(no subject)
Lots of nonfiction, much of it dancing around the theme of intellectual property and/or violent death:
Owen M. Fiss, The Irony of Free Speech: Fiss is one of liberal legalism's grand old men (and a former professor of mine, so give that whatever weight you want). The titular irony is the insight that, by regulating some speech, the government can produce more and better speech. Fiss is thinking about campaign finance reform, telecommunications regulation, hate speech and pornography, though the proposition is most obviously true with respect to my favorite subject, copyright. Copyright law gives rights to some people, which means that the federal marshals can break into other people's houses, seize their computers and other materials, and even burn books if they're ultimately found to be infringing. Fahrenheit 451? No, just ordinary copyright law. We tell some people (copiers) they can't speak, or read, or listen to certain words, so that other people (authors) will have the incentive to create and disseminate works. The result: a diverse and bountiful marketplace, better than it would be without copyright. Anyhow, Fiss argues that this sort of speech-promoting speech regulation is justified in other contexts, see above. While I think this is quite right, this slender book is not particularly concerned with rebutting the arguments against campaign finance reform and hate speech codes, so I wouldn't start with it if you're interested in what liberal First Amendment theory looks like at the fin du siecle.
Paul Goldstein, Copyright's Highway: This is a new edition of Goldstein's modern classic, an accessible and entertaining book about what copyright means for you, me, the industries we support with our patronage, and our nations. One nice thing Goldstein does is tell the stories behind some of the big cases - the stories of the composers and publishers who created ASCAP and established the rights of composers to collect fees for music performances in restaurants, stores and other places; the story of the publisher who challenged the federal government's policy of making huge numbers of photocopies of journal articles for anyone who asked, and, unlike ASCAP, lost his case. Goldstein also provides a concise, well-written history of copyright law and fascinating speculations on the digital future. His ideal is the "celestial jukebox," where you can get anything you want anytime you want it, but you generally have to pay for the privilege. "Ownership" won't be as important as access, but then access may well be a lot cheaper than ownership. I pay $7 or so for CDs I buy off Half.com, but I only pay $3.95 per month for Launch.com's streaming radio, which I play for around five to eight hours each weekday. If you are interested in the owners' side of the story, this is not an apologia but a well-articulated argument for preserving copyright even in the world Napster made.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience: Rifkin, on the other hand, is far less sanguine about access replacing ownership. The strength of this book is how it identifies a number of trends in American (and to a certain extent other nations') life and unites them around the theme of "access" as opposed to "ownership." So, Nike divests itself of factories and other real property, and owns only the intellectual property applied, swoosh by swoosh, in subcontractors' free enterprise zone factories. Franchises proliferate; the franchisee is only renting most of what a traditional businessperson would own, like the appearance of the business and other elements of its goodwill. Public space - space owned by the public - diminishes in importance as we meet more often in malls and other places to which we gain entrance only by the grace of some private company. It's a really interesting argument, weakened only by Rifkin's apparent willingness to twist the facts to make them fit his theory; at one point, he talks about how we're all going to shopping malls instead of public spaces, and quotes figures about the huge growth and growth potential of malls, but at another point, when he wants to argue that the Internet is taking over, depriving us of tangible reality, he suggests that Internet purchases are already hurting shopping malls. These things are reconcilable, if one is careful, but he isn't. Rifkin also doesn't investigate the implications of the changes he identifies; he acknowledges that a shift from owning things, and being owned by them, might be positive or negative, but he doesn't really get into what the benefits and harms might be. Upshot: A neat theory joining many apparently unrelated trends, but the disapproving tone isn't matched by analysis of why we should disapprove.
Joe Anastasi, The New Forensics: Investigating Corporate Fraud and the Theft of Intellectual Property: I got this book because it had "forensics" and "IP" in the title, meaning it falls within my book budget and I thought it would be about skullduggery, like Kevin Mitnick's fascinating The Art of Deception. But it's not; it's not even about the theft of trade secrets as the title implies. It's more a series of stories about tracking down accounting fraud, with a big discussion of what happened at Enron. There have got to be better books about Enron than this one.
Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context: What makes people creative? Sure, we can say it's inherent, but is there anything we can do to encourage whatever creativity individuals have to be used instead of suppressed? Amabile's work tries to answer this question by investigating contextual factors, like training, workplace environments, the presence or absence of external rewards, etc. The book is dry and rough going, especially as the author has chosen to update the work not by a full revision but by extra material at the end of each chapter, so one has to go back and forth to see what's changed. I'm intrigued by the idea that external rewards are generally bad for creativity, unless they're very carefully structured in an overall work environment that gives "surprise" bonuses. I'd read similar things about getting kids to like reading, or drawing, or whatever - if you give them a reward for doing something, they dislike that something more than if you just tell them to do it. They decide that they were doing the reading in order to get the reward, whereas if you just tell them to do it, they're likely to decide that they wanted to read. Anyhow, Amabile has this theory that similar mechanisms are at work in creativity, but she really weakened her case for me by providing examples of creative people who were very much motivated by external factors - Crick and Watson were desperate to get the structure of DNA because they were competing with another guy who they thought might beat them. And all she says is that Crick and Watson might have been even more creative without external pressure. That's terrible science, since stated that way it's a nonfalsifiable hypothesis. John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind and Nobel fame), likewise, actually canvassed colleagues to make sure he was working on problems other people thought were interesting, so he'd be recognized as making big contributions. Probably creativity is just as variable as creators; I'd be willing to buy that monetary rewards have some sort of dampening effect, but, as Amabile recognizes in the updated sections, an external/internal motivation divide lacks explanatory power.
Angus McLaren, Sexual Blackmail: A history of sex-related blackmail for the past few centuries. McLaren's thesis is that accounts of blackmail provided the public with ways to talk and think about issues of sexuality that were too sensitive to discuss straight out (so to speak). This seems true some of the time, but too sweeping. He's more persuasive when he discusses judges' condemnation of blackmail of rich men by impecunious young boys and women as a way of assuring that rich men could do as they wanted, by pretending that the boys and women were at fault for lying about whether sex had occurred, or, at least with the women, for giving in sexually. It was the fear of blackmail, along with some change in social attitudes, that led to the abolition of the "heartbalm" torts that allowed women to sue if they'd been seduced and abandoned, and blackmail also played a role in the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain. Overall, the book would be good for people interested in the history of sexuality, but not a more general audience. McLaren doesn't spend much time on the near disappearance of sexual blackmail, but it is notable how weird the concept seems to us - in large part, McLaren suggests, because the tabloids will pay a lot better than the misbehaving celebrity who's likely to be a target of surveillance. And as for the rest of us, who really cares who we fuck?
Disclaimer: I might be less charitable to McLaren because, though he cites me, it's for a strange and offputting proposition about the use of engagement rings as economic leverage against men. That's not really what I meant, and I don't even think it's what I said.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare: The title is pretty descriptive; though Keegan mostly focuses on Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, he makes occasional excursions further out, to Easter Island, New Guinea, New Zealand, and the Aztec Empire, among others. He goes back and forth through history, slowly zagging ever closer to the present, arguing that there was a certain Western style of warfare that came to dominate warmaking because it was more focused on killing, while other styles of warfare were more focused on demonstrating power and solving conflicts through sometimes ritualized shows of force. It's an engaging book, but not a must-read on the level of Six Armies in Normandy or those classics of warmaking and leadership, The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command.
Drew Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation: Disclaimer the second: Drew is a good friend of mine, a real sweetie and possibly coming soon to an election near you; he's interested in politics and I fully expect to contribute to his campaign. Drew is interested in what made King's speech at the March on Washington so powerful - it was full of things King had said before. In fact, he explains, people didn't think of it as King's best speech at the time; after his assassination, it was turned into the defining moment. Drew argues that canonizing the Dream speech allowed people to gloss over King's anti-militarism and anti-poverty initiatives, which he was turning to with more vigor when he was killed (and which weren't doing all that well, either). The book is mostly made up of accounts of the speech itself and close analysis of the words, some borrowed; the most interesting part for me was the analysis of the speech as oratory, its sound and rhythm characteristics that were unlike what so many white listeners and viewers had ever heard but which sounded familiar to people steeped in the language of the African-American church.
