Quotulatiousness

August 3, 2012

How “you didn’t build that” strikes at “Bourgeois Dignity”

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Virginia Postrel explains why President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” gaffe has lasted so long when usually politicians’ gaffes barely last a single news cycle, by outlining the arguments of a recent book by Dierdre N. McCloskey:

The president’s sermon struck a nerve in part because it marked a sharp departure from the traditional Democratic criticism of financiers and big corporations, instead hectoring the people who own dry cleaners and nail salons, car repair shops and restaurants — Main Street, not Wall Street. (Obama did work in a swipe at Internet businesses.) The president didn’t simply argue for higher taxes as a measure of fiscal responsibility or egalitarian fairness. He went after bourgeois dignity.

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 — and much higher in developed nations. (McCloskey’s touchstone is Norway’s $137 a day, second only to tiny Luxembourg’s.)

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”

[. . .]

McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ — or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.

I’ve read McCloskey’s book and plan on reading the next one too. Earlier mentions of Bourgeois Dignity are here and here.

Sir John Keegan, RIP

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:04

One of the most influential military historians of the 20th century is dead. Sir John Keegan, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking book The Face of Battle is remembered by Con Coughlin of the Telegraph:

While, on a personal note, I was deeply saddened to learn of the the death of my dear friend and colleague Sir John Keegan, I hope his passing will provide all of us with the opportunity to reflect on his truly monumental contribution to the study of military history, as well as his more waspish contributions as the Daily Telegraph‘s Defence Editor.

As Professor of Military History at Sandhurst, a position he held with distinction for many years before joining the Daily Telegraph in 1986, John, and he liked to be known in the Telegraph office, single-handedly transformed the way in which we approach military history. Before John made his seminal contributions with books such as The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command, military history was mainly confined to the study of strategy, tactics and technological advances in equipment. The human face — and cost — of warfare was largely overlooked, until Sir John opened up a whole new dimension to the discipline by addressing the human element of conflict.

Update: The New York Times obituary.

Mr. Keegan never served in the military. At 13, he contracted orthopedic tuberculosis and spent the next nine years being treated for it, five of them in a hospital, where he used the time to learn Latin and Greek from a chaplain. As he acknowledged in the introduction to “The Face of Battle,” he had “not been in a battle, nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”

But he said he learned in 1984 “how physically disgusting battlefields are” and “what it feels like to be frightened” when The Telegraph sent him to Beirut, Lebanon, to write about the civil war there.

Mr. Keegan’s body of work ranged across centuries and continents and, as a whole, traced the evolution of warfare and its destructive technology while acknowledging its constants: the terrors of combat and the psychological toll that soldiers have endured.

Update, the second: “Sir Humphrey” at the Thin Pinstriped Line regrets the news:

Humphrey was deeply saddened to read of the death of the esteemed author and military historian, Sir John Keegan. He was one of the greatest authors of military history of the late 20th century, and many of his books can be found on Humphreys bookcases.

Humphrey first discovered Keenan’s work in his teens, and found the excellent analysis and writing style to be engrossing. It was always a pleasure to read his books, and the world is a poorer place for his passing. Similarly, his work on the Daily Telegraph provided first rate analytical capability to that paper, enabling him to join many disparate facts and events and turn them into a critical ‘so what’ assessment on the implications of a situation. In many ways Keegan was an intelligence analyst in all but name, and proponents of the value of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) could do worse than look at his media articles to show how well written work, derived using the same information as everyone else had access to, could easily be used to inform policy makers without being classified as ‘Top Secret Burn Before Reading’.

One of the most important roles that Keegan played though was in his work at Sandhurst. Working alongside other superb historians, such as the late Richard Holmes, he was able to educate an entire generation of British Army Officers in the subtleties of the academic study of the profession of war. The 1970s and 1980s saw almost a ‘golden generation’ of academics emerge from Sandhurst, teaching and writing, and making the move from being a lecturer through to being internationally renowned historians. This was not a new move, for there has long been a strong academic trend at all three service academies over many years, and where whole generations of officers would have been brought into contact with their theories and ideas. The academic studies teams would teach on strategy, tactics, and history and try to bring the wider theoretical and conceptual understanding of military conflict, and merge it with what the cadets were learning in their basic training. This marked the start of a lifelong process of military education, where throughout their careers, military officers returned to Staff College for further updates on strategy, history and wider considerations.

