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queenluaI got on a nonfiction kick these past two months, so! Hope you like reviews that are mostly me spewing facts.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
This book is extremely good, and relatively concise, and you should probably just read it if you have any interest in the thesis.
Lifting said thesis from the back cover:
"Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day."
Rothstein delivers brutally on this promise. In particular, I think he's incensed over the 2007 Supreme Court school busing decision, which determined that, since cities are merely segregated by individual choice, it'd be unlawful to use a forced busing program to fix it. Rothstein goes after the "by individual choice" bit and eviscerates it. Each chapter is just a new Way In Which Government Was Evil, i.e., here's the chapter on why zoning is evil, here's the chapter on why federal home loans were evil, here's the chapter on every time black people got murdered for moving into a white neighborhood, here's the chapter on how HOAs came into existence for the purpose of evil, etc. It's intensely admirable in its thoroughness (though, y'know, also depressing!).
Two big takeaways for me, personally (though, again, just read the dang book):
I couldn't get this phrase out of my head, the whole time I was reading: "Treat us like dogs and we will become wolves." It was stunning how often you'd have a relatively egalitarian, not-perfect-but-actually-doing-okay community, with a reasonable amount of racial diversity—but then some institution of the federal or state government would actively work against the nice thing that already existed, or else the local government would bend over backwards for the anxieties of a minority of rich white people in the community, and suddenly you'd have all the black families relocated to the "ghetto" area. And then, the people in the ghetto become poorer and more desperate, because you've removed them from transit to good jobs, you've put chemical plants next to their homes, like, exactly the thing you could've predicted would happen—except then, the next generation of white people are even more terrified of the "scary" part of town, and somehow they're blaming the people in the ghetto for their problems, even though they made that part of town that way, and no one talks to each other and the whole clusterfuck worsens, and the more time that passes the harder it is to remedy, all because some asshats decades and decades ago couldn't shelve their minor discomforts to create a decent community for everyone.
Also: this book made me oddly optimistic about local governance. Not because the local governments in this book did the right thing. But, they were a huge part of the problem, and there were rare city governments who were able to fight the larger national trends and managed to pass more egalitarian setups for their own cities. So what the local government does fucking matters. And I can't do much for national trends but I can do something for my own city.
I hope so, anyway. The book makes you angry enough that you want to try, at least.
The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz
This one reads a bit like a textbook, but a textbook with enough random fun facts thrown in to keep things spicy.
The author's overarching thesis is that the "happy breadwinner-and-homemaker 1950s marriage" in the United States was a historical aberration rather than a norm, and that such 'self-sufficient,' upwardly mobile families actually benefited from (and were in some sense manufactured by) substantial financial support from the federal government."
As a corollary, the author argues that the US's late-1800s "Gilded Age" is the most apt comparison to family dynamics today. The Gilded Age was a time of general political cynicism, like now. The rich got richer, the poor had no voice, and the middle class increasingly felt squeezed between the two, like now. And thus the middle class reacted with a sort of "radical individualism," where you can still be a Good Person by focusing solely on your family (to the exclusion of all other communities), but it turns out compensating for individualism and antisocial tendencies in larger society by obsessing over just your nuclear family is bad news! I should really read more Gilded Age history so I can fully understand the comparison being made, but, honestly in a weird way I found this comparison uplifting. Being a lazy single millennial with a dope city job was a thing that The Olds fretted over in the 1880s just as much as now, the kids are alright, etc
Other random fun facts from the book:
* in a 1950s survey, 40% of Barnard graduates admitted to "playing dumb" to catch a dude's interest
* Some excerpts from a perfectly respectable Victorian lady's letters to her best friend, plus commentary:
so yeah romantic tl;dr romantic male-male relationships were fine until the late 1800s and romantic female-female relationships were fine until the early 1900s and then MODERNITY FUCKED IT ALL UP, THANKS FOR NOTHING MODERNITY
* "One image of the self-reliant pioneer family has been queathed to us by the Little House on the Prairie books and television series, which almost every American has read or seen. What is less well-known is that these stories, based on the memoirs of Laura Ingalls Wilder, were extensively revised by her daughter as an ideological attack on government programs. When Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, failed to establish a secure income as a freelance writer in the 1930s, Linda Kerber reports, 'Lane announced that she would no longer write so that she would not have to pay taxes to a New Deal government.' However, 'she rewrote the rough drafts of her mother's memoirs, . . . turning them into the Little House books in which the isolated family is pitted against the elements and makes it—or doesn't—with no help from the community.' In reality, prairie farmers and other pioneer families owed their existence to massive federal land grants, government-funded military mobilizations . . ."
