Odd nonfiction reviews
Joshua Mark Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Mediation in the Consumption Junction: This Ph.D. dissertation offers a useful addition to existing histories of the VCR, focusing on the people who reinterpreted the VCR from time-shifting device (about controlling TV) to movie-viewing device (about experiencing movies at home), with profound consequences for the structure and size of the video industry. Greenberg’s writing is mercifully clear and engaging. While I found that the reiterations that technological practices only exist in their social contexts eventually got repetitive, that point is well worth making. The chapters most of interest to me were the earliest, about the videophiles who gathered to make tapes for one another and to tinker. Greenberg points out that they experienced a sort of “authorship” when they struggled to make the best possible copies and to edit out commercials from programs recorded off the air. They were destroyed by their own success, as VCRs went from techie toys to consumer commodities. The rest of the story, in which mom and pop rental stores developed to package video rental as a type of moviegoing experience and then were displaced by big chains, is important as well. Multiple interviews help Greenberg convey a sense of what the various environments were like, from buffs’ living rooms to the little stores where a generation of clerks absorbed the film history that many hoped to parlay into Quentin Tarantinohood.
Susan Orleans, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: This is a collection of short (and a few short-short) pieces Orleans wrote about people who caught her attention, from an average ten-year-old child to an MTV VJ to three Bulgarian tennis star sisters. Her technique is to observe rather than to comment; she’s just as nonjudgmental about the Tonya Harding fan club as she is about the Manhattan birthday parties for three-year-olds involving cakes shaped like miniature Tudor castles and helicopters landing on the lawn. Orleans is, I suppose, a good observer, but I figured out by the end that these pieces left me cold for the same reason that I prefer “genre” fiction - I prefer strong plots that seize the characters, transform them with extraordinary events, and speak of something larger than life, and random people-watching is the opposite of that. Every profile seemed like it could have ended a paragraph before it did, or after, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because Orleans was telling the story of a life not as it is normally recounted, as a narrative, but as it’s really lived, incomplete and meandering.
Shelby Anne Wolf & Shirley Brice Heath, The Braid of Literature: Children’s Worlds of Reading: Well. This was different. It’s a study based around the experiences of two children (offspring of one of the authors) as they became literate, exploring how children - at least children of a particular race, time, and class - use literature for pleasure and for problem-solving. The girls integrated what they’d read into their play, their conversations, and so on, producing responses to new situations by referring to earlier stories, predicting outcomes by reasoning from the tropes they knew, etc. As a demonstration that texts are neither read nor reread in isolation and that they influence later experiences, it’s pretty convincing; the trouble is that I knew that all along. I got nothing from the book, though I may have missed a lot given that I skimmed over most of the specific examples taken from life. The book is better summarized by its epigraph: “Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.” (Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 1925)
Richard Posner, Overcoming Deadlock: Gosh, Judge Posner writes a lot. This time, he defends the outcome in Bush v. Gore as necessary to political stability and general fairness. There’s a lot of detail here that is overwhelming unless you really, really want to know specifics of the recount and the legal arguments about the relevant Florida law. I think Posner does a worse job than usual in picking sides based on substantive preferences (which he’s quite right to say everybody in the legal world did, too) - for example, he says that Bush is a legitimate president because Americans have short memories so the uncertainty surrounding the Florida vote had no lasting repercussions -- oddly, he makes no mention of Sept. 11, which certainly affected how people saw Bush -- then quickly says that a decision allowing a full recount would have threatened the legitimacy of President Gore, because the period of uncertainty would have lasted a month longer. That’s possible, but like many of Posner’s favorite economic arguments, it has a distinctly just-so flavor about it. (My father thinks that Gore would have been impeached over Sept. 11, whereas Bush wasn’t blamed at all; in that sense, the Florida debacle would have affected reactions to Sept. 11 regardless of who was inaugurated, but differently.) Overall, my reaction was: this is weird. Why does he take time out to defend Korematsu v. US, the infamous Japanese internment case? Why does he think he’s an exception to the tendency in the legal professoriate that he so harshly criticizes, of thinking ourselves experts on every topic because we’ve got an appointment at a law school? (Again borrowing from my father, this is the “Lawyer as Astrophysicist” problem.) Posner has actually defended himself on this very count in his guise as guest blogger at Larry Lessig’s blog, and he does a decent job of convincing me that he can spot problems in experts’ arguments by thinking carefully about what they’re saying, but I’m still skeptical about his positive pronouncements. Posner’s the smartest kid in the room, as usual, but for all his defense of pragmatism in judging, he doesn’t seem to have much sense of his own limits as he goes from statistics to political science to critiquing journalism.
