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Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth: The thing about land is that they aren’t making any more of it, and although you can make more farmland (for now) from forests, it’s not a good idea. This means that agriculture is hugely important to climate change, but most of the time proposals for, e.g., biofuels or organic farming don’t take into account the costs in farmland. The book explores various things that backfired because of that failed accounting and what might work in the future. Bonus: the audiobook is narrated by Kevin R. Free, the voice of Murderbot, who turns out to be substantially more expressive when condemning habitat destruction.
Tony Magistrale & Michael J. Blouin, King Noir: The Crime Fiction of Stephen King (feat. Stephen King and Charles Ardai): Treads the scholarly/popular line, as the inclusion of a chapter by King and a “dialogue” with Ardai suggest. The book explores King’s noir-ish work like Joyland, but also considers his horror protagonists as hardboiled detectives, trying to find out why bad things happen (and, in King’s own words, often finding the noirish answer “Because they can.”). I especially liked the reading of Wendy Torrance as a more successful detective than her husband Jack. Richard Bachman shows up as the dark side of King’s optimism (I would have given more attention to the short stories—they’re also mostly from the Bachman era and those often are quite bleak). And the conclusion interestingly explores the near-absence of the (living) big city and the femme fatale—two noir staples—from King’s work, part of a general refusal of fluidity.
Gerardo Con Diaz, Everyone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World: This book is literally not for me because I live and breathe copyright law and it is a tour through the law of copyright & the internet that is aimed at an intelligent nonlawyer. Although I didn’t learn much, I appreciated lines like “Back then, all my porn was illegally obtained, and it definitely constituted copyright infringement.” The focus is on court cases and the arguments behind them, so the contributions of “user generated content” and, notably, fanworks to the ecosystem don’t get a mention.
Stephanie Burt, Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift: Burt (disclosure: personal friend whose class I’ve visited) teaches a class on Taylor Swift at Harvard. Swift, Burt argues, is both relatable and aspirational—a good girl who can’t stop working, who can’t stop wanting us to like her. Her privileges (wealth, whiteness, attractiveness) combined with her talent at melding lyrics with strong melodies. Burt reads Swift’s beginning with country as like using the pastoral literary mode—rather than writing country because that was her own background, Swift used the medium to imagine a “happy escape” and access useful metaphors. She took from country “tools, and tropes, and sounds” but then sang “about popularity and unpopularity, about frustration and ambition, about romance and alienation, in the lives of suburban and exurban teenage girls.”
Moving to 1989, the songs there, “self-consciously artificial from their slick surfaces to their digital cores, promised that you too could move to the city, reinvent yourself, and go out on the town with your new best friends.” That is, they appealed to a fantasy that more money and more access the privileges of whiteness would also make things better for the listener.
Then, Burt says, Reputation “almost demands that we think about Blackness and whiteness, even if some of us find the result hard to take.” Swift created distance from her earlier personae “by embracing the powers of Black pop, by letting alert listeners notice her whiteness, and trying to reject, musically and lyrically, the powers and limits, the blamelessness and childlikeness, that American white girlhood has long implied.” Burt’s (partial) defense of this is that, “[l]ike every other product of white America, she must learn to listen to Black culture and Black-coded art forms so that she can recognize, and honor, the rejected, ignored, suppressed, bracketed parts of herself.” Another interpretation is that Reputation is about “context collapse”: “How does an international pop star who’s also an all-American country star who’s also a self-conscious role model for teens who’s also on the town in New York City who’s also a constant target for paparazzi who’s also on tour (and not used to dancing in skimpy, shiny outfits) sort it all out?”
Relatedly, “Swift’s strongest political songs speak to social problems she has personally experienced: online bullying, but not homophobia; social exclusion and body-shaming, but not class prejudice; casual contempt for successful women, especially from powerful men who assume that men are, or should be, in charge.” Burt summarizes: “You can be Taylor Swift and succeed. But you can’t be Taylor Swift and feel secure. And you shouldn’t have to be Taylor Swift in order to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated world.”
I also liked her discussion of “Swift’s no-win situation. Once people start alleging that you’re fake, or constructed, or calculating, or artificial, there’s no way to prove otherwise. Anything you do to show that you’re real, that you make decisions against your own interest, that you’re vulnerable or messy, can look to hostile observers like just another calculation. At some point, if you can (a big if), you have to stop caring what they think.” To me, this description also fits the classic model of accusations of homosexuality: once raised, the topic is impossible to dispel, since anything up to and including heterosexual reproduction can be explained as an effect of the closet. Though Burt thinks the most likely ground truth is that Swift is sexually attracted to men, Gaylors are reading the texts for clues the way she’s asked them to do with respect to other topics.
I loved the reading of the literal crowd shouting “More!” in “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart”: “Swift—who famously encourages fans to buy more and more records—comes across as an engine of capitalism, and as its creation, and also as its victim. Her participation in the world economy, her ability to give us product—to produce the feelings we demand—becomes the most stable part of her identity.”
Burt argues for Swift as a genius, but not a modernist genius, that is, one who expects society “to catch up, aesthetically or politically, to writing that it by and large didn’t read and couldn’t understand.” She’s also not a Romantic genius, “the spirit to whom great art just comes naturally.” She could never be The Man, so why not show herself trying? That’s why it’s important to call her a genius, in the sense of “a great artist.” Songwriting isn’t poetry, but “Swift’s powers let her do some things that, in past societies, poets have done: She holds up a mirror (or a mirrorball), gives shape to shared experience, takes us for an emotional ride, and represents large groups, generations, or nations.”
Kyla Sommers, When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital: Extensive account of the lead-up to, experience of, and consequences of the 1968 riots after MLK Jr.’s assassination. There was some interesting stuff about Stokely Carmichael, who (reportedly) told people to go home during the riots because they didn’t have enough guns to win. (Later: “According to the FBI, Carmichael held up a gun and declared ‘tonight bring your gun, don’t loot, shoot.’ The Washington Post, however, reported Carmichael held up a gun and said, ‘Stay off the streets if you don’t have a gun because there’s going to be shooting.’”) Congress did not allow DC to control its own political fate, and that shaped how things happened, including the limited success of citizens’ attempts to direct development and get more control over the police, but ultimately DC was caught up in the larger right-wing backlash that was willing to invest in prisons but not in sustained economic opportunity. Reading it now, I was struct by the fact that—even without riots, fires, or other large-scale destruction—white people who don’t live in the area are still calling for military occupation because they don’t feel safe. So maybe the riots weren’t as causal as they are considered.
Tony Magistrale & Michael J. Blouin, King Noir: The Crime Fiction of Stephen King (feat. Stephen King and Charles Ardai): Treads the scholarly/popular line, as the inclusion of a chapter by King and a “dialogue” with Ardai suggest. The book explores King’s noir-ish work like Joyland, but also considers his horror protagonists as hardboiled detectives, trying to find out why bad things happen (and, in King’s own words, often finding the noirish answer “Because they can.”). I especially liked the reading of Wendy Torrance as a more successful detective than her husband Jack. Richard Bachman shows up as the dark side of King’s optimism (I would have given more attention to the short stories—they’re also mostly from the Bachman era and those often are quite bleak). And the conclusion interestingly explores the near-absence of the (living) big city and the femme fatale—two noir staples—from King’s work, part of a general refusal of fluidity.
Gerardo Con Diaz, Everyone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World: This book is literally not for me because I live and breathe copyright law and it is a tour through the law of copyright & the internet that is aimed at an intelligent nonlawyer. Although I didn’t learn much, I appreciated lines like “Back then, all my porn was illegally obtained, and it definitely constituted copyright infringement.” The focus is on court cases and the arguments behind them, so the contributions of “user generated content” and, notably, fanworks to the ecosystem don’t get a mention.
Stephanie Burt, Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift: Burt (disclosure: personal friend whose class I’ve visited) teaches a class on Taylor Swift at Harvard. Swift, Burt argues, is both relatable and aspirational—a good girl who can’t stop working, who can’t stop wanting us to like her. Her privileges (wealth, whiteness, attractiveness) combined with her talent at melding lyrics with strong melodies. Burt reads Swift’s beginning with country as like using the pastoral literary mode—rather than writing country because that was her own background, Swift used the medium to imagine a “happy escape” and access useful metaphors. She took from country “tools, and tropes, and sounds” but then sang “about popularity and unpopularity, about frustration and ambition, about romance and alienation, in the lives of suburban and exurban teenage girls.”
Moving to 1989, the songs there, “self-consciously artificial from their slick surfaces to their digital cores, promised that you too could move to the city, reinvent yourself, and go out on the town with your new best friends.” That is, they appealed to a fantasy that more money and more access the privileges of whiteness would also make things better for the listener.
Then, Burt says, Reputation “almost demands that we think about Blackness and whiteness, even if some of us find the result hard to take.” Swift created distance from her earlier personae “by embracing the powers of Black pop, by letting alert listeners notice her whiteness, and trying to reject, musically and lyrically, the powers and limits, the blamelessness and childlikeness, that American white girlhood has long implied.” Burt’s (partial) defense of this is that, “[l]ike every other product of white America, she must learn to listen to Black culture and Black-coded art forms so that she can recognize, and honor, the rejected, ignored, suppressed, bracketed parts of herself.” Another interpretation is that Reputation is about “context collapse”: “How does an international pop star who’s also an all-American country star who’s also a self-conscious role model for teens who’s also on the town in New York City who’s also a constant target for paparazzi who’s also on tour (and not used to dancing in skimpy, shiny outfits) sort it all out?”
Relatedly, “Swift’s strongest political songs speak to social problems she has personally experienced: online bullying, but not homophobia; social exclusion and body-shaming, but not class prejudice; casual contempt for successful women, especially from powerful men who assume that men are, or should be, in charge.” Burt summarizes: “You can be Taylor Swift and succeed. But you can’t be Taylor Swift and feel secure. And you shouldn’t have to be Taylor Swift in order to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated world.”
I also liked her discussion of “Swift’s no-win situation. Once people start alleging that you’re fake, or constructed, or calculating, or artificial, there’s no way to prove otherwise. Anything you do to show that you’re real, that you make decisions against your own interest, that you’re vulnerable or messy, can look to hostile observers like just another calculation. At some point, if you can (a big if), you have to stop caring what they think.” To me, this description also fits the classic model of accusations of homosexuality: once raised, the topic is impossible to dispel, since anything up to and including heterosexual reproduction can be explained as an effect of the closet. Though Burt thinks the most likely ground truth is that Swift is sexually attracted to men, Gaylors are reading the texts for clues the way she’s asked them to do with respect to other topics.
I loved the reading of the literal crowd shouting “More!” in “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart”: “Swift—who famously encourages fans to buy more and more records—comes across as an engine of capitalism, and as its creation, and also as its victim. Her participation in the world economy, her ability to give us product—to produce the feelings we demand—becomes the most stable part of her identity.”
Burt argues for Swift as a genius, but not a modernist genius, that is, one who expects society “to catch up, aesthetically or politically, to writing that it by and large didn’t read and couldn’t understand.” She’s also not a Romantic genius, “the spirit to whom great art just comes naturally.” She could never be The Man, so why not show herself trying? That’s why it’s important to call her a genius, in the sense of “a great artist.” Songwriting isn’t poetry, but “Swift’s powers let her do some things that, in past societies, poets have done: She holds up a mirror (or a mirrorball), gives shape to shared experience, takes us for an emotional ride, and represents large groups, generations, or nations.”
Kyla Sommers, When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital: Extensive account of the lead-up to, experience of, and consequences of the 1968 riots after MLK Jr.’s assassination. There was some interesting stuff about Stokely Carmichael, who (reportedly) told people to go home during the riots because they didn’t have enough guns to win. (Later: “According to the FBI, Carmichael held up a gun and declared ‘tonight bring your gun, don’t loot, shoot.’ The Washington Post, however, reported Carmichael held up a gun and said, ‘Stay off the streets if you don’t have a gun because there’s going to be shooting.’”) Congress did not allow DC to control its own political fate, and that shaped how things happened, including the limited success of citizens’ attempts to direct development and get more control over the police, but ultimately DC was caught up in the larger right-wing backlash that was willing to invest in prisons but not in sustained economic opportunity. Reading it now, I was struct by the fact that—even without riots, fires, or other large-scale destruction—white people who don’t live in the area are still calling for military occupation because they don’t feel safe. So maybe the riots weren’t as causal as they are considered.
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Very interesting!
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