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I'm enjoying the hell out of Black Lightning. Anybody else?
Also, random bleg: anyone speak Polish willing to contact a store for me and ask if they ship to the US? I've sent a message in via their site but it might well have been treated as spam, inasmuch as I relied on Google Translate.
Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book: Really interesting though a bit repetitive history of the audiobook, mostly in the US and secondarily in Britain. I hadn’t thought about the history of technology as a history of disability at the same time, but that was my error. Rubery recounts the ways in which audiobooks were both touted as making books available to those who couldn’t read print (especially those who lost sight late in life and hadn’t learned Braille) and also condemned as being less than real reading, reflecting serious debates in the print-disabled community and equally serious demand for reading material. Questions of censorship were also significant, as governmental institutions strove to avoid controversy and provide “uplifting” material, while blind readers themselves wanted access to the books their friends and family were reading, however “pornographic.” (This puts audiofic in a new context for me.) There were also recurring debates about what the narrator should be like—mechanical (so as to more nearly replicate the experience of meeting the text on one’s own, without interpretation), varying voices by character/speaker, sharing the author or narrator’s sex/race/etc. characteristics, and so on.
Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: As you might expect, this book plays out over a substantially longer period than the film based on it, which focuses on the space race. Even before that, black female mathematicians had a place at Langley, and navigated that place and its boundaries in various professionalized ways, usually by passive resistance to things like table signs indicating where “colored girls” should sit. It’s a story of mostly quiet dignity, hard work, and love for numbers.
Adam Winkler, Gun Fight: This 2016 book takes as its premise that there is a strong constitutional basis for an individual right to bear arms in self-defense, and that there would be due to dozens’ of states’ constitutions even without the Second Amendment. That said, Winkler aims to discomfit both “gun nuts” and “gun grabbers” by arguing that this individual right was historically consistent with substantial amounts of regulation, including universal gun registration and even—in the supposedly Wild West—requirements that cowboys coming into town surrender their guns to the sheriff while they were in town. In 2018, I can’t share Winkler’s hope that the Supreme Court’s decision affirming an individual right will calm “gun nuts” down enough for them to agree to sensible, historically grounded regulations, even if gun sales have dropped now that a black man is no longer president.
James Meese, Authors, Users, and Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity: Argues that copyright law emerges out of and constitutes the three figures of the title, and that the user is often generated as a legal subject through association with or contrast to the author or the pirate. A lot of jargon and, as that previous sentence indicates, fewer actors than I would have preferred. Does nicely make the point that “authorship” is an operation of power, one that Richard Prince has access to while many faceless “foreign” pirates don’t; the difference between the author and the pirate can be in how much cultural power they possess, and this is true for businesses as well: Apple’s “Rip. Mix. Burn.” succeeded while Napster was litigated out of existence. The book also discusses the way that large copyright owners have used Australia as a testing ground for stricter copyright enforcement rules that, if successful, could be rolled out elsewhere. I also learned of Ramon Lobato’s studies of pirate DVD distribution in Mexico City, which found that some stalls “do more than simply sell in-demand films to customers at a price point they can afford. In some cases, they also function as important repositories of culture …. [One stall] gives life to orphan works that have been abandoned by studios that have closed down but continue to retain the film’s copyright, leaving the work with no authorized method of distribution…. Juan sources and copies obscure films … for locals and overseas collectors. He has even performed similar services for the Imcine, Mexico’s state-run film institute.”
Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Sea level rise is starting, and it’s going to be bad. We’ll be lucky if it’s only 6 feet by the end of the century, and even that represents millions of people displaced. Goodell visits various places, including Florida where they are still just hoping for a bigger sucker to buy their expensive houses and also counting on a government bailout, bolstered by judicial rulings suggesting that the government engages in a “taking” of their property if it, for example, fails to rebuild a storm-washed-out road that is the only way to reach their property. Lagos offers an example of trying to adapt in poverty, and while the houses are more movable/less of an investment, there are still problems such as corrupt governments kicking people out instead of helping them. Big warning: rising water will be shitty, polluted water as it encounters things like septic systems and graves.
Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea: History of the ghetto as a concept, with origins in Europe describing Jewish areas and shift to the US for poor African-American areas. Duneier is mostly interested in the way that discussions often blur the ways in which US ghettos were created by force and law rather than “self-selected.” This was true of European Jewish ghettoes as well, but there were periods where those ghettoes were relatively prosperous and free (ending with the Holocaust, during which the past ghettoes were invoked to pretend that what the Nazis were doing was just more of the same). At the end he wanders a bit into the Moynihan report and diagnoses of pathology versus oppression, but it’s still an interesting story.
Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: Democracies die when one party stops treating the other as legitimate. This is happening in the US. Levitsky & Ziblatt argue that tit for tat is not helpful but they don’t identify tactics that are, which is frustrating—they indicate that things like coup attempts by the other party are bad and lead to backlash that speeds the transition to autocracy, which I get, but this to me does not translate to the idea of perhaps abolishing the filibuster if/when Democrats get some control back. That said, it’s not clear to me that other people have a clear path forward either unless the Republican party decides to clean house, and this is a useful look at repeating patterns: the key difference between those countries that succumb and those that don’t, they say, is whether the mainstream party to which the fascist insurgency is closest decides to embrace it for short-term benefit (Weimar Germany, Venezuela, etc.) or reject it and support the “opposing” mainstream party to keep fascists out of power (more recent Germany, France).
William Langweische, Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson: Short book lengthened too much by addition of extraneous lists (types of birds that hit planes, although the bit about the fish that hit the plane midair because it was carried in a bird’s mouth is funny; all other non-bird animal strikes have been on the ground), which I suppose was done to justify the idea that this was a book. Still, there were fairly interesting parts, such as the captain’s deliberate attempt to use his brief celebrity to create some financial security for his family including his college-bound kids, and a dive into why an airline pilot today lacks financial security. I also learned that tests of airplane evacuations always went really well until the tester decided to give the participants small monetary incentives to get out first (to increase the similarity to a real accident), at which point they started to trample each other.
Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder: Biography of Wilder and her daughter/editor Rose, who seems to have been a truly unpleasant person who loved to decry the New Deal. Wilder glossed over a lot of the bad stuff in her life, especially the financial insecurity that plagued her and ultimately led her to write the Little House books.
Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: Third volume in Atkinson’s trilogy on the US part of WWII in Europe. It’s still gripping and frustrating by turns (the screwups that led to Market Garden, for example), but what I really noticed this time was the tenderness and longing with which these most prototypical of American tough guys wrote home to wives and parents. Men like Eisenhower did not hesitate to tell women how much they loved and missed them; we have flattened our concept of tough guys in really sad ways over the past fifty years.
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present: Mishra suggests that today’s troubles are the result of the unresolved clash between the Enlightenment tradition and the mass of the citizenry, who are generally less interested in change and rationality and feel condescended to by the educated elites. Modernism is full of violence; ISIS is not an Islamic entity but rather a backlash entity similar to many others provoked by Enlightenment ideals implemented in a context of economic inequality. He has an extended riff on the coherence of Timothy McVeigh’s ideology that helps illustrate why US conservatives are so happy to have Russian conservatives on their side.
Also, random bleg: anyone speak Polish willing to contact a store for me and ask if they ship to the US? I've sent a message in via their site but it might well have been treated as spam, inasmuch as I relied on Google Translate.
Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book: Really interesting though a bit repetitive history of the audiobook, mostly in the US and secondarily in Britain. I hadn’t thought about the history of technology as a history of disability at the same time, but that was my error. Rubery recounts the ways in which audiobooks were both touted as making books available to those who couldn’t read print (especially those who lost sight late in life and hadn’t learned Braille) and also condemned as being less than real reading, reflecting serious debates in the print-disabled community and equally serious demand for reading material. Questions of censorship were also significant, as governmental institutions strove to avoid controversy and provide “uplifting” material, while blind readers themselves wanted access to the books their friends and family were reading, however “pornographic.” (This puts audiofic in a new context for me.) There were also recurring debates about what the narrator should be like—mechanical (so as to more nearly replicate the experience of meeting the text on one’s own, without interpretation), varying voices by character/speaker, sharing the author or narrator’s sex/race/etc. characteristics, and so on.
Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: As you might expect, this book plays out over a substantially longer period than the film based on it, which focuses on the space race. Even before that, black female mathematicians had a place at Langley, and navigated that place and its boundaries in various professionalized ways, usually by passive resistance to things like table signs indicating where “colored girls” should sit. It’s a story of mostly quiet dignity, hard work, and love for numbers.
Adam Winkler, Gun Fight: This 2016 book takes as its premise that there is a strong constitutional basis for an individual right to bear arms in self-defense, and that there would be due to dozens’ of states’ constitutions even without the Second Amendment. That said, Winkler aims to discomfit both “gun nuts” and “gun grabbers” by arguing that this individual right was historically consistent with substantial amounts of regulation, including universal gun registration and even—in the supposedly Wild West—requirements that cowboys coming into town surrender their guns to the sheriff while they were in town. In 2018, I can’t share Winkler’s hope that the Supreme Court’s decision affirming an individual right will calm “gun nuts” down enough for them to agree to sensible, historically grounded regulations, even if gun sales have dropped now that a black man is no longer president.
