Scott Folsom

I feel guilty for admitting that I’m relieved that the “love-triangle” aspect has been backgrounded in this film – I feel as though contemporary media discourse about the franchise, inasmuch as it focuses on the “Team Peeta/Team Gale” conflict, recapitulates the message of the texts themselves: that the media, in the interest of preserving order, will use anything as a distraction from sites of disorder.

I almost wonder if, on some level, the becoming of text as a verb goes so far as to render the use of text as a noun endangered in some sense – already, I’ve heard of professors in English having to expunge the word “text” from manuscripts, in the interest of “accessibility,” and I wonder if, on some level, “we” have always wanted “text” to be a verb.

I’ve always loved focusing especially on the orthographic elements that dropped out of English between, say, 900 and 1650. I suppose, after spending a few centuries mixing up þ and þ, certain linguistic forces tend to work these sorts of conflicts out.

Does anyone remember the episode of Leave it to Beaver where Ward tells the Beav to read Ivanhoe, and as a result of having read it, the kid gets in a fight and is banned from the schoolbus? And all along, June is the voice of reason, arguing to the wind that, perhaps, a small child shouldn’t be reading about chivalry and knighthood before he’s old enough to realize that that isn’t how people settle things?
It’s moments like this that illustrate that, even in the text itself, masculine violence was already being presented alongside its critique.

Thank you for letting me know – I’m going to edit this post to rectify the situation.

I think the next step here is to look at the way that the iconography of the Shoah, and of the Nazi regime more broadly, seeps into other cultural representations of evil or totalitarian power – the furor over the most recent Nicki Minaj video seems like a starting place.

Here’s another one: Rebecca Blithely from the CBC’s Strange Empire, which you can easily find online, and who also has Dr. before her name, albeit as a result of some, shall we say, unique circumstances.

I delight in Abed, not so much in Sheldon, mostly because of the way in which the others treat him as some kind of alien creature. Granted, Sheldon doesn’t help his own case that much, but we could chalk that up to the writers.

I, too, would like to see more exploration of this particular linkage between the Sherlock Holmes character and the idea of autism, but I’d hate to see the conversation limited to the paradigm of diagnosis, or made open only to those who can “diagnose” or “identify” a patient as having AS. Certainly, there should be room for the community of people like your son (and I, as someone else’s adult son with AS) to comment on the ways in which we see ourselves (or don’t) in certain media representations.

As an aside, the BBC Sherlock is on Netflix, and sometimes runs on PBS. I think you’d find Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Sherlock might remind you quite a bit of your son.