Good subject, trash in the US: and a good hook, the Garbage Project, Rathje's combination of (zero-day) archaeology and (zero-distance) anthropology. I think it got too popped up, though, too reduced to bite-sized anecdotes, and is aging poorly. (Rathje's writing online has more pith.)
Both Fat of the Land and Waste and Want are better books on the history of waste in the U.S. Both have stronger narrative and are willing to go into more systematic detail about less "pop" topics.
I'd like more of the anthropology.
Find in a Library: Rubbish!
This has gone into enough editions that I can believe it is popular in the Netherlands. I can't believe it's popular anywhere else, except among very dated English Europhobes, and I'm surprised it should be popular in the Netherlands either. It's not just that I find it unfunny, and not useful in explaining the national peculiarities of the Dutch; it's that so little of it is specific. Entire chapters could be pulled from your lower-grade email forwarding list and renamed to describe the annoying little quirks of anywhere. (The one on driving is especially inane, but complaints that clothing shops play loud music and you might have your wallet stolen at a street market are also typical.)
If it is, in fact, popular in the Netherlands, I can only assume that it has the charms that the bad email does, shared with newspaper horoscopes; plenty of people like being talked about, even insultingly and by rote.
Perhaps I want some good Dutch novels. I very much liked the country, in my one short visit; I liked the sense of design, cultural and physical, that allowed seemingly disparate things to trot along side by side. Some of this is the necessity of crowding, of course, but it didn't feel like -- for instance -- Japan. I can't say what it did feel like, except that I didn't think knowledge of the formal rules would explain the society to me. A novel about the formation of some important aspect of the current Dutch way might help; or one about not fitting in even though brought up Dutch; or I suppose one about moving there as an adult. Any recommendations? Or do I stick with ?
Find in a Library: The UnDutchables
Darlington tells stories, over and over, of people coming to the desert for noninterference, and then interfering with each other. Often the interference is through intermediaries, as with all the argument over what's been most, or least excusably, or finally insupportably, damaging to the wildlife in the deserts.
There's some natural and geographic history, but most of the history is human.
Find in a Library: The Mojave
Well, how embarrassing. I think I thought about some of Wilson's analysis of Symbolist literature, but I only remember the parts that agreed with suspicions I already had. Principally I'm comforted that The Remembrance of Things Past wasn't going to get less depressing than Swann's Way and that all the people were in fact self-defeating in more or less morally unpleasant ways. I'll happily forgo the technical skill of 's dying world; if I want to be in it I'd rather visit, say, the jolly .
And second recognition; goes all high-church & his verse turns into iffy .
The chapter on is unusually convincing in its argument that she's unreadable but fundamentally important, like the Velvet Underground I suppose; and the one on is fun because it was written during Finnegans Wake's original serialized publication. Wilson is not so overcome by Joyce's method. There are publications devoted to Joyce and hypertext, though there seems to be no hypertext of FW or U; famously the surviving holder of copyright is "a Joyce not a Joycean", so there probably won't be, either. Pity.
Axel of the eponymous Castle sounds a totally unreadable pile and madly seductive to the touchy young: like The Fountainhead or The Flame of Araby. Castles! Cryptonomicon-sized piles of gold! gorgeous young Rosicrucian aristocrats who fall in love while trying to kill each other, only Axel persuades her to an immediate joint suicide because even for them no life could be as good as their fantasies... It's really just as well I didn't come across this at fourteen. To my surprise, Axel isn't online; not on Project Gutenberg, not at the Online Books Page. There are hard copies, some in what sound like lovely nineteenth-c. editions, what with Symbolists enjoying the decorative arts. The author (count de, etc.), is all biographized and everything.
There's a nice bit about the importance of sleep to the Symbolists, both as a naturally Symbolist realm and a suitably lethargic revolt against the demands of the modern world. It might cross Rosicrucianism, too; The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance mentioned that some esoteric adepts regarded sleep as a mystic art, one with which they could see or do what they could not waking.
With that in mind, I was dubious of Wilson's closing paragraph, which is largely a defense of the Symbolists' dreaming retreat into "things that are dying—the whole belle-lettristic tradition of Renaissance culture perhaps, compelled to specialize more and more, more and more driven in on itself, as industrialism and democratic education have come to press it closer and closer&mdash" Well, but the whole tradition includes the parts that did and the parts that didn't have science and democracy as their descendants. Not that there's a clear line between those parts, any more than The Metaphysical Club could lay out distinct parentage for modern political alliances. I get massively annoyed by accounts that assume the only 'real' or interesting part of the past was the part most like us (e.g., The System of the World) and on nearly the same principle am annoyed by accounts that assume that the only 'good' or interesting part of the past is the part we've given up.
Find in a Library
A dozen threads of US history cross here, and Spain keeps them competently aligned. I'd enjoy a book of more reckless assertions as to what caused what, but this careful one would have to be written anyway.
Threads: the Woman Question; good government; architecture; volunteerism, especially the US strain; racism, ditto; immigration; urbanization; de-urbanization; religion; urban planning. Dear me, that's only ten threads, but the Woman Question here is wound up of at least three.
The city saved women while women saved the city. In the late nineteenth century, US habits were fracturing. More and more women had jobs and educations; work flooding into the city off the farm; the cities were jammed with immigrants. The world barely knew how to build for such dense crowds of people. City governments were weak or laissez-faire or outright corrupt; they weren't always trying to build physical infrastructure, let alone the social service network that would keep immigrants and refugees from remaining an immiserated class. Some of the movement was of black citizens, out of the rural South, and the immiserated classes were played against each other.
These fractures aligned and into them women drove a lever that shifted the whole mass. Many respectable young women had to support themselves, and arrangements for their living in the city had to be made. Also, women were going to work, including well-off women who did not work for pay: as wrote,
women who wanted to escape the "immense imprisonment of life which was stifling them" (p. 187).
Some of them avoided direct competition with men by doing the work men left undone. Finally, in a brilliant ideological feint, they combined these two things by phrasing the whole project of making cities livable as housekeeping and mothering. Many a leaflet accepted, sweetly, that women had their proper sphere; but made clear that the sphere was considerably larger than one family home. The home could not be kept safe and clean until the city was safe and clean.
If that argument didn't take, there were theological ones:
Settlement workers... were among the first to identify it [urban poverty] as a systemic problem rather than a personal failing. ...the Social Gospel defined poverty as a public issue warranting institutional reform... Thus the Social Gospel strongly justified women's work outside the home. (p. 63)
The YMCA, the Salvation Army, and the NAACP all grew in this era and worked on these problems. The YMCA of course built huge, complicated domiciles in the cities, which were homes to many poorish working women and must have been fascinating work for the women running them. I love the floorplans; the Cleveland YMCA headquarters had an interior gymnasium with a running track, as well as a library, classrooms for millinery and bookkeeping and more, and of course bedrooms offices dining-hall and chapel.
And in other places there were precedents; the last clean, well-drained Cities Beautiful had been Roman. I hadn't previously thought about the logical association of classical style with public, everyday, mens sana in corpore sano construction, but I should have, even if they didn't combine baths and libraries:
New York City's [public] baths were huge, with one hundred showers (and fewer tubs). They were modeled on Roman public baths with classical pilasters, columns, arches, and cornices. (p. 132)
The settlement houses didn't survive in their own names, largely because so many of their functions were absorbed into city government (and subsequently run by professionalized men). The settlements were houses for college women living in some of the tougher poor neighborhoods, with the intent of improving the lot of the neighborhoods by living among them and sharing knowledge, rather than going among them and granting bounty. (Certainly some of this knowledge was useful-connection knowledge, e.g. how to shame the city into collecting street trash.) The most famous of these was Hull House; ' Twenty Years at Hull House is at Project Gutenberg. Hull House itself is mostly gone. Spain has some rather trenchant comments on how many of these practical donation-funded buildings were destroyed as unimportant, despite having been 'firsts' of many kinds - often the first public libraries or baths, for instance, only later supplanted by Carnegie or city edifices that spent some of their money on famous architects. She calls the humbler works 'vernacular architecture', referring to 's 'vernacular space', always shared.