Best American Crime Writing 2003, eds. Otto Penzler & Thomas H. Cook: Collected magazine essays on crime, going beyond murder to prostitution, genocide, and impersonating a transit officer. The ones I liked: a nice essay on the Body Farm, though possibly duplicative if you already read a lot of this stuff; a poignant article on a Palestinian suicide bomber and her victim, a girl much like her; an interesting piece on the pit-bull mauling death of a woman, for which two lawyers were ultimately held responsible; a fascinating essay on "The Terrible Boy," examining the criminalization of bullying and - maybe - of aspects of boyhood/childhood themselves; the better article on Enron I wished for above; a strange tale of failed Nazi saboteurs; and a NYT Magazine story about Pauline Nyiramashuko, who oversaw the Hutu program of rape and genocide in Rwanda. Very few of these pieces try to figure out why bad things happen to good, or ordinary, people. "The Terrible Boy" is probably the most powerful, written by a man who was briefly a bully. It's about a boy who killed a classmate and was used as a symbol of evil by the anti-bullying movement, even though he seems to have been a reasonably normal kid who was very, very unlucky when his single punch to another boy's head killed him. The author grew out of his own bullying stage, but his victim still won't talk to him, twenty years later, and he left me wondering how much of childhood's cruelty we'll ever be able to eliminate.
Barbara Holland, Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling: Z. fences, so I read this book to see if I could get a better sense of what he likes about it. Holland's tone is annoying; she writes as if she and you, the reader, are superior to the deluded fools about whom she writes. She also lets clever turns of phrase substitute for what I was looking for, to wit a real history of dueling instead of a bunch of anecdotes. And she takes the duellists' rhetoric at face value, accepting that they weren't scared and really did want to kill at the drop of a glove, when even her own evidence speaks otherwise. Just like Keegan's early warriors, duellists evolved a number of techniques to make duels less deadly, including deliberately firing into the air instead of at one's opponent. Maybe there is a good book about duelling, but this isn't it.
Owen M. Fiss, The Irony of Free Speech: Fiss is one of liberal legalism's grand old men (and a former professor of mine, so give that whatever weight you want). The titular irony is the insight that, by regulating some speech, the government can produce more and better speech. Fiss is thinking about campaign finance reform, telecommunications regulation, hate speech and pornography, though the proposition is most obviously true with respect to my favorite subject, copyright. Copyright law gives rights to some people, which means that the federal marshals can break into other people's houses, seize their computers and other materials, and even burn books if they're ultimately found to be infringing. Fahrenheit 451? No, just ordinary copyright law. We tell some people (copiers) they can't speak, or read, or listen to certain words, so that other people (authors) will have the incentive to create and disseminate works. The result: a diverse and bountiful marketplace, better than it would be without copyright. Anyhow, Fiss argues that this sort of speech-promoting speech regulation is justified in other contexts, see above. While I think this is quite right, this slender book is not particularly concerned with rebutting the arguments against campaign finance reform and hate speech codes, so I wouldn't start with it if you're interested in what liberal First Amendment theory looks like at the fin du siecle.
