Haven, and nonfiction
OK, some shows would say "let's wind down and deal with everything," while other shows would say "let's get Bill Shatner!" While you tried my patience with many of the storylines, I will admit to grinning at that.
Mark Crislip, Puswhisperer II: Another Year of Pus: Free review copy-turns out to be collected blogpost entries by a doctor writing very “inside baseball” stories about infectious disease-mostly individual cases but sometimes research generally. Might well be entertaining if I had sufficient background, but I don’t.
Kiese Laymon, How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Laymon writes of his Mississippi childhood, of learning how being black was probable cause and how the worst of white folks always put him at risk, of hip-hop, and other topics in this essay collection. I really like people who try to use techniques from one genre in another, so I was intrigued when he said he wanted the book to follow the form of some of his favorite albums, but I don’t think I got as much out of that as I could had I known the albums. The strongest work was what I’d read before in published essays-how white culture “forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share,” how it forced “our mamas and grandmas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch.” The worst of white folks is “all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It had an insatiable appetite for virtuoso black performance and routine black suffering.” I also really loved this phrase for an unlovable experience: being “thirty cents away from a quarter.”
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination: A series of essays about Atwood’s own understanding of the sf-nal elements of her work as well as the work of others. I know it’s ridiculously fanboy of me, but I wish Atwood hadn’t repeatedly asserted that Wonder Woman loses her powers if she snogs a man. (As we all know, it’s if a man binds her!) The broader point about the links between sf and mythology is well taken, though. Atwood sees sf as a genre defined by its permeability. Atwood is very interested in what she calls ustopias, which she presents as a cross between dystopias and eutopias, though clearly the “us” is also in there because she considers these inventions diagnostic of the human temperature at a given time and place. (Each eutopia, she says, carries its dystopia within, and likewise for dystopias.) Essays include pieces on H.G. Wells, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell, Marge Piercy, and Jonathan Swift, all well-written and insightful.
C. Richard King, Redskins: Insult and Brand: Passionate, if somewhat repetitive (as perhaps all moral calls to action are), argument about the poisonous nature of the Washington football team’s name. King argues that the name isn’t just about insulting Native Americans, but about white people owning them, propertizing their images and getting to decide what “counts” as a real problem, and that this ownership itself is one of the benefits the name provides in bolstering white supremacy. Claiming Indianness becomes a privilege of white masculinity, the mascot now a trophy. (Notably, the team was famously racist towards African-American players and the last in the NFL to integrate, with an anthem that not only stereotyped “braves on the warpath” and used mock pidgin but also urged the players to “fight for old Dixie.”) The name, and the images with which it is associated, combine a “paradoxical love of imagined Indians and a loathing of actual, embodied Indians that continues to this day.” That love is indifferent to the fact that, for example, the team currently plays on the ancestral territory of the Piscataway Tribe, or that DC is where the Patawomeck used to live. And as hard as the team tries to remove the stereotypes and leave only tribute, as late as December 2014, fans ran a “Scalp Out Cancer” fundraiser. When defending the name, team fans speak of their own hurt and pain-what King calls “playing Indian and playing the victim.” It’s their power to name and claim that’s threatened, and that’s all they see-as when fans consider protesters inauthentic because they don’t look “Indian” enough then claim that they have 1/16 Cherokee blood.
Along with the privileging of whiteness, King also discusses the harms directly done by stereotypical images: making Native Americans feel worse and triggering disparaging stereotypes in whites. I learned that owner Dan Snyder’s Original Americans Foundation, while launched to huge hoopla, appears to have gone completely dormant in terms of carrying out any charitable activities. I also learned more about the history of the term that arose “to accommodate an increasingly racialized European and European American view of the world which was imposed on a broad range of peoples who only gradually developed a sense of a collective identity in response to it.”
King also discusses Native Americans who don’t mind the team name, or like it. It’s a useful point: “how could there not be some American Indians who support it?” There’s a lot of diversity among any group of people; some don’t think about it; some have family connections to the team; and, “in a society that offers so few images of American Indians, … that has so fully erased living indigenous people in favor of imaginary versions of them, why wouldn’t some number of Native Americans come to accept, endorse, and even identify with” the team? King also suggests that Native Americans living on reservations experience racism differently than Native Americans living in large cities, who see the logo regularly and don’t have the insulating counter-narratives that might surround them in their communities. So, while three high schools with a majority Native American student body still use the same name, their communities and audiences wouldn’t use the stereotypes that white football fans do.
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City: I held off reviewing this because I’d made too many notes, and now I’ll admit defeat. This is the best book on American poverty, of a pretty good crew, that I’ve read in the last few years. It features ethnography from Desmond’s research with an African-American landlord, a white landlord at a trailer park, and a number of renters-mostly African-American and white-facing eviction over the course of a few years. But these individual stories are effortlessly combined with the stunning statistics about poverty and race Desmond has compiled through quantitative research. It’s a tour de force about a terrible topic. Among other things, Desmond shows that poor African-American women, many with children, are as likely to get evicted as African-American men are to go to prison or jail. Desmond also documents the ways in which poverty keeps people poor-expenses accrued trying to keep precious possessions and documents in storage, sometimes ultimately lost; jobs and schools disrupted by moving around; benefits missed. Poverty contributes to unreliability, and unreliability is a good way to stay poor (though not so much a problem if you are already comfortable-that’s when people make excuses for you). Highly recommended, though not a pleasant read.