The women's clubs are less famous now, but I think they were more accepted then. A hundred years ago many nice respectable quiet wives and mothers were also clubwomen, that is, member's of women's clubs, and some of them may have played bridge all day but some of them built refuges for unwed mothers. Spain's book doesn't talk about them much; it seems to me that they intentionally fluttered under the radar and looked harmless at all times. Seattlites might remember that the Harvard Exit movie house is in a building originally built for a women's club; surviving members are occasionally interviewed, and they usually come off as not feminists but precursors of feminists.
Clubwomen might have been more likely to talk about the City Beautiful than to agitate for labor rights, for instance, but in doing so they served as infiltrators rather than shock troops. It wasn't all cornices; that City needed to start with paving the streets. (Somewhere in here is a contemporaneous remark assuming that the mess of overhead wires will, of course, be buried as city development catches up with technological change. Oops; we haven't gotten there yet.) Urban planning became a feminine concern because the lack of air and water was unclean and unhealthy, the lack of schools unfitting, the lack of playgrounds unwise. No-one needed playgrounds when rich children lived in parks and farms and poor ones worked; city parks and playgrounds had to be retrofitted into corners. They were ambitiously designed, with sandboxes and educational vegetable gardens. They were also segregated by race and often by gender, and not separate-but-equal.
The failure of these various movements to attack racism is depressing. The Salvation Army might have done the most of the white-founded groups; it was originally English. Various branches of groups that theoretically worked for all poor people refused to work for blacks, and the ideology of sweet womanhood didn't stretch to cover it. The schools and colleges built by black women are all the more heroic, and there were decent exceptions, but it's a repeated failure of principle elsewhere. There's an awfully familiar ring to some of it, the seemingly irreducible residuum of underpaid, necessary, labor in the reproduction of labor. , who was not willing to save only the 'talented tenth',
advocated the unionization of domestics because "the women voters will be keen to see that laws are passed that will give eight hours a day to women in other industries, but they will oppose any movement that will, in the end, prevent them from keeping their cooks and house servants in the kitchen twelve or fifteen hours a day." (p. 164)
On the other hand, the Social Gospel was reliably willing to stand up with organized labor and worker's rights, as they were then being developed; and there were scientists and utopians reducing the required effort. Some had read , and were probably planning neighborhood cafeterias (how old is deli?); others built the Rumford Kitchen with the science of Home Ec.
The June 2005 Heifer International newsletter, World Ark, that arrived as I was reading this has a review of How to Change the World, by , which is apparently about the rise of nonprofit entrepreneurial
"citizen sector" and the tremendous growth of nonprofits that are tackling social problems that government or business have failed to solve or even address. (p. 25)
After a volume on the comprehensive invention of social-goods institutions a hundred years ago, this didn't sound all that new, but the big change is that the ideology then was female Virtue, Religion, and Cleanliness; and now the ideology is Entrepreneurship. The substances overlap constantly, since they're attacking similar problems, but the metaphors are tremendously different. It's probable that there are insoluble contradictions in the new hopeful ideology, too, but I expect there's a generation of work to be extracted from it first.
ISBN: 0816635315
I know why one would want to write a worshipful little-sister book about the wisecracking characters in the classic screwball movies. I think the content and tone of this one are at odds, though. A random sample of the prose:
Garbo's sublime imposture of Soviet enthusiasm seems inspired by this Bergsonian perception linking rigidity of thought with inelasticity of demeanor.
That isn't even an uninteresting thought in context (Ninotchka). The 'seems' is unfortunate, since it's not an unusual thought either.
But none of the screwball heroines would have been so cautious or so slow. I can't write a paragraph in wisecracks either, and my conclusion is that prose is the wrong format for this whole book: it should have a whole lot of film clips attached with reasoning. Even better, it would have clips of parallel scenes in 1950s or modern movies to demonstrate what was different about the great age. Pity that the copyright system currently makes that unlikely.
The other wrong note in the prose is that the content is unquestioningly optimistic about the meaning, the intent, the effect of the wisecracking heroines. This includes a Lubitsch film, and who could reasonably get unambiguous optimism out of that? There is a little mention of the stock foolish-new-bride joke to take the heroine down a peg at the end. I like the literary connection DiBattista makes between romantic comedies and the health of society in companionate marriages, but she covers movies with as much difference as A Winter's Tale to Much Ado About Nothing, and even the latter has no wisecracks from Beatrice in the final speeches.
ISBN: 0300088159
Subtitle: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere
This is not poetry or philosophy of the edge city, or the strip mall, or the cul-de-sac, but Steuver makes a game try at representing all three as a environment of sufficient age and complexity to develop poetry or philosophy. I don't know that he shows the Elsewhere would want any it doesn't get from TV. I am presumably missing the heartfelt meaning in his TV and pop-song references.
Most of the essays are medium-close biography of representative people; an engaged couple, a low-cost funeral director, an unlikely candidate for the California governorship.
ISBN: 0805075739
...the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a position on a map fixed by triangulation.
A large argument! nor a provable one. Most of the book is much more specific, though, usually a precise account of the social changes afflicting the poor and grimy London neighborhoods Raban lived in as a young freelance writer in the 1970s. I should think it was nearly unreadable for a couple of decades while it was just out of date; it is aging back into interest. For the US, at least, some of the interest comes from the image of London as a city permanently decaying and being renewed block by block (fashion and mortgage rules between them froze the renewal for a couple of decades in the States). Raban's general descriptions probably fit New York a decade later and smaller cities now.
Bits I liked: several sections analyzing the minimalist, anxious style of white-paint, open-floorplan gentrifiers. A little of what Raban assumes matches a history of Victorian London:
This style is a strategy of urban disengagement; it is a deliberate renunciation of almost every possibility afforded by the city. [...] (Significantly, London is unique amongst capital cities in that its middle class regard it as a right to live in a whole house and not in an apartment.)
Raban goes on to say that his gentrifiers are buying not just real-estate but the idea and practicality of neighborliness; "Community is becoming an increasingly expensive commodity". I wonder how that played out over thirty years. Community doesn't seem like a commodity that would stay bought.
There are many sections on surface, and style, and style communities and signals, and even on what kind of shopping is neccessary to maintain style; part of the argument is that the size and motion of cities requires them. Raban manages to discuss all this with very few brand-names or shop names, and only loose descriptions, which is probably why it's still readable; but I think the descriptions are specific enough that someone who was an adult in the '70s would know what he was talking about. (White-painted Moroccan birdcages were stylish? Ouch.) The birdcage chapter also summarizes Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which categorized the street masses by their occupations and access to materials; but Raban divides his contemporaries by what they buy. I am never much impressed by claims that consumer identity has explanatory power; sumptuary laws date back at least to ancient Rome, so consumer identity can't be new and thus doesn't automatically explain whatever new thing is under discussion; but it may be that sumptuary laws and consumer identity are an urban phenomenon. (That would make urban; a laughable concept from my vantage, or a cheerful one if it means urbanity is really winning, or a depressing one if only the shallowest parts of urbanity are winning. On the other hand, Mayhew evidently divided all people into the Settled and the Wanderers, and explained urbanites rich and poor as being Wanderers, and nearly subhuman to boot; no side of this argument is new.)
Of course, I like his description of Moroccan birdcages as the use of culch in fashion, or possibly the use of fashion to keep the culch-pile well churned.
Raban only leaves London twice in this book; once while visiting Cambridge, where he is surprised by the isolationist attitudes (and tax policy) of each district of Boston; and horrified by its effects in, for instance, Roxbury, which (I guess) wouldn't have fallen so far in London, because London recognized itself as a city and connected all its parts. After all Raban's outsiderness and observation, after his praise of London's contingency and privacy, after his despair in his youth not fitting into villages and small towns that weren't playing at conformity, Roxbury moves him to a moral opinion, phrased with remarkable lack of vanity: "More than anything else, I would like, sometime, to be a capable citizen."
We live in cities badly; we have built them up in culpable innocence and now fret helplessly in a synthetic wilderness of our own construction. We need—more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes—to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make a serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.
ISBN: 1860461077
divides technology into string and glue, doesn't he? String is older. Information technology was first a child of string (some children were lost).