Paul Goldstein, Copyright's Highway: This is a new edition of Goldstein's modern classic, an accessible and entertaining book about what copyright means for you, me, the industries we support with our patronage, and our nations. One nice thing Goldstein does is tell the stories behind some of the big cases - the stories of the composers and publishers who created ASCAP and established the rights of composers to collect fees for music performances in restaurants, stores and other places; the story of the publisher who challenged the federal government's policy of making huge numbers of photocopies of journal articles for anyone who asked, and, unlike ASCAP, lost his case. Goldstein also provides a concise, well-written history of copyright law and fascinating speculations on the digital future. His ideal is the "celestial jukebox," where you can get anything you want anytime you want it, but you generally have to pay for the privilege. "Ownership" won't be as important as access, but then access may well be a lot cheaper than ownership. I pay $7 or so for CDs I buy off Half.com, but I only pay $3.95 per month for Launch.com's streaming radio, which I play for around five to eight hours each weekday. If you are interested in the owners' side of the story, this is not an apologia but a well-articulated argument for preserving copyright even in the world Napster made.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience: Rifkin, on the other hand, is far less sanguine about access replacing ownership. The strength of this book is how it identifies a number of trends in American (and to a certain extent other nations') life and unites them around the theme of "access" as opposed to "ownership." So, Nike divests itself of factories and other real property, and owns only the intellectual property applied, swoosh by swoosh, in subcontractors' free enterprise zone factories. Franchises proliferate; the franchisee is only renting most of what a traditional businessperson would own, like the appearance of the business and other elements of its goodwill. Public space - space owned by the public - diminishes in importance as we meet more often in malls and other places to which we gain entrance only by the grace of some private company. It's a really interesting argument, weakened only by Rifkin's apparent willingness to twist the facts to make them fit his theory; at one point, he talks about how we're all going to shopping malls instead of public spaces, and quotes figures about the huge growth and growth potential of malls, but at another point, when he wants to argue that the Internet is taking over, depriving us of tangible reality, he suggests that Internet purchases are already hurting shopping malls. These things are reconcilable, if one is careful, but he isn't. Rifkin also doesn't investigate the implications of the changes he identifies; he acknowledges that a shift from owning things, and being owned by them, might be positive or negative, but he doesn't really get into what the benefits and harms might be. Upshot: A neat theory joining many apparently unrelated trends, but the disapproving tone isn't matched by analysis of why we should disapprove.
Joe Anastasi, The New Forensics: Investigating Corporate Fraud and the Theft of Intellectual Property: I got this book because it had "forensics" and "IP" in the title, meaning it falls within my book budget and I thought it would be about skullduggery, like Kevin Mitnick's fascinating The Art of Deception. But it's not; it's not even about the theft of trade secrets as the title implies. It's more a series of stories about tracking down accounting fraud, with a big discussion of what happened at Enron. There have got to be better books about Enron than this one.
Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context: What makes people creative? Sure, we can say it's inherent, but is there anything we can do to encourage whatever creativity individuals have to be used instead of suppressed? Amabile's work tries to answer this question by investigating contextual factors, like training, workplace environments, the presence or absence of external rewards, etc. The book is dry and rough going, especially as the author has chosen to update the work not by a full revision but by extra material at the end of each chapter, so one has to go back and forth to see what's changed. I'm intrigued by the idea that external rewards are generally bad for creativity, unless they're very carefully structured in an overall work environment that gives "surprise" bonuses. I'd read similar things about getting kids to like reading, or drawing, or whatever - if you give them a reward for doing something, they dislike that something more than if you just tell them to do it. They decide that they were doing the reading in order to get the reward, whereas if you just tell them to do it, they're likely to decide that they wanted to read. Anyhow, Amabile has this theory that similar mechanisms are at work in creativity, but she really weakened her case for me by providing examples of creative people who were very much motivated by external factors - Crick and Watson were desperate to get the structure of DNA because they were competing with another guy who they thought might beat them. And all she says is that Crick and Watson might have been even more creative without external pressure. That's terrible science, since stated that way it's a nonfalsifiable hypothesis. John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind and Nobel fame), likewise, actually canvassed colleagues to make sure he was working on problems other people thought were interesting, so he'd be recognized as making big contributions. Probably creativity is just as variable as creators; I'd be willing to buy that monetary rewards have some sort of dampening effect, but, as Amabile recognizes in the updated sections, an external/internal motivation divide lacks explanatory power.
Angus McLaren, Sexual Blackmail: A history of sex-related blackmail for the past few centuries. McLaren's thesis is that accounts of blackmail provided the public with ways to talk and think about issues of sexuality that were too sensitive to discuss straight out (so to speak). This seems true some of the time, but too sweeping. He's more persuasive when he discusses judges' condemnation of blackmail of rich men by impecunious young boys and women as a way of assuring that rich men could do as they wanted, by pretending that the boys and women were at fault for lying about whether sex had occurred, or, at least with the women, for giving in sexually. It was the fear of blackmail, along with some change in social attitudes, that led to the abolition of the "heartbalm" torts that allowed women to sue if they'd been seduced and abandoned, and blackmail also played a role in the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain. Overall, the book would be good for people interested in the history of sexuality, but not a more general audience. McLaren doesn't spend much time on the near disappearance of sexual blackmail, but it is notable how weird the concept seems to us - in large part, McLaren suggests, because the tabloids will pay a lot better than the misbehaving celebrity who's likely to be a target of surveillance. And as for the rest of us, who really cares who we fuck?
