I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

More of these to come when I find the time to write up my notes.

Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman: ( artist as hustler )
Rory Cormac, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons From the World of Secret Statecraft: ( everyone does it )
Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: ( ethical capitalism? )
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution:( history from another time )
Adrienne Mayor, Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: ( cryptozoology )
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain: ( tolerance = not all the pogroms were religious )
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: ( in country )
Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis: ( historical rhymes )
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires:( read the essay )
Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Who Makes and Who Takes from the Real Economy: ( economics is a rhetoric )
David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order: ( really? )
Nancy L. Mace & Peter V. Rabins, The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementias, and Memory Loss: Useful for walking through the realities of caring for someone with dementia. Hard to read.


Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It: As with any fan, Tiffany maybe overattributes causation to her own fandom (One Direction) and I know I’m prone to it too so I can’t say too much. But she sets out how everything is fannish and fandom now, in ways both good and bad, commercialized (often exploitatively so) and not (a lot of online vitriol, from Qanon to fans of specific singers).

Marc McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: Essays centering around the idea of Amazon and its effects on our consciousness, specifically literary consciousness and readerly consciousness (the reader as consumer). I found it too dense for my taste/interested in things I’m not interested in (e.g. the modern realist novel), but interesting to see someone unite a kind of survey of ordinary works in general fiction with reflections on the economic conditions producing them.

"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, ed. Torie Bosch: Short essays on code, good and bad, buggy and intentional, from the origins of code in weaving and music to the Volkswagen defeat device to the “like” button to the first police profiling algorithm (in 1968!) and more. Ethan Zuckerman, who coded the first pop-up ad, writes: “Sometime around 1997, I wrote a line of JavaScript code that made the world a measurably worse place.” “Brand safety” was the motivation: “The pop-up specifically came about after an auto company complained about their ad appearing on a personal homepage about anal sex. My boss asked me to find a way to sell ads while ensuring brand managers wouldn’t send us screen shots of their precious brands juxtaposed with offensive content. My slapdash solution? Put the ad in a different window than the content. Presto! Plausible deniability!”

Joi Lisi Rankin is one author exploring the ways race and gender affected code: “Among the high schools connected to the Dartmouth network as part of the [1960s] NSF Secondary Schools Project, the coed public schools—all predominantly White—had only 40 hours of network time each week. By contrast, the private schools—which were all male, wealthy, and almost exclusively White—had 72 hours of network time each week.” And access was only for students in math/science classes, from which girls were often excluded. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth to be taught in a standard math class, was therefore a way of transitioning computing from women’s work to work from which women were excluded. From Meredith Broussard: “When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, … [t]he database redesign process was informally called Y2gay.”

Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War: ( Most disputes die and no one shoots )Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design:( universal design? )
Ayelet Waldman & Michael Chabon eds., Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Various writers on Israel’s Occupied Territories.( Read more... )
Susan Orlean, The Library Book: Reading about a giant 1986 library fire in LA now counts as escapism.  ( Read more... )
Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party: ( Read more... )
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar: ( Read more... )
Jack Lewis, The Science of Sin: Why We Do The Things We Know We Shouldn’t: ( A bit longer... )

Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry:( Read more... )

Fandom feeds on the AO3!  Great rejoicing! Helloooo, Revenge and Alphas. Also, subscriptions to individual works for WIPs!

Poison pen review by Evgeny Morozov of a book on privacy. Sample: “Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody—as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison—it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.” Also: “This is how Sarah Palin would read Habermas if she could read Habermas.” Good times!

( Life after economic collapse, psychopathy and reality, and fixing copyright )

The setting: a lecture by one of our visiting profs. The lecture is named in honor of a big donor. Dinner to follow in the building next door.

The principals: another big donor and his group; me; the nervous development person who is confusing them with directions to the building.

The action: I volunteer to walk them over, since I'm going to the dinner too.

The dialogue: Big donor: "Oh, are you a new student here?" Me (smile cracking like Magic Shell): "No, I'm a professor."