July 28, 2012

“Beevor’s book stinks”

Filed under: Books, History, Japan, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Yes, the headline is taken out of context. Here’s the context:

Granted, we already knew that World War II was brutal. What, then, can Beevor add to this horridly familiar tale? Or, stated differently, do we need another history of that war? Yes, we do. While the war itself remains a constant, the way it is viewed evolves according to changing moral perceptions. In late 1945, for instance, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal decided to suppress evidence of cannibalism in order not to traumatize the families of soldiers who died in Japanese prison camps. Beevor thinks that this once-taboo story needs now to be told. He’s probably right. His skill lies in telling it without descending into gratuitous horror.

The challenge that confronts historians is how to convey the immensity of total war without losing sight of singular torment. Too often, the grandeur of great battles smothers the suffering of the individual. Soldiers become battalions that attack on faceless flanks. “One death is a tragedy,” Stalin famously remarked. “A million deaths a statistic.” In the grand narrative, human beings disappear. War is thus sanitized; Stalingrad and Normandy are re-created without the detail of men and women screaming in agony. That is how some readers like it — war without the carnage and putrefaction, without the dismembered limbs and torn faces.

But that is chess, not war. Good military history should stink of blood, feces and fear. Beevor’s book stinks. It reconstructs the great battles but weaves in hundreds of tiny instances of immense suffering. War is presented on its most personal level. We learn not only of the vanity of Gen. Mark Clark, the cruelty of Gen. George Patton and the stupidity of Gen. Maurice Gamelin, but also of the terrible misery endured by what the poet Charles Hamilton Sorley once called “the millions of mouthless dead.” Very few heroes emerge, because heroes are too often cardboard constructs. Detail adds nuance and dimension, clouding characteristics worthy of worship. “Say not soft things as other men have said,” warned Sorley to those who wanted to remember war. Beevor constructs a true picture by avoiding soft things. The book brims with horror, but so it should.

July 26, 2012

Should Travels with Charley be filed in non-fiction or fiction?

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:53

Bill Steigerwald talks about his research into John Steinbeck’s famous Travels with Charley and what was eliminated from the manuscript before it went to press:

Three weeks before I left on my trip to retrace John Steinbeck’s steps in Travels With Charley in Search of America, I did something no one in the world had done in four years. I went to the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan to read the first draft of the book. The handwritten manuscript — along with a typed and edited copy — has been stored at the Morgan like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark for almost 50 years.

Few scholars, graduate students, or critics had bothered to read it. If they had, the Travels With Charley myth — that for 11 weeks Steinbeck slowly traveled alone, camped out often, carefully studied the country, and told readers what he really thought about America and its 180 million people — might have been debunked decades ago.

[. . .]

The edits to the first draft mostly make sense; a lot of extraneous details and long-windedness on Steinbeck’s part are cut. But excising material about Steinbeck’s regular liaisons with his wife Elaine in fancy hotels, his stay with his good friend and failed presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and his outright contempt for Richard Nixon serve another purpose. The casual or romantic reader is left with the impression that Steinbeck was alone and on the road most of the time, when in fact he was neither. By the time Viking Press was done marketing the book as nonfiction and dressing it up with excellent but misleading illustrations by Don Freeman, the Travels With Charley myth was born and bronzed. The book was an instant and huge bestseller. Critics and reviewers, followed by several generations of scholars, never questioned the book’s nonfiction status.

July 25, 2012

Reason.tv: Fan fiction versus copyright

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

“It takes a big studio to make The Avengers, but it doesn’t necessarily take a big studio to write a piece of Avengers fan fiction,” says Georgetown University law professor and fan fiction advocate Rebecca Tushnet. “Big content companies largely recognize that fan activities are really good for them because they engage people.”