Disclaimer: I might be less charitable to McLaren because, though he cites me, it's for a strange and offputting proposition about the use of engagement rings as economic leverage against men. That's not really what I meant, and I don't even think it's what I said.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare: The title is pretty descriptive; though Keegan mostly focuses on Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, he makes occasional excursions further out, to Easter Island, New Guinea, New Zealand, and the Aztec Empire, among others. He goes back and forth through history, slowly zagging ever closer to the present, arguing that there was a certain Western style of warfare that came to dominate warmaking because it was more focused on killing, while other styles of warfare were more focused on demonstrating power and solving conflicts through sometimes ritualized shows of force. It's an engaging book, but not a must-read on the level of Six Armies in Normandy or those classics of warmaking and leadership, The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command.
Drew Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation: Disclaimer the second: Drew is a good friend of mine, a real sweetie and possibly coming soon to an election near you; he's interested in politics and I fully expect to contribute to his campaign. Drew is interested in what made King's speech at the March on Washington so powerful - it was full of things King had said before. In fact, he explains, people didn't think of it as King's best speech at the time; after his assassination, it was turned into the defining moment. Drew argues that canonizing the Dream speech allowed people to gloss over King's anti-militarism and anti-poverty initiatives, which he was turning to with more vigor when he was killed (and which weren't doing all that well, either). The book is mostly made up of accounts of the speech itself and close analysis of the words, some borrowed; the most interesting part for me was the analysis of the speech as oratory, its sound and rhythm characteristics that were unlike what so many white listeners and viewers had ever heard but which sounded familiar to people steeped in the language of the African-American church.
Best American Crime Writing 2003, eds. Otto Penzler & Thomas H. Cook: Collected magazine essays on crime, going beyond murder to prostitution, genocide, and impersonating a transit officer. The ones I liked: a nice essay on the Body Farm, though possibly duplicative if you already read a lot of this stuff; a poignant article on a Palestinian suicide bomber and her victim, a girl much like her; an interesting piece on the pit-bull mauling death of a woman, for which two lawyers were ultimately held responsible; a fascinating essay on "The Terrible Boy," examining the criminalization of bullying and - maybe - of aspects of boyhood/childhood themselves; the better article on Enron I wished for above; a strange tale of failed Nazi saboteurs; and a NYT Magazine story about Pauline Nyiramashuko, who oversaw the Hutu program of rape and genocide in Rwanda. Very few of these pieces try to figure out why bad things happen to good, or ordinary, people. "The Terrible Boy" is probably the most powerful, written by a man who was briefly a bully. It's about a boy who killed a classmate and was used as a symbol of evil by the anti-bullying movement, even though he seems to have been a reasonably normal kid who was very, very unlucky when his single punch to another boy's head killed him. The author grew out of his own bullying stage, but his victim still won't talk to him, twenty years later, and he left me wondering how much of childhood's cruelty we'll ever be able to eliminate.
Barbara Holland, Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling: Z. fences, so I read this book to see if I could get a better sense of what he likes about it. Holland's tone is annoying; she writes as if she and you, the reader, are superior to the deluded fools about whom she writes. She also lets clever turns of phrase substitute for what I was looking for, to wit a real history of dueling instead of a bunch of anecdotes. And she takes the duellists' rhetoric at face value, accepting that they weren't scared and really did want to kill at the drop of a glove, when even her own evidence speaks otherwise. Just like Keegan's early warriors, duellists evolved a number of techniques to make duels less deadly, including deliberately firing into the air instead of at one's opponent. Maybe there is a good book about duelling, but this isn't it.