* while government subsidies were the only thing that made small, independent family farms possible, they were not the economic powerhouse of the west—instead, they just offered a nice political-constituency-slash-ideological-cover for subsidies to bigass corporations, e.g. the railroad companies & friends, such that "probably only one acre in nine went to the small pioneers." does this sound... familiar
* Coontz argues that "self-reliance" has been an American virtue from the beginning, but not in the way you think—self-reliance means only a person "free from domination by any landlord, employer, or political patron" can engage usefully in society, but that's just a prereq. You then have to do the work of actually being involved in your community. It's interesting to reread Emerson's "Self-Reliance" with this in mind
* "A communistic habitation forces the family to conform to communistic modes of thought," said some U of Chicago professor in 1902, and thus came a bunch of shitty laws against boarding and lodging, shared houses, etc, lollollol sigh
* similarly, as late as the 1970s, food stamps were denied to any sensible poor person who, y'know, shared cooking facilities with... other people... smh
* Mother's Day originated to celebrate organized activities of women outside the home. Y'know, like, campaigning to improve the conditions of miners in Appalachia, providing medical services during the Civil War, etc. Naturally by the time the federal government decided to glom onto the holiday the fucked the whole thing up and now it's just "thanks mom for taking care of kids"
* She touches on narcissism in a way similar to The Last Psychiatrist's take on it. tl;dr: narcissim doesn't come from self-indulgence, it comes from self doubt; the solution is to have a strong sense of self. (This is hard thanks to the commoditization of, oh, everything.)
* Marriages where the dude has more education than the lady are more likely to end in divorce. Also, marriages in which housework is shared equally are happier, have more sex, and so on. Articles that claim to the contrary are generally citing statistics for marriages formed before the 1990s, when everyone was having trouble adjusting to the New World Order or whatever; turns out modern couples like egalitarianism wow.
* THIS WHOLE ANECDOTE holy shit
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
I've been trying to understand horror as a genre more lately. I've never been into horror movies—not because I find them too violent, or gross, or scary, but just because they're always boring. But lately, one of the stories I've been trying to write is probably-kind-of a horror story, and probably the only example in my mind of a well-done horror story shouldn't be "The Screwfly Solution" (even though holy shit is that a good one), so. Here's a horror-ish short story collection that someone recommended.
It does the very Virginia Woolf-esque thing where certain objects recur throughout the stories, picking up new and haunting resonances each time they appear, which is a neat and pleasing trick, and serves as an efficient replacement for belabored or overly-florid descriptions. However, the product as a whole still felt more eerie than visceral or horrifying, which is probably fine if you're into that, but eh, I'm not.
Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie
I saw quotes from this book plastered in the visitor center for Gates of the Arctic National Park, when I visited in August, and the quotes were beautiful enough I felt compelled to pick the book up.
(It helps that the title alone is pure poetry. Like, damn.)
I wouldn't recommend the book in general—I think you have to be pretty invested in Alaska to be into it at all. And it's very much not a narrative, just a charming old lady's journals about her life. But not every old lady lived in Fairbanks as a young woman in the 1910s, and not every old lady went romping through the arctic chasing caribou for their honeymoon, and not every old lady becomes so noted for their wildlife advocacy that they're dubbed the "grandmother of the conservation movement," so.
If you've traveled in Alaska before, you'll be charmed to see descriptions of so many familiar places—Bettles, Coldfoot, Arctic Village—as they were so many decades ago. And it's rich with all the subtle details you'd never think to ask about because they're just so ingrained into her life as she lived it—the grubstake system that allowed early Alaskan prospectors to get loans (and the debt-collector who would stalk and wait by the dock when the first boat after snowmelt came back from the wild), the need to travel by night when dogsledding south in late summer due to the risks of melting ice during the daytime, the hundreds of songs they'd sing to each other on long hikes and long boat journeys to keep from being bored, the sound of thousands of caribou migrating that sounds just like an approaching freight train, and so on and so forth.
