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Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: Bitter (with justification) account of the ways in which the US has screwed up since the 1970s, assuming that it has the right to control the area in order to maintain access to oil and superpower status. Frustrating and painful and ultimately quite isolationist, with very little to offer going forward (which might be the most truthful thing). We keep fighting the last wars but not even learning their lessons, first not considering culture/Islam in our calculations at all because we were so powerful they’d have to give way, right? Then considering each anti-American Islamicist leader as the weirdo who needed to be killed, for much the same arrogant reasons, without realizing that (1) new leaders do tend to arise, as the graveyards are filled with indispensable men, and (2) often fragmenting groups further via decapitation makes things worse.
Charles L. Chavis Jr., The Silent Shore: The history of one lynching on Maryland’s shore in the 1930s, in the context of the suppression of black power and the silencing of any discussion about it, through the eyes of the governor’s private investigator who managed to figure out a lot of what happened but not to get anyone to do anything about it.
Tabitha Carvan, This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends on It: Ah, that intense fannish energy and its sometimes disturbing demands. This is a book about that! It is about how good it is to find self-actualization, and sometimes but not necessarily community, in something you love because you love it. It is breezily written and talks a lot about shame and the barriers to allowing yourself big love, as one of the things a self-regarding individual might do with their time, in particular if they didn’t feel like they constantly had to be actively “mom” or otherwise self-monitoring for acceptable femaleness. “What would we do if we were free?” is a big feminist and fannish question, and Carvan spends a lot of time with variations of that question. E.g.: “Women mature out of their pleasures. Men, on the other hand, get to hang on to theirs, turning them into lifelong passions, or even better, a career. Then they get to make cute jokes about how they never grew up.” On the devaluation of “girl stuff,” she notes that in her day job as a science communication writer she interviewed a researcher who has proved that 71% of studied songbird species include singing females, not just singing males, but ornithologists still routinely think that song is a function of maleness. Also pointed me to this fantastic essay on the Male Glance, the counterpart to the Male Gaze that leads to immediate dismissal of girl stuff.
Alex Cummings, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century
Well-written narrative of copyright law from the perspective of (1) recorded sound and in particular (2) how people who made copies of records shaped legal reactions thereto. A few bobbles ("Justice" Learned Hand; the description of the DMCA could have been improved), but does a great job contextualizing music copyright in larger political, social, and legal currents. Cummings provides a particularly clear explanation of why copyright in sound recordings seemed inappropriate early on, when everyone assumed that recordings would mostly be of lectures--it didn't make much sense to say that one version of a stump speech would have a separate copyright from another, or that a record company could own a copyright in a professor's lecture that would seemingly stop him (always him) from delivering the lecture to some other audience. And after the initial attempt to get federal sound recording copyright failed, attention shifted to the states. If you remember how Viacom accidentally accused some of its own YouTube channels of piracy, you may also see that prefigured in how RCA ended up pressing discs of copies of its own recordings on behalf of an outfit literally named Jolly Roger.
Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: Autism and feminism, in the form of letters to Virginia Woolf, Adelheid Bloch, Frau V and Katharina Kepler. Bloch was “a German Jewish woman who had learning disabilities following a bout of childhood meningitis,” killed because of her disabilities (Limburg notes that Woolf, an anti-Semite and eugenicist, would not have thought her worthy of life). Frau V was the mother of one of Asperger’s patients, whose own characteristics as reported by Asperger are suggestive of autism. Katharina Kepler was Johannes Kepler’s mother; he defended her in a witch trial. “Katharina had an unfortunate habit of rubbing people up the wrong way. She did this by being assertive, forthright and persistent, by preferring rational argument to tears, and by refusing to bestow sympathy on someone just because they asked for it.” Without diagnosing them, Limburg writes about their weirdness as a way of understanding autism and women. Eloquent about humilitation, eugenics, motherhood, and other topics. A key note: “Weirdness is not the same as conscious rebellion or resistance, though it may come to inform it.”
