Nonfiction
Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans: Brooker's a good, clear writer and this book is a lot of fun, even if it lacks an easily articulable theoretical point. If anything, it serves to remind me that fandom is broad; he points out that most people who identify as Star Wars fans don't like slash, which the academic literature might have obscured. The chapters on fan films versus fan fiction contrast well, especially as it's so clear that George Lucas is more comfortable with the films (male-dominated, effects-heavy) than with the fiction (women/relationships). The most useful point to me was his discussion of slash and authorized novels as undertaking the same basic type of work: both are extrapolating from the main text, filling in, saying more. Slash isn't alone in looking for subtext, it's just a particular type of extrapolation. That's not to say that slash and authorized novels are the same, but the difference is not that slash is about subtext.
Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism: This book is a collection of pieces from the early 90s, mostly about international trade and how the popular conception of "competitiveness" was (and remains) deeply misguided. Krugman's a free trader, and he doesn't hesitate to say that, but his aim is to explain why classical economics favors free trade and how the concept of comparative advantage demonstrates that everyone can gain from trade even if one trading partner is more productive in every sector. He says that he learned that economists weren't explaining themselves in clear enough language to compete with the "a nation is like a business competing with other businesses" rhetoric that persuaded noneconomists; these pieces haven't yet mastered the art of simplifying without distorting. He is good at pointing out that nations don't go bankrupt (though one has to wonder about some African "states" that aren't performing basic governance functions), so the business comparison is wrong from the get-go. And his statistics on the relatively small size of international trade compared to domestic, even in a "global economy," are eye-opening. But: "[A] rich country trading with a poor country will export skill-intensive goods (because it has a comparative abundance of skilled workers) and import labor-intensive products. As a result of this trade, production in the rich country will shift toward skill-intensive sectors ... [which ] raises the demand for skilled workers and reduces that for unskilled workers." So far, so good. But then "a rising relative wage for skilled workers leads all industries to employ a lower ratio of skilled to unskilled workers. Indeed, this reduction is the only way the economy can shift production toward skill-intensive sectors while keeping the overall mix of workers constant." [emphasis added] This is true but far from obvious; you need to be comfortable with ratios to demonstrate it to yourself. Krugman does better these days in his newspaper columns, I think. As it is, this book is mostly of interest as documentation of free-trade and less free-trade thinking of the early 90s.
George Orwell, An Age Like This: 1920-1940, Essays, Journalism & Letters Vol. 1: Although a lot of the writing has lost relevance for us today - reviews of obscure Socialist books, for example - there are still plenty of gems in this collection. "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." "[F]or my part I like a florid style: if your motto is 'Cut out the adjectives', why not go a bit further and resort to a system of grunts and squeals, like the animals?" "What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one."
His observations about class - the inherent indignity and extra expense involved in waiting to be paid a week's wages as opposed to having one's salary deposited in the bank, and how that affects attitudes towards the rest of life, for example - remain powerful. Also: "I do not believe that a man with [50,000 pounds] a year and a man with fifteen shillings a week either can, or will, co-operate. The nature of their relationship is, quite simply, that one is robbing the other, and there is no reason to think that the robber will suddenly turn over a new leaf."
Sometimes, his literary and political views merge in delightful ways, as in his discussion of Dickens: "It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful. ... [Dickens] is rather ignorant. ... He has no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love, ambition, avarice, vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write, about, however, is work." (I'm reminded of why I used to like The West Wing -- unlike so much TV drama, it was about something, something more important than individual love affairs. That's also why I tend to prefer sf to "non-genre" TV and novels; even when relationships are central, there are bigger things at stake.) He compares Henry Miller's attitude of acceptance of everything life has to offer with Walt Whitman's, then makes the point that the attitude means a very different thing in the 1930s. "To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but those things among others." (NB: Bedaux was a Taylorist whose time-and-motion rationalizations revolutionized British industry.) He likes Auden's Spain (rather more than Auden ultimately did, I take it), but cautions, "notice the phrase 'necessary murder'. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. ... Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled."