Not his fault; not even the security guards buy that one. I wish I looked more authoritative, but I'm afraid I just look like a coed.

Recent books of interest, many fannish, ahead.

I reread David Brin's "The Postman," and found it less fun than I remembered. The novel is made up of shorter stories that were retro-written into the novel, and the seams show, like the seams on a baseball. The ending is abrupt, veering suddenly into "The Gate to Women's Country" territory, and not particularly satisfying. Still, as hopeful post-apocalyptic fiction goes, it's pretty good entertainment.

"The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media," edited by Lisa A. Lewis, is an okay survey of various cultural studies approaches to fandom. Though John Fiske's essay "The Cultural Economy of Fandom" is here, the best parts of the book are less theory-heavy and more specific. "Essays from Bitch: The Women's Rock Newsletter with Bite," "'I'll Be Here with You': Fans, Fantasy and the Figure of Elvis," "Television Executives Speak about Fan Letters to the Networks," and "A Glimpse of the Fan Factory" (reprints of actual letters to various celebrities and gossip columnists) are worth reading, even if the psychoanalytic theory in the Elvis piece gets a little heavy. Henry Jenkins's work on filking is here too, but unnecessary if you've read "Textual Poachers" -- and if you haven't, what the hell are you doing in fandom?

I didn't like Camille Bacon-Smith's "Enterprising Women" when I first read it, because it didn't describe my fannish experience at all. Now that I can use my research budget to add such books to my library, I got my own copy and found my opinion markedly improved upon rereading. Bacon-Smith is not describing Internet fandom, though there are important areas of overlap. I think she's also a little off in treating fandom like an onion, with layers only revealed over time to newbies, who are first protected from hurt/comfort and slash and only gradually allowed in. But again, this may be because Internet fandom doesn't work that way. It's an interesting book if you want to know every strand of academic analysis of fandom.

But the fan-type book that I really loved among my recent reads was Samantha Barbas's "Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars and the Cult of Celebrity," which looks at fans' relationships and contributions to movie star images during the first half of the twentieth century. Barbas has excellent evidence and a persuasive story about how fans themselves controlled, to a much more significant extent than anyone really understood except the studio execs, who became a celebrity and what his/her public image would be. Highly recommended.

Jack Stillinger's "Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius" is important for the evidence it marshals, but tough going when he spends a chapter on Coleridge's contributions to Wordsworth, Keats and the other people who helped write one Keats poem, etc. The fine detail is too much for people who don't know the targeted works intimately, but the first and last three chapters more than make up for the hard going with an excellent discussion of why the romantic concept of the individual author never made any sense, doesn't make any sense now, and won't make any sense in the future. Although editors claim not to create and just to assist authors, in fact that assistance often reminds one of Michelangelo's statement that the sculpture's always in the marble and his job is just to chip off the bits that aren't part of the sculpture. The collaborative enterprise of fandom (and, indeed, movies and series television) acknowledges the fact of communal creation, but it's the acknowledgement and not the community that make it different from "mainstream" literary works.

Naomi Klein's "No Logo" is a great account of the branding of America and the world, and how the value of Nike's swoosh turns out to affect labor conditions around the world, as companies switch to a model in which they only own their names and subcontract out everything else. Although her ending chapters are far too optimistic in my opinion, the work effortlessly weaves the theory of product branding with the commercialization of American education with the story of Third World development, enriching one's understanding of all of it (and more besides).

I bought Kevin Mitnick & William Simon's "The Art of Deception" because I wanted to learn more about how corporate security can be breached (yes, this will turn up in the post-Spiders story). There's a lot of repetition, only to be expected of a business book, but the reason to read this book is for the stories. Time after time, people described in this book fall prey to cons that, by attacking the people responsible for security, easily bypass all technical measures. And don't feel superior -- I suspect that, if we were all honest, most of us would admit that we'd have been fooled by (at a bare minimum) half of these tricks. This book will make you nervous, but that's probably a good thing.

"Spiders" is slouching towards completion. Yay!