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: Biography of Alan and John Foster Dulles, head of the CIA/State Department during a big chunk of the post-WWII period. They were terrible human beings convinced of their Christian, pro-American big business righteousness—when not in government, they represented major businesses with interests overseas, including in places whose governments they later helped overthrow on the grounds that they weren’t pro-capitalist enough. Foster Dulles (1) thought that Gurkhas were Pakistani (they are not), (2) when informed that they were not, said, well, they’re Muslim (they are not), and (3) as a result of his beliefs, insisted that Pakistan be included in a regional compact in a region of which it was not part, which contributed to the dissolution of that compact, though I suppose that might be a good thing given how awful his aims generally were. So much of the world has reason to despise America, and the Dulles brothers oversaw a big chunk of that—more, possibly, than the Koch brothers. That said, it’s not clear that much would have differed without them; as the author emphasizes, they were products of their (white, Christian, male, wealthy) environment and the other people around them, especially the Republicans and especially Eisenhower, thought similarly.
Charles L. Marohn Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:Interesting book by someone who doesn’t believe in Big Highway or Big Transit. His main argument is that we’ve killed a lot of people by developing stroads—things that are neither roads, which are wide and optimized for cars and have few entrances and exits and no way for people to cross on foot, nor streets, which are narrow and clearly signal by their design that drivers need to go slow and that people will be crossing on foot. Because of midcentury design standards, we instead have roads/stroads marked at 30 mph that are designed for 50 or 60, and drivers naturally go that fast, but people are crossing and drivers are entering/making lefts across traffic too, with tragic results. I’m not really sure this is a reasonable diagnosis—I don’t really see where you should put a school in this framework—but it’s provocative and I appreciated his focus on helping people by starting with the smallest thing you can do from them and going from there, and not assuming that transit is a solution to poverty. You get healthy communities, he argues, by building places that people want to be—not parking lots or roads.
Wayne E. Lee, David L. Preston, David Silbey, Anthony E. Carlson, The Other Face of Battle: Really interesting book, explicitly inspired by John Keegan’s classic. Focuses on the experience of battle by (colonial and) American soliders in places unfamiliar to them, fighting people who didn’t agree with them on the definition of war and, particularly, the definition of defeat—continuing to fight guerilla engagements after being defeated conventionally. Recommended.
Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History: Challenging book of history/intellectual history, focusing on Britain and its beliefs and resulting behavior at home (making arms) and in India. A belief in greater historical forces, she argues, let Quakers excuse their arms dealing and let Britons treat historical inevitability as an independent reason for its actions: of course the weak would fade and the strong prevail.
Jay Wexler, Holy Hullaballoos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars: Outdated by now (the Supreme Court has gone a lot further in mandating deference to religion), but recounts key cases and in many instances talks to people involved in them. Wexler has a very strong, jokey voice that you may react strongly to one way or another, but does a good job communicating what the doctrines were like at the time.
Jane Addams, 20 Years at Hull House: Interesting historically. Addams was an assimilationist who spoke fairly respectfully about Southern European and Jewish traditions; a reformer who sought government by experts but also the franchise for women; a believer that labor rights mattered and that bad conditions produced bad behavior rather than the reverse; and a condemner of prostitution who both thought that many women were tricked or coerced into sex work and that sex work ruined any woman who engaged in it such that other “good” people were justified in excluding them from polite society no matter how repentant they were.