Most people who care already know that the Jacquard loom used punch cards to store the amazingly complex patterns of fashionable brocade and damask cloth; Essinger can only stretch that out into a few chapters, mostly related to the economic importance of cloth, because not a lot is known about Jacquard's life and what is mostly comes before his inventing. The rest of the book is about the currently-more-interesting descent of computing, of which Jacquard's looms were parents twice: once to part of Babbage's machines, d.s.p., again to telegraphic paper tape, most fruitfully to Hollerith's punchcards. Hollerith was related to a weaver/industrialist who used Jacquard looms.
Quite a lot of this book is devoted to the history of I.B.M., descended mostly from Hollerith's company but also some others, including one that made cheese-slicers... Remington Rand is a more suitable example, since it was a powerful maker of typewriters partly from its experience in making sewing-machines, which required speed, precision and enough reliability to run without a dedicated maintenance team. It's not actually very surprising that clothing should have several times impelled a technological leap. It's a tempting use of capital, since so much money is spent on it at all times, and the standards are high; really good handwork is still better at some things than what machines can do. If the next industrial revolution is 'mass customization', it will probably start in clothes again. I hope so, because it's an offense to aesthetics that so many people have so many clothes that don't really fit.
I wonder if Hollerith's cards were the first time data lived naturally in a database. It's an error-inviting pain to fill out even a two-dimensional table by hand, let alone a deeper one.
It's a pity that information never went from cloth back into the machines; I imagine it as long-term storage: punch the cards until the design is right, weave a reference sample, and when the cards wear out unweave the sample through a machine that generates cards from cloth: then save the first weaving from those cards as the new reference. This wouldn't be a good idea, since punching more cards from cards is easy.
I also wonder where Jacquard got the idea for punched cards. (Or where one Falcon, who built the first but worse punchcard loom got it, if Jacquard got the idea from Falcon.) I have a Theory, actually; bobbin-lace patterns. Bobbin-lace was as expensive and slow to make as brocade, and the patterns changed with fashion much faster than one person could make up a suit of lace. Complicated patterns require pinholes punched into stiff card, which give a skilled lacemaker enough direction to make up the pattern. Middlemen made up many many cards corresponding to small pieces of a fashionable pattern and handed them out to lacemakers as they picked up the finished pieces from the last pattern. It would have been important that the patterns lined up well to be invisibly sewn together, although the threads did not weave from one piece into the next. I think there must have been a lot of these cards around, especially in a town as devoted to luxury clothing as Lyons was. It's still a big intellectual jump to switch from a human feeling with a pin to know where thread-crossing should go, to a machine that always crosses in the same places feeling a card to decide whether a crossing should happen; but it would explain why sheaves of punched cards 'looked like' information storage.
Online glossaries give 'lace cards' as a synonym for punchcards, but they also sometimes suggest that that only refers to a card with all possible holes punched out, giving it a resemblance to simple lace. On the other hand, that resemblance would provide an easy false etymology.
I can't find an online picture of how the early automatic lacemaking machines work, although Nottingham has a promising history of mostly-Nottingham lace machine inventions; the Jacquard idea came in after decades of improving knitting-frames to approximate the action of lace-twisting.
ISBN: 0192805770
Subtitle: Confessions of a Book Addict
Baxter's book addiction is undeniable, but is also completely unlike my own, although our reading overlaps. Baxter has been a collector, private and professional; he cares about the provenance of particular copies, which should be as untouched as possible, unless they're inscribed by some perverse celebrity, to raise the value. His perfect book is in some way unique and untouched, which as far as I'm concerned makes it no more a book than is the inside of someone's head. I would find his view much more annoying if it wasn't clear that he does really read (other copies) of the books he collects; and also that he recognizes this collectors' taste as perverse. He eventually decides that he can't be a 'collector of' someone he hopes to talk to even as a reader, let alone a colleague of sorts; so he sells his collection in a lump.
So; the book collecting with a lot of money in it has something in common with celebrity-memorabilia collecting, and something in common with antiquing for the money. No-one's going to suddenly mass-produce Poe manuscripts, which improves their investment value. I guess that partly explains why book-collecting became a rockstar, movie-star business in the 1960s and 1970s—according to Baxter, who doesn't say what proportion of rockstar income the trade took up.
Baxter's first connection to books and publishing was through science-fiction fandom in Australia in the 1950s, but he's worked all over the English-speaking world. He name-drops like an excellent schmoozer, and I should think that the pursuit of insiderdom has lots in common with collecting.
His claim that librarians never read books is, in my experience, untrue, and smacks a little of commercial distaste; library copies aren't any good for a bookrunner, though a copy unread by its rockstar owner is.
I was disappointed by his reaction to bookselling on the Internet. I can see why he doesn't like alibris, which bought used-book shops up wholesale; they're hard to compete against, and they don't themselves provide the knowledge some bookshop owners do. He spends too much time making fun of subliterate descriptions of books on eBay; he was happy to see the fools selling at car-boot sales, why not online? (Because you don't have to be cool and obsessive to buy online, just obsessive?) But it's oddly blinkered, or outright slanted, not to mention the universal-shopfront system that abebooks provides, which lets one search the databases of independent booksellers, who use the descriptions they already used to the trade; and purchases are usually made from the bookseller, not the intermediary. I should think this inconveniences Baxter, since he made a living by being an intermediary, but he seems intellectually honest enough that I was really curious how he'd describe it. Instead, silence.
I can't imagine that books reproduced as electronic files appeal to him at all, given his fascination with particular physical copies. Down some nearby trouserleg of time, a different Baxter is passionately devoted to Project Gutenberg, which relieves the trauma of his book-deprived Australian upbringing in a SFnal way. In this universe, he is so happy to live in the apartment above 's, to lug groceries up the very carpet-runner that threw up on, that I finished his autobiography with some charitable feeling. His next chapter was lists of important works, of modern or detective literature, many old enough to be out of copyright and therefore suitable hunting for a book-scanner too.
ISBN: 0312317255
Cross picks three contradictions out of the twentieth century structure of life, family, and childrearing, and pretty neatly shows how they reinforce each other. When technology pushed productive work out of the home, the home was represented as a sacred place, free of the unpleasantnesses of work. Women got to be the Angel in the House, and children even more so: children were angels still shining from heaven. Consumerism and advertising were rising at the same time, and they found steady profit in selling to the sense of 'childlike wonder', the untrained, therefore innocent, therefore all-deserving desire of the very young. Adults who are supposed to divide their lives between unpleasant work and the goblin-market joys of consumerism are, first, easy marks for buying their children 'real joy', and second, eager to coddle their own 'inner children', who were never as happy as the ads say they deserved to have been.
One of the problems this papers over is that childish innocence has two strong meanings; not just the 'wondrous innocence' that should get what it wants, but 'sheltered innocence' that needs to be protected. These are incompatible views, and they call out political divides between adults who have different sticking-points about what children absolutely have to be protected from. But "for the children" is a nearly untouchable political argument, the only claim strong enough to counter the ideology of the free market. Therefore it gets used more than it could support even if it weren't weakened by incommensurable beliefs regarding children's 'true natures'.
And finally, since children grow up and don't want to be tiny rois faineants forever, children turn wide-eyed cute into eyebrow-raised cool, which their parents experience as a betrayal. Great for the marketers, though, as it gives them a whole new segment.
All the above is my summary of Cross' argument, which is laid out with a lot more historical example. The evolutions of Christmas, of candy advertising, and especially of Halloween considerably strengthen his points. Halloween went from unpleasant but undangerous mumming, to cute kids and their candy, to a marker of fear; Cross points out that it is at least a little strange that parents would feel safer taking their children to the mall for trick-or-treating than letting them visit their neighbors. Little could be more telling about the decline of community trust than this.
Finally, Halloween is becoming a grown-up party with drink and naughty costumes, the squares' Mardi Gras.
I don't think Cross and I share many political viewpoints, but he seemed grudgingly fair when describing 'my' side's views.
ISBN: 0195156668
Subtitle: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
How depressing the gambling world is; breaks up marriages and friendships, relies on bribery drunkenness and threats, generates nothing.
