Books

Review: Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and _How You Can Fight Back_. Available from “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Jacob%20Hacker%20The%20Great%20Risk%20Shift , from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGreat-Risk-Shift-American-Retirement-%2Fdp%2F0195179501%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1161014561%3Fie%3DUTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 .

In his ethnography (PDF) of Grover Norquist’s weekly breakfast meetings, Thomas Medved tells us how Newt Gingrich sold reluctant conservatives attending the meeting on Medicare reform. [click to continue…]

A few months ago I praised Kim Deitch – as well I should. I didn’t mention at the time that his dad, Gene Deitch, is no slouch either. (I guess that must be why they gave him an Oscar, so maybe my help here is not needed.) And not just that: on Gene Deitch’s website you can listen to the original John Lee Hooker recordings he made long, long ago.

I mention Deitch because I notice that Amazon just put a bunch of Scholastic DVD’s for kids on sale (we parents watch out for such things). And the pick of the litter is Where the Wild Things Are; a bunch of Sendak stories, directed and produced by Deitch. And you get Peter “PDQ Bach” Schickele providing some music and narration. And Carole King singing songs we remember: “Pierre”, “One Was Johnny”, “Alligators All Around”, “The Ballad of Chicken Soup”. (You can watch them all on YouTube.) Best of all is “In the Night Kitchen”. It tripped out my 2-year old. And, of course, “Where The Wild Things Are”.

At the Valve we’re hosting a book event discussion of Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble With Diversity [amazon]. You can read a sample chapter at TAP and are cordially invited to attend.

In my post I discuss, in passing, Michael Lind’s Up From Conservatism (1996) – his notion of the ‘overclass’ – and so I happened to notice that he has a new book out just yesterday: The American Way of Strategy [amazon]. I haven’t seen much advance discussion of it. I’d be curious to hear about it.

Doesn’t float your boat? I’ll try to come up with more comic book jokes for later.

The other day, a sociologist I know slightly asked me (and another political philosopher) whether there were any important recent books in political philosophy he should read. We were stumped, and eventually suggested that he read Annette Lareau’s _Unequal Childhoods_ … which is a work in sociology (and not that recent any more). I’ve just used the amazon.com books “power search” feature to look for books in political philosophy published in 2005 and 2005. There are some interesting collections of papers here and there – both on topics and collecting someone’s previously published papers – and there are some goodish introductory books, but there was nothing listed (not a single book) of which it could truly be said that a political philosopher who had not read that book (within a reasonable time) would have neglected to do something that they should have done.

I have a short list of books that nearly made it (none of which I’ve read). The “nearly” books are Matthew Clayton’s _Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing_ (which I’ve bought but not started), Brian Barry’s _Why Social Justice Matters_, Martha Nussbaum’s _Frontiers of Justice_ and David Schmidtz’s _Elements of Justice_. I’m sure it would be a good thing to read any of those four, but _essential_? I don’t think so. Can commenters make a case for some book published since the beginning of 2005.

Making Light tells us that John M. Ford has died. I didn’t know him at all personally, but I loved his work. “The Dragon Waiting” is perhaps his best novel, but some of his short stories are even better. This extract from “Scrabble with God” (stolen from Brad DeLong ) gives some idea of his sense of humour.

I don’t recommend playing with God. It isn’t that he cheats, exactly. But the other night we were in the middle of a game, I was about thirty points up, and He emptied out his rack. ZWEEGHB. Double word score and the fifty-point bonus.

“Zweeghb?” I said.

“Is that a challenge?”

“Well…” If you challenge God and you’re wrong, you lose the points and get turned into a pillar of salt.

“Look outside,” He said. So I did. Sure enough, there was a zweeghb out there, eating the rosebushes, like Thurber’s unicorn.

“I thought you rested from creating stuff.”

“Eighth day, I did. Now I’m fresh as a daisy. You going to pass or play?”

He was also a fine, intelligent poet. Read 110 Stories or the poem quoted in Teresa’s memorial post at Making Light to see how good he could be when he was being serious. But he also had an extraordinary gift for ex tempore verse that was somehow light, complicated, funny and erudite, all at the same time. One of Kieran’s posts on Thomas Friedman helped indirectly inspire this quickie on mixed metaphor and misprision.