Francesca Coppa, Vidding: A History: She put me there! Freely available online, with an extra supplement of vids so you can see what she’s talking about. The origin of the project was her encounter with guys talking about the amazing thing they’d invented in the 1990s, machinima (which does have a history of its own but was “invented” the same way you and I invented fan fiction in our childhood bedrooms, which is to say reinvented). Coppa takes us on a tour of how vids are made and make meaning to preserve the specific history of live media vidding, particularly as a history of art made by “women and those who caucus with women,” with its incredibly technically complex origins first in slideshows then in VCR vids then in computer vids. I loved the descriptions of VCR vidding, where each machine had tricks you had to learn to synchronize the audio, and you could only do that at the end—the video had to be completely in place first, done sequentially instead of with a timeline you could work on bit by bit, so if your synch failed that was it. Vidding, with its focus on concentrated emotion, has similarities with poetry (as well as with music video). It puts big emotion back into modern narratives that often end “hours, days, or even years of ever-intensifying drama … with an ironic smile and a slap on the back.” While “denial of catharsis is an economic stratagem” to extend the series, it refuses what fans want. This is also connected to the feminization of emotion in modern Western culture; “what emotions male characters do have often come literally at the expense of women and children, which is particularly hard for the female spectator.” So, “[i]nstead of the textual violence and misogyny that result in canonical man tears, vidders create feelings and emotions using the techniques of poetry in the Aristotelian sense, which includes music, drama, rhythm, and movement as well as language.”
A vid is situated by the video source, not the music; the music then “serves as the vid’s blueprint, its road map, its code and key….The vidder uses all the information in a song—lyrics, melody, beat, tempo, instrumentation—as scaffolding upon which to build a montage that reveals (which is to say, creates) aesthetic and narrative patterns in the footage. In a vid, the ear tells the eye what to see.” Then, the spectator’s job is to perform a close reading: to understand how they come together. This is like poetry, as is the fact that “vids have a rhythm that is not separate or extricable from its narrative meaning.” And “just as students can be frustrated by poetry’s frequent allusions to nightingales, larks, and Grecian urns, vid watchers are expected to recognize densely packed signifiers both within the visual source material and, increasingly, to the history of vidding itself.” Vidding is an embodied critical art, designed to affect the body and create feeling, not separate from but part of the pleasure of analysis. If traditional film “creates a culture in which men are tested and women are investigated,” vidding reverses this: it’s men “who are strange and oh so mysterious, in need of intense collaborative scrutiny” and women who (in the editing chair and otherwise) are tested.
The relationship between the vidder and her technology “gives subtext to many fan vids about cars, planes, spaceships,” etc. And vidders made gendered use of technology, often deliberately hiding their works from the mainstream, often to avoid being laughed at or (they feared) sued. Because they weren’t made for the market, vids could focus on different things, and this non/anti-market status was connected to gender both directly and indirectly: “It was far more likely for a male science fiction fan to end up a science fiction magazine writer than it was for a female media fan to end up being a Hollywood screenwriter or director. The scale of the industry was totally different.”
Today, with the rise of YouTube, “vidding is now a tiny subculture lost in an enormous sea.” Content ID controls what can be seen, and the algorithm favors vids that “have a very mainstream sensibility” and people who release content on a rapid and regular basis, which is difficult for many vidders. “YouTube might follow up a Sherlock vid with an interview with Benedict Cumberbatch or a panel about Doctor Strange,” whereas “the algorithm downgrades you if someone stops watching YouTube after one of your videos.” “YouTube fan vids tend to be flashy and fast cut; they tend to feature textures, overlays, distortions, and speed changes, sometimes to the point of parody. These are all things that will help the vid survive, even if an individual vidder doesn’t realize the technological implications of these choices.” This is also enabled by modern software, which is simultaneously affecting the aesthetics of mainstream entertainment. Plus, the ability to make GIFs is also drawing people who might otherwise vid to “isolate, emphasize, and fetishize particular filmic moments, like a significant look or the touch of a hand.” This brings us “back to where we started: with the pause button, the single frame, the stilled image as a way of disrupting the propulsive force of narratives and shifting power relations.”
I loved it, and not just because I’m in it!
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake: Reflective account of how Black women survived and loved under slavery and Jim Crow, using fragmentary materials—centered on Ashley’s sack, embroidered with Ashley’s story of her mother’s love when she was sold away from her mother at age 9 by her granddaughter. I see why people like this, but I kind of preferred Marisa Fuentes’ reconstruction of Black women’s lives in Barbados because its language was less flowery though no less forthright about what is forever lost about the lives of people who mostly left few material traces and whose archival traces are almost always written by their oppressors.
