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I'm back! Actually, I'm now in Virginia – eek! – mostly settled in, which means that clothes are in dressers and books are on shelves, though paper and random bits of hardware remain strewn around lavishly. Also, we don't have a sofa for the living room, which means that the two end tables look kind of funny bracketing a sofa-shaped space. But I am hopeful that I'll soon have an ID card for my new job, and we've ordered a dishwasher and a microwave, which will improve matters considerably for me, since my "participation" in the kitchen is pretty much limited to washing dishes and reheating food. Z. has, after a number of difficulties imposed by uneven power and cable service, set up the entertainment center in the basement, which is now my space, so I can play (what I call) music or watch (crappy) television without bothering him.
It's cicada season here. I remember the cicadas from 17 years ago, when they last descended en masse, but they were a lot more fun when I was a kid and more into squishy things. One flew into my mouth yesterday. Not far, admittedly, but I did a great "Ack! Thhptt!" in response. I remain stunned by the fashions of the day; we went to the amusement park last weekend, and I can report that "high-rise" for women now means that only your belly button shows and most women won't need Brazilian waxing. Mid-rise shows the top of the hipbones, while low-rise bares about three-quarters of the hip/groin area. It's enough to make you nostalgic for the days when "short skirts" referred to the hemline. I remember thinking that Harrison Ford's pelvic cut was incredibly sexy in The Fugitive, because it was an unusual part of a man to see; it was intimate. Now it's a lot more common, though still less so with men than with women, and I worry that the currency of desire is being degraded. Not to mention the dignity of young girls.
Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton: Ah, Judge Posner. It's refreshing to find someone with absolutely no doubt that he can understand any topic to which he turns his attention. Unfortunately, Posner has little in the way of insight to offer on the whole sordid mess, other than he thinks it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that Clinton perjured himself and obstructed justice in some ways. (Incidentally, "sorted" for "sordid," as in "all the sorted details," is one of my favorite mistakes.) He seems to think that it's unfair to describe the impeachment process as partisan because Democrats opposed it for partisan reasons, which seems to me like the "it all started when he hit me back" school of political neutrality. As is often the case with Posner, he's at his best deflating others' claims rather than convincing you of his own. And the real gems are in the footnotes: William Bennett condemned Clinton for acting "sexually more like an alley cat than an adult," to which Posner replies, "Do cats engage in oral sex? That's news to me ...." Or Posner on the Wall Street Journal's claim that the "sorry little drama" was "populated with too many wimps and sycophants and not enough John Waynes. It was a tale of anti-heroes": "John Wayne was not a hero; he was an actor." The penultimate chapter, on lessons for the future, has some provocative musings on the oft-quoted, little-analyzed statement that war is politics by other means. I was especially sympathetic to Posner's claims about the difference between announced goals/victories and actually winning – defeat is the acceptance of defeat, which some leaders have trouble understanding:
Both sides on the Clinton impeachment had times when they pressed on when all the smart money was on admitting defeat, and that changed the outcome. Ultimately, if there had been a little more law and a little less general social commentary in the book – even though all the stuff that I was charmed by falls in the latter category – it would have been a better book, and might have contributed more to the understanding of impeachment's role in American constitutional democracy.
Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, ed. Bruce Ziff & Pratima V. Rao: We have a football team around here called the Redskins. Yet there's no team called the Hebes, or the Wops, so what makes Redskins okay? This collection does not address the Redskins controversy directly, being mostly Canadian-focused with some detours into international issues, African-American music, and Hopi artifacts. The topics include biological knowledge/indigenous plants, funerary objects, and other material and nonmaterial cultural properties. The best essays recognize that the question of "What is to be done?" is more vexing than "Have non-dominant cultures been treated badly?" Saying that we should return control of cultural resources to communities of origin is easy, but "communities" are composed of people, not all of whom have equal voices, and not all of whom agree on what to do with those resources.
Some of the arguments against cultural appropriation – meaning the use by dominant cultures of knowledge, symbols, stories or other elements of a marginal/oppressed/dispossessed group – are persuasive, and some aren't. An essay by a white Native American rights activist about her discomfort with white wanna-bes who wear beads, fringe and feathers and how they only display openly what many whites – even she, at times – think about the "natural" purity of a fixed (read: dead) native culture was the easiest for me to connect to emotionally, compared to the outrage expressed by a First Nations activist who didn't want white people using First Nations people as main characters in their stories. (Don't we have enough stories of our own? he asked. Do we need to take other people's from them?) But then, I'm white and I'm a writer who's pretended to take on the viewpoints of people I'm not, two conditions that make it hard for me to accept the idea that some stories are off-limits to me. Expressed as a concern for being true to the characters, that claim makes a lot more sense to me – "write what you know" is a maxim for a reason – and, coupled with legitimate fears that (1) white writers find it easier to reach an audience, potentially drowning out other voices and (2) stereotyped depictions reinforce those stereotypes, I do see why there are characters I shouldn't write as if I knew what it was like to be them. But, as another essayist points out, that negative rule isn't the central problem – the real issue is how to get more voices into the conversation in the first place, so there are diverse portrayals available.