Orwell's casual anti-Semitism and pacificism in the face of the Nazi threat are harder to take; he believed that war would end with the collapse of socialism/democracy and that fighting would only make Britain like Germany. At some point I'd like to read the next volume to see what he later says about his prewar beliefs.
Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism: This book is a collection of pieces from the early 90s, mostly about international trade and how the popular conception of "competitiveness" was (and remains) deeply misguided. Krugman's a free trader, and he doesn't hesitate to say that, but his aim is to explain why classical economics favors free trade and how the concept of comparative advantage demonstrates that everyone can gain from trade even if one trading partner is more productive in every sector. He says that he learned that economists weren't explaining themselves in clear enough language to compete with the "a nation is like a business competing with other businesses" rhetoric that persuaded noneconomists; these pieces haven't yet mastered the art of simplifying without distorting. He is good at pointing out that nations don't go bankrupt (though one has to wonder about some African "states" that aren't performing basic governance functions), so the business comparison is wrong from the get-go. And his statistics on the relatively small size of international trade compared to domestic, even in a "global economy," are eye-opening. But: "[A] rich country trading with a poor country will export skill-intensive goods (because it has a comparative abundance of skilled workers) and import labor-intensive products. As a result of this trade, production in the rich country will shift toward skill-intensive sectors ... [which ] raises the demand for skilled workers and reduces that for unskilled workers." So far, so good. But then "a rising relative wage for skilled workers leads all industries to employ a lower ratio of skilled to unskilled workers. Indeed, this reduction is the only way the economy can shift production toward skill-intensive sectors while keeping the overall mix of workers constant." [emphasis added] This is true but far from obvious; you need to be comfortable with ratios to demonstrate it to yourself. Krugman does better these days in his newspaper columns, I think. As it is, this book is mostly of interest as documentation of free-trade and less free-trade thinking of the early 90s.
George Orwell, An Age Like This: 1920-1940, Essays, Journalism & Letters Vol. 1: Although a lot of the writing has lost relevance for us today - reviews of obscure Socialist books, for example - there are still plenty of gems in this collection. "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." "[F]or my part I like a florid style: if your motto is 'Cut out the adjectives', why not go a bit further and resort to a system of grunts and squeals, like the animals?" "What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one."
His observations about class - the inherent indignity and extra expense involved in waiting to be paid a week's wages as opposed to having one's salary deposited in the bank, and how that affects attitudes towards the rest of life, for example - remain powerful. Also: "I do not believe that a man with [50,000 pounds] a year and a man with fifteen shillings a week either can, or will, co-operate. The nature of their relationship is, quite simply, that one is robbing the other, and there is no reason to think that the robber will suddenly turn over a new leaf."
Sometimes, his literary and political views merge in delightful ways, as in his discussion of Dickens: "It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful. ... [Dickens] is rather ignorant. ... He has no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love, ambition, avarice, vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write, about, however, is work." (I'm reminded of why I used to like The West Wing -- unlike so much TV drama, it was about something, something more important than individual love affairs. That's also why I tend to prefer sf to "non-genre" TV and novels; even when relationships are central, there are bigger things at stake.) He compares Henry Miller's attitude of acceptance of everything life has to offer with Walt Whitman's, then makes the point that the attitude means a very different thing in the 1930s. "To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but those things among others." (NB: Bedaux was a Taylorist whose time-and-motion rationalizations revolutionized British industry.) He likes Auden's Spain (rather more than Auden ultimately did, I take it), but cautions, "notice the phrase 'necessary murder'. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. ... Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled."
Orwell's casual anti-Semitism and pacificism in the face of the Nazi threat are harder to take; he believed that war would end with the collapse of socialism/democracy and that fighting would only make Britain like Germany. At some point I'd like to read the next volume to see what he later says about his prewar beliefs.