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First, thanks for the virtual flowers, Clark & Lex! And the sweet things from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
svmadelyn's lovefest -- they are much appreciated, so much so that I am going to work on my Lex/Lana story on the Metro and see if I can't get it done soon. In the meantime, I have over 30 books in the hopper, so I'll work on the backlog, starting with some nonfiction:
Mark Leyner & Billy Goldberg, Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini: Long at 217 large-print pages, this unfunny humor book – padded with IM exchanges between the authors in which they discuss, apparently presciently, how much money they're going to make with this drivel.
The answers are usually underexplained and sometimes nonsensical. Z. opened it at random to the question "do men need sex more than women?" to which their answer is "yes," because MRIs showed that men were aroused more than women by pictures of people having sex. Z. pointed out that, since they didn't have women read erotica, all that proved was that things that arouse men more than women arouse men more than women. And of course, even had the study actually shown that men want sex more than women, need wouldn't have much to do with it – I have yet to hear of a man actually dying of blue balls. Though it would be funny, unlike this book.
New Media, 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman & Geoffrey B. Pingree: This interesting volume collects essays about how various technologies, many of them now disappeared, were understood and used when they were new. I liked: Wendy Bellion’s study of profiles – created by a device that physically traced over a person’s body – and the meaning of “representation” in art and politics in Jeffersonian American; Patricia Crain’s exploration of the “optical telegraph,” used to teach large numbers of school children in rote learning, and the ways it was used to homogenize and enculturare Native American children; Katherine Stubbs on “telegraphic fiction,” stories written by telegraph operators about telegraphy, used to express and negotiate anxieties about the feminization of the initially all-male profession; Diane Zimmerman Umble’s piece on competing meanings of the telephone in Amish country – its arrival was so disruptive that it caused both the Amish and the Mennonites to split; and Ellen Gruber Garvey’s fascinating essay on the hobby of scrapbooking, showing how nineteenth-century families created their own identities by clipping bits and pieces from newspapers and other sources and pasting them into books; the scrapbooks often weren’t blank, but were printed books repurposed to function as scrapbooks, industrial-age palimpsests.
Susan Scafidi, Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law: Scafidi argues that the specific products of particular cultures, though often appropriated by the rest of society as part of an “identity tax” (such as the adoption and alteration of Italian coffee habits by the Starbucks Nation), sometimes deserve protection from exposure, appropriation, and/or commercialization. Unlike Michael Brown's much better book about cultural properties, Scafidi is frustratingly abstract about what it is that she wants to protect about cultures. She mentions examples (religious rituals, clothes, foods), but doesn't integrate them into her proposals except for the most screamingly obvious -- legal protection for secret Native American rituals photographed by sneaky outsiders. She proposes some type of limited property rights for cultural groups that would allow them to protect, say, religious texts -- beyond the expiration of copyright, or the proposal adds nothing to current law -- but doesn't grapple with the fact that she's just become Scientology's best friend. She makes gestures towards the interests of dissenters but never explores what dissent means (ex-Scientologists arguing that the religion is a cult that steals your money, using selective quotations from materials that Scientologists assert are dangerous for nonbelievers to see; or people fleeing from Mormon fundamentalisms that marry pubescent girls to their uncles). Examples without theory are incomplete but may help you think about what the theory should be; theory without examples is worse. She also talks about reverse appropriation – what we know as “fandom,” from Star Trek fans to Judy Garland fans – and says that this type of cultural construction should also be addressed by any cultural protection law, but then doesn’t mention it in her chapter on what is to be done. Disappointing.
ETA: LibraryThing now has a "completist" section on its stats page, so you can see what authors are likely to inspire collections -- that is, if you own one book by that author, you probably own several books by that author. Scroll down to see;coffeeandink in particular might be amused by the results.
svmadelyn's lovefest -- they are much appreciated, so much so that I am going to work on my Lex/Lana story on the Metro and see if I can't get it done soon. In the meantime, I have over 30 books in the hopper, so I'll work on the backlog, starting with some nonfiction: Mark Leyner & Billy Goldberg, Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini: Long at 217 large-print pages, this unfunny humor book – padded with IM exchanges between the authors in which they discuss, apparently presciently, how much money they're going to make with this drivel.
The answers are usually underexplained and sometimes nonsensical. Z. opened it at random to the question "do men need sex more than women?" to which their answer is "yes," because MRIs showed that men were aroused more than women by pictures of people having sex. Z. pointed out that, since they didn't have women read erotica, all that proved was that things that arouse men more than women arouse men more than women. And of course, even had the study actually shown that men want sex more than women, need wouldn't have much to do with it – I have yet to hear of a man actually dying of blue balls. Though it would be funny, unlike this book.
New Media, 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman & Geoffrey B. Pingree: This interesting volume collects essays about how various technologies, many of them now disappeared, were understood and used when they were new. I liked: Wendy Bellion’s study of profiles – created by a device that physically traced over a person’s body – and the meaning of “representation” in art and politics in Jeffersonian American; Patricia Crain’s exploration of the “optical telegraph,” used to teach large numbers of school children in rote learning, and the ways it was used to homogenize and enculturare Native American children; Katherine Stubbs on “telegraphic fiction,” stories written by telegraph operators about telegraphy, used to express and negotiate anxieties about the feminization of the initially all-male profession; Diane Zimmerman Umble’s piece on competing meanings of the telephone in Amish country – its arrival was so disruptive that it caused both the Amish and the Mennonites to split; and Ellen Gruber Garvey’s fascinating essay on the hobby of scrapbooking, showing how nineteenth-century families created their own identities by clipping bits and pieces from newspapers and other sources and pasting them into books; the scrapbooks often weren’t blank, but were printed books repurposed to function as scrapbooks, industrial-age palimpsests.
Susan Scafidi, Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law: Scafidi argues that the specific products of particular cultures, though often appropriated by the rest of society as part of an “identity tax” (such as the adoption and alteration of Italian coffee habits by the Starbucks Nation), sometimes deserve protection from exposure, appropriation, and/or commercialization. Unlike Michael Brown's much better book about cultural properties, Scafidi is frustratingly abstract about what it is that she wants to protect about cultures. She mentions examples (religious rituals, clothes, foods), but doesn't integrate them into her proposals except for the most screamingly obvious -- legal protection for secret Native American rituals photographed by sneaky outsiders. She proposes some type of limited property rights for cultural groups that would allow them to protect, say, religious texts -- beyond the expiration of copyright, or the proposal adds nothing to current law -- but doesn't grapple with the fact that she's just become Scientology's best friend. She makes gestures towards the interests of dissenters but never explores what dissent means (ex-Scientologists arguing that the religion is a cult that steals your money, using selective quotations from materials that Scientologists assert are dangerous for nonbelievers to see; or people fleeing from Mormon fundamentalisms that marry pubescent girls to their uncles). Examples without theory are incomplete but may help you think about what the theory should be; theory without examples is worse. She also talks about reverse appropriation – what we know as “fandom,” from Star Trek fans to Judy Garland fans – and says that this type of cultural construction should also be addressed by any cultural protection law, but then doesn’t mention it in her chapter on what is to be done. Disappointing.
ETA: LibraryThing now has a "completist" section on its stats page, so you can see what authors are likely to inspire collections -- that is, if you own one book by that author, you probably own several books by that author. Scroll down to see;
coffeeandink in particular might be amused by the results.
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The sad thing is, I gave up before I'd recorded 1% of my book collection. I may have gotten to about 10% of my manga collection, though.