On the less persuasive side, the essay on white appropriation of African-American music uses terms that the other essayists would likely decry as offensive, praising the "primordial" rhythms and "emotional directness" of black music. Without getting into that debate, I thought the essayist ignored important questions by claiming that African-American music "somehow" proved self-renewing by reinventing a new form every time mainstream white culture appropriated the older form. The author states that this reinvention occurred "in spite of" appropriation, but isn't it more likely to be at least as much "because of," when people needed a new form to distinguish themselves from the mainstream? Maybe, as in the case of the plain-bellied Sneetches and the star-bellied Sneetches, this constant generation of new forms is a socially wasteful endeavor, but appropriation doesn't seem to be a clear evil here (as opposed to the denial of economic rewards to African-American artists, through manipulation or outright fraud – I'm gonna take a stand and say that's bad).
Ilyce R. Glink, 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask: Z. and I are researching types who don't like to make purchases without help, preferably written help. Z. researches most purchases over $50 to get best value, and I raid my parents' subscription to Consumer Reports. So when we found out we could buy a house, naturally the first thing we did was find a book. This one was reasonably helpful, mostly for reassurance that we weren't doing really stupid stuff. There are some useful worksheets so that you & your partner/kids/etc. can list the things you want in a house and compare, which led to some interesting results for us. (I wanted, and got, a room with very little natural light so I can behave like a cavedweller, albeit a cavedweller with high-speed Internet and Diet Coke.) There are also a bunch of tables at the back so you can figure out what you can afford and how much you'll be paying at various interest rates and loan amounts, though the tables don't go up into the "really expensive house" range. You can find a lot of this information on the Internet, but it was nice to have the book with its chronological progression through the homebuying process, defining a lot of the unfamiliar terms and explaining what was normal and what was an attempt to manipulate you. (Anyone who wants our copy, drop me a line at RivkaT at aol dot com.)
Pete Earley & Gerald Shur, Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program: I like true law enforcement tales, and this is a breezy trip through the development of the witness protection program, its struggles to exist in a Marshals' Service far from the professional organization we think of today, and its various successes and failures. Shur was the founder of the program, so the spin is generally positive – deemphasizing crimes committed by people put into witness protection, though admitting that they do happen, and repeatedly assuring us that no one who was actively in the program (as opposed to dropping out and even going back to the old neighborhood) has ever been killed in retaliation. Some of the agents, and several of the criminals, are fascinating characters, and the last section of the book is the story of one woman in witness protection, and how hard erasing her life was on her, her family, and her new relationships, which all had to be built on a spongy foundation of lies. The result is that the book ends on a somber note, emphasizing that, though the US government spends a lot of money on people who are often criminals of one sort or another (and their more innocent families), it's not exactly a wonderful thing to get a new life, if there was anything at all about the old one you liked.
Amy Sutherland, Cookoff: Recipe Fever in America: I'm just a little bit competitive, which is why I love sports movies (that, and the training montage – I adore a good training montage, whether cheerleading, pool, or physics [Real Genius]). So when I find out about people who compete fiercely over something most people take for granted, I want to know more. Sutherland has written a light trip through these foreign lands, covering the major cooking competitions and the "circuit" of people who've won prizes for years, sometimes enough to furnish three or four kitchens. Her discussion of the ways in which the competitors, who are mostly women, keep overt competitiveness to a minimum while still being deadly serious, sometimes vicious and occasionally underhanded -- and the ways in which the women relate to the few men who compete -- rang true to me. The chapter on barbeque, an overwhelmingly male competitive circuit, was an interesting contrast, with a lot more bragging and rocket-science accoutrements. Sutherland became a "contester" in the course of her research, which is evidence enough of the seductive power of competing in a specialized area.
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld: I read the sequel to this, The Globe, first, which is okay because, like an ordinary Pratchett book, they're both self-contained. There's a tissue of Discworld story, in which the wizards of Unseen University accidentally create a bizarre universe in which magic doesn't work and the world is round, but mostly this is a Sunday-paper level excursion into various aspects of the universe's formation leading up to the evolution of humankind. Not really as much fun as I want Pratchett to be – but Amazon tells me that a new book is out, and then another in October, so I'll just consider this a palate cleanser.
