Nonfiction
The scary thing? These are all relevant to my work. Except maybe the Naomi Wolf. Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius: This bizarre, thick book is a collection of mostly primary documents from the lives of people who were affected by American anti-sex censorship. Some of them were ruined, others merely inconvenienced. Some court cases and book reviews are also excerpted. If you wanted to know about Lolita-related episodes from Nabokov’s life, I guess you could turn here, though a broader biography might be better. De Grazia’s attitude to censorship is so dismissive and contemptuous that there’s very little argument in the book, just colorful and not-so-colorful stories of difficulties publishing. Notably, de Grazia stops excerpting the censored works once we get closer to the present and they start getting close to the kind of explicit story you might find in this journal. Maybe he doesn’t really believe in the merit of such things.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: This is one of those books you don’t necessarily have to read, since so many people have already incorporated it into their theses. Still, Kuhn’s explanation of how normal science works, solving small problems, until some accumulation of problems turns into a crisis and brings a new paradigm, had some surprises. In particular, Kuhn’s sympathy for normal science, which involves a lot of hard work and intelligence even if it doesn’t break the world in half, stood out. Kuhn also recognized that old paradigms don’t necessarily disappear: we still learn Newtonian physics in high school, and they still work for engineers, though it means a different thing to learn Newtonian physics in a world that also has Einsteinian physics. Kuhn was also suspicious of analogizing from science to other fields, though his argument has since often been used to do so.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: Another classic whose insights have been so integrated into the field that the book is of historical interest, but offers few revelations. As an attempt to theorize the performance of the self before culture began to promise everyone fifteen minutes of fame, it’s clear and persuasive. But - and I have a whole essay on Logan Echolls to write that’s about this - we all understand ourselves to be performers now, and so it isn’t as surprising to think of ourselves as onstage, offstage, or moving from stage to stage. The book is notable for emphasizing the importance of teamwork; while our current idea of performance posits individuals each performing their own lives, each with its own individual iPodized soundtrack, Goffman explores how work and other groups help each other perform appropriately for customers, bosses, each other, etc. Very few plays, after all, are one-person shows - and even they usually have techs.
Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why: Ehrman, chair of the department of religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, began as an evangelical convinced of the literal truth of the Bible. Then he learned a lot of Greek and began to ask, “Which Bible?” This slender volume is a quick introduction to the study of the texts of the New Testament, explaining how early copies were made and how mistakes and well-meaning “corrections” changed the versions we now think of as standard. He doesn’t spend much time on how Matthew, Mark, Luke and John got selected as the canonical gospels while others were discarded, or how meaning changed in translation; even if you take those for granted, he shows, there have been theologically significant changes in the texts, for reasons likely both intentional and un-. When all copying was by hand, copying was interpreting, as was reading - since the text was read aloud to mostly illiterate congregations. You could argue that, if the King James Version was good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for us - but Ehrman asks instead why G-d would provide literal words and then let them be changed over time. In the end, interpretation is all we’ve got.
Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood: Wolf’s account of sexual awakening among teen girls like her in 1970s San Francisco. It’s beautifully written and has some interesting things to say about the power of female sexuality, what culture does to damage that sexuality, and how we might go about reclaiming that power. It suffers from resort to crude versions of evolutionary psychology, making the classic mistake of claiming a moral “design” from an outcome (female sexual capacity for extended pleasure). This is, of course, in service of Wolf’s claim that culture should do more to honor, rather than shame and simultaneously exploit, girls’ awakening sexuality. But that is a claim of justice, and should be asserted as such, rather than being harnessed to some just-so story about nature when what we are fighting about is culture. I enjoyed the book, though I found her Misconceptions a more useful and troubling book - in that case, about motherhood.
Susan Linn, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood: This is a deeply disturbing book about how marketers are infiltrating every aspect of childhood and carefully targeting ad appeals to kids, including kids too young to talk and walk. Linn powerfully explains why it’s no answer to say that parents should control their kids and teach them not to be materialistic; given the ad-saturated environment, that’s a lot like saying that parents should protect their kids from smog by teaching them to breathe better. It’s even worse, since marketers are systematically inducing kids to want the smog, to think that the smog is what makes them cool and grown-up, and to defy their parents to get the smog. Meanwhile, cash-strapped school districts accept Coke and Pepsi pouring contracts that guarantee a certain amount of sales each year, and school buses get ads on the side.