Dale Russakoff, The Prize: The titular prize is Newark’s school system, though generally as source of patronage or proving ground for big educational theories, rather than as its own unique entity with a history that had to be dealt with in trying to improve service for students. Russakoff tells how Chris Christie and Cory Booker (neither of whom comes off particularly well here, both seeming like publicity hounds using Newark as a pawn in a larger national game) solicited $100 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, then proceeded to spend it on a lot of things that didn’t help students--$1000/day consultants, teacher back pay (good reason for that, but didn’t address many pressing needs), keeping unneeded but tenure-protected teachers idle (again, there were good reasons to avoid shoving unneeded fourth-grade teachers into kindergarten classrooms, which would also result in firing promising younger kindergarten teachers, but still frustrating). Along with the profiteers, there are a number of dedicated people in the story, but each can only do so much in the face of a deeply dysfunctional system-Russakoff emphasizes how long the school system had been Newark’s employer of last resort, run for the benefit of adults and not children-and in the face of not unjustified suspicion on the part of local parents and teachers. After all, if school reform means closing your school, forcing your kid to walk through a dangerous area to get to the new school, and provides no guarantees of improved performance, it might not seem like the best idea even if the school system in general is failing. I did take some hope from the stories of passionate educators-teachers, principals, even system administrators-working hard to get parent buy-in and trying to create sustainable improvements. Russakoff is pretty evenhanded in treatment of charters, which he argues perform relatively well in places like Newark (though not everywhere), mostly because they don’t have the installed base of people who have to get paid, like the huge administrative staff in the Newark system, and thus can channel more dollars to students.
Marc Levinson, The Box: The history of the shipping container and how it changed the world, making lots of products lots cheaper but also disrupting traditional commercial centers and manufacturing processes. Much of the cost of many products used to come from moving them from where they were made to where they were sold. The shipping container movable from ship to truck without lots of longshoremen unpacking (and more than occasionally stealing) individual boxes and bags caused the price of transportation to drop hugely. This increased international trade and decreased employment in high-wage countries. This book has a lot of detail about how such big changes happen, without being planned by the people who are making the investments necessary to adopt a new technology but can’t see how it will all shake out. A lot of people who innovate lose money! Even if they’re right about the ultimate success of the technology! I was interested, though you have to be able to tolerate a fair amount of description of committee meetings.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Mark Crislip, Puswhisperer II: Another Year of Pus: Free review copy-turns out to be collected blogpost entries by a doctor writing very “inside baseball” stories about infectious disease-mostly individual cases but sometimes research generally. Might well be entertaining if I had sufficient background, but I don’t.
Kiese Laymon, How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Laymon writes of his Mississippi childhood, of learning how being black was probable cause and how the worst of white folks always put him at risk, of hip-hop, and other topics in this essay collection. I really like people who try to use techniques from one genre in another, so I was intrigued when he said he wanted the book to follow the form of some of his favorite albums, but I don’t think I got as much out of that as I could had I known the albums. The strongest work was what I’d read before in published essays-how white culture “forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share,” how it forced “our mamas and grandmas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch.” The worst of white folks is “all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It had an insatiable appetite for virtuoso black performance and routine black suffering.” I also really loved this phrase for an unlovable experience: being “thirty cents away from a quarter.”
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination: A series of essays about Atwood’s own understanding of the sf-nal elements of her work as well as the work of others. I know it’s ridiculously fanboy of me, but I wish Atwood hadn’t repeatedly asserted that Wonder Woman loses her powers if she snogs a man. (As we all know, it’s if a man binds her!) The broader point about the links between sf and mythology is well taken, though. Atwood sees sf as a genre defined by its permeability. Atwood is very interested in what she calls ustopias, which she presents as a cross between dystopias and eutopias, though clearly the “us” is also in there because she considers these inventions diagnostic of the human temperature at a given time and place. (Each eutopia, she says, carries its dystopia within, and likewise for dystopias.) Essays include pieces on H.G. Wells, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell, Marge Piercy, and Jonathan Swift, all well-written and insightful.
C. Richard King, Redskins: Insult and Brand: Passionate, if somewhat repetitive (as perhaps all moral calls to action are), argument about the poisonous nature of the Washington football team’s name. King argues that the name isn’t just about insulting Native Americans, but about white people owning them, propertizing their images and getting to decide what “counts” as a real problem, and that this ownership itself is one of the benefits the name provides in bolstering white supremacy. Claiming Indianness becomes a privilege of white masculinity, the mascot now a trophy. (Notably, the team was famously racist towards African-American players and the last in the NFL to integrate, with an anthem that not only stereotyped “braves on the warpath” and used mock pidgin but also urged the players to “fight for old Dixie.”) The name, and the images with which it is associated, combine a “paradoxical love of imagined Indians and a loathing of actual, embodied Indians that continues to this day.” That love is indifferent to the fact that, for example, the team currently plays on the ancestral territory of the Piscataway Tribe, or that DC is where the Patawomeck used to live. And as hard as the team tries to remove the stereotypes and leave only tribute, as late as December 2014, fans ran a “Scalp Out Cancer” fundraiser. When defending the name, team fans speak of their own hurt and pain-what King calls “playing Indian and playing the victim.” It’s their power to name and claim that’s threatened, and that’s all they see-as when fans consider protesters inauthentic because they don’t look “Indian” enough then claim that they have 1/16 Cherokee blood.
