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It seems somehow unfair that my Yuletide pinch hit is practically writing itself when my original assignment was taffy-slow. Time pressure is a strange thing.
David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice: Stories: Starts with a great essay on being a Macy’s Elf, then gets unpleasant: the humor is about how clueless, racist, insensitive, and overall horrible the narrators are, with ludicrous exaggerations of current cultural phenomena, and they don’t work as satire because they’re just too broad. His nonfiction, though obviously it’s as carefully curated as the fiction, is better because it has to be constrained by plausibility and thus can actually do some incisive work. Or maybe because his major target is usually himself, which takes a bunch of the meanness out of it.
Rachel Maines, Hedonizing Technologies: Paths to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure: Maines, the author of the wonderful Technologies of Orgasm, here turns to hobbies, especially needlecrafts, and the way they make what was once work into a pleasure activity, with the aid of technologies that are designed and marketed to consumers who are interested in the hedonic value of the activity, not pure efficiency (whatever that might mean)—so they buy, for example, wooden knitting needles because those feel better in the hand rather than metal ones that allow faster knitting, or they buy sewing machines to do seams but don’t generally like machine embroidery. The book is really provocative, but far too short (128 p. text) to do more than hint at the issues of the extent to which, for example, manufacturers and retailers were able to drive or shape consumer demand, or what consumers thought of doing things for pleasure that used to be necessities. Maines suggests intriguing connections between female needlecraft hobbies and male hobbies (the cover even depicts a guy at an outdoor grill, which may say more about what the publisher thought would sell books than anything else), but again doesn’t get beyond suggestion. As a participant in what’s essentially a handcrafting hobby, I was hungry for insight, but despite what I learned I stayed hungry.
Adam Haupt, Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion: I found this kind of a muddle of (post)colonial theory, opposition to big copyright owners, and boosting of political/oppositional South African musical artists. If anything, it made me think that the issues are very similar to those in the US, despite the lower level of copyright enforcement/economic reward from successful works.
Joanna Demers, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity: Short book about music and IP law which skims over some of the details (to be fair, the details are so complex that most IP lawyers don’t understand them). I liked her basic argument about how the law had changed music, especially music that relies on sampling, in a variety of contradictory ways: underground, creativity continues to flourish, except that its practitioners understand they can’t go mainstream, which is a constraint of its own. Meanwhile, big-label artists don’t sample recognizable works, or only do so as a show of excess wealth—they can afford to license a sample from The Police, which means forking over half or more of what they make off a song. Most provocatively, Demers argues that part of the shift to sampling non-R&B music, including “world” music, comes from a desire to target works that are less recognizable, which therefore can be exploited with less legal risk, because the owners—if any are still around—are less likely to come after the samplers, and less likely to be able to make out their cases. Moreover, she suggests that the growing technical ability to produce soundalikes will soon change the sampling landscape even further.
Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring: This volume of Churchill’s history of WWII covers the lead-up to D-Day, focusing much more on the complicated negotiations among the Allies, along with attempts to get Turkey and some chunk of the Italian government on their side, than on the battle against Hitler directly. While it’s hard to read due to the sheer volume of memos Churchill reproduces, what the book does give is a sense of just how immense the war was, and how many things Churchill had to know, balance, and compromise on every day. He was a control freak, but he somehow had the capacity to keep track of this sprawling, confusing mess and keep Britain basically on track. Last Lion, indeed.
Meizhu Lui et al., The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide: Chapters on various racial/ethnic groups focusing on their economic positions and the public policies that created, reinforced, and are still reinforcing those positions, with a capstone chapter that tells the story from the white perspective—all the things that whites got and get that African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos didn’t and don’t, which is mostly stuff we get from the government, though nongovernmental institutions play their own roles. Solid high school- or college-level text that might open some eyes about how racialized wealth persists.
Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading: Okay, it’s indulgent—and the “teen” a little misleading, because books routinely read by younger kids are heavily featured—but I’d missed talking and thinking about those books, the ones you wore out, the ones that taught you about sex, love, murder (The Grounding of Group Six! I thought I was the only person who loved that one), how to make maple candy by pouring the syrup on snow, etc. Like a hot cup of cocoa on a cold day.
Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution: Eh, for the completist, I think; Dawkins rants against creationists—I have less anger and more despair—and covers various refinements in the evidence over the years. To me, this sort of felt like “updates to all my previous books,” and, though united by one core idea, it still didn’t hang together in one well-organized structure. (Like, Dawkins might say, the path-dependent random walk of evolution itself.)