The growing popularity of fan fiction, a genre in which fans create their own stories featuring characters or settings from their favorite works of popular culture, raises thorny copyright issues. “Given how broad copyright is now, it’s now possible to say fan fiction is an infringing derivative work,” Tushnet explains. “In order to deal with that…we now talk about fair use, which allows people to make fair, limited uses of works without permission from the copyright owner.”

As a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, Tushnet works to defend fan fiction creators caught in the legal debate between protected intellectual property and fair use.

July 12, 2012

QotD: The real reasons for criticizing Fifty Shades of Grey

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

When you get down to it, the problem most people seem to have with Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s for girls. Even worse — it’s “mommy porn”, porn for mommies, for older women to read and get excited about, and that dangerous nonsense really needs to be stopped right now. Everyone knows that the only women who are allowed to actually have sexuality are slender, high-breasted twenty-one year old virgins — rather like, it has to be said, the heroine of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Laurie Penny, “In defence of Fifty Shades of Grey”, New Statesman, 2012-07-08

July 11, 2012

Antony Beevor’s latest book

Filed under: Asia, Books, Europe, History, Military, Pacific, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

In History Today, Roger Moorhouse talks to Antony Beevor on his latest booK:

I asked what novelties of approach or new material he employed for the book? Did he, for instance, set out to try to draw the two traditionally distinct narratives of the war in the Pacific and the war in Europe into a single integral whole? Though he does make a nod in that direction, Beevor believes that such an approach is not really feasible, adding that the war in the Pacific was ‘almost like a war on another planet’, such was its separation from events in Europe. ‘I was fascinated,’ he went on, ‘by the reaction of the US Marines on Okinawa when they heard about the surrender of Germany. It was “Who cares?” For them it was impossible to imagine, just as it was impossible for the people fighting in the snows of Russia to imagine war in the Pacific Islands.’

If the approach is largely conventional, the book does not lack new information. Russian sources are still yielding fascinating material, he notes, despite political retrenchment, while German scholarship is throwing up new approaches and new resources, such as the archive of Feldpostbriefe (soldiers ‘field post’ letters) in Stuttgart. Beevor’s most interesting revelation, however, is the horrific contention that the Japanese army practised organised cannibalism. As he explains: ‘Allied prisoners, especially Indian army prisoners, were kept as sort of human cattle and slaughtered one by one for their meat.’ News of such crimes was largely suppressed after the war, as it was considered ‘too awful even to be mentioned in the war crimes trials’, but has since been brought to light by Japanese historians.

[. . .]

Of course the heart of Beevor’s appeal is precisely that straightforward narrative approach, coupled with his lively, engaging style and his use of memorable, almost cinematic, set-pieces. I put it to him that, in tackling a book of this scope, perhaps he had been obliged to rein in some of those literary flourishes. ‘You are right,’ he conceded. ‘There is so much more to tell and there is much less room for the vignette, but it is still terribly important, serving to root the reader in the reality of the moment.’ He is swift to acknowledge a debt to John Keegan in this regard, under whom he studied at Sandhurst and whose The Face of Battle (1976) was hugely influential. ‘It is absolutely vital to give the reader a frequent reminder of what it was actually like, the view from below, otherwise it’s just history from above, which never really works.’

July 1, 2012

H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary turns 70

Filed under: Books, History, Humour, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Terry Teachout celebrates the 70th anniversary of the original publication of H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles From Ancient and Modern Sources:

The “New Dictionary” was a byproduct of its prolific editor’s fanatically industrious journalistic career. For years Mencken maintained a card file of quotations “that, for one reason or another, interested me and seemed worth remembering, but that, also for one reason or another, were not in the existing quotation-books.” In 1932 he decided to turn it into a book. When the “New Dictionary” finally saw print a decade later, Time praised it as “one of the rare books that deserve the well-worn phrase ‘Here at last.'”

Painstakingly organized and cross-referenced by subject, with each entry arranged in chronological order by date of original publication, the “New Dictionary” is formidably wide-ranging. Indeed, the only major writer missing from its index is Mencken himself. (“I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself,” he told a curious reporter. “I leave that to the intelligence of posterity.”) Its 1,347 pages abound with such innocent-sounding rubrics as “Civilization,” “Flag, American,” “Hell,” “Hypocrisy,” “Old and New” and “Science and Religion.” At first glance you might mistake it for a cornucopia of the world’s wisdom—but don’t let appearances fool you. The fathomlessly cynical Mencken wisely warned his readers in the preface that the “New Dictionary” was aimed at “readers whose general tastes and ideas approximate my own…. The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose.”

