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Grumpy historical review of Cowboys and Aliens, which was at least as fun for me to read as watching the movie was likely to be, even with Daniel Craig’s ass.
Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind, Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron: Readable account of this canary-in-the-coalmine scandal (though there were plenty of other canaries) about a company that slowly rotted from the beginning while using accounting tricks to make it seem like it was in good shape. The corporate culture of excess was a huge contributor, since people got to spend money on themselves any way they wanted as long as they could “book” results. Another important part was the company’s transition away from building actual things to trading—financial companies in which individuals get performance bonuses, I now think, are inherently parasites; paying for performance, especially paying huge sums for performance, is the best possible way to get accounting fraud. What’s really striking is how relatively small the amounts started compared to the payouts now common on Wall Street: when you get $100,000 for your job, but see someone close to you pulling in $1.5 million, you start to think “how do I get in on that?” and the answer is usually “cook the books.” Enron took it to extremes in every direction, as the book recounts, with pretty readable explanations of the special purpose vehicles used to hide Enron’s losses.
Something I hadn’t picked up last time I read about this: a big part of the immediate bad decisions that combined with the fraud to drive Enron down was its big investment in video-on-demand, which it thought it could make financially rewarding very quickly. But the content owners in Hollywood wouldn’t cut good deals! Quelle surprise.
As I was finishing this book, I was reading the big investor complaint against Bank of America, and one of the amazing things in the complaint was that by 2006 Countrywide’s CEO was internally admitting that they did a terrible job with option ARMs (also known as pick-a-pay, where you were negatively amortizing if you paid the minimum, and most people did), and complaining that the business wasn’t as good for them as it was for World Savings, which supposedly had much higher underwriting standards and did a better job of controlling eligibility. Yeah, not so much. Mozilo didn’t understand that its competition had also, driven by the selling imperative, made exactly the same unsustainable decisions. Basically, Enron didn’t teach anyone in positions of power anything, because they were willing to step on anyone if they got paid big. Without the huge disproportion in compensation between those on the top and those on the bottom, the incentive to subvert controls would have been much smaller; bring back the 90% top rate!
Gregory S. Parks and Matthew W. Hughey eds., 12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today: From the 99-cent Kindle sale. The Publishers Weekly review mentions thematic repetition, which I thought was a big part of the point: a black man can be 18 or 60, have a GED or a Ph.D., a seat in Congress or no job, be a sports star-turned-commentator or an ACLU lawyer working on a racial profiling project, be a father watching his kids at the park, be on foot or in a car or at an airport or in his sister’s apartment, have any ethnic background (Devin Carbado’s piece about his racial naturalization after arrival from England is particularly striking here), have a “cooperative” attitude or an “uncooperative” attitude, and no matter what else he is, he’s subject to police interruption and questioning. The biggest question is how trigger-happy the cops are going to be this time around. Paul Butler has the best laugh-so-you-won’t-cry sentence, “Sometimes, being a scholar of criminal procedure and a black man seems redundant.”
Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin: My husband enjoyed this book as a puzzle—it gives a huge amount of detail about the activities of the man whose legal name was James Earl Ray before he shot King. The question was which one of those details was going to matter to catching him. But that wasn’t enough to keep my attention through all the places Ray went and the laundry he did and the toiletries he bought, and how he swapped the first rifle he bought for the second but then had to get a box jury-rigged for him because the new rifle with the scope on it wouldn’t fit into the original box. There was also some wider context—what King was attempting with the Poor People’s Campaign, how Hoover and Johnson reacted to the assassination, and so on—but ultimately the story at the center didn’t grip me. Ray seems to have been something of a sociopathic cipher, not just to the people he met, many of whom found him unmemorable, but also to Sides, despite the dramatic assassination and escapes he carried out.
Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, & Dru Pagliassotti, Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre: There’s a fair amount of repetition across the essays in this book, which was nonetheless quite useful to me. The ethnographic parts focus on non-Japanese fans, mostly German and American (with some mentions of Korean manhwa and Korean fans), though the bibliography includes some pieces more about Japanese fans specifically. A lot of the contributions talk about the debate over whether BL is feminist/liberating or appropriative of gay men’s lives (or, maybe, both?), but reach the same lack of resolution that similar discussions of slash have—turns out there were active debates on pretty much the same terms among Japanese and Korean fans.
