robotnik2004 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
robotnik2004) wrote2004-02-01 03:54 pm
robotnik2004) wrote2004-02-01 03:54 pm
ARFFF 2004
Like every writer, he measured other men's virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.
—Borges, "The Secret Miracle"
Me read lots of books! Me read these books in January! Interesting to you? Me not know! But cool for me to look back in future, see books me read!
Ken Kalfus, The Commissariat of Enlightenment
A neat novel of ideas set around the deaths of Leo Tolstoi and V.I. Lenin, book-ending the Russian Revolution. Not what you'd call character-driven, it's really about technology: specifically the birth of cinema, and of embalming, of all things. The last chapter is a crazed internal monologue from the point of view of Lenin's embalmed corpse that runs from his death to the collapse of communism. Which brings us to:
Jack Womack, Let's Put The Future Behind Us
An offbeat thriller about Moscow in the mid-1990s. Accurate? I dunno, but a great evocation of surreal chaos following the collapse of the Soviet state. Violent demagogues and Russian mafiosi and bureaucracy worthy of Alpha Complex and radioactive Faberge eggs. Between this and Commissariat of Enlightenment I could be embarking on a big Soviet kick, if I wasn't already on a big samurai kick. I'd love to run a game in this milieu.
Michael Oriard, King Football
Apropos for Superbowl Sunday, a history of football from the 1920s to the 1950s. It seems like ninety percent of academic writing about sports is about baseball. I find baseball the least interesting of American sports but apparently academia doesn't agree with me. Probably one in three male historians, whatever their specialty, has written or is planning some kind of baseball history or memoir. (I figure it's because watching a baseball game gives you sooooo much dead time to think about the book you're going to write.) So I'm very happy to find good histories of other sports. This is actually the follow-up to Oriard's book on the origins of American football in the 1890s through 1920s, which is actually the book I really wanted to read.
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media
A cultural history of the association of the supernatural and uncanny with new electronic media from the telegraph to television. I once thought my dissertation would have much more cultural stuff in this vein; most of that dropped out but I still enjoy reading it. You don't often see academic analysis of the Ro-Man costume (you know: gorilla suit, diving helmet, TV antenna) from Robot Monster.
Naomi Klein, No Logo
Finally got around to reading this. Not too much to say about it beyond: go Canadian academics, go leftist academics reaching for a popular audience, go critique of hypercapitalism! Best chapter for me was the one about campus politics in the early 1990s, very close to my memory of the same milieu. Yeah, the personal is political, but hey, the economic is political too. I also have to find out more about The Ballyhoo, a 1930s magazine that Klein describes as a Depression-era Adbusters.
Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
An American No Logo with a bit more history, a bit less "culture jamming" hipness. Makes a case for "positive populism," which is a pretty cringe-worthy label—you know, like the nineteenth century radicals who stood up against the robber barons and industrial trusts would've done better if only they weren't so negative all the time—but his heart is in the right place. I respect anyone who tries to remind people that the United States does have genuine indigenous traditions of radicalism and reform.
William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties
Yeah, I'd never read this either. I liked Pattern Recognition so much I'm actually appreciating Gibson more than I did the first time through Neuromancer, Idoru, and so forth. He's not so hot on endings, though, is he?
Geoffrey Ashe, The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality
Hot Elizabethan wife-swapping action.
Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis
Weird wonderful novel about a secret society in the Dianetics / IAM / Business Secrets of Ancient Babylon vein. I learned about it from a column in the Ron Rosenbaum book Jeremiah lent me. Kind of a shaggy dog story, memorable not for the plot but for Portis' immense delight in the musical language of American flim flammmery.
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
I'd probably have more to say about this if I hadn't read most of it in an ER waiting room at 4 am when L had pneumonia. But I did finish it in January so on the list it goes.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Tomoe Gozen
Exhibit A in my current samurai fixation. Tomoe Gozen was a historical figure, a 12th-century woman samurai and personal hero of L's. But she's also the main character of this surprisingly good 1970s sword and sorcery novel in a mythic medieval Japan. Pulpy, hell yes, but weird and dreamlike and affecting too. Gotta play some SamuraiBabe or Charnel Gods in this vein.
Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting
There's a great and widely anthologized chapter in this book on the wireless amateurs of the 1910s and how they got squeezed out of the spectrum after the Titanic sank. At last I got around to reading the rest of the book. Commercial broadcasting does not really flow automatically from the technology of radio. In fact, given the technology, it's kind of the last way you might think of to make radio pay. In fact, it pretty much was.
Daniel Mackay, The Fantasy Role-Playing Game
I once thought I'd like to be some kind of pop culture historian. I'm glad I realized that there are few tasks more thankless than trying to write serious scholarship about your own frivolous personal enthusiasms. First, you have to overcompensate for the goofy subject with all this deadly theoretical apparatus. Then, any people who share your enthusiasm will find the work stale and uninteresting, while the people who don't share your love for the topic will remain unconvinced of its scholarly importance. Far better to keep your geek loves and your academic interests distinct. You'll enjoy both more.
Robert Darnton, George Washington's False Teeth
Collection of essays about the Enlightenment. Washington's false teeth are a fun way in, but the killer article here is the one about networks of news and gossip in pre-Revolutionary Paris. When it comes to seeing well-worn history with new eyes, Darnton is your man.
Edit: Hey, the Darnton article is online, including maps of the diffusion of gossip about the Sun King's sex life and MP3s of scandalous libelous songs!
Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Endless Nights
How did Elijah Snow put it: "I know it's been ten years, but... don't they look faintly ridiculous?" This did nothing for me, alas. I have a pile of the Sandman trades on my bookshelf, and today I just can't get into them or how good they seemed at the time. I have this memory of Sandman being intellectual and edgy and even sexy. Now it all seems very twee, not all that far removed from dreamcatchers, inspirational bumper stickers, and unicorn figurines.
David Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings
Steven Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Public Policy in America 1840-1920
Colleen Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia
Tony Freyer, Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and the United States
A. Edward Evenson, The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876
Louis Galambos, Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World
Michael Trebilcock, The Law and Economics of Canadian Competition Policy
R.J. Roberts, Competition/Antitrust: Canada and the United States
Well, I do have to work some of the time. Nye's always good. The Usselman book is marvelous. I'm probably forgetting a few: grad school really teaches you how to "read" a book without ever actually sitting down to, you know, read it.
—Borges, "The Secret Miracle"
Me read lots of books! Me read these books in January! Interesting to you? Me not know! But cool for me to look back in future, see books me read!
Ken Kalfus, The Commissariat of Enlightenment
A neat novel of ideas set around the deaths of Leo Tolstoi and V.I. Lenin, book-ending the Russian Revolution. Not what you'd call character-driven, it's really about technology: specifically the birth of cinema, and of embalming, of all things. The last chapter is a crazed internal monologue from the point of view of Lenin's embalmed corpse that runs from his death to the collapse of communism. Which brings us to:
Jack Womack, Let's Put The Future Behind Us
An offbeat thriller about Moscow in the mid-1990s. Accurate? I dunno, but a great evocation of surreal chaos following the collapse of the Soviet state. Violent demagogues and Russian mafiosi and bureaucracy worthy of Alpha Complex and radioactive Faberge eggs. Between this and Commissariat of Enlightenment I could be embarking on a big Soviet kick, if I wasn't already on a big samurai kick. I'd love to run a game in this milieu.
Michael Oriard, King Football
Apropos for Superbowl Sunday, a history of football from the 1920s to the 1950s. It seems like ninety percent of academic writing about sports is about baseball. I find baseball the least interesting of American sports but apparently academia doesn't agree with me. Probably one in three male historians, whatever their specialty, has written or is planning some kind of baseball history or memoir. (I figure it's because watching a baseball game gives you sooooo much dead time to think about the book you're going to write.) So I'm very happy to find good histories of other sports. This is actually the follow-up to Oriard's book on the origins of American football in the 1890s through 1920s, which is actually the book I really wanted to read.
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media
A cultural history of the association of the supernatural and uncanny with new electronic media from the telegraph to television. I once thought my dissertation would have much more cultural stuff in this vein; most of that dropped out but I still enjoy reading it. You don't often see academic analysis of the Ro-Man costume (you know: gorilla suit, diving helmet, TV antenna) from Robot Monster.
