Giveaway, thanks and books
Free to good home: Nearly complete set of videotapes of the X-Files, seasons 1-8, medium quality. Otherwise, they're probably going to be thrown out rather than wasting the space and carting them to Virginia. I also have tapes of S6 & 7 Buffy.
Yesterday, I had fries and chocolate mousse with two of the lovely women who welcomed me to fandom, long ago and far away. It was wonderful to meet two people who'd been so generous to me when I was a wee cowering fangirl. I remain amazed by the generosity of spirit and time to be found in fandom, not to mention expertise on a variety of topics.
Also, this weekend I read the novel of a friend of mine. Though I don't read death penalty books, I made an exception for his story of law, love, and the bargains we make in the shadow of both. My favorite quote comes from a hideous senior partner's reflections on the uselessness and simultaneous necessity of summer associates, law students hired to be wined and dined in an attempt to convince them that life as a real associate at the firm will be a permanent vacation. Their inexperience means that their work can't be trusted and certainly can't be billed to clients, so pro bono work (free legal representation for people who can't afford to pay) is the perfect solution. It makes them think the firm believes in public service; satisfies the firm's ethical obligations to provide pro bono services to the community; and gives them false hopes about the kind of work they'll be doing. And pro bono death penalty work - well, here's the quote: "Death penalty cases were ideal for these purposes, something the kids could get really excited about. Each summer had one, like a class project or a hamster brought in to delight kindergartners. Like kindergarten projects, the cases typically amounted to little, and like hamsters, the prisoners usually ended up dead." Watch this space for announcements when it's published.
Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: This is a history of the slow but generally untroubled development of the Oxford English Dictionary (not the Cambridge English Dictionary because Cambridge turned down the project early on, a decision it perhaps regrets), padded with a first chapter reviewing the history of English and full of short biographical sketches of people connected with the OED. Best description: one man was an avid hunter and good shot; the footnote corrects that to reasonably good shot, because he blew off his own hand one day. The OED was such a useful project that even an annoying head, who ignored it for so long that contributors grew weary and their strips of paper containing examples of how words were used in literature from the tenth century on were scattered around the world, couldn't derail it in the long run. Winchester's earlier The Professor and the Madman, focusing on two of the most colorful characters in the story (summarized briefly in this book, too), is more interesting, but if you have an interest in linguistic history, the book is short enough to be plausible.
John C. Tucker, Trial and Error: The Education of a Courtroom Lawyer: Tucker is a former partner at Jenner and Block, a large Chicago firm. His descriptions of trials involving Daley and patronage, the Chicago Seven/Eight, Mohammad Ali, housing discrimination, the Mafia, and other cases including a murder case with real courtroom pyrotechnics leading to an acquittal for his client, are workmanlike but not terrifically compelling, though I did like his description of a judge who wanted a case tried quickly "instead of spending the next year watching the parties masturbate over discovery disputes and pretrial motions."
Katherine Frank, G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire: The author worked as an exotic dancer for several years as part of her research. Her initial project was to study women who worked as dancers (she started out, like me, as an anti-pornography feminist college student), but found herself part of the tendency to "study down," that is, investigate groups with less social power. Women are assumed to strip because they have backgrounds of abuse, exhibitionism, or other disadvantage, but no one asks why the men are there watching them. Are they damaged? Is it an individual pathology or preference or is it a response to social/political circumstances? Studying male customers is a way to counteract the view that it's women's participation that is the "problem" to be explained. She mixes ethnography based on interviews with regulars and fiction she wrote while stripping for a different perspective. Really interesting parts included her discussions of how fantasies, not sex, are what the men are after; of the question of danger or perceived danger and its relation to strip clubs' ultimate safety, a sort of Disneyfication of sexual display (one interviewee says he was worried about showing up for the interview: "'Who knows?' he said. 'I've heard of men being robbed and killed this way.' (At Starbucks? I was tempted to ask.)"); of homosociality and the difference between single male customers and men in groups; of the touristic gaze and its relationship to authenticity; customers' demands for "realness" more than for the real and their desire to believe that the women didn't pay attention to them just for the money, because they were the special ones; and of their belief in their own fidelity because they were just looking. The book is sympathetic but not celebratory, and a good example of how theory can be used to clarify rather than to obscure.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed and The Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed: I was never taught grammar in any systematic way; I know the parts of speech because of Schoolhouse Rock. I was, however, taught how to punctuate, so the first book was much more informative than the second. What's really fun about these, though, is the examples. The sentences used to illustrate various principles are creepy and charming, often at the same time, hinting at bizarrities that would be at home in a Lovecraft story. The book on sentences was worth it for one example, which I am surely going to appropriate for myself: "Pain stood in the way like a sheet of glass: you could walk through it, but not without a certain noise." Now that's a fantastic figure of speech.
Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies: This book was recommended to me as an example of a good business book, and I can see why. The stories are detailed enough to seem useful, and the advice is both clearly and compellingly presented. The most interesting part for me was the repeated discussion of the way that only small can succeed; big companies have to subdivide if they are to be successful, and economies of scale are often not economical in the long run. You could go all evolutionary-psychologist and suggest that human beings aren't wired to deal with more than a few hundred people, but, whatever the explanation, it does seem that businesses work best when their employees share an ethos, and it's easier to share an ethos with your work group than with thousands of other employees. Thus, low-level autonomy and even competition - which can too easily be seen as redundancy to be eliminated in the name of cost savings -- form the bedrock of Peters and Waterman's recommendations.
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader: geekturnedvamp gave this to me when she noticed that the labels on our books were of two types - one, of books Z. cataloged before we merged our books, has only his initials, while the other has both sets. (Library of Congress cataloging; the Dewey Decimal system is a halfway measure if you're going to organize your private library systematically.) The first essay is about the level of marital commitment required for two serious readers to merge libraries, especially when they have slightly different beliefs about books. For example, Z. buys books for reference purposes; he'll pull one down and use the index to find the pages he needs, then return it to the shelf - which, because of LoC categories, often contains other books on point, in case he needs more. This practice helps him write lectures and brush up on things he doesn't know offhand. I, on the other hand, think that putting a book on the shelf generally requires reading it, at least if it doesn't annoy me so much that I can't make myself finish it - and those tend to get given away rather than added to the collection. (I'm possibly the only person I know who's actually read Bowling Alone cover-to-cover - which is not, by the way, really necessary; quick summaries do plenty of justice to Putnam's thesis about growing American social isolation. Perhaps that's an argument for Z.'s approach. But, damnit, I bought it and I read it.) We'd been married for several years before I joined up and left mere alphabetization by author's last name behind, though I did insist that we extract fiction from the LoC system, because the LoC system divides books by author's country of origin, century of birth, and only then last name. Pure last-name organization seems a lot more useful to me for a private collection. And Fadiman was right that merging libraries was a major step in really being married for us. Anyway, Fadiman's slim volume touches on other aspects of the pleasures of reading, including finding obscure vocabulary words (my current favorite: cladistic, used in the Robert Sawyer book I'm reading) and whether one's relationship to books is chaste and respectful or sensual and abusive. She argues, and I agree, that both involve deep love, even if the latter tends to put a lot of stress on a well-read volume. With respect to nonfiction, I'm an underliner -- though I never dog-ear any more -- while Z. prefers to limit his interventions to marginalia, and many of my sf/fantasy favorites are more than a little swelled and cover-impaired from my adventures in reading in the bathtub. This isn't a book for anyone who doesn't have a slightly obsessive regard for books and who doesn't occasionally just look at her overladen bookshelves and sigh in satisfaction.
Yesterday, I had fries and chocolate mousse with two of the lovely women who welcomed me to fandom, long ago and far away. It was wonderful to meet two people who'd been so generous to me when I was a wee cowering fangirl. I remain amazed by the generosity of spirit and time to be found in fandom, not to mention expertise on a variety of topics.
Also, this weekend I read the novel of a friend of mine. Though I don't read death penalty books, I made an exception for his story of law, love, and the bargains we make in the shadow of both. My favorite quote comes from a hideous senior partner's reflections on the uselessness and simultaneous necessity of summer associates, law students hired to be wined and dined in an attempt to convince them that life as a real associate at the firm will be a permanent vacation. Their inexperience means that their work can't be trusted and certainly can't be billed to clients, so pro bono work (free legal representation for people who can't afford to pay) is the perfect solution. It makes them think the firm believes in public service; satisfies the firm's ethical obligations to provide pro bono services to the community; and gives them false hopes about the kind of work they'll be doing. And pro bono death penalty work - well, here's the quote: "Death penalty cases were ideal for these purposes, something the kids could get really excited about. Each summer had one, like a class project or a hamster brought in to delight kindergartners. Like kindergarten projects, the cases typically amounted to little, and like hamsters, the prisoners usually ended up dead." Watch this space for announcements when it's published.
Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: This is a history of the slow but generally untroubled development of the Oxford English Dictionary (not the Cambridge English Dictionary because Cambridge turned down the project early on, a decision it perhaps regrets), padded with a first chapter reviewing the history of English and full of short biographical sketches of people connected with the OED. Best description: one man was an avid hunter and good shot; the footnote corrects that to reasonably good shot, because he blew off his own hand one day. The OED was such a useful project that even an annoying head, who ignored it for so long that contributors grew weary and their strips of paper containing examples of how words were used in literature from the tenth century on were scattered around the world, couldn't derail it in the long run. Winchester's earlier The Professor and the Madman, focusing on two of the most colorful characters in the story (summarized briefly in this book, too), is more interesting, but if you have an interest in linguistic history, the book is short enough to be plausible.
John C. Tucker, Trial and Error: The Education of a Courtroom Lawyer: Tucker is a former partner at Jenner and Block, a large Chicago firm. His descriptions of trials involving Daley and patronage, the Chicago Seven/Eight, Mohammad Ali, housing discrimination, the Mafia, and other cases including a murder case with real courtroom pyrotechnics leading to an acquittal for his client, are workmanlike but not terrifically compelling, though I did like his description of a judge who wanted a case tried quickly "instead of spending the next year watching the parties masturbate over discovery disputes and pretrial motions."