It's cicada season here. I remember the cicadas from 17 years ago, when they last descended en masse, but they were a lot more fun when I was a kid and more into squishy things. One flew into my mouth yesterday. Not far, admittedly, but I did a great "Ack! Thhptt!" in response. I remain stunned by the fashions of the day; we went to the amusement park last weekend, and I can report that "high-rise" for women now means that only your belly button shows and most women won't need Brazilian waxing. Mid-rise shows the top of the hipbones, while low-rise bares about three-quarters of the hip/groin area. It's enough to make you nostalgic for the days when "short skirts" referred to the hemline. I remember thinking that Harrison Ford's pelvic cut was incredibly sexy in The Fugitive, because it was an unusual part of a man to see; it was intimate. Now it's a lot more common, though still less so with men than with women, and I worry that the currency of desire is being degraded. Not to mention the dignity of young girls.
Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton: Ah, Judge Posner. It's refreshing to find someone with absolutely no doubt that he can understand any topic to which he turns his attention. Unfortunately, Posner has little in the way of insight to offer on the whole sordid mess, other than he thinks it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that Clinton perjured himself and obstructed justice in some ways. (Incidentally, "sorted" for "sordid," as in "all the sorted details," is one of my favorite mistakes.) He seems to think that it's unfair to describe the impeachment process as partisan because Democrats opposed it for partisan reasons, which seems to me like the "it all started when he hit me back" school of political neutrality. As is often the case with Posner, he's at his best deflating others' claims rather than convincing you of his own. And the real gems are in the footnotes: William Bennett condemned Clinton for acting "sexually more like an alley cat than an adult," to which Posner replies, "Do cats engage in oral sex? That's news to me ...." Or Posner on the Wall Street Journal's claim that the "sorry little drama" was "populated with too many wimps and sycophants and not enough John Waynes. It was a tale of anti-heroes": "John Wayne was not a hero; he was an actor." The penultimate chapter, on lessons for the future, has some provocative musings on the oft-quoted, little-analyzed statement that war is politics by other means. I was especially sympathetic to Posner's claims about the difference between announced goals/victories and actually winning – defeat is the acceptance of defeat, which some leaders have trouble understanding:
Because of the uncertainty and emotionality of war, and the resulting fear that it may be interminable or inconclusive, the contestants find it tempting to define in advance a sufficient condition for victory, so as to create an attainable goal, an intelligible focus, and a definite terminus of the struggle. But often this is just a convention, which the enemy is free to refuse to accept. It was "understood" in 1812 that if Napoleon captured Moscow, the war would be over; the Russians would admit defeat. But they didn't, and within months Napoleon's army was destroyed.
Both sides on the Clinton impeachment had times when they pressed on when all the smart money was on admitting defeat, and that changed the outcome. Ultimately, if there had been a little more law and a little less general social commentary in the book – even though all the stuff that I was charmed by falls in the latter category – it would have been a better book, and might have contributed more to the understanding of impeachment's role in American constitutional democracy.
Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, ed. Bruce Ziff & Pratima V. Rao: We have a football team around here called the Redskins. Yet there's no team called the Hebes, or the Wops, so what makes Redskins okay? This collection does not address the Redskins controversy directly, being mostly Canadian-focused with some detours into international issues, African-American music, and Hopi artifacts. The topics include biological knowledge/indigenous plants, funerary objects, and other material and nonmaterial cultural properties. The best essays recognize that the question of "What is to be done?" is more vexing than "Have non-dominant cultures been treated badly?" Saying that we should return control of cultural resources to communities of origin is easy, but "communities" are composed of people, not all of whom have equal voices, and not all of whom agree on what to do with those resources.
Some of the arguments against cultural appropriation – meaning the use by dominant cultures of knowledge, symbols, stories or other elements of a marginal/oppressed/dispossessed group – are persuasive, and some aren't. An essay by a white Native American rights activist about her discomfort with white wanna-bes who wear beads, fringe and feathers and how they only display openly what many whites – even she, at times – think about the "natural" purity of a fixed (read: dead) native culture was the easiest for me to connect to emotionally, compared to the outrage expressed by a First Nations activist who didn't want white people using First Nations people as main characters in their stories. (Don't we have enough stories of our own? he asked. Do we need to take other people's from them?) But then, I'm white and I'm a writer who's pretended to take on the viewpoints of people I'm not, two conditions that make it hard for me to accept the idea that some stories are off-limits to me. Expressed as a concern for being true to the characters, that claim makes a lot more sense to me – "write what you know" is a maxim for a reason – and, coupled with legitimate fears that (1) white writers find it easier to reach an audience, potentially drowning out other voices and (2) stereotyped depictions reinforce those stereotypes, I do see why there are characters I shouldn't write as if I knew what it was like to be them. But, as another essayist points out, that negative rule isn't the central problem – the real issue is how to get more voices into the conversation in the first place, so there are diverse portrayals available.