Much have I travell’d on the feet of gold,
And many tumbled walls and maidens seen,
Round many horny Africs have I been
Which bards like bosoms in their welkins hold,
Oft of a spare expanse had I been told
That fence-swung Homer looked on as demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its mountains clean
Till I heard Friedman speak out uncontrolled,
Then felt I like some Cousteau of the skies
When a new bubble undermines his ken,
Or sack-like Falstaff, when with precast eyes
He stared at echoes — and his fellow men
Harked back in multitudes like single spies
Silent, past their peak in Darien.

I don’t think that he’ll ever get the recognition that he deserved; his gifts didn’t fit well with his times. But the world feels poorer and sadder today for his absence.

Tyler Cowen – _Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding_

Available from “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=tyler%20cowen%20good%20and%20plenty, from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGood-Plenty-Creative-Successes-American%2Fdp%2F0691120420%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1159196244%2Fref%3Dpd%5Fbbs%5F1%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325.

There are two, quite different libertarian styles of writing about culture that I enjoy. One is the pop-culture variety, which uses libertarian precepts as the framework for a certain kind of flip, contrarian analysis. This can be quite entertaining, but it usually doesn’t bear up well to close examination. Libertarian nostrums all too frequently substitute for actual thought (granted, much leftist opinionating on culture has similar problems). The second style is that of Tyler Cowen. Cowen writes in an entertaining and straightforward manner. He’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable about both high and low culture. But the fun of his arguments is that they’re serious, interesting, and properly thought through. If they’re hard to fit into conventional frameworks of debate, they aren’t self-consciously contrarian either. Instead, they lead in their own directions, and Cowen isn’t afraid to follow them, even if they lead to unexpected destinations.
[click to continue…]

I am proud to announce our CT book event on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War On Science has become a book! (You’d rather buy from Amazon? Here you go.) I declare it an event! There is a certain danger of regress, admittedly. But I think it is quite sound publishing procedure. I’m now an editor for Parlor Press. We’re calling the line Glassbead. I like connotations of transparency and combinatoric possibility. All our books will be available as inexpensive paperbacks and freely downloadable PDF’s; all released under a Creative Commons license. We’re starting with book events – some ones that have happened here at CT and at the Valve. I also want to make anthologies of good blog material. Dig things out of archives that are worthy of editing and preservation. And some nice critical editions of public domain works. More generally, the idea is to figure out a low-cost, fast, efficient model for peer-reviewing and publishing. Mostly the idea – I’ve said it before – is that academic publishing can only truly distinguish itself in this day and age by becoming an exemplary gift culture. (Chris Mooney seems pleased with the treatment.)

Pessimism seems to be a newly popular theme in American cultural discourse. Having written a bit about worst-case scenarios, I was interested to get a review copy of Karen Cerulo’s Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. Perhaps because I’m naturally optimistic by temperament, I’m finding Cerulo’s relentless pessimism a bit annoying, and, not coincidentally, finding a lot to disagree with in the book.

One point particularly struck me. Cerulo claims that “positive asymmetry” is demonstrated by the fact that, in theology and art, Heaven is given a detailed and appealing description, while hell is described only in vague and non-specific terms. She mentions, as an illustration of the latter point, an etching inspired by Dante’s Inferno.

My recollection of Dante is that the descriptions of Hell, and the various categories of sinners, were detailed and intricate, making the Inferno a fascinating book, while Purgatory was less distinctly graded and the Paradiso was unreadably dull. I haven’t read Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, but I get the impression that the same is true. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I thought this was one of the standard criticisms of religious art – Hell and the Devil are made much more interesting than Heaven and Hell.

Cerulo focuses mainly on paintings, and maybe she’s right on this score, but even here I’d hazard a guess that the work of Hieronymus Bosch is much more widely reproduced than any detailed representation of Heaven.

Drawn & Quarterly’s long-awaited Moomin, the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip vol. 1 is delayed until October, but in the meantime they are releasing a strip a day from the publisher’s site, and you can download a 6-page PDF preview sample.

I have been so curious and eager. I’ve read and enjoyed moomin books since childhood and am not ashamed to say I once answered a daughter’s innocent, ‘why did you want to have children?’ with a less innocent, ‘so I could read them moomin books.’ Which was a wretched half-truth. (Belle and I also have plans to construct a plush Groke toy for children’s beds. It will have an opening in which you insert one of those athletic injury cold paks, so in the morning your bed has a horrid cold spot.) Until last year I didn’t even know there had been a long-running moomin newspaper strip.

