I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology: As it says, fragmentary and therefore not as challenging as Graeber’s other, longer work. He defends anarchism as an aspiration against empiricist challenges, arguing that skeptics demand evidence of a contradiction in terms—an anarchist state—being successful somewhere. “[W]hat we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot.” Instead, anarchist organizations wouldn’t look like states—they’d be overlapping groups, projects, etc. at different scales. Most successful popular resistance, he suggests, doesn’t involve challenging power head on (“this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some—often even uglier—variant of the very thing one first challenged”) but running away. Capitalists don’t really want mobile labor, which is why they keep reinventing slavery, “guest workers,” border control, etc. because if workers were actually free to leave work whenever they wanted the system would collapse.

I also really liked his observations about anarchists embracing pleasure as resistance, living as if one is already free. “The history of capitalism moves from attacks on collective, festive consumption to the promulgation of highly personal, private, even furtive forms.” But we have to be wary because “if one wishes to inspire ethnic hatred, the easiest way to do so is to concentrate on the bizarre, perverse ways in which the other group is assumed to pursue pleasure.”

Nick Seaver, Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation: Ethnographic exploration of how people at a music algorithm company think about music and playlists. “These services provide users access to the catalog, and then suggest that the size of the catalog is a problem that they can solve for those same users.” But the workers at these companies “feel the reality of overload in their everyday lives and come to understand their work as a form of care for users who are similarly beset by the paradox of choice.” Of course, concerns about information overload are nothing new—Seaver cites examples going back to the rise of the printing press. But overload doesn’t exist without people who feel like they should be experiencing more than they are of what’s out there—“the wish to know everything already.” Then strategies for helping the information consumer arise to manage that desire. “What makes this world of music so overwhelming as to require technological help is not its size but the presumption that a listener wants to explore it—to not simply return to familiar listening material.” But then capitalism and the desire for growth comes in, and the services start by giving listeners familiar hits, trying to hook them or tempt them into the system. The imagined user is less often leaning forward, trying to find new music (coded masculine), and more often leaning back, “indifferent” (coded feminine). Such listeners are problematic not just because they have to be caught, but also because they don’t interact as much with algorithmic systems, providing less data for recommendations. Seaver argues that people working in music recommendation end up thinking of themselves as “pastoralists”—curating the music landscape, an organic world of resources that need to be carefully managed, where they play the role of caretakers, both of the “land” and the people, but are not in complete control of the objects of their labor.

Rachel Hope Cleves, Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex: Focused on France, Britain, and the US as places where food and sexuality were linked in sometimes surprising ways, as still cashed out in the pressure that women feel not to eat too much or too “indulgently.” She takes the idea of “food porn” seriously! Restaurants—places that served food from a menu to individual diners—emerged in France in the late eighteenth century; their rise and association with prostitution and adultery led “middle-class moralists” in Britain and the US to link French food with immoral sex. This then created fertile ground for “sexual outlaws, like bohemians, lesbians, and gay men, to claim a taste for good food as an identity marker.” Not until the late twentieth century did straight people start to claim “foodie” as an identity.

Cleves argues that “Puritanism” is the wrong explanation for the hangups of the English-speaking peoples, given the long history of abstemiousness tracing back to Greek and early Christian precepts. Instead, the connection between luxurious food and sin was more deep-seated, and linked up with racism when “slender, white female embodiment” contrasted to Black immorality and gluttony became part of racial slavery’s justificatory apparatus. Puritans weren’t alone in condemning enjoyment of food, but it was more common to see such arguments in 19th and 20th-century texts than in earlier works of advice. She contends that, “[b]etween the early 1800s and the 1960s, the dominant middle-class Protestant culture in Brirain and the United States ratcheted its hostility against the enjoyment of good food to unprecedented extremes. Although men also experienced its effects, this anathema fell particularly harshly on women. Nothing was quite so distasteful, in the eyes of polite Victorian society, as the sight of a woman enthusiastically enjoying the taste of her food.”

I learned that “restaurant” came from the mid-18th century, meaning “a meat bouillon sold in Paris eateries to refined gentleman who supposedly required delicate foods to restore their sensitive constitutions.” Such dishes were served in “cabinets particuliers,” rooms that allowed men and women—especially men not married to those women—to dine together in private, and often featured couches or beds for the expected sex. As their reputation spread, foreign male tourists flocked to experience these delights: “The history of tourism has not sufficiently reckoned with the role of sex as one of the major motivators of travel in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.” Female tourists joined later, and eating in public stayed scandalous for them for longer. Feminists campaigned against private rooms in restaurants as promoting prostitution.