Susan Orleans, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: This is a collection of short (and a few short-short) pieces Orleans wrote about people who caught her attention, from an average ten-year-old child to an MTV VJ to three Bulgarian tennis star sisters. Her technique is to observe rather than to comment; she’s just as nonjudgmental about the Tonya Harding fan club as she is about the Manhattan birthday parties for three-year-olds involving cakes shaped like miniature Tudor castles and helicopters landing on the lawn. Orleans is, I suppose, a good observer, but I figured out by the end that these pieces left me cold for the same reason that I prefer “genre” fiction - I prefer strong plots that seize the characters, transform them with extraordinary events, and speak of something larger than life, and random people-watching is the opposite of that. Every profile seemed like it could have ended a paragraph before it did, or after, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because Orleans was telling the story of a life not as it is normally recounted, as a narrative, but as it’s really lived, incomplete and meandering.
Shelby Anne Wolf & Shirley Brice Heath, The Braid of Literature: Children’s Worlds of Reading: Well. This was different. It’s a study based around the experiences of two children (offspring of one of the authors) as they became literate, exploring how children - at least children of a particular race, time, and class - use literature for pleasure and for problem-solving. The girls integrated what they’d read into their play, their conversations, and so on, producing responses to new situations by referring to earlier stories, predicting outcomes by reasoning from the tropes they knew, etc. As a demonstration that texts are neither read nor reread in isolation and that they influence later experiences, it’s pretty convincing; the trouble is that I knew that all along. I got nothing from the book, though I may have missed a lot given that I skimmed over most of the specific examples taken from life. The book is better summarized by its epigraph: “Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.” (Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 1925)
Richard Posner, Overcoming Deadlock: Gosh, Judge Posner writes a lot. This time, he defends the outcome in Bush v. Gore as necessary to political stability and general fairness. There’s a lot of detail here that is overwhelming unless you really, really want to know specifics of the recount and the legal arguments about the relevant Florida law. I think Posner does a worse job than usual in picking sides based on substantive preferences (which he’s quite right to say everybody in the legal world did, too) - for example, he says that Bush is a legitimate president because Americans have short memories so the uncertainty surrounding the Florida vote had no lasting repercussions -- oddly, he makes no mention of Sept. 11, which certainly affected how people saw Bush -- then quickly says that a decision allowing a full recount would have threatened the legitimacy of President Gore, because the period of uncertainty would have lasted a month longer. That’s possible, but like many of Posner’s favorite economic arguments, it has a distinctly just-so flavor about it. (My father thinks that Gore would have been impeached over Sept. 11, whereas Bush wasn’t blamed at all; in that sense, the Florida debacle would have affected reactions to Sept. 11 regardless of who was inaugurated, but differently.) Overall, my reaction was: this is weird. Why does he take time out to defend Korematsu v. US, the infamous Japanese internment case? Why does he think he’s an exception to the tendency in the legal professoriate that he so harshly criticizes, of thinking ourselves experts on every topic because we’ve got an appointment at a law school? (Again borrowing from my father, this is the “Lawyer as Astrophysicist” problem.) Posner has actually defended himself on this very count in his guise as guest blogger at Larry Lessig’s blog, and he does a decent job of convincing me that he can spot problems in experts’ arguments by thinking carefully about what they’re saying, but I’m still skeptical about his positive pronouncements. Posner’s the smartest kid in the room, as usual, but for all his defense of pragmatism in judging, he doesn’t seem to have much sense of his own limits as he goes from statistics to political science to critiquing journalism.