James Meese, Authors, Users, and Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity: Argues that copyright law emerges out of and constitutes the three figures of the title, and that the user is often generated as a legal subject through association with or contrast to the author or the pirate. A lot of jargon and, as that previous sentence indicates, fewer actors than I would have preferred. Does nicely make the point that “authorship” is an operation of power, one that Richard Prince has access to while many faceless “foreign” pirates don’t; the difference between the author and the pirate can be in how much cultural power they possess, and this is true for businesses as well: Apple’s “Rip. Mix. Burn.” succeeded while Napster was litigated out of existence. The book also discusses the way that large copyright owners have used Australia as a testing ground for stricter copyright enforcement rules that, if successful, could be rolled out elsewhere. I also learned of Ramon Lobato’s studies of pirate DVD distribution in Mexico City, which found that some stalls “do more than simply sell in-demand films to customers at a price point they can afford. In some cases, they also function as important repositories of culture …. [One stall] gives life to orphan works that have been abandoned by studios that have closed down but continue to retain the film’s copyright, leaving the work with no authorized method of distribution…. Juan sources and copies obscure films … for locals and overseas collectors. He has even performed similar services for the Imcine, Mexico’s state-run film institute.”
Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Sea level rise is starting, and it’s going to be bad. We’ll be lucky if it’s only 6 feet by the end of the century, and even that represents millions of people displaced. Goodell visits various places, including Florida where they are still just hoping for a bigger sucker to buy their expensive houses and also counting on a government bailout, bolstered by judicial rulings suggesting that the government engages in a “taking” of their property if it, for example, fails to rebuild a storm-washed-out road that is the only way to reach their property. Lagos offers an example of trying to adapt in poverty, and while the houses are more movable/less of an investment, there are still problems such as corrupt governments kicking people out instead of helping them. Big warning: rising water will be shitty, polluted water as it encounters things like septic systems and graves.
Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea: History of the ghetto as a concept, with origins in Europe describing Jewish areas and shift to the US for poor African-American areas. Duneier is mostly interested in the way that discussions often blur the ways in which US ghettos were created by force and law rather than “self-selected.” This was true of European Jewish ghettoes as well, but there were periods where those ghettoes were relatively prosperous and free (ending with the Holocaust, during which the past ghettoes were invoked to pretend that what the Nazis were doing was just more of the same). At the end he wanders a bit into the Moynihan report and diagnoses of pathology versus oppression, but it’s still an interesting story.
Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: Democracies die when one party stops treating the other as legitimate. This is happening in the US. Levitsky & Ziblatt argue that tit for tat is not helpful but they don’t identify tactics that are, which is frustrating—they indicate that things like coup attempts by the other party are bad and lead to backlash that speeds the transition to autocracy, which I get, but this to me does not translate to the idea of perhaps abolishing the filibuster if/when Democrats get some control back. That said, it’s not clear to me that other people have a clear path forward either unless the Republican party decides to clean house, and this is a useful look at repeating patterns: the key difference between those countries that succumb and those that don’t, they say, is whether the mainstream party to which the fascist insurgency is closest decides to embrace it for short-term benefit (Weimar Germany, Venezuela, etc.) or reject it and support the “opposing” mainstream party to keep fascists out of power (more recent Germany, France).
William Langweische, Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson: Short book lengthened too much by addition of extraneous lists (types of birds that hit planes, although the bit about the fish that hit the plane midair because it was carried in a bird’s mouth is funny; all other non-bird animal strikes have been on the ground), which I suppose was done to justify the idea that this was a book. Still, there were fairly interesting parts, such as the captain’s deliberate attempt to use his brief celebrity to create some financial security for his family including his college-bound kids, and a dive into why an airline pilot today lacks financial security. I also learned that tests of airplane evacuations always went really well until the tester decided to give the participants small monetary incentives to get out first (to increase the similarity to a real accident), at which point they started to trample each other.
Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder: Biography of Wilder and her daughter/editor Rose, who seems to have been a truly unpleasant person who loved to decry the New Deal. Wilder glossed over a lot of the bad stuff in her life, especially the financial insecurity that plagued her and ultimately led her to write the Little House books.
Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: Third volume in Atkinson’s trilogy on the US part of WWII in Europe. It’s still gripping and frustrating by turns (the screwups that led to Market Garden, for example), but what I really noticed this time was the tenderness and longing with which these most prototypical of American tough guys wrote home to wives and parents. Men like Eisenhower did not hesitate to tell women how much they loved and missed them; we have flattened our concept of tough guys in really sad ways over the past fifty years.
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present: Mishra suggests that today’s troubles are the result of the unresolved clash between the Enlightenment tradition and the mass of the citizenry, who are generally less interested in change and rationality and feel condescended to by the educated elites. Modernism is full of violence; ISIS is not an Islamic entity but rather a backlash entity similar to many others provoked by Enlightenment ideals implemented in a context of economic inequality. He has an extended riff on the coherence of Timothy McVeigh’s ideology that helps illustrate why US conservatives are so happy to have Russian conservatives on their side.