Charles L. Chavis Jr., The Silent Shore: The history of one lynching on Maryland’s shore in the 1930s, in the context of the suppression of black power and the silencing of any discussion about it, through the eyes of the governor’s private investigator who managed to figure out a lot of what happened but not to get anyone to do anything about it.
Tabitha Carvan, This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends on It: Ah, that intense fannish energy and its sometimes disturbing demands. This is a book about that! It is about how good it is to find self-actualization, and sometimes but not necessarily community, in something you love because you love it. It is breezily written and talks a lot about shame and the barriers to allowing yourself big love, as one of the things a self-regarding individual might do with their time, in particular if they didn’t feel like they constantly had to be actively “mom” or otherwise self-monitoring for acceptable femaleness. “What would we do if we were free?” is a big feminist and fannish question, and Carvan spends a lot of time with variations of that question. E.g.: “Women mature out of their pleasures. Men, on the other hand, get to hang on to theirs, turning them into lifelong passions, or even better, a career. Then they get to make cute jokes about how they never grew up.” On the devaluation of “girl stuff,” she notes that in her day job as a science communication writer she interviewed a researcher who has proved that 71% of studied songbird species include singing females, not just singing males, but ornithologists still routinely think that song is a function of maleness. Also pointed me to this fantastic essay on the Male Glance, the counterpart to the Male Gaze that leads to immediate dismissal of girl stuff.
Alex Cummings, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century
Well-written narrative of copyright law from the perspective of (1) recorded sound and in particular (2) how people who made copies of records shaped legal reactions thereto. A few bobbles ("Justice" Learned Hand; the description of the DMCA could have been improved), but does a great job contextualizing music copyright in larger political, social, and legal currents. Cummings provides a particularly clear explanation of why copyright in sound recordings seemed inappropriate early on, when everyone assumed that recordings would mostly be of lectures--it didn't make much sense to say that one version of a stump speech would have a separate copyright from another, or that a record company could own a copyright in a professor's lecture that would seemingly stop him (always him) from delivering the lecture to some other audience. And after the initial attempt to get federal sound recording copyright failed, attention shifted to the states. If you remember how Viacom accidentally accused some of its own YouTube channels of piracy, you may also see that prefigured in how RCA ended up pressing discs of copies of its own recordings on behalf of an outfit literally named Jolly Roger.
Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: Autism and feminism, in the form of letters to Virginia Woolf, Adelheid Bloch, Frau V and Katharina Kepler. Bloch was “a German Jewish woman who had learning disabilities following a bout of childhood meningitis,” killed because of her disabilities (Limburg notes that Woolf, an anti-Semite and eugenicist, would not have thought her worthy of life). Frau V was the mother of one of Asperger’s patients, whose own characteristics as reported by Asperger are suggestive of autism. Katharina Kepler was Johannes Kepler’s mother; he defended her in a witch trial. “Katharina had an unfortunate habit of rubbing people up the wrong way. She did this by being assertive, forthright and persistent, by preferring rational argument to tears, and by refusing to bestow sympathy on someone just because they asked for it.” Without diagnosing them, Limburg writes about their weirdness as a way of understanding autism and women. Eloquent about humilitation, eugenics, motherhood, and other topics. A key note: “Weirdness is not the same as conscious rebellion or resistance, though it may come to inform it.”
