill League of Extraordinary Gentelmen / Black Dossier Edition

Start here.

There are 5 core posts dealing with this topic on the site. The rest of the related posts in the run are there Because It's A Blog, but only five of those posts directly tackle the issue. (This dvd bonus post included in the full run is also worth perusing. Let's call that entry 5.1.)

My hope is this entry will fix the index problems people linking have had trying to access the core posts over the years. We'll see. I'm making this up as I go along, people. I'm fully aware of the amount of housekeeping I need to do in this space, but I've just not had time to get to it all.

The Chaotic Neutral approach of my homeport's organization will have to stand until I hve a significant stretch of free time available to do something about it. Same with the wiggy formatting things in some of the 5 core posts. That's a TypePad quirk with older posts. I've tried to fix them over the years but it doesn't hold. The formatting issues are minor: the information is major. Please overlook the former for sake of the latter.

 

 

Oh Yeah. I Can Answer That One Very Easily! Kevin O'Neill Is Wrong. Absolutely. Unequivocally. Wrong.

Not that this is surprising or anything.

One of the biggest lies about the Golli white people cling to is that the original was somehow less racist than the later versions, and if it wasn't for the whole failing to copyright thing everything about the Golli would be just peachy.

But if you've read any of the Upton Golli books - which! I! have! - that claim is clearly a  lie.  It is a demonstrable untruth. It is a delusion.

Apparently there will never be a comics reporter or scholar who will ever, ever, ever challenge Moore or O'Neill on this directly** because goddammit if  we got YET ANOTHER interviewer who just lets LIES fly right past.

So I thought someone should say it. Again.

For the record - the other thing Kevin O'Neill is wrong about? The black woman photographer at the Golden Apple signing did not say "Polliwogg". Here's how I know that, (you know...besides in general clearly knowing a lot more about the full history of the Golli than he does and also giving a fuck about it, which he does not).

Wrong wrong wrong wrong fucking wrong just plain flat out wrong.

** I could give you names of the comics scholars and so-called journalists who have told me directly they are too afraid to bring it up because they don't want to lose access or they just don't want him mad at them. Hey. Good to know. UPDATE: Of course I won't give you those names. Because it would be Wrong to dime out someone from an off-the-record conversation just because I'm pissed off. Also, I still hold out to hope that maybe one of them will have a change of thought, get the bigger picture, and make the attempt down the road. It's only been three years since my initial series of posts about the Golli in The Black Dossier. That's nothing, really. There's still time.

A Note To The Late-To-The-Game League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier OMG You Totally Made That Up And What About My FEEEELINGS Golliwogg Defenders

None of you are going to get a personal response, except for the two people I've given a heads-up that I will get back to them.

The bibliography (of sorts) was included for a reason. I strongly suggest you start with Pickering. 

As for Eliot, I acknowledged the first time out that my argument for The Waste Land is weaker. But I am absolutely correct on my interpretation of Sweeney Agonistes because I have read it. Maybe you should do the same, if you can find a copy. Your best bet will be going to a good library. Then read up on some of the resorts he used to hang out in because you know he did not live in a self-contained bubble, right?

Also, I could give a fuck about your MFA, your relatives who have MFAs, or your degree in English lit. I recognize that earning an MFA takes an enormous amount of work, and I'm not denigrating that effort, but me not having one is irrelevant in this instance. 

Okay, Apparently I'm Not Done Talking About The Golliwogg In The Black Dossier

Because no one can save me from myself.

Posted here, top-of-head thoughts in response to a couple of thoughts shared by others over on Newsarama's blog.  Of course as soon as I hit "say it" two more things popped into my head, but that's how it rolls. There's a reason I rarely post on boards & blogs. Oh well!  I'll let it fly for now.

Replicating that post under the cut, but I suggest that if you're interested keep an eye out on that thread. If anything else pops up there that I feel needs to be responded to, I shall do so there. I will not do so here. (However, I will continue responding to your emails as time and temperament allows.)

Small Update Added to the 5th Golliwogg/Dossier Post

It's at the very bottom. To save you the time, here's what it says:

*** Update! To answer ... yes, I do remember the passing reference to the courageous black balloonist in the polar sections of the the second series. I thought it might have something to do with this, and that's the Benefit of the Doubt position I was taking during the discussions.  To save you time from reading it, all of the black people in that book are ignorant, violent and worship trinkets. (It's been a looong while since I've read it, so I'm being vague out of sketchy memory.) Since Moore was already using Verne via Nemo, and since he was doing other correctives (for lack of a better term) with other era attitudes and characters throughout the LoEG, I wondered if perhaps he was doing the same here, just really low-key about it. Ha. There I was being all clever thinking I'd spotted a subtle reference to the work that came before the one everybody knows (the one where, despite what the movie shows, they don't use a balloon), and down the road I'd be proven right! What an idiot I turned out to be.

And with that, done. Completely.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.  Full run.

 

“In this present moment we are either smaller than we were, or else are on our knees.” ***

Part 5 of 5. Under the cut.

 

Small Update Added the the 4th Golliwogg/Black Dossier Entry

It's in the entry about Caryl Phillips. To save you the time for looking for it, here's what it says:

Completely unrelated update: From the lj of somebody I don't know which I found on the flist of somebody else I don't know, here's his writing room. I bet he came up with that title while sitting at that desk.  Okay, I'll stop, now. Unrelated update II: Just wanted to point out this article, and this article, both of which generally relate to the big picture topic at hand. The first article is better at the top. I remember hearing about that BBC list when it first came out... I must add that I liked the book more than either of the reviewers linked to here. In case you don't know, one of the persons explored in the Foreigners book is David Oluwale, the British citizen of Nigerian origin whose murder and cover up by police officers  is the focus of the nonfiction book [not by Phillips] called Nationality Wog: The Hounding of David Oluwale. I don't have that one yet, but wanted to mention it. The title of that book comes from what was on two of Oluwale's book-in sheets. Where "British" was written for his nationality, a cop crossed that out and wrote "Wog." On another book-in sheet, "Wog" was typed in as his nationality. Here's an article from back in the spring about that book, which is titled "Nationality Wog" in case I hadn't mentioned it.)

To assist random visitors wondering what the hell I'm talking about:

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.  Full run.

"I don't want to have anything to do with anything black for at least a week."

Part 4 of 5. Under the cut.

"The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black." ***

Part 3 of 5. Under the cut.

"One white woman, two white girls, twenty five white men dressed up like women, made up to look like black people to entertain other white people." ***

Part 2 of 5. Under the cut.

PLEASE NOTE: Keep refreshing, or come back later until it's all up. I am bouncing between networks at airports and outlets in the provinces. Because all tech hates me, my computer is not getting along with other people's internet(s). I have been having problems getting pages to load and the included links to take. At one point I thought I'd finally gotten the whole thing cut & pasted over, only to get some weird notice that seemed to my uninformed eyes to boil down to computer-speak for ACKTOOMUCHDATA followed quickly by ACKINVALID.

I think if I go a few graphs at a time I can get it up between stops. Let us see..

Update! Okay, it's finally all up.