Nonfiction
Robert Spoo, Modernism and the Law: A history of modernism’s various encounters with law: the prohibition of homosexuality and obscenity, defamation law, privacy/right of publicity law, blackmail law, and copyright law. Spoo reads the danger of Dorian Grey as residing in his unauthorized replication of his own portrait, figuring the dangers of mechanical reproduction on morals writ large. As he says, both copyright and obscenity law developed “in response to printing technologies and fears of an ungovernable mass of readers.” Both laws are designed to produce artificial scarcity, though in different ways (but as he points out, obscenity law in Britain particularly always accepted the idea that some circulation was okay; the question was whether the material was circulating too widely, among those not fit to receive it like servants or wives). At the same time, the bodies of law could be at loggerheads-Byron and Shelley, as well as others, found themselves unable to suppress pirate editions because immoral works couldn’t have valid copyrights, and in the US likewise the inability to find a domestic publisher (required for protection under then-current US law) because of fears of obscenity prosecutions left works like Joyce’s Ulysses unprotected by copyright. Spoo also discusses how libel law was supposed to supplant private violence in an honor culture, and how a number of well-known authors nonetheless fought duels, or got very close, sometimes over (accurate) imputations of homosexuality, even through the early 20th century. Also, modernist authors sometimes deployed publicity rights to substitute for unavailable copyright in America, as when Wilde toured to promote the authorized version of Gilbert & Sullivan’s opera and Joyce sued for misappropriation of his name when he couldn’t sue for copyright infringement. And in discussing Pound’s fascism/treason in the context of his use of copyright law, Spoo draws connections to Wilde’s earlier quixotic attempts to use libel law-both artists thought that art had inherent superiority to law, and both were ultimately forced to comply with the state’s monopoly on violence.
Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive: This book is really heavy with jargon, only about half of which is useful (I think that if you’re going to use “elucidate” or “delineate” more than once a chapter, you should be really really sure it is the best word for the job, and it often wasn’t). The underlying theory and stories are both really interesting: Fuentes is trying to reconstruct the lives of enslaved women in Barbados through a historical record that bears essentially no direct traces from them, while the people who did make records about them had incentives to distort reality. So the book is about the necessity of imaginative leaps and honesty about the distortions in the historical record. It’s also about specific stories: the women runaways identified in newspaper ads by the scars on their bodies, testifying to the horrors inflicted on them which are now (additional horror) also the only remaining traces of their existence. Fuentes reconstructs how runaways and other enslaved people accused of crimes were publicly punished-whipped and executed-in towns in order to terrify other enslaved people. She tracks the story of one mulatto woman, born into slavery and freed by her sexual partner, who died a wealthy hotel-/brothel-/slaveowner, and reads her will to explain how that woman’s “agency” was always under threat and required the subjection and sexual violation of other enslaved women, because that’s how oppressive systems work versus individuals. She reads the deposition of a white woman in a case about adultery to suggest how white women’s sexual purity was constituted in opposition to black women’s inherent violability. The case involved a young enslaved boy dressed in women’s clothes-which allowed him to move about at night more easily-and carrying a sword-which could have gotten him the death penalty-who was sent from the house of the man in the affair to the house of the adulteress. It’s not clear, but the boy seems to have been acquitted of the crime of carrying a weapon because the white male jury accepted the idea that his enslaver sent him to kill the husband and of course he could have been killed for refusing that order. Fuentes also discusses the fact that enslavers were entitled to compensation from the colony government when an enslaved person was executed for a crime, which even then some people noted encouraged them to endeavor to have unproductive slaves executed for crimes. The house of horrors that was slavery can often only be seen in its fragmentary reflections; despite the annoyance I felt at the presentation, I learned a lot.
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States: Lepore’s political history focuses on who was allowed to be part of the process of politics over the years, and on the epistemology of political knowledge as mediated by various sources. Benjamin Franklin's sister, who was never allowed to do the things her brother became famous for, shows up early on to set the tone. I thought making Phyllis Schlafly one of the major figures to emphasize how women’s activism has long been an important political force was a useful choice. I was less impressed by her recent history; if you’re going to say that many of Trump’s supporters aren’t racist (especially after a history structured by slavery and racism), you need to take a moment to define that.
William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: Mostly notable to me for really driving home that when most white Americans talk about what “Americans” believe, they mean “white Americans.” Hitchcock really likes Eisenhower, especially as moral leader of the country, even while acknowledging Eisenhower’s at best grudging acceptance of desegregation-the domestic moral issue of his time.
Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: Thompson's writing is not aging well; he thinks the Hell’s Angels are pathetic and have been made that way by the lack of room in America for anything but a certain square path to acceptable masculinity. But his empathy extends only so far. (Here there’s a lot of rape.) The narrative begins with the Hell’s Angels’ rise to national prominence when two gang rapes were reported at a meetup. Thompson then tells us that one victim was African-American and another was a pregnant white girl, both of which apparently mean that they didn’t get raped. And later, he explains that the charges were dropped, and that they probably consented to the first few men and then freaked out, which both also apparently mean that there was no rape. Later, he asserts that all women secretly are at least curious about what it would be like to be raped, and that it’s easy to convict a man for rape of a lower-class woman because she’s not ashamed to reveal the crime the way an upper-class woman is. Then he says that, though he didn’t see any rapes at his Hell’s Angels hangouts, he did see disturbing behavior, such as multiple men having sex with a woman who was too drunk to stand up. Women also appear in a few other roles, such as his hoity-toity neighbor who was scared by the presence of multiple Hell’s Angels in his apartment/on the sidewalk at all hours, which was silly of her because the one time his guests shot out the windows of his apartment (1) that wasn’t the Hell’s Angels and (2) they didn’t hit anything.
Louis Hyman, Temp: One of the best books I’ve read all year. Hyman tells several interlocking stories about how work has gotten so unstable, focusing on the US but with tendrils all over. One story is about the rise of consulting and how well-paid Harvard men decided that short-term jobs were good, for them and then for others. Another is about the rise of temporary labor including pink-collar and other jobs, especially in Silicon Valley. When you think about high-tech production, he says, you should really think about low-paid women who might well have been pieceworkers, putting together devices in small factories. Relatedly, there’s the story of immigration to supply demand for workers in agriculture, construction, and other physically demanding jobs, first as legal immigration and then formally illegal (though of course the employers were never punished). Together, these stories explain why work no longer works the way the American dream supposedly taught us to believe it did.
Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The horrific story of the young women who painted radium dials for glow-in-the-dark watches that were popular for military and civilian use in the early 20th century. Their bones literally rotted inside their bodies; there are terrible descriptions of infections and jawbones being simply lifted from inside their sore-filled mouths. Their early misdiagnoses were a combination of accident, lack of knowledge, and institutionalized sexism that led doctors and others to take their pain less seriously. Even as the knowledge of radium’s deadly consequences became better known to the companies employing them, the women themselves were kept ignorant, and then told that they should have known better. Eventually, some of the women won small compensatory awards, but it’s hard to see this as a story of triumph despite the stamina that many of them displayed.
Dessa, My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science and Senseless Love: Unsurprisingly, Dessa is a beautiful writer, with small shockingly insightful observations all over. Much of the book is various descriptions of her attempts to fall out of love with her ex, including with biofeedback training, because they loved each other but couldn’t be good for each other. As she says, polyamory wasn’t for her, and perhaps separately she didn’t want to explain it to her family: “although I admire the zero-fucks-given attitude of my radical friends, I give plenty of fucks. I hand them out like perfume samples at the mall, in fact.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive: This book is really heavy with jargon, only about half of which is useful (I think that if you’re going to use “elucidate” or “delineate” more than once a chapter, you should be really really sure it is the best word for the job, and it often wasn’t). The underlying theory and stories are both really interesting: Fuentes is trying to reconstruct the lives of enslaved women in Barbados through a historical record that bears essentially no direct traces from them, while the people who did make records about them had incentives to distort reality. So the book is about the necessity of imaginative leaps and honesty about the distortions in the historical record. It’s also about specific stories: the women runaways identified in newspaper ads by the scars on their bodies, testifying to the horrors inflicted on them which are now (additional horror) also the only remaining traces of their existence. Fuentes reconstructs how runaways and other enslaved people accused of crimes were publicly punished-whipped and executed-in towns in order to terrify other enslaved people. She tracks the story of one mulatto woman, born into slavery and freed by her sexual partner, who died a wealthy hotel-/brothel-/slaveowner, and reads her will to explain how that woman’s “agency” was always under threat and required the subjection and sexual violation of other enslaved women, because that’s how oppressive systems work versus individuals. She reads the deposition of a white woman in a case about adultery to suggest how white women’s sexual purity was constituted in opposition to black women’s inherent violability. The case involved a young enslaved boy dressed in women’s clothes-which allowed him to move about at night more easily-and carrying a sword-which could have gotten him the death penalty-who was sent from the house of the man in the affair to the house of the adulteress. It’s not clear, but the boy seems to have been acquitted of the crime of carrying a weapon because the white male jury accepted the idea that his enslaver sent him to kill the husband and of course he could have been killed for refusing that order. Fuentes also discusses the fact that enslavers were entitled to compensation from the colony government when an enslaved person was executed for a crime, which even then some people noted encouraged them to endeavor to have unproductive slaves executed for crimes. The house of horrors that was slavery can often only be seen in its fragmentary reflections; despite the annoyance I felt at the presentation, I learned a lot.