Now that I see samples for the first time, my feelings are mixed. On the one hand, the art answers gorgeously to my need to feed my eyes on all the antlers and pajamas and especially the triangular noses and the over-sized ones. But the characters are all changed.

Hattifatteners who demand cocktails?

Where’s the small jolt of the silent, nordic, static electricity of vaguely yearning existential dread in that? No Moominmamma and Moominpappa? Sniff as an incompetent, pushy get-rich-quick schemer, played to broad, slapstick effect? Silly fake elixir of youth turning old ladies into old men who roar off after can-can girls? Obviously I must withhold judgment, but it looks as though – at least initially – Jansson didn’t trust the subtle tones of her storytelling to the three-panel form and somewhat condescended to it, letting lovely pictures do all the work. Or maybe she just has to grow into it.

You can pre-order from Amazon – and at a good discount: Moomin, the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip vol. 1.

The Netherlands is rightly regarded as one of the most gay-friendly countries. But in recent years there has been a growing concern about increased intolerance towards gays. The Dutch Parliament has therefore asked the “Social and Cultural Planning Office”:http://www.scp.nl/english/ to conduct a study on the acceptance of gays in this country, which was published last Friday. Is the Netherlands really a good place to be gay? [click to continue…]

I’ve taken up both of Chris’s recent suggestions of non-genre fiction reading, and am glad of it. I suspect I liked On Beauty (a good deal in the UK) less than he did, but I still enjoyed it a good deal (like him I’ll avoid spoilers, and ask commenters to do the same, but warn potential readers that I don’t police comments very well). Discussion on his thread focused on Smith’s ear for dialogue. The book is set in a liberal arts college in or around Boston, but almost all the characters are displaced in some way, and part of what is going on is that most of the characters are putting on a face with most of their interlocutors. So whereas some of the dialogue does sound inauthentic, it reflects the in-authenticity of the characters in the situation. And I love some of the little details – a throwaway sentence about how hard the main male character (a British émigré) finds it to take American bills seriously is exactly right – after 20 years here I am still absurdly pleased to get hold of a 20 pound note, and in my head its worth way more than one of those absurd $50 bills. Two other things to add. First is that, like all campus novels, it makes university life and university politics sound so much more interesting than they really are. Maybe I’m oblivious to this, as well as everything else, but I just never get to hear about these great rivalries and affairs that people have with each other and with their students, or attend the meetings in which people are more than mildly irritated with each other. (This is a complaint about campus novels, not about university life, I hasten to add – I’d hate it if it were the way it is portrayed – or perhaps it is like that and I just wander around with my blinkers on). Second, although Chris says it is loosely based on Howard’s End, I was put constantly in mind of The History Man, whom Howard (the central character) resembles in more than name – and in ways that cannot be accidental. BTW if, like my colleague who has read every other academic novel around, you have somehow missed Bradbury, The History Man is peerless.

The Company You Keep (UK) is, as Chris says, brilliant, and I liked it more than On Beauty.

[click to continue…]

My draft review of Steven Poole’s Unspeak is over the fold. Comments much appreciated.

[click to continue…]

Between 1998 and 2003, “Joris Luyendijk”:http://www.jorisluyendijk.nl/ worked for various Dutch media as their correspondent in the Middle East. He has now written a book about his experiences (as far as I know, it’s only available in Dutch).

Luyendijk, who studied political science and Arabic, lived as a correspondent in Egypt, Lebanon, and East-Jerusalem. One of the main themes of his book is the impossibility of being a correspondent in this region according to the standards that journalists are assumed to aspire to in Europe. With many anecdotes, he shows that the ‘news’ Dutch people are getting about the Middle Eastern countries in the mainstream media is heavily filtered, manipulated, and constrained. It seems plausible to think that if it really is so bad with the Middle East reporting in the Dutch media, it ain’t going to be any better for other countries. Despite that this book is written for a broad readership and therefore aspires to be as readable as possible, it does not offer one simple explanation for this problem. Rather, Luyendijk describes a number of factors. [click to continue…]

Tonight I got good results reading Tony Cliff’s fairy tale, “Old Oak Trees”, to the 5-year old. It’s from the new Flight 3 [amazon]. You can see a preview page here. And from there you can get to the flight blog, an excellent source for boingboing-ish things. In this case, it led me to Tony Cliff’s demo reel for season 1 of Pucca. Most peculiar. It’s Korean. More I really cannot say.