Brow Beat

The Week in Culture, “Hold Your Nose and Read a Lot of White Male Poets” Edition

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Hodor in "Game of Thrones".
Hodor in Game of Thrones.

HBO

Beach reading shmeach reading—going into this holiday weekend we’re thinking about nothing less than the fate of English letters: “The canon of English literature is sexist. It is racist. It is colonialist, ableist, transphobic, and totally gross. You must read it anyway.” That’s Slate words correspondent Katy Waldman telling it how it is in response to the news out of Yale University that students are petitioning to “decolonize” the English curriculum, which currently requires study of major (white, male) English poets like Chaucer, Milton, Wordworth, et. al. Waldman is all for diversity and inclusivity, but “[t]hese guys are the heavies, the chord progressions upon which the rest of us continue to improvise, and we’d be somewhere else entirely without them.”

Speaking of heavies, of late giants, of great wordsmiths now departed, this week Game of Thrones lost an important character—you really shouldn’t be reading this if you don’t want to know who—in Hodor, the beloved House Stark servant. Brow Beat honored Hodor by running a moving tribute to the character, in his own words, and you can also remember him with one of these custom doorstops.

Kristian Nairn, the actor who plays Hodor, would be perfect for Dancing With the Stars. Stay with me for a second, here! Since it began in 2005—it just wrapped up its 22nd season—that show has quietly become a pioneer in the way it lets celebrities present themselves to the world, Laura Bennett wrote this week. At the center of it all is Deena Katz, the show’s clever casting director and the woman responsible for “reel[ing] in a boggling mix of celebrities who would seem to have little incentive to swivel their pelvises on national TV: Steve Wozniak, Bristol Palin, Tom DeLay, Paula Deen.” Bennett talks to luminaries like Marla Maples, Jerry Springer, Tucker Carlson, all past competitors, and Katz herself in an attempt to explain the show’s place in the celebrosphere.

If you’re thinking about how you present yourself to the world—especially if you’re a man—you’ll benefit from Simon Doonan’s guide to the five tribes of modern male fashion, which dropped this week: Are you the Perverse Prepster, the Arty Ninja, the Dedicated Follower of Satin, the Statham, or the Schlub?

A few more highs and lows from Slate’s week in culture: