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Omer Bartov, Israel: What Went Wrong?:Bartov, a scholar of genocide, argues that the ongoing genocide is in part the result of Israel’s failure to adopt a real constitution, as well as, in the shorter term, Biden’s failure to exert pressure when he could. For an American, the surprising thing is how seriously he seems to take the idea that Trump might pressure Netanyahu into doing something.
Jef I. Richards, A History of Advertising: The First 300,000 Years: A lot of facts—adding in monuments, propaganda, trademarks’ branding function, and public relations beyond “advertising” as we conventionally think of it. A good potential source for advertising-related images and factoids, like who first made an ad that you could taste or an ad that popped up when touched. Also, Barry Manilow wrote the jingles “I’m stuck on Band-Aid,” State Farm’s “Like a good neighbor,” and McDonald’s “You deserve a break today,” among others.
Hal Brands, The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern Century: Eurasia has long had most of the world’s people and many of its resources; this account of how the world has oriented around it left me thinking about how many people will suffer from the Trump-led collapse of American hegemony, despite its undoubted costs and hypocrisies.
Paisley Rekdal, Appropriate: A Provocation:Interesting reflections on cultural/racial “appropriation” in fiction writing and how the complexities defeat any attempt to sum them up. There is harmful cultural appropriation—such works “traffic in stereotypes that link bodily and cultural difference with innate physical and mental characteristics. They are works that ask us not just to perceive a character’s racial difference but to see how those external characteristics stand in metaphorically for more profound interior difference.” But you can’t just “avoid stereotyping” and call it a day, given all the other considerations involved in imagining a person in their fullness and imagining a world around them (in which, if you’re doing any kind of realism, race and culture matter to that world).
Rekda also suggests that writing and reading with empathy should not stand it for the “harder task of working for social change.” Also, empathy to Rekda seems often to be offered by its proponents as a precursor to color-blindness, as if the end goal was a world where “bodily and cultural difference might be something we should finally ignore.” If we focus too much on empathy, we will end up conflating “the underrepresented community with its marginalization and pain. These in turn risk becoming the community’s authenticating narratives, both for readers outside and within the community. Because if writers outside a marginalized community imagine its trauma poorly, writers from within the community will be spurred to respond, to correct the record.” Importantly, Rekda frames this feedback loop as also driven by what publishers/the literary marketplace recognizes as “authentic.” (Rekda also connects this to transcultural/racial hoaxes, who regularly “choose the experience of being traumatized,” suggesting “they see the condition of being a person of color or a woman as itself traumatic.” But the fakes are only making literal what the rest of the culture rewards: white understandings of others’ identities are primary. “[F]akes are inevitable when we fetishize difference without working to understand it, or to sensitively represent it in our histories.”)
I found this particularly provocative: “[o]ne obvious but little practiced way to write about the trauma of racism, say, would be for a White writer to imagine the position of the racist. Why not write about slavery from the slaver’s perspective? Remarkably few writers have done this, perhaps because it is more appealing to imagine yourself as the victim rather than the perpetrator of violence, perhaps because the White writer fears that the audience would do to her what it tends to do to the writer of color, which is to collapse the identity of the narrator with that of the author.”
Mel Stanfill, Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia: Stanfill looks a little bit at fandom studies fandom and anti-fandom, interviewing Henry Jenkins and Rukmini Pande, but also at things like Dark Academia as a concept and right-wing caricatures of the university. Jenkins and Pande have, as you probably expect, experienced their prominence in fandom studies differently, with Pande subject to far more harassment, treated as both marginal and threatening. (Stanfill points out that one reason academia might have an interesting relationship to fandom is that people are supposed to be “stars” in their fields, or at least bright lights, in order to get tenure; stars require loving audiences.)
On Dark Academia versus posters who assume the persona of a ridiculous professor or a ridiculous dean: “It may be depressing that it is only the fannish texts created by people with no real knowledge of academia that are positive about it, but that fact reflects the reality of training a bunch of people to think critically and then turning them loose in a deeply problematic institution…. The snarky accounts replicate what they critique, both in the sense that their tweets are sometimes difficult to differentiate from sincerity when taken out of context and because @timgill924 participates in antagonistic masculine one-upmanship of the sort valued in academia. In that sense, Dark Academia may be the better model after all, invoking fandom’s tradition of imagining otherwise.”
Stanfill treats the Bari Weiss-affiliated “University of Austin” as an instance of right-wing anti-fandom (expressing both love and hate) in which they imagine a mainstream educational system with anti-conservative bias and imagine “saving” that system. Unlike the anti-education conservatives Stanfill also discusses, these people want to save “the university” and thus stand in the fannish role, even perhaps the transformative fannish role. (Which can include wearing the tin hat.) The contradictions are resolved by belief in a natural elite (shockingly, almost all old white men)—“these people very much understand universities as machines for churning out an elite—they simply want it to be them, without question or competition.” They are deep in their feels—they feel ostracized for their views (goose meme: which ones? Which ones?) and the problem they want to solve is the problem of conservative discomfort.
Although I was not fully convinced of the need to use “feels” as a noun so many time, Stanfill’s point was clear: “we fundamentally can’t understand external political attacks on academics and academia without recognizing that they are rooted in how feels and identity drive interpretation of texts …. People have strong feelings about this cultural formation [academia], and it doesn’t matter whether they are grounded in reality …. [T]hese feels around this text help shape anti-fans’ own identities and their group membership.” I take her point, though I’m not sure anyone has found a good way to respond to anti-fandoms even when we recognize them as based on affective logics. I guess I’ll just pitch Anat Shenker-Osorio’s work on political messaging here.
Roger Kreuz, Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots:I hoped for more on why people plagiarize but maybe I misread the introduction. It’s another history of plagiarism, interspersed with stuff about copyright infringement, despite the (occasionally acknowledged) distinction between the two; it tended just to recount the basic facts of a legal dispute without more conceptual analysis. And its treatment of fan fiction as topic-relevant is puzzling at best; perhaps it’s best that Kreuz sticks to saying that some published authors, like CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft, were ok with it and others like JKR and Stephenie Meyer are more nervous (albeit treating their views as somehow dispositive).
I did find some of the cited research interesting—because we’re really bad at source attribution (remembering where we learned something), apparently inadvertent plagiarism (misattributing an idea to yourself) is more likely in single-sex groups, because the perceived similarity to ourselves deprives us of perceptual cues. It’s also higher for things stated immediately before a given participant’s own turn: “The impending need to respond is thought to temporarily diminish the attention paid to these items, and this makes identifying their source more difficult later.”
Why do plagiarists plagiarize? Well, money for one. Some of the most interesting stories are about Eastern European/German/Russian PhDs who turn out to have plagiarized chunks, or more, of their dissertations—in the context of cultures that heavily value doctorates both culturally and often monetarily. When Romania stopped raising salaries by 15% for workers with PhDs in certain jobs, “the number of doctorates awarded in the country fell by two-thirds.” Other fairly obvious reasons: time pressure; admiration of the original; to get prestige; ignorance (which Kreuz demonstrates here by conflating copyright infringement with plagiarism). Plagiarists may also be more likely to be procrastinators, low on conscientiousness, and less motivated to achieve than non-plagiarists, but the correlations aren’t super strong.
What about perceived plagiarism when there’s at most some shared ideas? “[W]e tend to think of ourselves as unique, and this extends to the things we create.” Thus, similar works might seem threatening. We’re also vulnerable to pareidolia— “finding meaningful patterns in ambiguous stimuli,” like animals in cloud shapes, which might also extend to rejection of coincidence/shared ideas as a reason for resemblances. My favorite example of coincidence shaped by background circumstances, which I don’t think is in this book, is how an American author wrote about Larry Potter (a glasses-wearing young boy) and his magical adventures with the Muggles many years before Harry Potter, but there is absolutely no story about how JKR could have gotten access to the book, which was not widely distributed even in the US.
Kreuz also discusses how gender/racial hierarchies affect accusations of plagiarism through bias about who’s capable of creativity. And there are prominent plagiarism stories involving men misappropriating women’s work, including one involving HG Wells and another involving Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was based in part on reports and field notes from Sanora Babb. The manager of a migrant camp shared Babb’s work with Steinbeck without her knowledge, because Steinbeck promised to edit the manager’s future work. Steinbeck’s novel destroyed the market for Babb’s novel, whose contract was cancelled after Steinbeck’s book came out.
Farah Mendelsohn, Considering the Female Man: Or, as the bear swore: Short book about Joanna Russ’s “The Female Man.” I didn’t know how little we know about Russ’s life outside her writings, but enjoyed this short book/long essay situating her work within/against that of other feminist and sf writers. “Russ’s feminism has three key strands: anger with men, an anger with liberal feminism, which aspired to men’s estate, and which, as this book tackles, set ever more impossible barriers to ever being accepted ‘as a man’; and the third is a materialist Marxism which is rooted in her Jewishness.” Jewishness in the form: argument instead of synthesis; Jewishness in the humor: self-deprecating, striving to fit in because assimilation might mean safety. She was, Mendelsohn says, not trying to convince men but to reach women; Mendelsohn doesn’t shy away from the novel’s transphobia. I thought it plausibly read as an argument that patriarchy imposes transphobia as part of its commitment to creating a falsely “natural” order, but Mendelsohn writes that she later “repudiated such views (which strongly suggested she had held them) in an interview with Samuel R. Delany Jr.” Mendelsohn notes that both she and Russ “swam in a transphobic bio-essentialist feminist environment in the 1970s and 1980s.” Polysemy!
Joshua Clark Davis, Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back: Davis presents this as a story of persistence and vindication by history, but it’s hard not to read about all the infiltration and ginned-up prosecutions of Black activists for protesting police violence and compare to the present day where the SPLC has just been indicted for supposed fraud in investigating hate groups and think the tactics of both explicit violence and legal repression don’t often work.
Jef I. Richards, A History of Advertising: The First 300,000 Years: A lot of facts—adding in monuments, propaganda, trademarks’ branding function, and public relations beyond “advertising” as we conventionally think of it. A good potential source for advertising-related images and factoids, like who first made an ad that you could taste or an ad that popped up when touched. Also, Barry Manilow wrote the jingles “I’m stuck on Band-Aid,” State Farm’s “Like a good neighbor,” and McDonald’s “You deserve a break today,” among others.
Hal Brands, The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern Century: Eurasia has long had most of the world’s people and many of its resources; this account of how the world has oriented around it left me thinking about how many people will suffer from the Trump-led collapse of American hegemony, despite its undoubted costs and hypocrisies.
Paisley Rekdal, Appropriate: A Provocation:Interesting reflections on cultural/racial “appropriation” in fiction writing and how the complexities defeat any attempt to sum them up. There is harmful cultural appropriation—such works “traffic in stereotypes that link bodily and cultural difference with innate physical and mental characteristics. They are works that ask us not just to perceive a character’s racial difference but to see how those external characteristics stand in metaphorically for more profound interior difference.” But you can’t just “avoid stereotyping” and call it a day, given all the other considerations involved in imagining a person in their fullness and imagining a world around them (in which, if you’re doing any kind of realism, race and culture matter to that world).
Rekda also suggests that writing and reading with empathy should not stand it for the “harder task of working for social change.” Also, empathy to Rekda seems often to be offered by its proponents as a precursor to color-blindness, as if the end goal was a world where “bodily and cultural difference might be something we should finally ignore.” If we focus too much on empathy, we will end up conflating “the underrepresented community with its marginalization and pain. These in turn risk becoming the community’s authenticating narratives, both for readers outside and within the community. Because if writers outside a marginalized community imagine its trauma poorly, writers from within the community will be spurred to respond, to correct the record.” Importantly, Rekda frames this feedback loop as also driven by what publishers/the literary marketplace recognizes as “authentic.” (Rekda also connects this to transcultural/racial hoaxes, who regularly “choose the experience of being traumatized,” suggesting “they see the condition of being a person of color or a woman as itself traumatic.” But the fakes are only making literal what the rest of the culture rewards: white understandings of others’ identities are primary. “[F]akes are inevitable when we fetishize difference without working to understand it, or to sensitively represent it in our histories.”)
I found this particularly provocative: “[o]ne obvious but little practiced way to write about the trauma of racism, say, would be for a White writer to imagine the position of the racist. Why not write about slavery from the slaver’s perspective? Remarkably few writers have done this, perhaps because it is more appealing to imagine yourself as the victim rather than the perpetrator of violence, perhaps because the White writer fears that the audience would do to her what it tends to do to the writer of color, which is to collapse the identity of the narrator with that of the author.”
Mel Stanfill, Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia: Stanfill looks a little bit at fandom studies fandom and anti-fandom, interviewing Henry Jenkins and Rukmini Pande, but also at things like Dark Academia as a concept and right-wing caricatures of the university. Jenkins and Pande have, as you probably expect, experienced their prominence in fandom studies differently, with Pande subject to far more harassment, treated as both marginal and threatening. (Stanfill points out that one reason academia might have an interesting relationship to fandom is that people are supposed to be “stars” in their fields, or at least bright lights, in order to get tenure; stars require loving audiences.)
On Dark Academia versus posters who assume the persona of a ridiculous professor or a ridiculous dean: “It may be depressing that it is only the fannish texts created by people with no real knowledge of academia that are positive about it, but that fact reflects the reality of training a bunch of people to think critically and then turning them loose in a deeply problematic institution…. The snarky accounts replicate what they critique, both in the sense that their tweets are sometimes difficult to differentiate from sincerity when taken out of context and because @timgill924 participates in antagonistic masculine one-upmanship of the sort valued in academia. In that sense, Dark Academia may be the better model after all, invoking fandom’s tradition of imagining otherwise.”
Stanfill treats the Bari Weiss-affiliated “University of Austin” as an instance of right-wing anti-fandom (expressing both love and hate) in which they imagine a mainstream educational system with anti-conservative bias and imagine “saving” that system. Unlike the anti-education conservatives Stanfill also discusses, these people want to save “the university” and thus stand in the fannish role, even perhaps the transformative fannish role. (Which can include wearing the tin hat.) The contradictions are resolved by belief in a natural elite (shockingly, almost all old white men)—“these people very much understand universities as machines for churning out an elite—they simply want it to be them, without question or competition.” They are deep in their feels—they feel ostracized for their views (goose meme: which ones? Which ones?) and the problem they want to solve is the problem of conservative discomfort.
Although I was not fully convinced of the need to use “feels” as a noun so many time, Stanfill’s point was clear: “we fundamentally can’t understand external political attacks on academics and academia without recognizing that they are rooted in how feels and identity drive interpretation of texts …. People have strong feelings about this cultural formation [academia], and it doesn’t matter whether they are grounded in reality …. [T]hese feels around this text help shape anti-fans’ own identities and their group membership.” I take her point, though I’m not sure anyone has found a good way to respond to anti-fandoms even when we recognize them as based on affective logics. I guess I’ll just pitch Anat Shenker-Osorio’s work on political messaging here.
Roger Kreuz, Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots:I hoped for more on why people plagiarize but maybe I misread the introduction. It’s another history of plagiarism, interspersed with stuff about copyright infringement, despite the (occasionally acknowledged) distinction between the two; it tended just to recount the basic facts of a legal dispute without more conceptual analysis. And its treatment of fan fiction as topic-relevant is puzzling at best; perhaps it’s best that Kreuz sticks to saying that some published authors, like CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft, were ok with it and others like JKR and Stephenie Meyer are more nervous (albeit treating their views as somehow dispositive).