Naomi Klein, No Logo
Finally got around to reading this. Not too much to say about it beyond: go Canadian academics, go leftist academics reaching for a popular audience, go critique of hypercapitalism! Best chapter for me was the one about campus politics in the early 1990s, very close to my memory of the same milieu. Yeah, the personal is political, but hey, the economic is political too. I also have to find out more about The Ballyhoo, a 1930s magazine that Klein describes as a Depression-era Adbusters.
Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
An American No Logo with a bit more history, a bit less "culture jamming" hipness. Makes a case for "positive populism," which is a pretty cringe-worthy label—you know, like the nineteenth century radicals who stood up against the robber barons and industrial trusts would've done better if only they weren't so negative all the time—but his heart is in the right place. I respect anyone who tries to remind people that the United States does have genuine indigenous traditions of radicalism and reform.
William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties
Yeah, I'd never read this either. I liked Pattern Recognition so much I'm actually appreciating Gibson more than I did the first time through Neuromancer, Idoru, and so forth. He's not so hot on endings, though, is he?
Geoffrey Ashe, The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality
Hot Elizabethan wife-swapping action.
Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis
Weird wonderful novel about a secret society in the Dianetics / IAM / Business Secrets of Ancient Babylon vein. I learned about it from a column in the Ron Rosenbaum book Jeremiah lent me. Kind of a shaggy dog story, memorable not for the plot but for Portis' immense delight in the musical language of American flim flammmery.
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
I'd probably have more to say about this if I hadn't read most of it in an ER waiting room at 4 am when L had pneumonia. But I did finish it in January so on the list it goes.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Tomoe Gozen
Exhibit A in my current samurai fixation. Tomoe Gozen was a historical figure, a 12th-century woman samurai and personal hero of L's. But she's also the main character of this surprisingly good 1970s sword and sorcery novel in a mythic medieval Japan. Pulpy, hell yes, but weird and dreamlike and affecting too. Gotta play some SamuraiBabe or Charnel Gods in this vein.
Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting
There's a great and widely anthologized chapter in this book on the wireless amateurs of the 1910s and how they got squeezed out of the spectrum after the Titanic sank. At last I got around to reading the rest of the book. Commercial broadcasting does not really flow automatically from the technology of radio. In fact, given the technology, it's kind of the last way you might think of to make radio pay. In fact, it pretty much was.
Daniel Mackay, The Fantasy Role-Playing Game
I once thought I'd like to be some kind of pop culture historian. I'm glad I realized that there are few tasks more thankless than trying to write serious scholarship about your own frivolous personal enthusiasms. First, you have to overcompensate for the goofy subject with all this deadly theoretical apparatus. Then, any people who share your enthusiasm will find the work stale and uninteresting, while the people who don't share your love for the topic will remain unconvinced of its scholarly importance. Far better to keep your geek loves and your academic interests distinct. You'll enjoy both more.
Robert Darnton, George Washington's False Teeth
Collection of essays about the Enlightenment. Washington's false teeth are a fun way in, but the killer article here is the one about networks of news and gossip in pre-Revolutionary Paris. When it comes to seeing well-worn history with new eyes, Darnton is your man.
Edit: Hey, the Darnton article is online, including maps of the diffusion of gossip about the Sun King's sex life and MP3s of scandalous libelous songs!
Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Endless Nights
How did Elijah Snow put it: "I know it's been ten years, but... don't they look faintly ridiculous?" This did nothing for me, alas. I have a pile of the Sandman trades on my bookshelf, and today I just can't get into them or how good they seemed at the time. I have this memory of Sandman being intellectual and edgy and even sexy. Now it all seems very twee, not all that far removed from dreamcatchers, inspirational bumper stickers, and unicorn figurines.
David Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings
Steven Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Public Policy in America 1840-1920
Colleen Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia
Tony Freyer, Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and the United States
A. Edward Evenson, The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876
Louis Galambos, Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World
Michael Trebilcock, The Law and Economics of Canadian Competition Policy
R.J. Roberts, Competition/Antitrust: Canada and the United States
Well, I do have to work some of the time. Nye's always good. The Usselman book is marvelous. I'm probably forgetting a few: grad school really teaches you how to "read" a book without ever actually sitting down to, you know, read it.