There are some beautiful passages, almost schmaltzy, but I get it, I've loved a place enough to write drippy paragraphs like these:
It also struck me that, in a way, the book itself is a testament to the importance of education. Her husband, Olaus, matters because he's wise and learned and does lots of important scientific research. But his largest impact, by far, comes from his simple kindness and willingness to teach. His wife did not know all the birds when she first married him, yet she was keen to learn; though she's constantly referring to her "womanish" tendencies and belittling her own knowledge, the truth is she roughs it just as much as Olaus does, and he never suggests she'd be better off staying home. And so when Olaus passed away and all our wonderful wild areas came under threat, Murie was able to continue his work, and we've got tens of millions of acres of wild places preserved for it.
What you can do with your one life is a small thing. What you can inspire is something far greater.
Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett
I slammed the "reserve" button on my library seconds after I saw this trollish New York Times writeup on the book, that I snarkily summarized as "'show, don't tell' is the rule of imperialists and the CIA!"
I already blogged my favorite takeaway from the book, so I'll only add that I found the book oddly and unexpectedly empowering. Though it's been a long time since I aspired to be a Great Writer in the style of Bold MFA Graduates (fun fact: as a kid I attempted to submit, in vain, to the Kenyon Review), this was yet another reminder that any given artsy cult, or thing deemed Great Literature, is just one way of processing the Great Conversation and not the Right Answer, or even A Right Answer.
Also: I learned that, apparently, Wallace Stegner did a big speaking tour in Japan in the 50s to preach the virtues of Bold Creative Western Writers to the rest of the world. And, of course, one of my favorite authors of all time, Yukio Mishima, was just coming into his own at that time. I am so curious if they met? if Mishima sat in on a lecture? what they thought of each other's work? if they thought of each other's work? History is weird.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
This book is extremely good, and relatively concise, and you should probably just read it if you have any interest in the thesis.
Lifting said thesis from the back cover:
"Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day."
Rothstein delivers brutally on this promise. In particular, I think he's incensed over the 2007 Supreme Court school busing decision, which determined that, since cities are merely segregated by individual choice, it'd be unlawful to use a forced busing program to fix it. Rothstein goes after the "by individual choice" bit and eviscerates it. Each chapter is just a new Way In Which Government Was Evil, i.e., here's the chapter on why zoning is evil, here's the chapter on why federal home loans were evil, here's the chapter on every time black people got murdered for moving into a white neighborhood, here's the chapter on how HOAs came into existence for the purpose of evil, etc. It's intensely admirable in its thoroughness (though, y'know, also depressing!).
Two big takeaways for me, personally (though, again, just read the dang book):
I couldn't get this phrase out of my head, the whole time I was reading: "Treat us like dogs and we will become wolves." It was stunning how often you'd have a relatively egalitarian, not-perfect-but-actually-doing-okay community, with a reasonable amount of racial diversity—but then some institution of the federal or state government would actively work against the nice thing that already existed, or else the local government would bend over backwards for the anxieties of a minority of rich white people in the community, and suddenly you'd have all the black families relocated to the "ghetto" area. And then, the people in the ghetto become poorer and more desperate, because you've removed them from transit to good jobs, you've put chemical plants next to their homes, like, exactly the thing you could've predicted would happen—except then, the next generation of white people are even more terrified of the "scary" part of town, and somehow they're blaming the people in the ghetto for their problems, even though they made that part of town that way, and no one talks to each other and the whole clusterfuck worsens, and the more time that passes the harder it is to remedy, all because some asshats decades and decades ago couldn't shelve their minor discomforts to create a decent community for everyone.
Also: this book made me oddly optimistic about local governance. Not because the local governments in this book did the right thing. But, they were a huge part of the problem, and there were rare city governments who were able to fight the larger national trends and managed to pass more egalitarian setups for their own cities. So what the local government does fucking matters. And I can't do much for national trends but I can do something for my own city.
I hope so, anyway. The book makes you angry enough that you want to try, at least.
The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz
This one reads a bit like a textbook, but a textbook with enough random fun facts thrown in to keep things spicy.
The author's overarching thesis is that the "happy breadwinner-and-homemaker 1950s marriage" in the United States was a historical aberration rather than a norm, and that such 'self-sufficient,' upwardly mobile families actually benefited from (and were in some sense manufactured by) substantial financial support from the federal government."