Overall, unsurprisingly, the participants were highly sympathetic to BL and its fans. Spot the contradictions about the genre and its readers in Pagliassotti’s account: “Although write-in choices were generally in accord with stereotypes for the seme (e.g., bad boy, dominance, confidence), the write-in responses included a few strong rejections of the uke stereotype, including the uke’s perceived ‘femininity’ …. This rejection of the uke’s tendency to be assigned stereotypically feminine qualities seems to fit in with Western BL manga readers’ response that they appreciate the subgenre’s freedom from gender stereotypes.” I did like the note that because Japanese laws have traditionally suppressed genital display, “many Japanese BL manga contain scenes in which hands grip blank spaces that spurt liquids or one character penetrates another with emptiness, bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of the absent phallus.” Pagliassotti also, like many of the contributors, talks about BL as “for us by us”: not being present in the narrative doesn’t mean being powerless; indeed we rarely think of mainstream porn as being an expression of women’s power even though women are the focus—as Francesca Coppa says, there’s protection and power in being behind the camera/pen instead of in front of it.
But that leads, of course, to the issue of “nothing about us without us,” the objection of some gay men to slash/yaoi, and the validity of the common response, “well, it’s not really about you” in a world in which some people—including some young gay men--may take their expectations of how gay men should behave from slash/yaoi. Mark John Isola’s contribution is probably the best discussion of these questions, and their airing in the BL community, in the volume.
Alexis Hall investigates the standards for “realism” applied by Western fans to yaoi, concluding that their definitions often focus on coming out and embracing a gay identity/experiencing discrimination, even though that is not a universal for gay men in Japan or even in the US. She notes that Western fans often defer to Western gay men as arbiters of “realness,” privileging sexual identity over national identity (so realism/accuracy is not judged by asking Japanese women about it). American audiences thus read both ethnocentrically (assuming a universal gay identity) and exotifyingly (enjoying the otherness/difference of Japanese culture). But she sees potential too in BL’s cross-cultural influences and readers’ understanding that what seems natural may be encultured.
Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind, Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron: Readable account of this canary-in-the-coalmine scandal (though there were plenty of other canaries) about a company that slowly rotted from the beginning while using accounting tricks to make it seem like it was in good shape. The corporate culture of excess was a huge contributor, since people got to spend money on themselves any way they wanted as long as they could “book” results. Another important part was the company’s transition away from building actual things to trading—financial companies in which individuals get performance bonuses, I now think, are inherently parasites; paying for performance, especially paying huge sums for performance, is the best possible way to get accounting fraud. What’s really striking is how relatively small the amounts started compared to the payouts now common on Wall Street: when you get $100,000 for your job, but see someone close to you pulling in $1.5 million, you start to think “how do I get in on that?” and the answer is usually “cook the books.” Enron took it to extremes in every direction, as the book recounts, with pretty readable explanations of the special purpose vehicles used to hide Enron’s losses.
Something I hadn’t picked up last time I read about this: a big part of the immediate bad decisions that combined with the fraud to drive Enron down was its big investment in video-on-demand, which it thought it could make financially rewarding very quickly. But the content owners in Hollywood wouldn’t cut good deals! Quelle surprise.
As I was finishing this book, I was reading the big investor complaint against Bank of America, and one of the amazing things in the complaint was that by 2006 Countrywide’s CEO was internally admitting that they did a terrible job with option ARMs (also known as pick-a-pay, where you were negatively amortizing if you paid the minimum, and most people did), and complaining that the business wasn’t as good for them as it was for World Savings, which supposedly had much higher underwriting standards and did a better job of controlling eligibility. Yeah, not so much. Mozilo didn’t understand that its competition had also, driven by the selling imperative, made exactly the same unsustainable decisions. Basically, Enron didn’t teach anyone in positions of power anything, because they were willing to step on anyone if they got paid big. Without the huge disproportion in compensation between those on the top and those on the bottom, the incentive to subvert controls would have been much smaller; bring back the 90% top rate!
