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Hey, so I have an Archive of Our Own invite code—first come, first served. [ETA: and, taken, but if you want the next one I get let me know.]
Randall P. Bezanson, Art and Freedom of Speech: Bezanson examines key modern cases involving or implicating the regulation of art, arguing that courts have rather comprehensively failed to come to grips with the noncognitive, emotional and aesthetic meaning of art, and have tried to deal with it according to precedents from the cool, logical medium of print, with the result being incoherence. Oddly to me, Bezanson doesn’t have much to say about the special power of images compared to words, though he does talk about performance with respect to dance. I also really did not understand his stance that some religious people's deeply felt pain of seeing blasphemy (e.g., Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ) is not fundamentally different from the fear felt by African-Americans seeing a burning cross, because they all perceive threats to their selves. I've felt threat to my self-concept--it totally sucked--and I've felt physical threat--and I know which one the law ought to regulate. The book is a little repetitive (a byproduct of being stitched together out of essays, I suspect) and raises a lot more questions than it answers, but they’re good questions. It turns out to be really very hard to explain why the First Amendment protects art—and yet we generally feel quite strongly that it does. Bezanson deserves credit for taking the arguments seriously.
Robert Spector, The Mom & Pop Store: How the Unsung Heroes of the American Economy Are Surviving and Thriving: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Spector grew up working for the family butcher shop, and so the topic of the small business is close to his heart. The book is a celebration of the community values and hard work of mom & pop stores (or mom & mom, or father & son, etc.), but it is pretty shallow, skipping from business to business and sometimes even from country to country with sweet stories but little analysis. People work hard and change the store to survive; they get help from loyal customers who appreciate the detailed knowledge and service the small store can provide. Spector brushes up against the topic of failure, but it would have been a better book if it had attempted to distinguish success stories from failures, because in the end I don’t really know why these businesses thrived/continue to thrive—I don’t know how hard the failures worked or how much individualized service they provided.
Though Spector assumes (and says a couple of times) that small businesses have to deliver better quality to survive, and complains about the red tape that makes it hard for small businesses to compete, he doesn’t do much to prove the existence of that quality as a general rule. In fact, one of the small businesses in his family’s history was selling fake honey at a farmer’s market, sugar and water and coloring mixed together and labeled as the product of bees. It’s not that I think that Wal-Mart’s suppliers wouldn’t do that too if they could get away with it; I’m sure they would and even do. But there are reasons that red tape developed, and it’s kind of odd to say that small businesses have to be honest or they’ll go out of business—trusting the free market—and then also not like massive chains which are themselves products of the relatively free market/consumer choices. (Though he does make the good point that once a business gets big it can buy itself favorable treatment, which is a political problem and possibly a reason to like mom & pop stores regardless of whether you think they directly offer better products and services.)
Randall P. Bezanson, Art and Freedom of Speech: Bezanson examines key modern cases involving or implicating the regulation of art, arguing that courts have rather comprehensively failed to come to grips with the noncognitive, emotional and aesthetic meaning of art, and have tried to deal with it according to precedents from the cool, logical medium of print, with the result being incoherence. Oddly to me, Bezanson doesn’t have much to say about the special power of images compared to words, though he does talk about performance with respect to dance. I also really did not understand his stance that some religious people's deeply felt pain of seeing blasphemy (e.g., Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ) is not fundamentally different from the fear felt by African-Americans seeing a burning cross, because they all perceive threats to their selves. I've felt threat to my self-concept--it totally sucked--and I've felt physical threat--and I know which one the law ought to regulate. The book is a little repetitive (a byproduct of being stitched together out of essays, I suspect) and raises a lot more questions than it answers, but they’re good questions. It turns out to be really very hard to explain why the First Amendment protects art—and yet we generally feel quite strongly that it does. Bezanson deserves credit for taking the arguments seriously.
Robert Spector, The Mom & Pop Store: How the Unsung Heroes of the American Economy Are Surviving and Thriving: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Spector grew up working for the family butcher shop, and so the topic of the small business is close to his heart. The book is a celebration of the community values and hard work of mom & pop stores (or mom & mom, or father & son, etc.), but it is pretty shallow, skipping from business to business and sometimes even from country to country with sweet stories but little analysis. People work hard and change the store to survive; they get help from loyal customers who appreciate the detailed knowledge and service the small store can provide. Spector brushes up against the topic of failure, but it would have been a better book if it had attempted to distinguish success stories from failures, because in the end I don’t really know why these businesses thrived/continue to thrive—I don’t know how hard the failures worked or how much individualized service they provided.
Though Spector assumes (and says a couple of times) that small businesses have to deliver better quality to survive, and complains about the red tape that makes it hard for small businesses to compete, he doesn’t do much to prove the existence of that quality as a general rule. In fact, one of the small businesses in his family’s history was selling fake honey at a farmer’s market, sugar and water and coloring mixed together and labeled as the product of bees. It’s not that I think that Wal-Mart’s suppliers wouldn’t do that too if they could get away with it; I’m sure they would and even do. But there are reasons that red tape developed, and it’s kind of odd to say that small businesses have to be honest or they’ll go out of business—trusting the free market—and then also not like massive chains which are themselves products of the relatively free market/consumer choices. (Though he does make the good point that once a business gets big it can buy itself favorable treatment, which is a political problem and possibly a reason to like mom & pop stores regardless of whether you think they directly offer better products and services.)
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