Things I am Reading VII
Mar. 19th, 2022 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anorthiteFinalllllly sitting down at a ridiculous hour after letting the Read and Want to Discuss stack pile up to insurmountable heights for months. Now I can't remember all the really *important* and *insightful* things I wanted to say. This is genuinely a dismal selection of books and I did read more but then had an enormous slump in every possible way, so here we are. Next time I will be sure to write about more cheerful topics like geology, divine retribution, and maps.
“Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin --> I will always have a soft spot for Walter Benjamin because although I read because I have to, it is not for a grade but rather because I am insane, and so so much of the theory/philosophy/criticism world is set up to torture people. Right now I’m “reading” Marcuse “One-Dimensional Man” and may still be reading it in several weeks, or months, or even on the day I die, so it’s always so nice to read Benjamin and feel like, although someone much smarter than you has done the explaining, they did it because they want YOU TOO to understand and not because they want to give you a migraine.
I have literally millions of things to say about this one, which may eventually coalesce into something that I can write down, but basically it’s all about violence, primarily in its capacity as a tool of lawmaking. For this reason, and not because of violence’s consequences, the state aims always to monopolize all violence within itself. The essay also makes claims about this type of violence in contrast to “divine violence,” an eschatological jolt which neither serves to, nor has interest in, the formation of law on this earth. Benjamin hates the police too, as this argument logically demands.
“It explains the above mentioned tendency of modern law to divest the individual, at least as a legal subject, of all violence, even that directed only to natural ends. In the great criminal this violence confronts the law with the threat of declaring a new law, a threat that even today, despite its impotence, in important instances horrifies the public as it did in primeval times. The state, however, fears this violence simply for its lawmaking character, being obliged to acknowledge it as lawmaking whenever external powers force it to concede them the right to conduct warfare, and classes force it to concede them the right to strike.”
“Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War,” Michael Fellman --> Unfortunately I have to accept the permanent effects of exposure to at least tens and perhaps hundreds of hours of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentaries, as well as family vacations that consisted solely of driving into rural Virginia, Pennsylvania, and pretty much everywhere in the South, and looking at big fields with cannons on them. I even went to Gettysburg alone, as an adult, even though I have been forcibly THREE times prior, which is more than any person should ever go. This is known as Stockholm syndrome. Because of all this, I can always find some aspect of the Civil War that ties in with basically anything I’m ever interested in, and this book was the missing link between John Brown/Bloody Kansas and the western outlaw archetype, which seems like it probably began in the Confederate guerilla troops in the extreme western theater.
What is fun about reading Civil War books is that both armies were stocked with guys so weird and strange you couldn’t even make them up, such as the Union leader, a roundly shitty dude, who is on the front cover of this book and is also named Odon Guitar (??!?). I think the most surprising things about this book were 1) the actual extent of lawlessness in Missouri/Kansas at the time which was apparently total and complete, even among the command structures of the Union army, and 2) the way that the James/Younger gang AND America’s first bank robbery were direct extensions of Confederate guerilla activity, ideology, brutality, chauvinism and all. I feel like 2) is pretty obvious in retrospect but it’s just startling to see how thoroughly and omnipresent the looming of Jesse James is over the whole outlaw culture in a fairly neutral way while realizing that he wasn’t just a guy who *had* been a Confederate in the war. I was recently driving through Missouri on my way to California and there was billboard after billboard advertising Jesse James roadside kitsch. Especially given other books I read recently, it’s mind-boggling to think about the imperviousness granted by mythology to people who would be eight-o’clock cable villains in our own time. I think one of my next endeavors, especially since I’ve been watching more movies lately, has to be into the interactions between crime, media, and folklore in America. I already hate John Wayne so that’s a start.
“Travels in Hyperreality,” Umberto Eco --> I mainly read this for the first essay, with the same title as the collection, but I really enjoyed the entire thing. Eco seems like he would be one of those nutty and enjoyable humanities professors who sit on their desks and are genuinely interested in trying to understand pop culture. Additionally this book is actually a good starting place for an American folklore deep dive, because it’s all about the appeal to Americans of the hyperreal--the better than, the larger than life, the tall tale. Eco is DISGUSTED by Disneyland, and by malls built to look like cities, and Colonial Williamsburg, Hearst Castle, wax museums, and circuses. He identifies what is so compelling in the aspirational tackiness of the “real fake,” the commercialism inherent in turning life into entertainment, history and art and experience into something you can possess, and probably buy at a shop somewhere.
“The ideology of this [the hyperreal] American wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the bad ... Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destiny is heaven or hell, and so will consume new promises.”