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: Biography of Alan and John Foster Dulles, head of the CIA/State Department during a big chunk of the post-WWII period. They were terrible human beings convinced of their Christian, pro-American big business righteousness—when not in government, they represented major businesses with interests overseas, including in places whose governments they later helped overthrow on the grounds that they weren’t pro-capitalist enough. Foster Dulles (1) thought that Gurkhas were Pakistani (they are not), (2) when informed that they were not, said, well, they’re Muslim (they are not), and (3) as a result of his beliefs, insisted that Pakistan be included in a regional compact in a region of which it was not part, which contributed to the dissolution of that compact, though I suppose that might be a good thing given how awful his aims generally were. So much of the world has reason to despise America, and the Dulles brothers oversaw a big chunk of that—more, possibly, than the Koch brothers. That said, it’s not clear that much would have differed without them; as the author emphasizes, they were products of their (white, Christian, male, wealthy) environment and the other people around them, especially the Republicans and especially Eisenhower, thought similarly.
Charles L. Marohn Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:Interesting book by someone who doesn’t believe in Big Highway or Big Transit. His main argument is that we’ve killed a lot of people by developing stroads—things that are neither roads, which are wide and optimized for cars and have few entrances and exits and no way for people to cross on foot, nor streets, which are narrow and clearly signal by their design that drivers need to go slow and that people will be crossing on foot. Because of midcentury design standards, we instead have roads/stroads marked at 30 mph that are designed for 50 or 60, and drivers naturally go that fast, but people are crossing and drivers are entering/making lefts across traffic too, with tragic results. I’m not really sure this is a reasonable diagnosis—I don’t really see where you should put a school in this framework—but it’s provocative and I appreciated his focus on helping people by starting with the smallest thing you can do from them and going from there, and not assuming that transit is a solution to poverty. You get healthy communities, he argues, by building places that people want to be—not parking lots or roads.
Wayne E. Lee, David L. Preston, David Silbey, Anthony E. Carlson, The Other Face of Battle: Really interesting book, explicitly inspired by John Keegan’s classic. Focuses on the experience of battle by (colonial and) American soliders in places unfamiliar to them, fighting people who didn’t agree with them on the definition of war and, particularly, the definition of defeat—continuing to fight guerilla engagements after being defeated conventionally. Recommended.
Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History: Challenging book of history/intellectual history, focusing on Britain and its beliefs and resulting behavior at home (making arms) and in India. A belief in greater historical forces, she argues, let Quakers excuse their arms dealing and let Britons treat historical inevitability as an independent reason for its actions: of course the weak would fade and the strong prevail.
Jay Wexler, Holy Hullaballoos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars: Outdated by now (the Supreme Court has gone a lot further in mandating deference to religion), but recounts key cases and in many instances talks to people involved in them. Wexler has a very strong, jokey voice that you may react strongly to one way or another, but does a good job communicating what the doctrines were like at the time.
Jane Addams, 20 Years at Hull House: Interesting historically. Addams was an assimilationist who spoke fairly respectfully about Southern European and Jewish traditions; a reformer who sought government by experts but also the franchise for women; a believer that labor rights mattered and that bad conditions produced bad behavior rather than the reverse; and a condemner of prostitution who both thought that many women were tricked or coerced into sex work and that sex work ruined any woman who engaged in it such that other “good” people were justified in excluding them from polite society no matter how repentant they were.
Francesca Coppa, Vidding: A History: She put me there! Freely available online, with an extra supplement of vids so you can see what she’s talking about. The origin of the project was her encounter with guys talking about the amazing thing they’d invented in the 1990s, machinima (which does have a history of its own but was “invented” the same way you and I invented fan fiction in our childhood bedrooms, which is to say reinvented). Coppa takes us on a tour of how vids are made and make meaning to preserve the specific history of live media vidding, particularly as a history of art made by “women and those who caucus with women,” with its incredibly technically complex origins first in slideshows then in VCR vids then in computer vids. I loved the descriptions of VCR vidding, where each machine had tricks you had to learn to synchronize the audio, and you could only do that at the end—the video had to be completely in place first, done sequentially instead of with a timeline you could work on bit by bit, so if your synch failed that was it. Vidding, with its focus on concentrated emotion, has similarities with poetry (as well as with music video). It puts big emotion back into modern narratives that often end “hours, days, or even years of ever-intensifying drama … with an ironic smile and a slap on the back.” While “denial of catharsis is an economic stratagem” to extend the series, it refuses what fans want. This is also connected to the feminization of emotion in modern Western culture; “what emotions male characters do have often come literally at the expense of women and children, which is particularly hard for the female spectator.” So, “[i]nstead of the textual violence and misogyny that result in canonical man tears, vidders create feelings and emotions using the techniques of poetry in the Aristotelian sense, which includes music, drama, rhythm, and movement as well as language.”