He wasn’t kidding. Look up “Evolution,” for example, and you’ll find this 1925 statement by the Bible-thumping evangelist Billy Sunday: “If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar.” Look up “Critic” and you’ll be confronted with a rich catalog of ripe insults, among them this passage from Samuel Coleridge’s “Modern Critics”: “All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, / Disinterested thieves of our good name: / Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame.” Or check out “Irish,” under which can be found no less than a page of invidious comments, including a sideswipe from, of all people, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The ambition of the Irish is to say a thing as everybody says it, only louder.”

Teachout is the author of a brilliant biography of Mencken: The Sceptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, which I happen to be re-reading at the moment. For more on Mencken himself, the wikipedia entry is here.

June 30, 2012

A sneak peek at Lois McMaster Bujold’s next SF novel

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

If you’d like to get a taste of the next novel in the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold, the first six chapters of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance have been posted for your reading pleasure.

June 29, 2012

Coming soon: The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:21

His latest novel is number 4 in the “Laundry” series, as Bob Howard recovers from his injuries accumulated over the course of The Fuller Memorandum. It should be on sale in North America next week, and a couple of weeks after that in the UK and (I assume) other European markets.

If you want to order signed copies, right now your only option is Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh, who call me in to sign books. (I will normally sign anything you shove under my nose except a cheque, but I don’t have a signing tour scheduled for The Apocalypse Codex and this is a nose-to-the-grindstone working month for me.)

If you want to know which sales channel give the author most money, the order is: ideally an undiscounted hardback from a small retailer (like Transreal), followed by a discounted hardback from a big box store or Amazon or the undiscounted UK trade paperback, then an ebook, then a discounted trade paperback from a big box store … the book will be available as a mass market paperback or discounted ebook in July 2013, which makes the author even less money, but more than a remaindered copy or a pirate download or library loan.

Want a taster of the contents? Orbit, my UK publisher, are posting extracts over the next week, starting here … or you can look below the cut!

My connection to Charles is pretty obscure: we worked for the same company (in different countries) briefly, and I met him in that context for a few minutes (this was before his writing career had taken off). His political views and mine differ pretty substantially (he thinks libertarians are, at best, deluded), but he’s a very good writer and I’ve enjoyed reading everything of his I’ve encountered.

June 26, 2012

Poland’s uneasy WW2 history

Filed under: Books, Europe, Germany, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Poles are being told unwelcome things about the country’s experiences under Nazi rule. The most recent upheavals have been triggered by the publication of a new book by Jan T. Gross:

Its title, Golden Harvest, stems from a cover photograph that purportedly shows Polish peasants who have been digging through remains of victims killed at Treblinka, where 800,000 Jews were gassed and cremated, to find gold or valuable stones neglected by the Nazis.

From there, Mr. Gross narrates events beyond the barbed wire of Nazi death camps. He describes Poles hunting Jews down, extorting money from them, massacring them, and profiting by taking over their jobs and property. Some 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland before the war began, and about 90 percent had perished by its end.

“There was a sense of satisfaction that was quite widespread that they are being eliminated from Polish economic and social life,” Mr. Gross says in a phone interview from Kraków, where he is teaching a summer course for Princeton students. “When given the opportunity, a large number of Poles participated in victimization of Jews.”

[. . .]

The white-haired, New York-based writer, 64, enjoys a level of notoriety in his native country that lacks any analogue among American historians. When word gets out that he is publishing a new book, anxiety spreads about what dirty laundry he will expose this time. His writing gets discussed on prime-time TV.

Mr. Gross “polarizes public opinion probably more than anyone else outside of the political world,” says Jan Grabowski, a Holocaust historian who splits his time between the University of Ottawa and Poland.

His books have struck such a nerve because they cut against the national narrative that Poland is exclusively a victim of history, not a victimizer.

