Original Website Blurb from 2011
We left off with Barbara Oakley, talking about personality as a compromise between nature and nurture. We didn’t address last week’s topic of homosexuality, but I want to remind you of something she said on the general topic of nature vs. nurture: that where we admit multiple causes at all, we want it to be 50/50, whereas in reality the causal mixture is different in every individual case. There are a lot of genes that contribute to mating behavior, so there are lots of opportunities for variation in those genes. But it’s equally clear to me, at least, that some people adopt a lifestyle for social reasons, like some of the broke and hungry street kids in Paris is Burning.
This week, inspired by an old episode of Acme Wave Projector I was listening to at the gym, my son and I hit the comic store for the first time since Free Comic Book Day. It’s been that busy. He picked up the recommended issue of The Intrepid Escape Goat, and I passed on a hardcover collection of all Jack Kirby’s Etrigan stories.
Later in the week I bought Grant Morrison’s Supergods, a combination autobiography and history of the comics industry, centering around his ideas on the relationship between fictional realities and our reality. He talks a lot about the voices of individual writers from the 70s and 80s, when I was reading comics most intensely. That’s why the writing of Norman Corwin, Poet Laureate of Radio, hit me so strongly today as I was listening to the interview on Bob Edwards. I realized that the voice of comics is the voice of radio. The founding comics writers were radio listeners, and the way they wrote inherited the cultural practices they picked up from radio, and today's comics writers ape that, even when they didn't listen to radio. Not only that; the worldview of the comics, their visions of what America can and should be, were so similar that I can’t imagine it was just coincidence.
Anyway, on to Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and today's show.
VSI Episode 22