I didn't like Mezrich's prose, either. It assumes that everyone finds the Vegas high-roller style both seductive and dangerously vulgar; it invites us to leer and sneer at once. 'Everyone' is narrow, since the perspective is so clearly from a decent Boston neighborhood and university. The view from this apex is blinkered: part Chinese—you could see it in his eyes, narrow drops of oil beneath a ridged brow
, p. 13; He looked like he owned at least one pickup truck.
, p. 166. Unfortunately, his writing wasn't even accidentally descriptive of his own world.
However, the closing essay by Kevin Lewis, one of the MIT students who pulled tremendous profits out of blackjack over three years' work, is fine. It is entirely about the general principles of card-counting; it presents the one equation it uses in clear, accurate prose; it spends a page on subtleties of application. With such a grasp of analysis and explication, it isn't surprising that Lewis navigated Vegas better than Mezrich did.
ISBN: 0743225708
Subtitle: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
There are plenty of books on the collision of advertising, technology, and mass production with changing labor arrangements and feminism and changing taste. The two strengths of this particular one are, first, its attention to how advertising led the shift to modernized, not-from-scratch cooking habits; second, some entertaining and relevant biographical details about popular cooks of the 20th century.
The strength of the biographies comes from the paradox of being a 'great chef' in the Mass Age. , for instance, comes off much worse than I would have thought, for decrying popular taste and mass production while working for the producers. Some less-lasting cooks ruined their food but saved their intellectual honor by trying to find decent food in the redoubling pile of goo.
The story starts right after WWII, because the new technology needed a use to pay off:
What the industry had to do was persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.
This wasn't easy, because most of the food tasted awful and wasn't all that much cheaper than fresh; as Peter Wimsey learns in Murder Must Advertise, you don't have to advertise butter; you only have to advertise margarine. It can't have helped the advertisers of the day that food labs were producing dehydrated sherry and breaded lima-bean-sticks; Pompayne is a far more natural sell.
The history of processed food is thus a little like the history of The Zipper, which neither worked well when invented nor met a need. The zipper was sold on its modernism while it was still being developed; only much later were zippers so much better than rows of buttons that new garment design could happen. Frozen food needed lots of things to happen. Non-farm families needed to get freezers. The food needed to taste better and get cheaper. Women needed to be persuaded that they were just as good and loving if they served defrosted food; since the postwar period was also rife with expostulation that women needed to leave paid work because a woman's touch was vital to the home, and at the same time it took most of a decade for even the US economy to really get going and support consumerism, this was a bit of a rough start.
There's a lot of argument that the consumerist habits of modern America are supported by feminism, more specifically by women's increased earnings and decreased time for thrift; but the ad frenzy is older than The Female Eunuch. I can't remember how much I've read arguing that consumerism accidentally pushed women out of the traditional directly productive rôle in the house and into middleman-heavy paid employment, to support consumption.
I've veered from Shapiro's actual book. The next section to catch my imagination was on the fashion for "glorifying" goshawful, canned-soup-casserole type recipes in the '50s. This seems to have done well partly because advertisers pushed it, partly because it was the least effort that felt like "home-making", and maybe because the 1950s are more responsible for the death of skill than I had previously thought.
The oddest figure is , who was a gourmand and acquaintance of James Beard, but a much more openhearted ally of the food industry. Shapiro defends her:
At the center of Beard's culinary life was a glorious heap of fresh ingredients—the meats, fish, vegetables, and herbs that needed only his talented hands to release their goodness. At the center of Poppy Cannon's culinary life was an American housewife, and she just got home from work.
Both half right, I think.
Cannon's prose was awful, and her food sounds worse; her most popular book was The Can-Opener Cookbook. She was ambitious and successful overall, though; she expected and achieved a home and a career and romance. The last was her long, long attachment and moderately-illegal-then marriage to , a famous civil rights activist.
Cannon knew , and 's rapture over a Mixmaster. Toklas in turn was the avant-garde for . Child wouldn't have written her astounding book if she hadn't been shut out of the male ranks of Parisian cookery; without her systematic and gentle ordering of techniques, characteristic of people who learn cooking late or painfully (; ), the American backlash against bland processed food would have happened differently, and later.
ISBN: 0670871540
A New Yorker would probably recognize more of the faded fashions from these eighty years' worth of The New Yorker essays. Anyone might recognize many; Hirschfeld, crosswords, domain-name squatting. Readers will find familiar authors either displaying their style in small, or polishing it into near transparency. I thought the most transparent essays the best ones. They're so short, and on such slight subjects, that there's no room for posturing or even overt personality from the author. Posturing fades into archness or incomprehensibility.
Reading the book straight through is like watching an old movie on the walls of Plato's cave. Enormous events of the twentieth century pass without direct mention. The essayist is looking at a polished spot on the wall of the cave; we peer over the essayist's shoulder, with a little light of future knowledge. Wars and revolutions explode outside the cave and the glare is at the edges of our vision.
The earliest Talk of the Town essays were published under the pseudonym "Van Bibber III", a reference to ' urbane character.
ISBN: 0375736493
Subtitle: enlightenment culture and the inhuman
Nice work on a nasty subject, the conflation of pity, power, reason, and science with cruelty in the Enlightenment. It doesn't just remind one that science, medicine especially, developed with cruelty, but makes an argument that the delight in cruelty was more of the scientific impulse than one would like to think. I only skimmed it, as (one) I really ought to be working on a dozen other things, and (two) it draws lots of its evidence from Hogarth and . I accordingly noticed mostly the surgery & sex parts, which jump out because of the illustrations. I didn't do any justice to the arguments from the Scottish Enlightenment, which had most of the claims for kindness and sympathy as natural states; from , among others.
I did notice, among a dozen more things I want to read, a reference to a novel Melmoth the Wanderer by one , which has a shipwreck in it; I want to read that and look for 's Maturin's slightly creepy scientific detachment.
Slightly later in the day, again distracted from those dozen things, I was drawn into Love at Goon Park; also about slightly creepy scientific detachment with results that were probably a boon to human suffering. Goon Park is the nickname of the psych lab where Harry Harlow did the paradigm-shattering experiments with wire-mother monkeys, and many follow-up experiments; all showing with great clarity that affection, even a pale simulacrum of affection, is as necessary for primate development as food.
The first experiment showed that baby macaques preferred a terry-cloth 'mother' to an equally warm wireframe 'mother', even if the latter had the milk. Follow-ons demonstrated that affection and socialization are needed for monkey development. This overturned a congeries of accepted theories, among them that babies had no particular attachment to their parents except as a source of food, that maternal affection led to needy stupidity, etc etc. The three amazing things in the summary of the experiments and the theories they overthrew are, first, that anyone could have had such cruel beliefs about humans or monkeys; second, that monkeys at least can develop well-enough given the least, barest, pathetic simulacrum of care - terrycloth is almost enough by itself; third and most relevant to Cruel Delight, that anyone who had the insight to start these experiments could be cruel enough to do them. Some of it was good old clinical detachment, some the knowledge that only controlled experiments would convince experts to stop prescribing cruelty in real life, and some was probably related to his own deep and repeated unhappiness. How would that heart weigh against a feather?
ISBN: 0253343674 (Cruel Delight)
ISBN: 0738202789 (Love at Goon Park)
I lived in Portland, Oregon, just after the Bhagwan Shree Ragneesh's commune fell apart, and Oregon was still shivering at the combination of happy, creepy, creepily happy, and outright exploitative behavior rumored to have flourished in Antelope. No single view of the whole thing is either established or dispelled by Guest's autobiography of a childhood spent in various Ragneeshi communes. Clearly his parents were well-meaning but too caught up in their own lives. Many of the people and some of the systems in the communes were loving and caretaking, but there was always a threatening, cruel-ecstatic vein in the practice. The cruelty and games and venality expanded until the whole endeavor collapsed, to the advantage of a tiny few and the amazed sorrow of some.
Guest is a little bit distant in the whole narration; clearly he was a weird outsider little kid even in a nest of outsiders, and maybe he's maintained that his whole life. He reports that at least one child died in a Ragneeshi commune, and more were damaged, but it's also believable when he says that he's met fellow kids who had very different experiences and still remember it fondly.
