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Books & sundries
Slate has a letter from Rose Wilder Lane to Laura Ingalls Wilder about the Little House books, and it’s amazing.
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?: Important problem, terrible solution. Lanier notes that many people are increasingly providing free content to large online services, at the same time as many traditional jobs are being destroyed or their conditions becoming immiserated. Proposed solution: everyone should be entitled to micropayments for their online contributions, which would be I guess netted out at regular intervals (he doesn’t really say). I am befuddled by his theory that you can have monetized microproperty rights without government involvement. He criticizes libertarians and then reenacts them. His micropayment idea explicitly disparages government, when only an unwaivable, inalienable right would get the job done that he wants done (and at that point we should have a guaranteed basic income instead; why should your financial well being depend on whether you entertain others?). He says that in his world, instead of government mandates, lawyers would come in and renegotiate deals on behalf of ordinary users to protect their microinterests, as if lawyers hadn't already tried! Many times! And lost, because unless a contract term is unlawful it is enforceable. Perhaps relatedly, his treatment of the mortgage crisis is ridiculous; he argues that it was caused by the same speeded up information flow as that which produced Google/inability to control one’s own information. But the crash wasn't a crisis of lack of transparent information about who had your mortgage, something that wasn't under the borrower's control anyway. He's a very smart dude who thinks his intelligence makes him an expert in anything, and he is doing nothing to dispel my impression of white guys who have dreadlocks.
Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: Modern American upper-class (you could say upper-middle class, but I think that’s misleading except as to self-concept) parenting, with its multiple stresses as well as its sources of fulfillment. Basically, Senior argues, we’ve turned inward so much that we’re spending all our time investing in our kids specifically; this is exhausting for everyone, but it’s hard to figure out how to opt out on an individual basis, especially when it’s so easy to judge and be judged on one’s parenting and specifically on one’s mothering. Yet another iteration of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Gender roles (enforced more heavily on women) are a part of this, as is the general speedup of work without allowance for caretaking obligations. Senior writes perceptively about these issues and about how the inward turn might not be good for anyone, but if you think it’s privileged navel-gazing then you might want to skip it.
Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture: I’m not sure how I feel about this as an introductory text. On the one hand, it reminds us that there are many different fandoms, including celebrity fandoms, music fandoms, and TV/movie fandoms (not so much here on sports fandoms, but a bit), with commonalities and differences. On the other hand, I didn’t like the style very much—a lot of italics for concepts that probably didn’t merit them, some simple editing errors, and some unfamiliarity with media fandom that made me less than trusting. According to Duffett, “genfic” is the opposite of slash, and only genfic can be critical of the existing text. I’m not sure that’s his real belief as opposed to an infelicitous editing, but it does suggest a distance between my fandom and his.
You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact…. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate that.Eliza Rickman, Pretty Little Head: second great song I’ve discovered thanks to WTNV.
… Maybe it is a fact that you girls lived a whole summer within easy walking distance of your cousins, out on an empty prairie where there were no other neighbors, and had nothing to do with them, but such a thing absolutely can not happen in fiction. You will just have to take my word for it. Not once in a thousand million times will such a thing happen among actual human beings actually living, and a writer can’t make it happen in fiction without providing some terrific motive for it. The mere fact that you did it has no bearing whatever upon the question. I can not imagine why you did it. Neither can any reader, and I tell you that … in fiction you have to explain them. You have the brief scene in which Laura threatens to kill Charley with a knife, but that has to be cut out. A 12-year-old girl whose cousin wants to kiss her does not normally threaten him with a knife; she laughs and kisses him, he’s her cousin. Or if she’s shy or doesn’t like him she just escapes, and the incident is not important enough to mention. Here you have a young girl, a girl 12 years old, who’s led rather an isolated life with father, mother, sisters in the country, and you can not have her suddenly acting like a slum child who has protected her virginity from street gangs since she was seven or eight. Maybe you did it, but you can not do it in fiction; you can not make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book.
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?: Important problem, terrible solution. Lanier notes that many people are increasingly providing free content to large online services, at the same time as many traditional jobs are being destroyed or their conditions becoming immiserated. Proposed solution: everyone should be entitled to micropayments for their online contributions, which would be I guess netted out at regular intervals (he doesn’t really say). I am befuddled by his theory that you can have monetized microproperty rights without government involvement. He criticizes libertarians and then reenacts them. His micropayment idea explicitly disparages government, when only an unwaivable, inalienable right would get the job done that he wants done (and at that point we should have a guaranteed basic income instead; why should your financial well being depend on whether you entertain others?). He says that in his world, instead of government mandates, lawyers would come in and renegotiate deals on behalf of ordinary users to protect their microinterests, as if lawyers hadn't already tried! Many times! And lost, because unless a contract term is unlawful it is enforceable. Perhaps relatedly, his treatment of the mortgage crisis is ridiculous; he argues that it was caused by the same speeded up information flow as that which produced Google/inability to control one’s own information. But the crash wasn't a crisis of lack of transparent information about who had your mortgage, something that wasn't under the borrower's control anyway. He's a very smart dude who thinks his intelligence makes him an expert in anything, and he is doing nothing to dispel my impression of white guys who have dreadlocks.
Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: Modern American upper-class (you could say upper-middle class, but I think that’s misleading except as to self-concept) parenting, with its multiple stresses as well as its sources of fulfillment. Basically, Senior argues, we’ve turned inward so much that we’re spending all our time investing in our kids specifically; this is exhausting for everyone, but it’s hard to figure out how to opt out on an individual basis, especially when it’s so easy to judge and be judged on one’s parenting and specifically on one’s mothering. Yet another iteration of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Gender roles (enforced more heavily on women) are a part of this, as is the general speedup of work without allowance for caretaking obligations. Senior writes perceptively about these issues and about how the inward turn might not be good for anyone, but if you think it’s privileged navel-gazing then you might want to skip it.
Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture: I’m not sure how I feel about this as an introductory text. On the one hand, it reminds us that there are many different fandoms, including celebrity fandoms, music fandoms, and TV/movie fandoms (not so much here on sports fandoms, but a bit), with commonalities and differences. On the other hand, I didn’t like the style very much—a lot of italics for concepts that probably didn’t merit them, some simple editing errors, and some unfamiliarity with media fandom that made me less than trusting. According to Duffett, “genfic” is the opposite of slash, and only genfic can be critical of the existing text. I’m not sure that’s his real belief as opposed to an infelicitous editing, but it does suggest a distance between my fandom and his.