clew's reviews: a book log

Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, Lawrence B. Glickman, ed.

This isn't the collection on the subject I was looking for; that one is edited by Goodwin, Ackerman and Kiron and I remember it as having a lot more numbers, being economic history. This owes enough allegiance to "cult stud" history to have an essay by Baudrillard in it; and that essay crystallized my opinion of cult stud, which is that it repeatedly fails to meet its repeated promise because it would usually be better done as a novel. Baudrillard's arguments can be convincing, but - like a good worldbuilding novel, whether SF or roman fleuve - they are not logically supported and usually cannot be so. As someone said of something else, they are not substantiative enough to be wrong. However,

Work, leisure, nature, and culture, all previously dispersed, separate, and more or less irreducible activities that produced anxiety and complexity in our real life, and in our "anarchic and archaic" cities, have finally become mixed, massaged, climate controlled, and domesticated into the simple activity of perpetual shopping.

needs some disprovability to be science, but would be a fine lead-in to Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Interesting subjects in Consumer Society : total debunking, with numbers, of the stereotype of "man earns/woman consumes" starting in the late 1800s when it became fashionable. The sole excuse, and it's flimsy, for the error is that male consumption was mostly done in all-male environs; men's clubs of all degrees of permanence and swank took up a lot of money and provided a lot of glamour and stuff. (Ballrooms, fancy dishes, costumes with dyed feathers and silk sashes, fur coats, sports-watching clothes.) The essay on the history and politics of Hot Rod magazine was good too; hotrodding started in the 20s - it seems ot me that some real inventions were probably made by amateurs that early, but the essay doesn't say - and the magazine supported what is clearly a hacker culture. The best reason to work on one's machine is the reward for skilled effort, and the unity if human and machine; doing it for a living is both a goal and a risk, since it makes one's work less pure; the magazine is balanced between defending the culture from the suspicious mainstream, and trying to provide older, wiser advice to the young hotheads who might be justifying mainstream suspicions. So wrote clew in History.