On the less persuasive side, the essay on white appropriation of African-American music uses terms that the other essayists would likely decry as offensive, praising the "primordial" rhythms and "emotional directness" of black music. Without getting into that debate, I thought the essayist ignored important questions by claiming that African-American music "somehow" proved self-renewing by reinventing a new form every time mainstream white culture appropriated the older form. The author states that this reinvention occurred "in spite of" appropriation, but isn't it more likely to be at least as much "because of," when people needed a new form to distinguish themselves from the mainstream? Maybe, as in the case of the plain-bellied Sneetches and the star-bellied Sneetches, this constant generation of new forms is a socially wasteful endeavor, but appropriation doesn't seem to be a clear evil here (as opposed to the denial of economic rewards to African-American artists, through manipulation or outright fraud – I'm gonna take a stand and say that's bad).
Ilyce R. Glink, 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask: Z. and I are researching types who don't like to make purchases without help, preferably written help. Z. researches most purchases over $50 to get best value, and I raid my parents' subscription to Consumer Reports. So when we found out we could buy a house, naturally the first thing we did was find a book. This one was reasonably helpful, mostly for reassurance that we weren't doing really stupid stuff. There are some useful worksheets so that you & your partner/kids/etc. can list the things you want in a house and compare, which led to some interesting results for us. (I wanted, and got, a room with very little natural light so I can behave like a cavedweller, albeit a cavedweller with high-speed Internet and Diet Coke.) There are also a bunch of tables at the back so you can figure out what you can afford and how much you'll be paying at various interest rates and loan amounts, though the tables don't go up into the "really expensive house" range. You can find a lot of this information on the Internet, but it was nice to have the book with its chronological progression through the homebuying process, defining a lot of the unfamiliar terms and explaining what was normal and what was an attempt to manipulate you. (Anyone who wants our copy, drop me a line at RivkaT at aol dot com.)
Pete Earley & Gerald Shur, Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program: I like true law enforcement tales, and this is a breezy trip through the development of the witness protection program, its struggles to exist in a Marshals' Service far from the professional organization we think of today, and its various successes and failures. Shur was the founder of the program, so the spin is generally positive – deemphasizing crimes committed by people put into witness protection, though admitting that they do happen, and repeatedly assuring us that no one who was actively in the program (as opposed to dropping out and even going back to the old neighborhood) has ever been killed in retaliation. Some of the agents, and several of the criminals, are fascinating characters, and the last section of the book is the story of one woman in witness protection, and how hard erasing her life was on her, her family, and her new relationships, which all had to be built on a spongy foundation of lies. The result is that the book ends on a somber note, emphasizing that, though the US government spends a lot of money on people who are often criminals of one sort or another (and their more innocent families), it's not exactly a wonderful thing to get a new life, if there was anything at all about the old one you liked.
Amy Sutherland, Cookoff: Recipe Fever in America: I'm just a little bit competitive, which is why I love sports movies (that, and the training montage – I adore a good training montage, whether cheerleading, pool, or physics [Real Genius]). So when I find out about people who compete fiercely over something most people take for granted, I want to know more. Sutherland has written a light trip through these foreign lands, covering the major cooking competitions and the "circuit" of people who've won prizes for years, sometimes enough to furnish three or four kitchens. Her discussion of the ways in which the competitors, who are mostly women, keep overt competitiveness to a minimum while still being deadly serious, sometimes vicious and occasionally underhanded -- and the ways in which the women relate to the few men who compete -- rang true to me. The chapter on barbeque, an overwhelmingly male competitive circuit, was an interesting contrast, with a lot more bragging and rocket-science accoutrements. Sutherland became a "contester" in the course of her research, which is evidence enough of the seductive power of competing in a specialized area.
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld: I read the sequel to this, The Globe, first, which is okay because, like an ordinary Pratchett book, they're both self-contained. There's a tissue of Discworld story, in which the wizards of Unseen University accidentally create a bizarre universe in which magic doesn't work and the world is round, but mostly this is a Sunday-paper level excursion into various aspects of the universe's formation leading up to the evolution of humankind. Not really as much fun as I want Pratchett to be – but Amazon tells me that a new book is out, and then another in October, so I'll just consider this a palate cleanser.