Guest was there because of odd parents; his mother was way too eager to find connection, possibly related to a family so traditional that they threatened to kill her for getting pregnant out of wedlock; and his father seems awfully disconnected, possibly connected to a personality that went off to Silicon Valley and became a successful programmer in the 1980s.
The strangely almost-happy ending is that Guest's mother is well-married to someone she met in the commune, who was a good parent to Guest. They used psychological knowledge they'd learned there to apologize to Guest, and repair the three of them as a family. The parents are still happiest when wandering; Guest roots.
ISBN: 1862076324
The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole -- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the read object to allow of affection, laughter and argument.
Adsum.
From "On Not Knowing Greek", which bothers the daughter-of-an-educated-man: The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place [in Wycherly], and the pause is fatal.
Huh.
An essay on how nobody reads , even in the Spectator, which moved me enough to look up the link.
Lots of mentions of women writers; the plain letter-writing Paston, and her portentous bore
of an energetic, inventing father; Eleanor Ormerod, a self-taught entomologist of a very practical turn; and then the increasing numbers of respected woman novelists. She dismembers a ladylike biography of by , who limited herself too much when choosing a subject:
...the stock of female characters who lend themselves to biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason or another, running short. For instance, little is known of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably obscure. Of George Sand, the more we know the less we approve. George Eliot was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse. The Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an atheist; Mrs. Browning was a married woman...
That's all Woolf's supposition of how Hill eliminated possibilities.
Looks like Woolf isn't in the public domain in the U.S., although some of these essays were clearly written before 1923.
Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.
Biographies of wealth or struggle are irrefutable signposts in the national economy. As particularity gives them vividness, though, it makes them less plausible as grounds for economic policy. Single measures - GDP, unemployment, 10-year Treasury returns - are vivid to few of us and anyway are each explained in contradictory fashions.
Divergent Paths has grasped two masses of employment history data and statistically compared them. They don't intersperse quoted or composite biographies. The measure they seek, of economic mobility through U.S. employment, doesn't lend itself to a single number. But the results are vivid anyway and are worse than I had feared. This book argues strongly that most (white, male) U.S. workers are worse off in absolute and relative mobility than their peers were twenty years ago; and that the changes are due to systemic habits in business practice that will not reverse without organization, and even trust, between competing firms and interests.
Fortunately they cite a few regions in which these reverses might be happening. Otherwise I would be too dispirited to summaraize the book at all.
The method is clear: they compare two nationally representative samples of white young men, starting between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. Each cohort was interviewed annually (almost) about their education and employment for fifteen years. This should give an outline of how these men settled into their life careers, if any. One survey started in 1966, the other in 1979.
The bulk of the book is analysis of the two masses of data. As a non-statistician, I found the frequent graphs and tables effective summaries. The prose was rarely jargonful; it more often laid a path of common terms to the streambank of technicalities.¹¹ One can leap over the flood to the path on the other side.
To summarize the results even more than the authors do: Jobs, especially low-wage jobs, have become less stable; and each interruption in employment is now more damaging to future wages than it was for the first cohort. This makes a vicious circle. Education doesn't improve a worker's chances much until it's a full four-year degree, and even then a surprising proportion of graduates are stuck.¹ A few occupations - "finance, insurance, and real estate", and some "professional services" - made gains; the top decile held steady, although it's more white-collar than it used to be; the rest of the distribution is lumping towards the bottom.
Some of the usual explanations for this split and slump are described as not consonant with the data. Lack of technical skill isn't it, as the best-rewarded occupations aren't technical, and engineering wages went down by 1.5%, CS graduates' wages up by 3% (p. 183). [T]he number of contingent workers is nowhere near large enough to produce the trends that we have documented in this book... Temporary work, then, is best considered as the tip of the iceberg, just one symptom of a wide variety of restructured work and production arrangements.
(p. 188) I can't find a summary reference to shifts in employment between nations; they do mention that population shift within the States led to higher rates of job instability, perhaps reflecting the lower rates of unionization in the South.
(p. 86)
One obvious explanation is the increase in service sector jobs instead of mass-production jobs, partly because the latter were unionized. (In 1981, 21.8% of the top final wage decile was blue-collar; now, 8.8% is (p. 145). Some of this is expectable because the total proportion of blue-collar jobs is lower.) However, deindustrialization has not been the main force driving the stagnation and growing inequality in wages, though it has played a role... industrial shifts have played virtually no part in the doubling of workers in the bottom decile of the old wage distribution. It is not so much compositional shifts that are at work here as changes in the pay structure within industries.
(p. 158)
The other explanation, obvious in hindsight, is that firms are much more segmented internally than they used to be. The worst jobs are often intentionally deskilled, and then subcontracted. Unfortunately these used to be entry-level jobs that had natural learning curves, so firm and employee benefited by stable employment, and natural meritocratic paths for advancement. But one cannot work one's way up from a call center in Kansas to a headquarters in New York the way one could work one's way up from the mailroom in a single building. Less so, when the call center is run by a separate business whose sole profit model is providing cheap generic phone service. (Does the Zuboff federation have a career path?)
This kind of deskilling and segmentation is a "low road" response to risk and complexity. Some industries - banks are mentioned - have apparently had both "low road" and "high road" approaches; the latter increases all employees' skills, opportunity, responsibility and pay and has been competitive with the low road (p. 182). This takes, I interpolate, more trust between the different parts of the company, and I suspect it requires different management skills - different philosophy, even. Another difficulty with reduced internal promotion is that employers do less training, but return to individual education is riskier, plausibly leading to less total investment in worker training than the whole economy (let alone individual workers) needs.²
What to Do about this is the eighth chapter; something I hadn't heard of, which combines many sensible-seeming approaches, is the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, which involves unions, plants and colleges to provide good employees and provide them with good jobs. The unionization of Las Vegas hotels is also promising. They point out that benefits - unemployment, health insurance, pensions - are usually tied to the old model of stable employment; if the country is going to be fluid and competitive, the benefits need to be portable.
One nagging possible partial explanation hasn't left me. The cohorts being compared are white men because the data on everyone else's work was bad or ignored, in 1966. Besides, the social changes allowing others into better jobs should be enormous, very hard to distinguish from labor-market changes in their opportunities. All right so far; but of course nonwhite men, and many women, started work in 1966, and were shunted to the jobs that were unreliable, and poorly paid, and didn't become careers. If the country actually has about the same job distribution now that it did then (maybe the service jobs are more often paid than they were, and less often allotted to women), but the competition for the good jobs is no longer reserved for white men (p. 57), then white men as a class should fairly be worse off. Their experiences will have been shuffled all the way through the deck of possibilities, not cushioned from the bottom by the unsurveyed unfortunates. The few much-better-off white men in the recent cohort might be floating on a 'glass ceiling' supported by a more meritocratic, and therefore more profitable, hiring regime lower down. --Even if true, this wouldn't be admirable: better to improve all work to the old standards of decency. And the supposition might not be tractable at all without data we never gathered, and even if it were tractable, it might be another book of as much length. I'd like a rough guess as to how big such an effect ought to be, given what we do know.
The only other complaint I have is that the index isn't very full; it doesn't have more heads than would be secondary heads in a good table of contents.
¹¹ Of which my favorite is the phrase, robust to this, and other, specifications of unobserved heterogeneity.
(p. 73)
¹ And "the fraction of college graduates has declined" (p. 140), which surprises me.
²Dsquared, now at Crooked Timber, has said some interesting things about changes in money action representing shifts of risk from one group to another, but I can't find those things or his search function.
The best steel jobs of a few decades ago seem to have shoved off their risk of paying pensions to the state.
ISBN: 0-87154-150-5
Subtitle: A Love Story
The sweet naivete, boom, and disillusionment of "old" and "new" Seattle are the stage for the fiscal naivete, recklessness, and resignation of the author, an old Seattlite. He was poor but honest, an alternative journalist, until he was finally swept up in the dream of riches - alas, just late enough to lose almost everything. Likewise, he follows the career of one unworldly but technically adept sculptor in granite and radioactivity; and a bunch of would-be-worldly programmers, most of whom lose vast heaps of money; and Bill Gates, of course.