Along with the privileging of whiteness, King also discusses the harms directly done by stereotypical images: making Native Americans feel worse and triggering disparaging stereotypes in whites. I learned that owner Dan Snyder’s Original Americans Foundation, while launched to huge hoopla, appears to have gone completely dormant in terms of carrying out any charitable activities. I also learned more about the history of the term that arose “to accommodate an increasingly racialized European and European American view of the world which was imposed on a broad range of peoples who only gradually developed a sense of a collective identity in response to it.”
King also discusses Native Americans who don’t mind the team name, or like it. It’s a useful point: “how could there not be some American Indians who support it?” There’s a lot of diversity among any group of people; some don’t think about it; some have family connections to the team; and, “in a society that offers so few images of American Indians, … that has so fully erased living indigenous people in favor of imaginary versions of them, why wouldn’t some number of Native Americans come to accept, endorse, and even identify with” the team? King also suggests that Native Americans living on reservations experience racism differently than Native Americans living in large cities, who see the logo regularly and don’t have the insulating counter-narratives that might surround them in their communities. So, while three high schools with a majority Native American student body still use the same name, their communities and audiences wouldn’t use the stereotypes that white football fans do.
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City: I held off reviewing this because I’d made too many notes, and now I’ll admit defeat. This is the best book on American poverty, of a pretty good crew, that I’ve read in the last few years. It features ethnography from Desmond’s research with an African-American landlord, a white landlord at a trailer park, and a number of renters-mostly African-American and white-facing eviction over the course of a few years. But these individual stories are effortlessly combined with the stunning statistics about poverty and race Desmond has compiled through quantitative research. It’s a tour de force about a terrible topic. Among other things, Desmond shows that poor African-American women, many with children, are as likely to get evicted as African-American men are to go to prison or jail. Desmond also documents the ways in which poverty keeps people poor-expenses accrued trying to keep precious possessions and documents in storage, sometimes ultimately lost; jobs and schools disrupted by moving around; benefits missed. Poverty contributes to unreliability, and unreliability is a good way to stay poor (though not so much a problem if you are already comfortable-that’s when people make excuses for you). Highly recommended, though not a pleasant read.
Dale Russakoff, The Prize: The titular prize is Newark’s school system, though generally as source of patronage or proving ground for big educational theories, rather than as its own unique entity with a history that had to be dealt with in trying to improve service for students. Russakoff tells how Chris Christie and Cory Booker (neither of whom comes off particularly well here, both seeming like publicity hounds using Newark as a pawn in a larger national game) solicited $100 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, then proceeded to spend it on a lot of things that didn’t help students--$1000/day consultants, teacher back pay (good reason for that, but didn’t address many pressing needs), keeping unneeded but tenure-protected teachers idle (again, there were good reasons to avoid shoving unneeded fourth-grade teachers into kindergarten classrooms, which would also result in firing promising younger kindergarten teachers, but still frustrating). Along with the profiteers, there are a number of dedicated people in the story, but each can only do so much in the face of a deeply dysfunctional system-Russakoff emphasizes how long the school system had been Newark’s employer of last resort, run for the benefit of adults and not children-and in the face of not unjustified suspicion on the part of local parents and teachers. After all, if school reform means closing your school, forcing your kid to walk through a dangerous area to get to the new school, and provides no guarantees of improved performance, it might not seem like the best idea even if the school system in general is failing. I did take some hope from the stories of passionate educators-teachers, principals, even system administrators-working hard to get parent buy-in and trying to create sustainable improvements. Russakoff is pretty evenhanded in treatment of charters, which he argues perform relatively well in places like Newark (though not everywhere), mostly because they don’t have the installed base of people who have to get paid, like the huge administrative staff in the Newark system, and thus can channel more dollars to students.
Marc Levinson, The Box: The history of the shipping container and how it changed the world, making lots of products lots cheaper but also disrupting traditional commercial centers and manufacturing processes. Much of the cost of many products used to come from moving them from where they were made to where they were sold. The shipping container movable from ship to truck without lots of longshoremen unpacking (and more than occasionally stealing) individual boxes and bags caused the price of transportation to drop hugely. This increased international trade and decreased employment in high-wage countries. This book has a lot of detail about how such big changes happen, without being planned by the people who are making the investments necessary to adopt a new technology but can’t see how it will all shake out. A lot of people who innovate lose money! Even if they’re right about the ultimate success of the technology! I was interested, though you have to be able to tolerate a fair amount of description of committee meetings.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.