June 23, 2012

Autobiography as fiction, lightly dusted with personal history

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Mark Steyn on America’s first Invented-American president:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’ new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish nonliterary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

[. . .]

In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over “Dreams From My Father” is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straitjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

June 18, 2012

The wins and losses in the C-11 copyright reform bill

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Michael Geist on the good and the bad aspects of bill C-11 which will probably pass third reading today in the House of Commons and be sent to the Senate for approval:

There is no sugar-coating the loss on digital locks. While other countries have been willing to stand up to U.S. pressure and adopt a more flexible approach, the government, led by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore on the issue, was unwilling to compromise despite near-universal criticism of its approach. It appears that once Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the call for a DMCA-style approach in early May 2010, the digital lock issue was lost. The government heard that the bill will hurt IP enforcement, restrict access for the blind, disadvantage Canadian creators, and harm consumer rights. It received tens of thousands of comments from Canadians opposed to the approach and ran a full consultation in which digital locks were the leading concern. The NDP, Liberals, and Green Party proposed balanced amendments to the digital lock rules that were consistent with international requirements and would have maintained protection for companies that use them, but all were rejected. [. . .]

Since the Conservatives took power in 2006, there were effectively four bills: the Pre-Bill C-61 bill that was to have been introduced by Jim Prentice in December 2007 but was delayed following public pressure, Bill C-61 introduced in June 2008, and Bill C-32/C-11, which was introduced in June 2010 (and later reintroduced in September 2011). The contents of December 2007 bill was never released, but documents obtained under the Access to Information Act provide a good sense of what it contained (a call was even scheduled on the planned day of introduction between Prentice and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins to assure the U.S. that digital locks were the key issue and would not be altered). This chart highlights many of the key issues and their progression over the years as the public became increasingly vocal on copyright:

Issue Pre-Bill
C-61 (2007) 		Bill C-61
(2008) 		Bill C-11
(2012)
Fair Dealing Expansion No No Yes (education, parody, satire)
Format Shifting No Limited (only photographs, book,
newspaper, periodical, or videocassette) 		Yes (technology neutral, no
limit on number of copies, includes network storage, and no reference
to contractual overrides)
Time Shifting No Limited (no network PVRs,
Internet communications) 		Yes (C-61 limitations removed)
Backup Copies No No Yes
User Generated Content Exception No No Yes
Statutory Damages Cap No Limited ($500 cap for
downloading) 		Yes (Max of $5000 for all
non-commercial infringement)
Enabler enforcement provision No No Yes
Internet Publicly Available
Materials Exception for Education 		Yes Yes Yes
Public Performance in Schools No No Yes
Technology Neutral Display
Exception in Schools 		No No Yes
Limited Distance Learning
Exception 		Yes Yes Yes
Limited Digital Inter-Library
Loans 		Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Notice Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Takedown No No No
Three Strikes//Website Blocking No No No
Internet Location Tool Provider
Safe Harbour 		Yes Yes Yes
Broadcaster Ephemeral Change No No Yes
Expanded Private Copying Levy No No No
Commissioned Photograph Change Yes Yes Yes
Alternate Format Reproduction No No Yes

[. . .]

Public engagement on copyright continuously grew in strength – from the Bulte battle in 2006 to the Facebook activism in 2007 to the immediate response to the 2008 bill to the 2009 copyright consultation to the 2010 response to Bill C-32. While many dismissed the role of digital activism on copyright, the reality is that it had a huge impact on the shape of Canadian copyright. The public voice influenced not only the contents of the bill, but the debate as well with digital locks the dominant topic of House of Commons debate and media coverage until the very end. Bill C-11 remains a “flawed but fixable” bill that the government refused to fix, but that it is a significantly better bill than seemed possible a few years ago owes much to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians that spoke out on copyright.

May 27, 2012

Fifty shades of suburbanizing stuff to make it boring

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

In the National Post, Darrin Rose laments the “mainstreaming” of BDSM, or badly written erotica, or something:

The erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has sold 10 million copies in only six weeks of sales, and in doing so has shed a lot of light on what suburban moms are looking for in the bookstore, if not in the bedroom. It has been banned in some U.S. libraries, generating controversy in equal measure for pornographic content and terrible writing. If you like books that read like a triple-X version of your Grade 8 diary, then you’re in luck. But trouble looms on the horizon.