Katherine Frank, G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire: The author worked as an exotic dancer for several years as part of her research. Her initial project was to study women who worked as dancers (she started out, like me, as an anti-pornography feminist college student), but found herself part of the tendency to "study down," that is, investigate groups with less social power. Women are assumed to strip because they have backgrounds of abuse, exhibitionism, or other disadvantage, but no one asks why the men are there watching them. Are they damaged? Is it an individual pathology or preference or is it a response to social/political circumstances? Studying male customers is a way to counteract the view that it's women's participation that is the "problem" to be explained. She mixes ethnography based on interviews with regulars and fiction she wrote while stripping for a different perspective. Really interesting parts included her discussions of how fantasies, not sex, are what the men are after; of the question of danger or perceived danger and its relation to strip clubs' ultimate safety, a sort of Disneyfication of sexual display (one interviewee says he was worried about showing up for the interview: "'Who knows?' he said. 'I've heard of men being robbed and killed this way.' (At Starbucks? I was tempted to ask.)"); of homosociality and the difference between single male customers and men in groups; of the touristic gaze and its relationship to authenticity; customers' demands for "realness" more than for the real and their desire to believe that the women didn't pay attention to them just for the money, because they were the special ones; and of their belief in their own fidelity because they were just looking. The book is sympathetic but not celebratory, and a good example of how theory can be used to clarify rather than to obscure.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed and The Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed: I was never taught grammar in any systematic way; I know the parts of speech because of Schoolhouse Rock. I was, however, taught how to punctuate, so the first book was much more informative than the second. What's really fun about these, though, is the examples. The sentences used to illustrate various principles are creepy and charming, often at the same time, hinting at bizarrities that would be at home in a Lovecraft story. The book on sentences was worth it for one example, which I am surely going to appropriate for myself: "Pain stood in the way like a sheet of glass: you could walk through it, but not without a certain noise." Now that's a fantastic figure of speech.
Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies: This book was recommended to me as an example of a good business book, and I can see why. The stories are detailed enough to seem useful, and the advice is both clearly and compellingly presented. The most interesting part for me was the repeated discussion of the way that only small can succeed; big companies have to subdivide if they are to be successful, and economies of scale are often not economical in the long run. You could go all evolutionary-psychologist and suggest that human beings aren't wired to deal with more than a few hundred people, but, whatever the explanation, it does seem that businesses work best when their employees share an ethos, and it's easier to share an ethos with your work group than with thousands of other employees. Thus, low-level autonomy and even competition - which can too easily be seen as redundancy to be eliminated in the name of cost savings -- form the bedrock of Peters and Waterman's recommendations.
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader: geekturnedvamp gave this to me when she noticed that the labels on our books were of two types - one, of books Z. cataloged before we merged our books, has only his initials, while the other has both sets. (Library of Congress cataloging; the Dewey Decimal system is a halfway measure if you're going to organize your private library systematically.) The first essay is about the level of marital commitment required for two serious readers to merge libraries, especially when they have slightly different beliefs about books. For example, Z. buys books for reference purposes; he'll pull one down and use the index to find the pages he needs, then return it to the shelf - which, because of LoC categories, often contains other books on point, in case he needs more. This practice helps him write lectures and brush up on things he doesn't know offhand. I, on the other hand, think that putting a book on the shelf generally requires reading it, at least if it doesn't annoy me so much that I can't make myself finish it - and those tend to get given away rather than added to the collection. (I'm possibly the only person I know who's actually read Bowling Alone cover-to-cover - which is not, by the way, really necessary; quick summaries do plenty of justice to Putnam's thesis about growing American social isolation. Perhaps that's an argument for Z.'s approach. But, damnit, I bought it and I read it.) We'd been married for several years before I joined up and left mere alphabetization by author's last name behind, though I did insist that we extract fiction from the LoC system, because the LoC system divides books by author's country of origin, century of birth, and only then last name. Pure last-name organization seems a lot more useful to me for a private collection. And Fadiman was right that merging libraries was a major step in really being married for us. Anyway, Fadiman's slim volume touches on other aspects of the pleasures of reading, including finding obscure vocabulary words (my current favorite: cladistic, used in the Robert Sawyer book I'm reading) and whether one's relationship to books is chaste and respectful or sensual and abusive. She argues, and I agree, that both involve deep love, even if the latter tends to put a lot of stress on a well-read volume. With respect to nonfiction, I'm an underliner -- though I never dog-ear any more -- while Z. prefers to limit his interventions to marginalia, and many of my sf/fantasy favorites are more than a little swelled and cover-impaired from my adventures in reading in the bathtub. This isn't a book for anyone who doesn't have a slightly obsessive regard for books and who doesn't occasionally just look at her overladen bookshelves and sigh in satisfaction.