These are combined because, to Moody's eye, Seattle's innocence was lost to the money of the tech boom. We had innocence? Needleless seamstresses and Boeing's Star Wars money *ever* had innocence? I wonder. There's a lot of dirty Seattle history as well as the claim of a 'lost age' of consensual politics. I actually thought of the WTO protests, with which Moody opens the book, as a sign of innocence; the chamber of commerce, or whatever, thought it would be a feather in the city cap - the protesters thought protest might change things. Innocents all.
I was somewhat amused by Moody's move in the late '70s, early '80s to Bainbridge Island to get away from the uncool, gentrifying changes in Seattle. I'm amused because my family moved there at about the same time, when I was a kid, and B.I. was in my experience much more status-conscious and social-climbing than most of Seattle was a decade later.¹
I add this scrap of my personal psychological history, because Seattle... is full of Moody's. He's all about the self-defeating, polite, work-to-live ethos of Seattle, with a restrained but identifiable undertone of "But in the 60s...". I think it's very odd that he didn't notice for years (decades?) that this is an inheritance from Asian settlers, as well as Scandinavian ones. When the consensual politics is consensual, it's great, although it isn't quick. When the work-to-live principle leaves room for what people actually do - ski, build wooden boats, cook, commit more socially recognized arts - also delightful. Moody's mockery and despair at the unimaginative, expensive city efforts to be "world class" by building copies of anything big that other cities have has all my sympathy. I still live in the city itself, so am domestically affronted by the rotten-borough sports stadiums, to start with.
But he loses my sympathy, nearly my comprehension, by a fixed and inexplicable failure to see that technocracy has also been a long Seattle inheritance - mining, Boeing, aluminum - and that many technologists are as purely moved by the passion for what they're doing as more abstract artists are. His unworldly artists are victims; his unworldly programmers are comic children. How he could write this way after several immersive histories of Seattle tech endeavors, I don't know. I'll have to read them.
A friend of mine, when I expostulated on this, said it was obvious most techies are just in it for the money and hate the actual work; he adduced the career of a friend of his.² It's a sloppy argument, analagous to my dismissing all "art" because I know people who are "artists" out of a desire to be cool and shocking and free of petty social constraints of decency. ¹¹
On the other hand, I can understand being too annoyed to admit that the numerate and logical get joy in what they do and money to boot. To be fair to Moody, he sees the joy in Bill Gates and in some of the people at the HIT Lab. He just finds it hard to see in anyone (except Gates) who's practical at managing money; I think that's a bit of "But in the 60's..." leftover. He says it better than that:
... I felt it myself: an unpalatable, unendurable mix of horror, envy, disgust, and prurience.
Was that a good state of soul to look for startup work in? No. He overreached, he fell, he sat through the Slough of Despond at monster.com. And afterwards he started working for the Metro bus authority, which he describes as thoughtful, civic and determined; and observes Gates giving away money to mend market failures the rest of the country won't conceptually admit. There's still some old Seattle here.
It would be interesting to compare Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver B.C. for their reactions to wealth, bust, and social shock.
ISBN: 0-312-30421-8
¹ I asked my mother how she saw it as an adult; she said that it probably had had hippie cred until right about when we moved there - my parents weren't looking for status fights - but not necessarily more than Fremont or Ballard or South Park, even at the time. I can see Moody's belief as one in good faith, then, although I don't think it's very perceptive. Or maybe these things are particularly bad for teenagers, although I know my parents experienced them too.
²This makes me slightly ill, as I don't expect this to produce technology that's very good for people. When the coders are weirdos who love what they're doing, they can someday convert us to the same weird love; but how is someone who hates it to begin with to know that it doesn't have to hate us back?
¹¹It's an eternal battle, the attempt to substitute wealth for coolth, or v.v., or either for virtue.
The cover bills the book as "old world recipes, hospitality, barns & farmhouses..." (much more); this is partly true, but it's equally striking as a slice of 1970s half-measures.
The authors left the US and toured Greece and Turkey, Yugoslavia and Switzerland, on a motorcycle in 1971 & 1972; they had no plan but to get in touch with a highly developed attunement of humankind and nature
. They brought back pictures and recipes; they considered settling as mostly-subsistence farmers in Northern Europe, but didn't.
It's not as annoying a book as some of these are, largely because it's not idiotically romantic. They point out that the stone walls that charm them in Greece are horribly vulnerable to the frequent earthquakes, for instance. They notice that goat-culture around the Mediterranean is a final and destructive stage - goats browse practically anything to death, and nearly all the wood and soil is therefore gone, but because the wood and soil are gone goats are about the only way left for agriculture to support people.¹ (This is, I deduce, why Heifer International teaches people to bring their animals prunings instead of letting the animals browse - more work, but safer in the long run.) They're wonderfully full of the ineffable joy of simple pleasures, which I am hardly against, but am a little suspicious of in tourists. (They were hardy tourists, but not up to finishing an apprenticeship as a white cooper, for instance. Began it, though.)
What they liked that I admire, and am glad they photographed, is the brilliant handmade work of people who are very nearly self-sufficient. A good stercorary is a worthy thing. The canny use of light, irregular wood to brace Mediterranean roofs is a great art; so is the Lapp and Norwegian and Swiss use of enormous quantities of enormous timbers to build complex buildings that last for centuries against snowfall, avalanches, and bears.
Clever ideas from the last: a bow-tie-shaped floorboard running the length of the house to handle seasonal compression; logging only in winter, when the freeze and the snow cover protect the delicate alpine topsoil - otherwise dragging logs gives one runnels in the soil, which tend to compound themselves even in less challenging climates.
The Turkish drop-spindle is, they report, easier than the Greek for the beginner to use, and when full it slips apart and comes out of an already-wound ball of yarn.
¹Which came first?
ISBN: 0-517-514206
I don't know how much of this was enjoyable because British commentary culture is different from US commentary culture. Burchill:...it is our mischievous desire to see the rich and powerful debagged for the hell of it that makes British society so much less craven, so much more irreverent than that of others across various ponds.
First thing I liked: no mimsy mouth. Burchill actively mocks practically everyone in terms that would alarm several of the extremes of US social style. It seems to me that she really does mock people only for what they have chosen to do with their good luck, not for what they've managed to do with their bad luck, which goes beyond the trope of "only for actions under their control". Leaves plenty to mock, too.
Another oddity is that she's a fat, happy, randy, working-class ex-drug-addled punk-partygoer. In her summary, No university, no proper job, just straight from school to being rude for a living.
At least she's clear that most of the strengths of journalism are, in fact, rudenesses.
Sample use of this history:
Like his friend Bowie...[John] Peel advocated ceaseless shagging and substance abuse as the road to the palace of wisdom. ... I don't blame Peel, Bowie and Douglas for changing their minds. But I do blame them for rubbing our collective noses in the fact that the rich and famous can walk on the wild side and still return to the domestic fold when it suits them, whereas the young and poor need only stray off the straight and narrow once to be trapped in a cul-de-sac of sorrow.
The essays were tight enough that I didn't mind reading them all together as a book, which is unusual. Most of them have a one-sentence summary about three-quarters through, lots of which I marked to quote, but it might be better to summarize her positions in case you want to go agree or argue with them yourself. Something like: French misogynistic, therefore disgusting. Sports fans too often likewise. Fashion a cush job. Enjoying sex when you're young and beautiful is A-OK, and so is enjoying it when you're not. Aggression is under-regarded as a creative force. Everyone needs both work and love to be happy, and these should include money and sex as corollaries. I have had and contnue to have an enormous amount of fun. My parents were wonderful, as is the working class in general.
A representative online essay lays out her opinions as a fat feminist, disagreeing with rather a lot of the others. Here's a calm, measured counterargument to a Burchill defense of cocaine, and a much more damning dissection of Burchill's importance as either a journalist or a feminist. And, O Fates, a fax flamewar between Burchill and . Paglia in general is almost equally abrasive, but Burchill gets it on points for attacking more sacred cows. (via)ISBN: 0-75284-380-X
Not as funny as Bryson's other books, e.g. Neither Here Nor There, but it had funny bits in his patented gormless-adventure style. I was a bit distracted all through by the mildness of his response to the environmental damage he decries; Jeremiads would have been out of character, but surely he could have summoned more mockery to the cause.