A vid is situated by the video source, not the music; the music then “serves as the vid’s blueprint, its road map, its code and key….The vidder uses all the information in a song—lyrics, melody, beat, tempo, instrumentation—as scaffolding upon which to build a montage that reveals (which is to say, creates) aesthetic and narrative patterns in the footage. In a vid, the ear tells the eye what to see.” Then, the spectator’s job is to perform a close reading: to understand how they come together. This is like poetry, as is the fact that “vids have a rhythm that is not separate or extricable from its narrative meaning.” And “just as students can be frustrated by poetry’s frequent allusions to nightingales, larks, and Grecian urns, vid watchers are expected to recognize densely packed signifiers both within the visual source material and, increasingly, to the history of vidding itself.” Vidding is an embodied critical art, designed to affect the body and create feeling, not separate from but part of the pleasure of analysis. If traditional film “creates a culture in which men are tested and women are investigated,” vidding reverses this: it’s men “who are strange and oh so mysterious, in need of intense collaborative scrutiny” and women who (in the editing chair and otherwise) are tested.
The relationship between the vidder and her technology “gives subtext to many fan vids about cars, planes, spaceships,” etc. And vidders made gendered use of technology, often deliberately hiding their works from the mainstream, often to avoid being laughed at or (they feared) sued. Because they weren’t made for the market, vids could focus on different things, and this non/anti-market status was connected to gender both directly and indirectly: “It was far more likely for a male science fiction fan to end up a science fiction magazine writer than it was for a female media fan to end up being a Hollywood screenwriter or director. The scale of the industry was totally different.”
Today, with the rise of YouTube, “vidding is now a tiny subculture lost in an enormous sea.” Content ID controls what can be seen, and the algorithm favors vids that “have a very mainstream sensibility” and people who release content on a rapid and regular basis, which is difficult for many vidders. “YouTube might follow up a Sherlock vid with an interview with Benedict Cumberbatch or a panel about Doctor Strange,” whereas “the algorithm downgrades you if someone stops watching YouTube after one of your videos.” “YouTube fan vids tend to be flashy and fast cut; they tend to feature textures, overlays, distortions, and speed changes, sometimes to the point of parody. These are all things that will help the vid survive, even if an individual vidder doesn’t realize the technological implications of these choices.” This is also enabled by modern software, which is simultaneously affecting the aesthetics of mainstream entertainment. Plus, the ability to make GIFs is also drawing people who might otherwise vid to “isolate, emphasize, and fetishize particular filmic moments, like a significant look or the touch of a hand.” This brings us “back to where we started: with the pause button, the single frame, the stilled image as a way of disrupting the propulsive force of narratives and shifting power relations.”
I loved it, and not just because I’m in it!
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake: Reflective account of how Black women survived and loved under slavery and Jim Crow, using fragmentary materials—centered on Ashley’s sack, embroidered with Ashley’s story of her mother’s love when she was sold away from her mother at age 9 by her granddaughter. I see why people like this, but I kind of preferred Marisa Fuentes’ reconstruction of Black women’s lives in Barbados because its language was less flowery though no less forthright about what is forever lost about the lives of people who mostly left few material traces and whose archival traces are almost always written by their oppressors.
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no subject
I... ...did not know any of this about Woolf :(
I am deeply disappointed in her. :(
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turns out to be prejudiced in other areas.
When someone I already dislike and knew was terrible about X turns out to be also terrible about Y and Z, it doesn't bother me as much.
But when it's someone I respected/admired... :(