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Husain Haqqani, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding: This book by a former member of Pakistan’s government tells the same story decade after decade, ramping up the reader’s amazed anger each time. The title summarizes the thesis: Pakistan and the US have both been victims of their own illusions about the other (though Pakistan seems to have been much closer to the truth, given how much money and arms we’ve sent to the government). Pakistan has believed that it was so important to the US in the fight against communism, and then the fight against terrorism that was necessitated by the people we backed in the fight against communism, that it could just present the US with a wish list of stuff (often stuff that would be useful to fight India, but not useful to fight the people the US wanted Pakistan to fight) and the US would have no choice but to give in. The US, by contrast, has believed that Pakistan would be pro-US if we pumped enough money and equipment into the government, while instead the government has deliberately fostered public anti-Americanism, encouraged the production of regional threats or at least the appearance thereof, and supported radical Islamists, with the most recent notable example being Osama bin Laden. If you don’t end the book thinking that the US should stop providing any aid to Pakistan at all, I’d like to hear why not.
James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain: Short, not particularly helpful book that veers from a ton of anatomy terms listing parts of the brain and functions generally associated with them to the author’s personal story, which is that his brain scans show many of the physical signs associated with people (men) who’ve committed terrible crimes and have no remorse for them. But Fallon identifies as a prosocial psychopath because, although he drinks and flirts (and possibly does more) too much, he’s a productive scholar and a generally helpful, though manipulative, person. Only at the end of the book does he reveal that, along with the brain scans, he also has many of the behavior patterns of a person with a behavior disorder. Also, he’s a libertarian who doesn’t believe in government assistance for poor people (though he will take grants as long as he’s not the primary researcher, because he’s practical), because failure is a matter of personal choice/characteristics—despite his own claim that nurture made the difference between him and criminal psychopaths, who generally have histories of early childhood abuse. The most notable thing about the book is that it seems to be getting generally respectful treatment in the popular press, despite being pretty noticeably less thoughtful and less honest than an equally troubling book about being a psychopath/sociopath published less than a year ago. What’s the difference? I can’t help thinking that at least part of the difference comes from the gender of the authors—his behavior is “boys will be boys”; hers is not.
New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays (Sarah S.G. Frantz & Eric Murphy Selinger eds.): Taking romance seriously as a genre and romance readers seriously as a community, which means a fair number of chapters devoted to one author or to just a few works exploring a particular theme (PTSD in romance as a critique of patriotic ideology, for example). Deborah Kaplan’s essay on the Harlequin Romance challenge in SGA fandom makes the really interesting point, to me, that the normatively expected structure of a slash story at this point in time diverges from that of a conventional romance in one key respect—the declaration. While conventional (heterosexual) published romance generally requires both parties to declare their love in explicit verbal terms, the stories often judged successful in the slash circles I frequent don’t. Often, if there’s a declaration, it’s only from one side, with the other’s equal love presumed, provided by the POV, or inferred from actions. (Also she points out that romance readers tolerate POV shifts within the narrative much more than many slash fans currently do.) I wonder if the missing declaration/less explicitly emotional dialogue can be connected to broader questions of what functions slash serves for its authors/audience.
Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Contrasting T.E. Lawrence’s story to those of three other young men—a Zionist from the Ottoman Empire, a Yale man who worked for Standard Oil and then for the US government, and a German official/spy—Anderson suggests that the Middle East in the time of WWI was a place where many stranger-than-fiction stories played out. Lawrence wasn’t alone in being able to pivot events through a combination of luck, conviction, and distance from the authority ostensibly giving him orders. Like A Peace to End All Peace, the book makes clear just how arrogant and short-sighted the Western powers were, splitting up the Ottoman Empire for themselves well before they’d won the war while prevaricating to the Arabs (and Zionists) they sought to induce to fight on their side.
James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain: Short, not particularly helpful book that veers from a ton of anatomy terms listing parts of the brain and functions generally associated with them to the author’s personal story, which is that his brain scans show many of the physical signs associated with people (men) who’ve committed terrible crimes and have no remorse for them. But Fallon identifies as a prosocial psychopath because, although he drinks and flirts (and possibly does more) too much, he’s a productive scholar and a generally helpful, though manipulative, person. Only at the end of the book does he reveal that, along with the brain scans, he also has many of the behavior patterns of a person with a behavior disorder. Also, he’s a libertarian who doesn’t believe in government assistance for poor people (though he will take grants as long as he’s not the primary researcher, because he’s practical), because failure is a matter of personal choice/characteristics—despite his own claim that nurture made the difference between him and criminal psychopaths, who generally have histories of early childhood abuse. The most notable thing about the book is that it seems to be getting generally respectful treatment in the popular press, despite being pretty noticeably less thoughtful and less honest than an equally troubling book about being a psychopath/sociopath published less than a year ago. What’s the difference? I can’t help thinking that at least part of the difference comes from the gender of the authors—his behavior is “boys will be boys”; hers is not.
New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays (Sarah S.G. Frantz & Eric Murphy Selinger eds.): Taking romance seriously as a genre and romance readers seriously as a community, which means a fair number of chapters devoted to one author or to just a few works exploring a particular theme (PTSD in romance as a critique of patriotic ideology, for example). Deborah Kaplan’s essay on the Harlequin Romance challenge in SGA fandom makes the really interesting point, to me, that the normatively expected structure of a slash story at this point in time diverges from that of a conventional romance in one key respect—the declaration. While conventional (heterosexual) published romance generally requires both parties to declare their love in explicit verbal terms, the stories often judged successful in the slash circles I frequent don’t. Often, if there’s a declaration, it’s only from one side, with the other’s equal love presumed, provided by the POV, or inferred from actions. (Also she points out that romance readers tolerate POV shifts within the narrative much more than many slash fans currently do.) I wonder if the missing declaration/less explicitly emotional dialogue can be connected to broader questions of what functions slash serves for its authors/audience.
Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Contrasting T.E. Lawrence’s story to those of three other young men—a Zionist from the Ottoman Empire, a Yale man who worked for Standard Oil and then for the US government, and a German official/spy—Anderson suggests that the Middle East in the time of WWI was a place where many stranger-than-fiction stories played out. Lawrence wasn’t alone in being able to pivot events through a combination of luck, conviction, and distance from the authority ostensibly giving him orders. Like A Peace to End All Peace, the book makes clear just how arrogant and short-sighted the Western powers were, splitting up the Ottoman Empire for themselves well before they’d won the war while prevaricating to the Arabs (and Zionists) they sought to induce to fight on their side.
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I'd go further and say that the reason it's a slow development is not only because the publishers assumed readers wanted to insert themselves in the story and see things from the heroine's POV - it's also because when you see the masculine POV, you see all his vulnerabilities and insecurities as the story progresses - in the traditional romance, he just appeared as a strong, distant, somewhat terrifying figure, until the very end, when he confesses he's been vulnerable all along. Allowing the male POV into the story is an allowance for male vulnerability in the narrative at all.
Anyhoo, these are exactly the issues that slash kind of gets around, so slash doesn't need to switch POV for the same reasons.
Is that coherent? Anyway, I'm not kidding about it being a new development, the male POV in traditional published romances. You won't see it in the early Harlequins at all.
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I also wonder, though, to what extent there's path dependence, and how that's associated with politics if at all. Like, at a certain point, the segments of slash fandom I know and love decided that "we're not gay, we just love each other" no longer made sense at least for contemporary portrayals (and often for noncontemporary ones). While this is obviously a political move, I would argue it's also an aesthetic one. And I think this is probably true of POV as well.