The fourth-seeded Creator of Laws or Rules us up against the third-seeded Cool Person. This matchup should satisfy the Bechdel Rule. Whether you want Mrs Peel to succeed will depend a bit on what you think about the British Empire Commonwealth.
What’s it gonna be, the Avengers or the Secret to Superhuman Strength?
I’ll be going on vacation for a few days, so post your arguments and we’ll move on to the next bout at the end of the week.
Past matchup
Siobhan writes:
Cleary and Dylan have to progress so that Dylan can sing ‘To Ramona’ to Beverley Cleary during their round.
And she should win! Klickitat Street to beat Highway 61, hands down!
People who weren’t bookish kids generally have little idea of the scale of the universes of girls’ novels – how much time we spend in them, and how they become part of our minds, even when we grow out of them. Music has visibility and prestige, which children’s literature mostly doesn’t. But in terms of cultural socialization, children’s literature is hugely-significant.
It’s my impression that music takes up a smaller part of the cultural space now than it did 40 or 50 or 60 years ago. I don’t really know why this should be, and it could just be that my impressions are distorted by this being a different stage in my own life . . . I dunno. We’ve discussed this before. I guess the question is how best to measure it.
In any case, Siobhan’s argument is compelling, but I don’t like the idea of advancing Dylan just for the purpose of making him lose in the next round. Bob may be friends with Patti but he’s no patsy.
So it’ll be Helmsley who will advance to face the Cleary juggernaut in the next round. Who knows, maybe Leona has a killer karaoke rendition of To Ramona up her sleeve!
I want Mrs Peel to succeed for a selfish reason. As she will be sipping champagne while giving the talk, I hope the organization will go for a caviar seminar instead of the usual pizza seminar. I confess that I don’t know how stylish Bechdel is with champagne, so maybe I’m rooting for the wrong person. As for the Britishness, I dunno, all Anglo-Saxon look the same to me.
It’s one thing (actually two things, I suppose) to beat Willie Nelson and Hammurabi. After all, they’re men, and beating men at their own games has been a Bechdel specialty. But now she faces a double-X chromosome, and what a phenotype. So we now have two women and their conflict has no intervening man. By making it to this match, Bechdel has won and can now modestly withdraw from the contest. Who would you rather hear about Hollywood sexism from? Men ķnow the answer. (Uh-oh… maybe that means it should be Bechdel after all.)
It bugged me as I staggered home goroggily. I mean, I’m not priggish about how some egghead blogger chooses his seminar speaker, it’s no skin of my noggin. But, doggone it, what aggravated me was this: why make this “contest” so aggressively Rigged from the get-go? Good gravy, it was like begging for a mugging, like tobogganing a ziggy-zaggy path toward a jagged cliff, it was maggot-gagging. It nagged me: What tale was wagging these doggerels? Then, suddenly, the tip of a daggerat my bag jogged my memory…