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States: Lepore’s political history focuses on who was allowed to be part of the process of politics over the years, and on the epistemology of political knowledge as mediated by various sources. Benjamin Franklin's sister, who was never allowed to do the things her brother became famous for, shows up early on to set the tone. I thought making Phyllis Schlafly one of the major figures to emphasize how women’s activism has long been an important political force was a useful choice. I was less impressed by her recent history; if you’re going to say that many of Trump’s supporters aren’t racist (especially after a history structured by slavery and racism), you need to take a moment to define that.
William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: Mostly notable to me for really driving home that when most white Americans talk about what “Americans” believe, they mean “white Americans.” Hitchcock really likes Eisenhower, especially as moral leader of the country, even while acknowledging Eisenhower’s at best grudging acceptance of desegregation-the domestic moral issue of his time.
Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: Thompson's writing is not aging well; he thinks the Hell’s Angels are pathetic and have been made that way by the lack of room in America for anything but a certain square path to acceptable masculinity. But his empathy extends only so far. (Here there’s a lot of rape.) The narrative begins with the Hell’s Angels’ rise to national prominence when two gang rapes were reported at a meetup. Thompson then tells us that one victim was African-American and another was a pregnant white girl, both of which apparently mean that they didn’t get raped. And later, he explains that the charges were dropped, and that they probably consented to the first few men and then freaked out, which both also apparently mean that there was no rape. Later, he asserts that all women secretly are at least curious about what it would be like to be raped, and that it’s easy to convict a man for rape of a lower-class woman because she’s not ashamed to reveal the crime the way an upper-class woman is. Then he says that, though he didn’t see any rapes at his Hell’s Angels hangouts, he did see disturbing behavior, such as multiple men having sex with a woman who was too drunk to stand up. Women also appear in a few other roles, such as his hoity-toity neighbor who was scared by the presence of multiple Hell’s Angels in his apartment/on the sidewalk at all hours, which was silly of her because the one time his guests shot out the windows of his apartment (1) that wasn’t the Hell’s Angels and (2) they didn’t hit anything.
Louis Hyman, Temp: One of the best books I’ve read all year. Hyman tells several interlocking stories about how work has gotten so unstable, focusing on the US but with tendrils all over. One story is about the rise of consulting and how well-paid Harvard men decided that short-term jobs were good, for them and then for others. Another is about the rise of temporary labor including pink-collar and other jobs, especially in Silicon Valley. When you think about high-tech production, he says, you should really think about low-paid women who might well have been pieceworkers, putting together devices in small factories. Relatedly, there’s the story of immigration to supply demand for workers in agriculture, construction, and other physically demanding jobs, first as legal immigration and then formally illegal (though of course the employers were never punished). Together, these stories explain why work no longer works the way the American dream supposedly taught us to believe it did.
Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The horrific story of the young women who painted radium dials for glow-in-the-dark watches that were popular for military and civilian use in the early 20th century. Their bones literally rotted inside their bodies; there are terrible descriptions of infections and jawbones being simply lifted from inside their sore-filled mouths. Their early misdiagnoses were a combination of accident, lack of knowledge, and institutionalized sexism that led doctors and others to take their pain less seriously. Even as the knowledge of radium’s deadly consequences became better known to the companies employing them, the women themselves were kept ignorant, and then told that they should have known better. Eventually, some of the women won small compensatory awards, but it’s hard to see this as a story of triumph despite the stamina that many of them displayed.
Dessa, My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science and Senseless Love: Unsurprisingly, Dessa is a beautiful writer, with small shockingly insightful observations all over. Much of the book is various descriptions of her attempts to fall out of love with her ex, including with biofeedback training, because they loved each other but couldn’t be good for each other. As she says, polyamory wasn’t for her, and perhaps separately she didn’t want to explain it to her family: “although I admire the zero-fucks-given attitude of my radical friends, I give plenty of fucks. I hand them out like perfume samples at the mall, in fact.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.