ISBN: 0-385-40816-1
There's a book by that missed its mark - wanted to make a virtue, a nation or clan or creed, of travelling all the time, and tried too hard to be poetic and visionary about it. Terzani certainly travels all the time, and seems to slide between the beliefs of one place and the next with more ease than I'd manage. But Terzani also has a family home he keeps going back to, and settles into houses in several cities in between.
The hook, for a modern travel tale, is double and sharp; he was long ago told by a fortune-teller to avoid air travel in 1993, and - maybe just because it would make a good book - he didn't fly for that year (an extended year, to allow for Fate's unknown choice of calendar). But he's a foreign correspondent, so he had to travel all the time anyway: but he did it by train and slow boat, and saw things he wouldn't have otherwise. It's not a journey I expect to make or would be good at... I liked 's From Heaven Lake, too.
Terzani also kept going to fortune-tellers, with only enough bare possibility of belief that it doesn't seem actually rude. As he points out, more and more as he visits more and more of them, their predictions and warnings tend to make sense for their particular locales. The people who recommend the local seers are also compare-and-contrast exercises in their attitudes towards doing so. And the best fortuneteller is always somewhere exotic; Bangkok if you're in LA, but in Prague if you're in Bangkok.
ISBN: 0-609-80958-X
A summary of how badly Amtrak has failed the interests of passenger rail; some plausible reasons why; and a slightly outdated argument for its piecemeal privatization. Vranich has worked for Amtrak, likes trains generally, is a high-speed-train proponent.
Amtrak hasn't worked for anyone, doesn't like its customers, and is a proponent of redefining 'high speed trains' to get Amtrak more funding. I summarize, but even though I really like riding trains, riding Amtrak hasn't given me reason to distrust Vranich's tables of damning data.
Vranich's proposed solution is all about privatization, and looks a little scruffier now than it did in 1997 when this was published. As he wrote, Japan's railways had had wildly profitable privatizations in the '80s but were suffering as Japan's depression took hold; likewise for some examples about airline profitability as private ventures - which are a bit less convincing after the post-boom's airline closings, national airline subsidies, bailouts. Also, Britain's privatized rail isn't a gonfalon of glory for the process. So I would worry that the very good results reported during the economic booms depended on the booms.
A much more interesting argument, which Vranich adumbrates but does not, I think, ever say, is that train travel is now valuable because of cities. (He's so Northeast-Sprawl-centric that he may think it goes without saying. Even there, surely there's been some change in the popularity of train lines as the urban centers they were built with decay and regrow?) The death and tortured sort-of strangled-by-Amtrak-and-highway-authorities rebirth of rail in the States lines up very well with the death and rebirth of our cities.
The romantic view, and Amtrak in some unhealthy combination of romance, dog-in-the-manger, and Congressional pork, think of 'real' trains as long-distance trains. Japan and Europe have their glorious high-speed trains, which can compete with air travel. At, oh, an hour of plane flight, merely fast trains are competitive. (With longer security checkthroughs on planes, trains get another little edge.) But what makes a medium-distance train trip competitive with air between Seattle and either Portland or Vancouver, BC is not the shorter lines, or the roomier seating, but that I live in the city in Seattle - and am usually visiting the city itself at either end - and the trains pick me up and drop me off where I want to be. The airports are all to heck and gone; Portland's is convenient because they -- built a train.
Train travel also depends on the trains being even vaguely on time: Vranich's book explains that the long-haul train that goes all the way to California is under Amtrak's control, which is why it's almost-but-not-quite-dependably late; the BC-Seattle-Portland one is as much as possible a state endeavor, and is much nicer and more reliable, except when the long-hauler comes through and bollixes it up.
When the cities are really both ends of most travel, e.g. BostonNewYorkPhiladelphia, also increasing parts of California, commuter rail comes into its own, and obviously nothing carries as many people - thinking about London and New York reminds one that the subway and the elevator were equally needed to achieve those densities. There's something of a balance between the annoying non-privacy on the train, and the ability to do something other than drive. I like transit because I can't think about anything deeply while driving, not without becoming a total danger to myself, others, street trees. So driving is lost time, where the bus and walking aren't. The lagniappe that may finally get lots of people onto commuter rail is, as Brad DeLong remarked, WiFi access.
The routing problems are still hard, where two systems have to share rails or switchpoints. One of the oddities of Britain's privatization, it seemed to me, was to break the system into regional carriers - and then claim they were supposed to compete with each other, as though a trip from City A to City B could substitute for a trip between other cities. As with air travel, the interesting specialties are more likely to be between really different kinds of travel; private varnish scenic cruises, executive express commuter trains, seasonal car-carrying trains to and from snowy regions. All of these are likely to share some tracks with each other and with the freight trains.
Any train-ignorant computer nerd at this point is thinking, "Okay, packet switching protocol, collision algorithms - I guess we need collision avoidance algorithms - Shannon, innit? Model me something with competing trains over common lines, and tell me how to isolate the variables they're really bidding for - speed, reliability, ability to run really long trains. Cool problem." The freight companies have clearly solved some of it w.r.t. covering repsonsibility and costs for the tracks themselves - as the brownout over the Northeast showed this summer, that can be a hard problem in deregulating.
Nothing so specific in Vranich's book. I must go look.
ISBN: 0-312-17182-X
Subtitle: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
Los Angeles, as I understand the argument of this book, is profoundly invested - both psychologically and economically - in its image as a bucolic idyll, as someplace where Nature is so kindly that people can be relaxed and free. No-one familiar with Freud, or nineteenth-century Christian theology, or the dullness of stories in which 'nothing happens' would be surprised that this investment led to an opposite fascination with LA as the victim of fictional disasters. Davis argues that urban planning and politics have actually increased the number and damage of disasters, especially in the poor regions, but also in some expensive ones.
I don't think the evidence that LA is especially popular for disaster fiction was very compelling - there is a great list of disaster novels and movies set there, but of course London and New York and Tokyo have plenty of their own. Does LA have more, proportionately, than its importance as a city warrants? And anyhow, it's probably the easiest place for LA-local filmmakers to set their B-movies. Are there Bollywood disaster flicks, and where are they set? On the other hand, it doesn't really matter if LA has an unusual quantity of them; he only needed to convince me that the Eden/Apocalypse cognitive dissonance is unusually strong in LA. Since I find it unusually strong about LA even among people who haven't lived there, that's plausible.
The fury at stupid waste - building in ways that invite repeated disasters, and wailing in surprise when they reoccur - was more convincing, esp. a nearly-funny summary of the apparent refusal of locals to believe that they get tornadoes, no matter how many houses the last "waterspout" destroyed. Worse planning shoves all the risks into the poor neighborhoods and funnels all the rescue money into the rich ones; the treatment of fire risks in Malibu was the most startling thing there.
I was most impressed with the enjambment of subjects. Many of his subjects are enormously different in tone: tables of historical data, citizens quoted on their sense of the normal, catchy pictures from lowbrow movies, statistics about pest control, dense geological maps. Davis doesn't repeat himself, didn't write several basically independent sub-books, and maintains an even pace of argument throughout.
ISBN: 0-8-50-5106-6
The text is gently informative on many heads: development form Victorian mores, relation to settlement houses, invention of new flosses and dyes, how to use & launder old textiles.
I think it's a pity there aren't more clothes represented; there are many contemporaneous illustrations of Arts and Crafts clothing, but they are awfully romantic and it's hard for me to guess what people actually wore. It isn't surprising that fewer dresses have survived than dresser-cloths, but it's a pity the survivors aren't shown on mannequins; they're kind of shapeless, and I wonder whether they were drapey and Pre-Raphaelite or boxy and proto-modernist.
ISBN: 0-8109-0434-9
A cheering and melancholy book. Well balanced; hard to summarize.
Sacks' family was large and thoroughly scientific - both parents doctors, and many many aunts uncles and cousins were scientists, inventors, chemists, mathematicians, all over the world. His immediate family lived in London in a big Edwardian house, which they seem to have kept full of people: four siblings; the home-surgery needs of his parents; an aunt who lived with them; and many relatives who stayed for a while between peregrinations, of widely varying ages and styles and obsessions. Good thing the house had all those rooms closed off from each other (now horribly unfashionable) to allow inhabitants their peculiarities without getting up each others' noses. Well, some of Oliver's chem experiments got up everyone's noses, but with anough ventilation they weren't lethal.