Gregory S. Parks and Matthew W. Hughey eds., 12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today: From the 99-cent Kindle sale. The Publishers Weekly review mentions thematic repetition, which I thought was a big part of the point: a black man can be 18 or 60, have a GED or a Ph.D., a seat in Congress or no job, be a sports star-turned-commentator or an ACLU lawyer working on a racial profiling project, be a father watching his kids at the park, be on foot or in a car or at an airport or in his sister’s apartment, have any ethnic background (Devin Carbado’s piece about his racial naturalization after arrival from England is particularly striking here), have a “cooperative” attitude or an “uncooperative” attitude, and no matter what else he is, he’s subject to police interruption and questioning. The biggest question is how trigger-happy the cops are going to be this time around. Paul Butler has the best laugh-so-you-won’t-cry sentence, “Sometimes, being a scholar of criminal procedure and a black man seems redundant.”
Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin: My husband enjoyed this book as a puzzle—it gives a huge amount of detail about the activities of the man whose legal name was James Earl Ray before he shot King. The question was which one of those details was going to matter to catching him. But that wasn’t enough to keep my attention through all the places Ray went and the laundry he did and the toiletries he bought, and how he swapped the first rifle he bought for the second but then had to get a box jury-rigged for him because the new rifle with the scope on it wouldn’t fit into the original box. There was also some wider context—what King was attempting with the Poor People’s Campaign, how Hoover and Johnson reacted to the assassination, and so on—but ultimately the story at the center didn’t grip me. Ray seems to have been something of a sociopathic cipher, not just to the people he met, many of whom found him unmemorable, but also to Sides, despite the dramatic assassination and escapes he carried out.
Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, & Dru Pagliassotti, Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre: There’s a fair amount of repetition across the essays in this book, which was nonetheless quite useful to me. The ethnographic parts focus on non-Japanese fans, mostly German and American (with some mentions of Korean manhwa and Korean fans), though the bibliography includes some pieces more about Japanese fans specifically. A lot of the contributions talk about the debate over whether BL is feminist/liberating or appropriative of gay men’s lives (or, maybe, both?), but reach the same lack of resolution that similar discussions of slash have—turns out there were active debates on pretty much the same terms among Japanese and Korean fans.
Overall, unsurprisingly, the participants were highly sympathetic to BL and its fans. Spot the contradictions about the genre and its readers in Pagliassotti’s account: “Although write-in choices were generally in accord with stereotypes for the seme (e.g., bad boy, dominance, confidence), the write-in responses included a few strong rejections of the uke stereotype, including the uke’s perceived ‘femininity’ …. This rejection of the uke’s tendency to be assigned stereotypically feminine qualities seems to fit in with Western BL manga readers’ response that they appreciate the subgenre’s freedom from gender stereotypes.” I did like the note that because Japanese laws have traditionally suppressed genital display, “many Japanese BL manga contain scenes in which hands grip blank spaces that spurt liquids or one character penetrates another with emptiness, bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of the absent phallus.” Pagliassotti also, like many of the contributors, talks about BL as “for us by us”: not being present in the narrative doesn’t mean being powerless; indeed we rarely think of mainstream porn as being an expression of women’s power even though women are the focus—as Francesca Coppa says, there’s protection and power in being behind the camera/pen instead of in front of it.
But that leads, of course, to the issue of “nothing about us without us,” the objection of some gay men to slash/yaoi, and the validity of the common response, “well, it’s not really about you” in a world in which some people—including some young gay men--may take their expectations of how gay men should behave from slash/yaoi. Mark John Isola’s contribution is probably the best discussion of these questions, and their airing in the BL community, in the volume.
Alexis Hall investigates the standards for “realism” applied by Western fans to yaoi, concluding that their definitions often focus on coming out and embracing a gay identity/experiencing discrimination, even though that is not a universal for gay men in Japan or even in the US. She notes that Western fans often defer to Western gay men as arbiters of “realness,” privileging sexual identity over national identity (so realism/accuracy is not judged by asking Japanese women about it). American audiences thus read both ethnocentrically (assuming a universal gay identity) and exotifyingly (enjoying the otherness/difference of Japanese culture). But she sees potential too in BL’s cross-cultural influences and readers’ understanding that what seems natural may be encultured.