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The poet Monica Youn has long found inspiration in pop culture, probing its pleasures and possibilities for subversive verse. Her 2010 collection “Ignatz,” a finalist for the National Book Award, turned the madcap energies and mysterious syntax of George Herriman’s famed comic strip “Krazy Kat” into a lyric investigation of desire. “Krazy Kat,” of course, has long been seen as literary, earning adaptations across mediums, including a jazz ballet in the nineteen-twenties, along with admiration from writers like E. E. Cummings and Gilbert Seldes, who praised the comic-strip form as one of the “lively arts.” Youn’s verse is no less lively, blending a range of cultural references with piercing social and philosophical explorations; her most recent book, “Blackacre,” investigates race, childbirth, and being, through the lens of law, which Youn practiced for a number of years.
Which, again: All of this was put in place back in October of 2020, before
Green Eggs And Ham had even become a fundamental conservative text. But the all-seeing, all-glowering eye of the COM has no concern for your linear understanding of time, mortals. The disclaimers were part of a wave of streaming services coming to terms with the racially insensitive legacies of older materials, a modern iteration of the “What do we do with
Gone With The Wind?” issue that’s dogged film critique for decades. (Or the “What to do with sitcom blackface?” issue that’s dogged network TV comedies since, uh, way back in the late-2000s.) None of it’s new, and most of it feels pretty reasonable, in so far as parents might, in fact, want to talk to their kids before showing them something like the racist stereotypes on display in
More than 1.2 million copies of Dr. Seuss books sold the first week of March after the news six books were being pulled over racial and ethnic stereotyping.