Jane C. Ginsburg & Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, Intellectual Property Stories: Foundation Press has been issuing various collections, centered on particular fields of law, where the authors take an important case and tell the actual story of the litigation. Some add commentary on the place of the case in doctrine, though that’s not the unique thing about the series; what’s neat, and possibly worth reading about, is how the particular facts that led to litigation get turned into broad principles, sometimes in contradiction to the actual facts on the ground. The best essay in this collection, I thought, was about INS v. AP. I will definitely consider assigning it, because the story underlying the litigation, which features William Randolph Hearst on both sides of the case (!), offers a useful perspective about using unfair competition law to restrain copying that isn’t otherwise prohibited by law. Trademark, copyright, and patent cases are all represented. Specialists will probably find something to entertain them; I’m not sure I’d ever really assign the whole book, but that’s what Foundation seems to hope.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: This is one of those books you don’t necessarily have to read, since so many people have already incorporated it into their theses. Still, Kuhn’s explanation of how normal science works, solving small problems, until some accumulation of problems turns into a crisis and brings a new paradigm, had some surprises. In particular, Kuhn’s sympathy for normal science, which involves a lot of hard work and intelligence even if it doesn’t break the world in half, stood out. Kuhn also recognized that old paradigms don’t necessarily disappear: we still learn Newtonian physics in high school, and they still work for engineers, though it means a different thing to learn Newtonian physics in a world that also has Einsteinian physics. Kuhn was also suspicious of analogizing from science to other fields, though his argument has since often been used to do so.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: Another classic whose insights have been so integrated into the field that the book is of historical interest, but offers few revelations. As an attempt to theorize the performance of the self before culture began to promise everyone fifteen minutes of fame, it’s clear and persuasive. But - and I have a whole essay on Logan Echolls to write that’s about this - we all understand ourselves to be performers now, and so it isn’t as surprising to think of ourselves as onstage, offstage, or moving from stage to stage. The book is notable for emphasizing the importance of teamwork; while our current idea of performance posits individuals each performing their own lives, each with its own individual iPodized soundtrack, Goffman explores how work and other groups help each other perform appropriately for customers, bosses, each other, etc. Very few plays, after all, are one-person shows - and even they usually have techs.
Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why: Ehrman, chair of the department of religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, began as an evangelical convinced of the literal truth of the Bible. Then he learned a lot of Greek and began to ask, “Which Bible?” This slender volume is a quick introduction to the study of the texts of the New Testament, explaining how early copies were made and how mistakes and well-meaning “corrections” changed the versions we now think of as standard. He doesn’t spend much time on how Matthew, Mark, Luke and John got selected as the canonical gospels while others were discarded, or how meaning changed in translation; even if you take those for granted, he shows, there have been theologically significant changes in the texts, for reasons likely both intentional and un-. When all copying was by hand, copying was interpreting, as was reading - since the text was read aloud to mostly illiterate congregations. You could argue that, if the King James Version was good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for us - but Ehrman asks instead why G-d would provide literal words and then let them be changed over time. In the end, interpretation is all we’ve got.
Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood: Wolf’s account of sexual awakening among teen girls like her in 1970s San Francisco. It’s beautifully written and has some interesting things to say about the power of female sexuality, what culture does to damage that sexuality, and how we might go about reclaiming that power. It suffers from resort to crude versions of evolutionary psychology, making the classic mistake of claiming a moral “design” from an outcome (female sexual capacity for extended pleasure). This is, of course, in service of Wolf’s claim that culture should do more to honor, rather than shame and simultaneously exploit, girls’ awakening sexuality. But that is a claim of justice, and should be asserted as such, rather than being harnessed to some just-so story about nature when what we are fighting about is culture. I enjoyed the book, though I found her Misconceptions a more useful and troubling book - in that case, about motherhood.
Susan Linn, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood: This is a deeply disturbing book about how marketers are infiltrating every aspect of childhood and carefully targeting ad appeals to kids, including kids too young to talk and walk. Linn powerfully explains why it’s no answer to say that parents should control their kids and teach them not to be materialistic; given the ad-saturated environment, that’s a lot like saying that parents should protect their kids from smog by teaching them to breathe better. It’s even worse, since marketers are systematically inducing kids to want the smog, to think that the smog is what makes them cool and grown-up, and to defy their parents to get the smog. Meanwhile, cash-strapped school districts accept Coke and Pepsi pouring contracts that guarantee a certain amount of sales each year, and school buses get ads on the side.
Jane C. Ginsburg & Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, Intellectual Property Stories: Foundation Press has been issuing various collections, centered on particular fields of law, where the authors take an important case and tell the actual story of the litigation. Some add commentary on the place of the case in doctrine, though that’s not the unique thing about the series; what’s neat, and possibly worth reading about, is how the particular facts that led to litigation get turned into broad principles, sometimes in contradiction to the actual facts on the ground. The best essay in this collection, I thought, was about INS v. AP. I will definitely consider assigning it, because the story underlying the litigation, which features William Randolph Hearst on both sides of the case (!), offers a useful perspective about using unfair competition law to restrain copying that isn’t otherwise prohibited by law. Trademark, copyright, and patent cases are all represented. Specialists will probably find something to entertain them; I’m not sure I’d ever really assign the whole book, but that’s what Foundation seems to hope.