As a corollary, the author argues that the US's late-1800s "Gilded Age" is the most apt comparison to family dynamics today. The Gilded Age was a time of general political cynicism, like now. The rich got richer, the poor had no voice, and the middle class increasingly felt squeezed between the two, like now. And thus the middle class reacted with a sort of "radical individualism," where you can still be a Good Person by focusing solely on your family (to the exclusion of all other communities), but it turns out compensating for individualism and antisocial tendencies in larger society by obsessing over just your nuclear family is bad news! I should really read more Gilded Age history so I can fully understand the comparison being made, but, honestly in a weird way I found this comparison uplifting. Being a lazy single millennial with a dope city job was a thing that The Olds fretted over in the 1880s just as much as now, the kids are alright, etc
Other random fun facts from the book:
* in a 1950s survey, 40% of Barnard graduates admitted to "playing dumb" to catch a dude's interest
* Some excerpts from a perfectly respectable Victorian lady's letters to her best friend, plus commentary:
"I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you . . . that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish." They recorded the "furnace blast" of their "passionate attachments" to each other, extolled each other's "sweet, soft lips" and "lily-white hands," and counted the hours until they could lie in bed, "caressing" each other again. They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another's portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivalries and small slights.
Today, if a woman died and her son or husband found such diaries or letters in her effects, he would probably destroy them in rage or humiliation. In the nineteenth century, those sentiments were so respectable that surviving relatives often published them in elegies or donated the diaries and letters to libraries.
so yeah romantic tl;dr romantic male-male relationships were fine until the late 1800s and romantic female-female relationships were fine until the early 1900s and then MODERNITY FUCKED IT ALL UP, THANKS FOR NOTHING MODERNITY
* "One image of the self-reliant pioneer family has been queathed to us by the Little House on the Prairie books and television series, which almost every American has read or seen. What is less well-known is that these stories, based on the memoirs of Laura Ingalls Wilder, were extensively revised by her daughter as an ideological attack on government programs. When Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, failed to establish a secure income as a freelance writer in the 1930s, Linda Kerber reports, 'Lane announced that she would no longer write so that she would not have to pay taxes to a New Deal government.' However, 'she rewrote the rough drafts of her mother's memoirs, . . . turning them into the Little House books in which the isolated family is pitted against the elements and makes it—or doesn't—with no help from the community.' In reality, prairie farmers and other pioneer families owed their existence to massive federal land grants, government-funded military mobilizations . . ."
* while government subsidies were the only thing that made small, independent family farms possible, they were not the economic powerhouse of the west—instead, they just offered a nice political-constituency-slash-ideological-cover for subsidies to bigass corporations, e.g. the railroad companies & friends, such that "probably only one acre in nine went to the small pioneers." does this sound... familiar
* Coontz argues that "self-reliance" has been an American virtue from the beginning, but not in the way you think—self-reliance means only a person "free from domination by any landlord, employer, or political patron" can engage usefully in society, but that's just a prereq. You then have to do the work of actually being involved in your community. It's interesting to reread Emerson's "Self-Reliance" with this in mind
* "A communistic habitation forces the family to conform to communistic modes of thought," said some U of Chicago professor in 1902, and thus came a bunch of shitty laws against boarding and lodging, shared houses, etc, lollollol sigh
* similarly, as late as the 1970s, food stamps were denied to any sensible poor person who, y'know, shared cooking facilities with... other people... smh
* Mother's Day originated to celebrate organized activities of women outside the home. Y'know, like, campaigning to improve the conditions of miners in Appalachia, providing medical services during the Civil War, etc. Naturally by the time the federal government decided to glom onto the holiday the fucked the whole thing up and now it's just "thanks mom for taking care of kids"
* She touches on narcissism in a way similar to The Last Psychiatrist's take on it. tl;dr: narcissim doesn't come from self-indulgence, it comes from self doubt; the solution is to have a strong sense of self. (This is hard thanks to the commoditization of, oh, everything.)
* Marriages where the dude has more education than the lady are more likely to end in divorce. Also, marriages in which housework is shared equally are happier, have more sex, and so on. Articles that claim to the contrary are generally citing statistics for marriages formed before the 1990s, when everyone was having trouble adjusting to the New World Order or whatever; turns out modern couples like egalitarianism wow.
* THIS WHOLE ANECDOTE holy shit
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
I've been trying to understand horror as a genre more lately. I've never been into horror movies—not because I find them too violent, or gross, or scary, but just because they're always boring. But lately, one of the stories I've been trying to write is probably-kind-of a horror story, and probably the only example in my mind of a well-done horror story shouldn't be "The Screwfly Solution" (even though holy shit is that a good one), so. Here's a horror-ish short story collection that someone recommended.