But this house was in London and Oliver was six when the Blitz began; he was sent away to a hastily invented and unusually cruel boarding school. Four years later, when the school was disbanded, he came back somewhat detached from people but deeply attached to chemistry and numbers. The child's-eye narration of learning chem by recapitulating its history is the bulk of the book.
His much more reticent mentions of the pains of a war childhood, and of not studying what one's parents hope, are clear but secondary. Other issues; Englishness and internationalism, before and after the war, more or less affected by the Sacks' being Jewish. Neighborhoods, different attitudes towards child & material safety, the sensuous appreciation of an intellectual subject.
I want a spinthariscope.
ISBN: 0-375-40448-1
In 1928 one John Logie Baird got a human eyeball to use as part of his experimental television scanner. Apparently it worked when the eye was fresh, but failed by the second day. First thought: City of Lost Children. Second thought: why assume that the eye needed to be human?
Most of this is a morality tale about the end of private invention, and the invention of television propaganda. Philo T. Farnsworth, the actual¹ inventor of television, was hobbled at every turn by RCA and its self-aggrandizing director Sarnoff. Sarnoff told many tales about his importance that weren't true, but had the broadcasting stations when the dust settled, after which it was his tales that were heard. Sarnoff managed this with FUD and lawsuits and RCA money; RCA stock made heaps of money for private investors in the 1920s, after RCA was created by government fiat and IP-arrogation in wartime. RCA, like other big companies at the time, was developing the process of work-for-hire invention.
That is to say, the invention of television shares its themes with plenty of other battles for control of ideas, from Disney vs. Eldred to open-source vs. Microsoft to Carlyle vs. Marx.
Farnsworth learned invention mostly from Hugo Gernsback magazines and from the machinery on an Idaho farm, and was backed in various ways by plenty of the people he met, who were soon convinced that he might indeed be really on to something. (Machinery that a kid can fix is a great accelerator of technology. I worry about injection-molded parts driven by screen-printed circuitboards: they don't take minor tinkering well. When the molders and printers are common, bliss will it be to be alive.) His life should have been a boring had-an-idea-built-it-throve story, like Mauve; but RCA thwarted it.
The saddest thing wasn't even that Farnsworth got so little of the money despite being so far in advance of other inventors. The saddest thing was that he believed television would lead to truth and mutual understanding, and then to peace: but the first public broadcast he ever saw was Sarnoff's PR coup claiming television for RCA.
¹See comment for another inventor. Either way, RCA is out.
This is a much better exploration of class and snobbery than Snobbery, although that is scarcely what it's about. De Santis was a successful journalist and the child of white-collar parents, but was so curious about what it would be like to work in a factory that she went to work at a doomed GM truck-assembly plant for more than a year. Life... is pretty close to just describing what that was like, although, since social and economic issues have a lot to do with plant-closings, she does describe some of those.
Mostly it was godawful hard painful work, among people who were often kind to each other and often interesting but mostly tired. De Santis' motives and results are a little like those from an essay on extreme sports or mountain climbing; it was really hard, and she did it anyway, and now she's tougher. Like good essays on mountain-climbing, she's nervous of what the people doing it with less choice will think of her - porters on the mountain, immigrants from the Balkans or Prince Edward Island in the factory. At the beginning, she keeps her mouth shut and they think she's trying. She doesn't have to pretend to be less literate than she is; one of the points she makes without belaboring it is that all sorts of people wind up on the line. As the plant closes, she's more open about why she's there, and is not apparently disliked for it. Maybe she didn't notice, or didn't mention, but it seems plausible that her coworkers both liked her well enough and were pleased to think that a book would be published describing their lives.
She's a business journalist; some of her throwaway comments contrast things she notices about the factory to abstract beliefs held by pro-unionists and pro-unfettered-marketists alike. By her description, the union is an imperfect and sometimes unpleasant power; but it also seemed to be a reasonable belief of autoworkers that almost all the physical and legal protections the company offered them had been won through the union, which explains why the union can get away with flaws. I would really like De Santis to research fixes to this stalemate, and others that are accused of driving decently-paid uneducated labor out of North America, and write a book on what she thinks about those.
Olympian detachment is harder than wholehearted attachment to one's particular follies, and I was more expecting an accurate view from Epstein's vantage, whatever that turned out to be; most books on snobbery do this, of course, and it's sometimes insightful and sometimes informative and sometimes entertaining, like the cultural sections of the Economist. Some people defend their particular snobberies well enough to be convincingly educational, although the more convincing they are the less it seems like snobbery; Knuth's Literate Programming is borderline for me, so I can see it both ways. (Easier when the judgment is aimed at works, not directly at people.) But - possibly hamstrung by its desire to be Olympian - this Snobbery waffles between admiring the things it admires and defending the less-stylish perfectly pleasant achievement Epstein actually lives with. Sometimes he emits a little spurt of vitriol at the more-fashionable - Haryard, Yale, and Princeton as one overrated mass; all of San Francisco; dieting. I didn't think he was very funny about any of them, though. It's normally difficult not to make pretensions funny - all you have to do is describe them clearly enough to lay the pretense bare - but he doesn't describe much, certainly nothing more recent than Paul Fussell's Class, which was mostly descriptive and a bit vituperative, or Bad, which reversed the proportions. Epstein doesn't seem to know much about anything less than thirty years old (he must be at least in his sixties), and makes claims about the immunity of science and technology to snobbery that are unintentionally quite funny: "computer-made entrepreneurs -- seem uninterested in qualifying: ... social prestige in any form thus far known holds ... little magic for them."
Where he sticks to his autobiography, the book is better because it does know something, so the analysis and vitriol are honest. The best description is of what it was like to be Jewish as Jews broke into the WASP power structure; this is also where he puts a bit of vitriol of surprising nastiness. The one piece of anti-Semitism he describes most clearly had no evidence, as he also says - he was afraid a WASP tennis-player was going to be rude to him, and the tennis-player wasn't - and yet he identifies this man, almost certainly dead and unable to defend himself, by city and name. Tacky. He could have been perfectly clear about how real the intimidation felt without tarring someone.
If you feel like seeing the anthill of the moment laid bare, read Kurt Anderson's Turn of the Century instead. Anderson was nearer the fashion centers of New York, and did a fair job of describing the oddities of Silicon Valley and Redmond. I don't think he always deduced correctly what the unfamiliar status symbols meant to their users, but it seemed like a fair try. Snobbery would probably be useful if you want to know what impresses the humanities departments at the U. of Chicago or Northwestern, but anything by Allan Bloom would probably do better.
Reaching Up for Manhood,
Two books written by black men who grew up in bad circumstances and escaped. Canada has a faint air of bluster or swagger in his writing, not distracting, but an unusual counterpoint to his discussions of feelings and social engineering. The three doctors use plenty of slang, and have equally grim anecdotes, but mostly come across as really sweet.
Problem with Texas-style access to education, of letting the top 10% of each school into the desirable universities: thoe from the worst schools will be terrifically behind in all sorts of knowledge; the authors of The Pact manage to sound only exasperated about getting through premed and med school surrounded by children and friends of doctors, who understood a lot more of the system.
Also has a popularizing but not trendy sense of humor and a helpful, though not scholarly, bibliography.
This means, I think, to indict Amazon for suckering workers into Giving Their All. However, Daisey's early self seems so eager to be suckered, and so bad at his various jobs, that he isn't much of a test case - a very minor flimflam artist could have pulled him in and only a very successful company could have absorbed someone so puzzled by their work. Amazon may have been trying to be sneaky, but they seem to have been about as subtle as Nigerian money-transfer scams. Of course, some of those still work.
What'a best is his description of how he wanted to be fooled, which is extra embarrassing in someone who started as an outraged slacker outsider artist. It isn't just a special case of the fiscal hope that overtook everyone. Just as the worst cynic is said to be a disappointed idealist, the childlike trust of a