Meanwhile, American and British moralists condemned all that and insisted that food should be plain (Cleves reminds us that the Graham cracker was, among other things, designed to suppress masturbation). The popular American cookbook author Lydia Maria Child (early 19th century) explained: “I have attempted to teach how money can be saved, not how it can be enjoyed.”

Even when restaurants were more regularly separated from brothels, they were still implicated in sex and sexuality. The rise of the waitress in the second half of the nineteenth century created another focus for male sexual desire and potential scandal. “The waitress seemed to be on the menu, even if she wasn’t listed there.” And, in some places, people who had lived as boys took on the identity of barmaid or waitress, though it’s hard to tell how they thought of themselves. “If sexologists are to be believed, in the late nineteenth century waiting tables was one of the professions most favored by gay men, who, like their female counterparts, often served customers with an inviting smile that hinted at the possibility of something more.” Cleves also recounts the connections between lesbianism and overt enjoyment of food, with many well-known names represented (Colette, Radclyffe Hall, Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein, among others).

Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White: Exploring the contradictions of American racial politics from three stories of families with different economic situations and relationships to Blackness. Sharfstein notes that even with “one drop” rules in place, legal authorities exercised substantial discretion to keep social relations in place—without much in the way of birth records for most people, especially going back generations, it was the only way to keep most white people from being under constant threat of challenge. So they’d do things like say that the African ancestor had to be proven to be pure African, which was impossible. What really mattered was acceptance by the community as white. Two of the families Sharfstein follows were already passing as white by the time of the Civil War and had members who fought as Confederates—one was rich (a prominent member served as a Senator and was part of the destruction of Reconstruction, although he felt that violence was gauche)—and one was poor. The third’s paterfamilias worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau, among other endeavors, and after Reconstruction was crushed and various personal setbacks, members of his family started drifting into whiteness.
 
William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932: I love reading about Churchill, but man, those Britons were screwed up, and Jennie Churchill, though American, fit right in with her distance from her son. Manchester paints a vivid portrait of the bustle of Imperial Britain at its height, including exploitation of the Queen’s image to sell products (for example, Hudson’s Dry Soap, “The Subject’s Best Friend”). Lillie Langtry sold her signed endorsement for a product, and a forger copied her signature and “cleaned her out.” And there were the battles: “The British soldier was given a small island for his birthplace and the whole world as his grave.” The Victorian army Churchill entered was equally insular in culture and global in reach. It followed the gentleman’s code, by which gambling debts must be settled promptly, but Churchill didn’t pay his tailor for over six years. Churchill led an objectively wild life: he was in a Boer prison camp, bullied his way into an escape attempt planned by two other prisoners, was the only one who actually escaped, but unbeknownst to him his release had already been ordered due to strings pulled by his mother (one of the Prince of Wales’s lovers). Also he conceived of the tank and pushed its adoption in WWI. Also flak and several other military innovations, not all of them good ideas. And you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty baller to end the first volume of a multivolume biography with a 1932 anecdote in which Stalin asks Lady Astor about British politicians; she tells him Chamberlain is the coming man. “What about Churchill?” he asks. She gives a scornful little laugh and replies: “Oh, he’s finished.”

William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone 1932-1940: The fact that Churchill was so witty, and so right about one big thing, is why I read so much about him. He was a great man, and a racist who did terrible things to people he thought didn’t count, which was most of the human race. His concern was for Britain, always. Manchester is also a pleasure to read: “If the man existed with whom Wallis [Simpson] had enjoyed a platonic friendship, his name is lost to history.”

William Manchester & Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965: Manchester died before finishing his epic biography, and based on the intro Reid wrote, I dislike Reid as the finisher. Reid insists that Churchill didn’t suffer from depression because (as far as I can tell Reid’s logic) Churchill still got stuff done and never said anything about suicide, and when he acted depressed it was because bad things had happened. His wife Clementine gets to be “depressed” at points, by contrast. Anyway, here Churchill keeps Britain fighting long enough for the US to enter the war, and then gets turfed out by voters who recognize that he is a war leader but not what they wanted for peace even before the Axis surrender is complete. But he’s Churchill, so he keeps going, and even gets to be prime minister again. The most Churchillian moment in the whole thing is in December 1941, when—after Pearl Harbor—he says privately: So we had won the war after all. He was never afraid to swing for the fences.