The book has become part of the zeitgeist, leading to all kinds of new sexual ideas in the suburbs. I should confess that as a city dweller, I like to encourage the notion that urbanites lead sexy, dangerous lives already. But the suburban soccer moms who make up the majority of the book’s readership are discovering a sexy, dangerous world of bondage, discipline and sado-masochism, also known — by lazy people and perverts — as BDSM. While BDSM is currently a risqué, fun activity, the suburbs will do what they always do when they find a new sexy idea — turn it into an exercise you do at the gym, thereby simultaneously destroying its sexiness and enjoyability. They did the same thing to the Lambada and stripper poles.

[. . .]

The same thing happened to stripper poles, which you can find in the aerobics room of many gyms these days. It takes a really asexual person to see a stripper pole and think “that’d be great for low impact muscle development.” So stripper poles were installed in the sweat factories, and real life took a hit. If you go to a strip club and think the best part is the gymnastics, you’re really missing the point. They did the same thing to lap dances and stripteases, two related disciplines now doled out in 60 minute lessons at strip malls across the nation.

And now Fifty Shades of Grey has BDSM lined up next for the exercise treatment. That way middle-aged women can take flogging classes, where personal instructors literally beat you into shape. We’re probably a couple years away from spending 30 minutes on the elliptical machine while a personal trainer whispers in your ear “do you like that?” and “you’re such a dirty little jogger.” A workout seems much more intimidating if you need a safety word to make it stop, but I would rather be spared the sight of a gym full of moms being spanked while they do hamstring curls.

May 26, 2012

Neil Davenport reviews Tony Judt’s final book

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

As I just started reading Judt’s best known work recently (Postwar), I was unaware that Judt had died not long after that book was published. In the sp!ked review of books, Neil Davenport reviews Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder:

In 2008, Judt discovered that he was suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disease. Over a two-year period, Snyder records and transcribes a series of conversations that cover both Judt’s life and intellectual pursuits by way of the tumultuous events of the last century. Judt died in August 2010, 62 years old, just a few weeks after dictating a final afterword to this book.

The format works surprisingly well. Judt relishes his role as a public intellectual and makes accessible huge swathes of history and ideas throughout the book’s 400 pages. There are never any lapses into impenetrable jargon or academic riddles. The book is tremendously lucid and informed, thoughtful and engaging. Credit must be given to Snyder who, rather than stamping on the coat tails of Judt’s intellect, proffers sharp questions and observations only intermittently. When he does, it serves as a striking reminder that this is a conversation, not an academic monologue. Mostly we are left to marvel at Judt’s command of his material, his knowledge, intellect and insights, as they’re casually reeled off into a digital recorder. The working-class ex-grammar school boy makes attractive and vital something that has been relentlessly and scandalously attacked in recent decades: a liberal, humanities-based education.

[. . .]

Judt gave much of his early career to the history of the French left, but could not buy into their assumption that the Russian Revolution was merely the continuation of 1789. And to his credit, he saw through the cultural studies, Marcuse-era left of 1968, too. As he rightly puts it, ‘my residual socialist-Marxist formation made me instinctively suspicious of the popular notion that students might now be a — the — revolutionary class’. He was also spot on about how the cultural left fragmented history as a discipline into competing ‘narratives’.

These are all sharp, well-observed points. So it’s a pity that, like so many left-leaning academics before him, he retained that most durable of illusions: belief in the credibility of the British Labour Party’s social democracy. For someone so well versed in Marxism and interwar radicalism, it’s surprising that he remained steadfastly quiet about the real purpose of social democracy. And if he was feeling generous about its achievements, he doesn’t nail down social democracy’s strengths during its postwar heyday, either. Although he used the social-democracy banner to describe contemporary politics both in Britain and Europe, there’s no awareness of how ‘parliamentary socialism’ has come to mean something very different in the twenty-first century.

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