I did find some of the cited research interesting—because we’re really bad at source attribution (remembering where we learned something), apparently inadvertent plagiarism (misattributing an idea to yourself) is more likely in single-sex groups, because the perceived similarity to ourselves deprives us of perceptual cues. It’s also higher for things stated immediately before a given participant’s own turn: “The impending need to respond is thought to temporarily diminish the attention paid to these items, and this makes identifying their source more difficult later.”
Why do plagiarists plagiarize? Well, money for one. Some of the most interesting stories are about Eastern European/German/Russian PhDs who turn out to have plagiarized chunks, or more, of their dissertations—in the context of cultures that heavily value doctorates both culturally and often monetarily. When Romania stopped raising salaries by 15% for workers with PhDs in certain jobs, “the number of doctorates awarded in the country fell by two-thirds.” Other fairly obvious reasons: time pressure; admiration of the original; to get prestige; ignorance (which Kreuz demonstrates here by conflating copyright infringement with plagiarism). Plagiarists may also be more likely to be procrastinators, low on conscientiousness, and less motivated to achieve than non-plagiarists, but the correlations aren’t super strong.
What about perceived plagiarism when there’s at most some shared ideas? “[W]e tend to think of ourselves as unique, and this extends to the things we create.” Thus, similar works might seem threatening. We’re also vulnerable to pareidolia— “finding meaningful patterns in ambiguous stimuli,” like animals in cloud shapes, which might also extend to rejection of coincidence/shared ideas as a reason for resemblances. My favorite example of coincidence shaped by background circumstances, which I don’t think is in this book, is how an American author wrote about Larry Potter (a glasses-wearing young boy) and his magical adventures with the Muggles many years before Harry Potter, but there is absolutely no story about how JKR could have gotten access to the book, which was not widely distributed even in the US.
Kreuz also discusses how gender/racial hierarchies affect accusations of plagiarism through bias about who’s capable of creativity. And there are prominent plagiarism stories involving men misappropriating women’s work, including one involving HG Wells and another involving Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was based in part on reports and field notes from Sanora Babb. The manager of a migrant camp shared Babb’s work with Steinbeck without her knowledge, because Steinbeck promised to edit the manager’s future work. Steinbeck’s novel destroyed the market for Babb’s novel, whose contract was cancelled after Steinbeck’s book came out.
Farah Mendelsohn, Considering the Female Man: Or, as the bear swore: Short book about Joanna Russ’s “The Female Man.” I didn’t know how little we know about Russ’s life outside her writings, but enjoyed this short book/long essay situating her work within/against that of other feminist and sf writers. “Russ’s feminism has three key strands: anger with men, an anger with liberal feminism, which aspired to men’s estate, and which, as this book tackles, set ever more impossible barriers to ever being accepted ‘as a man’; and the third is a materialist Marxism which is rooted in her Jewishness.” Jewishness in the form: argument instead of synthesis; Jewishness in the humor: self-deprecating, striving to fit in because assimilation might mean safety. She was, Mendelsohn says, not trying to convince men but to reach women; Mendelsohn doesn’t shy away from the novel’s transphobia. I thought it plausibly read as an argument that patriarchy imposes transphobia as part of its commitment to creating a falsely “natural” order, but Mendelsohn writes that she later “repudiated such views (which strongly suggested she had held them) in an interview with Samuel R. Delany Jr.” Mendelsohn notes that both she and Russ “swam in a transphobic bio-essentialist feminist environment in the 1970s and 1980s.” Polysemy!
Joshua Clark Davis, Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back: Davis presents this as a story of persistence and vindication by history, but it’s hard not to read about all the infiltration and ginned-up prosecutions of Black activists for protesting police violence and compare to the present day where the SPLC has just been indicted for supposed fraud in investigating hate groups and think the tactics of both explicit violence and legal repression don’t often work.