It does the very Virginia Woolf-esque thing where certain objects recur throughout the stories, picking up new and haunting resonances each time they appear, which is a neat and pleasing trick, and serves as an efficient replacement for belabored or overly-florid descriptions. However, the product as a whole still felt more eerie than visceral or horrifying, which is probably fine if you're into that, but eh, I'm not.
Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie
I saw quotes from this book plastered in the visitor center for Gates of the Arctic National Park, when I visited in August, and the quotes were beautiful enough I felt compelled to pick the book up.
(It helps that the title alone is pure poetry. Like, damn.)
I wouldn't recommend the book in general—I think you have to be pretty invested in Alaska to be into it at all. And it's very much not a narrative, just a charming old lady's journals about her life. But not every old lady lived in Fairbanks as a young woman in the 1910s, and not every old lady went romping through the arctic chasing caribou for their honeymoon, and not every old lady becomes so noted for their wildlife advocacy that they're dubbed the "grandmother of the conservation movement," so.
If you've traveled in Alaska before, you'll be charmed to see descriptions of so many familiar places—Bettles, Coldfoot, Arctic Village—as they were so many decades ago. And it's rich with all the subtle details you'd never think to ask about because they're just so ingrained into her life as she lived it—the grubstake system that allowed early Alaskan prospectors to get loans (and the debt-collector who would stalk and wait by the dock when the first boat after snowmelt came back from the wild), the need to travel by night when dogsledding south in late summer due to the risks of melting ice during the daytime, the hundreds of songs they'd sing to each other on long hikes and long boat journeys to keep from being bored, the sound of thousands of caribou migrating that sounds just like an approaching freight train, and so on and so forth.
There are some beautiful passages, almost schmaltzy, but I get it, I've loved a place enough to write drippy paragraphs like these:
On that last evening, after the baby was asleep, Olaus and I slipped across the river in the canoe and climbed up onto the tundra. It was ten o'clock, July 26. The sun had just slipped below a distant blue ridge, but bright saffron light filled the northwest; the rest was pale blue. It was daytime, but that very still, strange, exhilarating daytime of the arctic summer night, which can only be felt, not described. Here the flowing green-bronze tundra stretched as far as we could see—to the north, a few short ranges of hills; far to the south, rising pale blue off the flatness, the Old Crow Mountains again. In the morning we would be turning toward them.
We stood there for a long time, just looking. This might be our farthest north, ever. If we could only take a giant step and see the Arctic shore; we were so near.
Then our eyes came back to the near tundra, the velvety shphagnum hummocks, the myriad tiny arctic plants gleaming in the moss, in the golden light. The Labrador tea had gone to seed, but its sharp fragrance filled the air. In a tiny birch tree, a white-crowned sparrow, the voice of the arctic summer—"You will remember; you will remember," he sang.
It also struck me that, in a way, the book itself is a testament to the importance of education. Her husband, Olaus, matters because he's wise and learned and does lots of important scientific research. But his largest impact, by far, comes from his simple kindness and willingness to teach. His wife did not know all the birds when she first married him, yet she was keen to learn; though she's constantly referring to her "womanish" tendencies and belittling her own knowledge, the truth is she roughs it just as much as Olaus does, and he never suggests she'd be better off staying home. And so when Olaus passed away and all our wonderful wild areas came under threat, Murie was able to continue his work, and we've got tens of millions of acres of wild places preserved for it.
What you can do with your one life is a small thing. What you can inspire is something far greater.
Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett
I slammed the "reserve" button on my library seconds after I saw this trollish New York Times writeup on the book, that I snarkily summarized as "'show, don't tell' is the rule of imperialists and the CIA!"
I already blogged my favorite takeaway from the book, so I'll only add that I found the book oddly and unexpectedly empowering. Though it's been a long time since I aspired to be a Great Writer in the style of Bold MFA Graduates (fun fact: as a kid I attempted to submit, in vain, to the Kenyon Review), this was yet another reminder that any given artsy cult, or thing deemed Great Literature, is just one way of processing the Great Conversation and not the Right Answer, or even A Right Answer.
Also: I learned that, apparently, Wallace Stegner did a big speaking tour in Japan in the 50s to preach the virtues of Bold Creative Western Writers to the rest of the world. And, of course, one of my favorite authors of all time, Yukio Mishima, was just coming into his own at that time. I am so curious if they met? if Mishima sat in on a lecture? what they thought of each other's work? if they thought of each other's work? History is weird.