David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice: Stories: Starts with a great essay on being a Macy’s Elf, then gets unpleasant: the humor is about how clueless, racist, insensitive, and overall horrible the narrators are, with ludicrous exaggerations of current cultural phenomena, and they don’t work as satire because they’re just too broad. His nonfiction, though obviously it’s as carefully curated as the fiction, is better because it has to be constrained by plausibility and thus can actually do some incisive work. Or maybe because his major target is usually himself, which takes a bunch of the meanness out of it.
Rachel Maines, Hedonizing Technologies: Paths to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure: Maines, the author of the wonderful Technologies of Orgasm, here turns to hobbies, especially needlecrafts, and the way they make what was once work into a pleasure activity, with the aid of technologies that are designed and marketed to consumers who are interested in the hedonic value of the activity, not pure efficiency (whatever that might mean)—so they buy, for example, wooden knitting needles because those feel better in the hand rather than metal ones that allow faster knitting, or they buy sewing machines to do seams but don’t generally like machine embroidery. The book is really provocative, but far too short (128 p. text) to do more than hint at the issues of the extent to which, for example, manufacturers and retailers were able to drive or shape consumer demand, or what consumers thought of doing things for pleasure that used to be necessities. Maines suggests intriguing connections between female needlecraft hobbies and male hobbies (the cover even depicts a guy at an outdoor grill, which may say more about what the publisher thought would sell books than anything else), but again doesn’t get beyond suggestion. As a participant in what’s essentially a handcrafting hobby, I was hungry for insight, but despite what I learned I stayed hungry.
Adam Haupt, Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion: I found this kind of a muddle of (post)colonial theory, opposition to big copyright owners, and boosting of political/oppositional South African musical artists. If anything, it made me think that the issues are very similar to those in the US, despite the lower level of copyright enforcement/economic reward from successful works.
Joanna Demers, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity: Short book about music and IP law which skims over some of the details (to be fair, the details are so complex that most IP lawyers don’t understand them). I liked her basic argument about how the law had changed music, especially music that relies on sampling, in a variety of contradictory ways: underground, creativity continues to flourish, except that its practitioners understand they can’t go mainstream, which is a constraint of its own. Meanwhile, big-label artists don’t sample recognizable works, or only do so as a show of excess wealth—they can afford to license a sample from The Police, which means forking over half or more of what they make off a song. Most provocatively, Demers argues that part of the shift to sampling non-R&B music, including “world” music, comes from a desire to target works that are less recognizable, which therefore can be exploited with less legal risk, because the owners—if any are still around—are less likely to come after the samplers, and less likely to be able to make out their cases. Moreover, she suggests that the growing technical ability to produce soundalikes will soon change the sampling landscape even further.
Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring: This volume of Churchill’s history of WWII covers the lead-up to D-Day, focusing much more on the complicated negotiations among the Allies, along with attempts to get Turkey and some chunk of the Italian government on their side, than on the battle against Hitler directly. While it’s hard to read due to the sheer volume of memos Churchill reproduces, what the book does give is a sense of just how immense the war was, and how many things Churchill had to know, balance, and compromise on every day. He was a control freak, but he somehow had the capacity to keep track of this sprawling, confusing mess and keep Britain basically on track. Last Lion, indeed.
Meizhu Lui et al., The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide: Chapters on various racial/ethnic groups focusing on their economic positions and the public policies that created, reinforced, and are still reinforcing those positions, with a capstone chapter that tells the story from the white perspective—all the things that whites got and get that African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos didn’t and don’t, which is mostly stuff we get from the government, though nongovernmental institutions play their own roles. Solid high school- or college-level text that might open some eyes about how racialized wealth persists.
Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading: Okay, it’s indulgent—and the “teen” a little misleading, because books routinely read by younger kids are heavily featured—but I’d missed talking and thinking about those books, the ones you wore out, the ones that taught you about sex, love, murder (The Grounding of Group Six! I thought I was the only person who loved that one), how to make maple candy by pouring the syrup on snow, etc. Like a hot cup of cocoa on a cold day.
Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution: Eh, for the completist, I think; Dawkins rants against creationists—I have less anger and more despair—and covers various refinements in the evidence over the years. To me, this sort of felt like “updates to all my previous books,” and, though united by one core idea, it still didn’t hang together in one well-organized structure. (Like, Dawkins might say, the path-dependent random walk of evolution itself.)