"From a Taller Tower: the Rise of the American Mass Shooter," Seamus McGraw --> This book made me so irritated that I could barely finish it. First of all, the writing is pretentious; the motif about the "silence between the gunshots" growing shorter over time or whatever is really just a chunk of repeated text and not as good a one as the frequency it appears with would imply, and it's not as if the meaning isn't obvious the very first time it's brought up. Also, while I think pretty much every style guide at this point directs media to avoid naming shooters when possible, choosing to do the same thing here leads to the use of lots of weird and cartoony nicknames--the angry and violent one, the depressed one, the homebound loner, the disturbed young man. It's a bit of an odd choice because I can't imagine anybody who is interested enough to pick up this book in the first place wouldn't be able to immediately identify most of the individuals in question, as well as making the text a bit confusing. Also, it lends to McGraw's bizarre insistence throughout on emphasizing how awful and terrible all these people were, what messed-up losers they were, on and on, again as if that's something his audience would be unsure about, and as if turning the names of terrible people into unspeakable curses in a low-print-run university published book gave them less power instead of more.
Structurally, most chapters are set up by referencing two or three shootings that are described as being similar in some way. Unfortunately, this is pretty much as far as the book's thesis ever gets: these two events were similar ... and mass shootings are a cultural American problem ... with no kind of connective logical tissue spanning the gap. Basically I think the point this book was making is a good one and probably an accurate one: that these kinds of stylized violence are the result of lax gun control and mental health issues but also of some kind of wider societal rottenness specific to American culture. The problem is that this isn't at all a novel thought and the "some kind" in question is never elaborated on in any way whatsoever which makes this entire book kind of pointless. It's the sort of book that makes me easily turn contrarian and I couldn't accept anything in it without getting annoyed and posing unanswered questions. Such as: if the problem is *America*, why start with Charles Whitman? Did he think up this particular template of violence? Where did he get it? Why is he so writ large in a book that otherwise obsessively diminishes these criminals at every turn, except that the author finds him a useful through-line for the other shootings he describes? Why does the author think, in a gratingly jingoistic chapter, that heroism is in the DNA, when he clearly doesn't think the same of evil?
The thing is, I DO think there's an argument, and many books, to be written about the complex stew of American media, history, sociology, and celebrity culture which coalesces into the stew from which these sort of events emerge. The whole time I kept thinking of events and figures other than Charles Whitman who could have served as much more interesting and useful keystones for this book: what about literally any of the huge names of the televised media trial era? What about the military industrial complex and the nuclear era? What about context in the history of violence in the American mass media: Lee Harvey Oswald, depression-era gangsterism, Bonnie and Clyde, Robert Ford, Billy the Kid, Quantrill and Anderson, John Wilkes Booth, John Brown, John D. Lee? It's ironic that McGraw takes a shot at "Natural Born Killers," even though it absolutely deserves one, because even the car-sickness-inducing newsreel flashes in that film cast a wider net for any kind of explanation of a distinct American violence than he does. I don't think anybody pretends to know the *answer* to this topic, or suggests that an author must come up with one, but with all the pretension and thudding solemnity of this book at least a thesis that the average person who watches CNN couldn't come up with from the top of their head would be nice.
Currently reading:
"Basin and Range"
"The Hatred of Music" (400000th time's the charm!!)
“Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin --> I will always have a soft spot for Walter Benjamin because although I read because I have to, it is not for a grade but rather because I am insane, and so so much of the theory/philosophy/criticism world is set up to torture people. Right now I’m “reading” Marcuse “One-Dimensional Man” and may still be reading it in several weeks, or months, or even on the day I die, so it’s always so nice to read Benjamin and feel like, although someone much smarter than you has done the explaining, they did it because they want YOU TOO to understand and not because they want to give you a migraine.
I have literally millions of things to say about this one, which may eventually coalesce into something that I can write down, but basically it’s all about violence, primarily in its capacity as a tool of lawmaking. For this reason, and not because of violence’s consequences, the state aims always to monopolize all violence within itself. The essay also makes claims about this type of violence in contrast to “divine violence,” an eschatological jolt which neither serves to, nor has interest in, the formation of law on this earth. Benjamin hates the police too, as this argument logically demands.
“It explains the above mentioned tendency of modern law to divest the individual, at least as a legal subject, of all violence, even that directed only to natural ends. In the great criminal this violence confronts the law with the threat of declaring a new law, a threat that even today, despite its impotence, in important instances horrifies the public as it did in primeval times. The state, however, fears this violence simply for its lawmaking character, being obliged to acknowledge it as lawmaking whenever external powers force it to concede them the right to conduct warfare, and classes force it to concede them the right to strike.”
“Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War,” Michael Fellman --> Unfortunately I have to accept the permanent effects of exposure to at least tens and perhaps hundreds of hours of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentaries, as well as family vacations that consisted solely of driving into rural Virginia, Pennsylvania, and pretty much everywhere in the South, and looking at big fields with cannons on them. I even went to Gettysburg alone, as an adult, even though I have been forcibly THREE times prior, which is more than any person should ever go. This is known as Stockholm syndrome. Because of all this, I can always find some aspect of the Civil War that ties in with basically anything I’m ever interested in, and this book was the missing link between John Brown/Bloody Kansas and the western outlaw archetype, which seems like it probably began in the Confederate guerilla troops in the extreme western theater.
What is fun about reading Civil War books is that both armies were stocked with guys so weird and strange you couldn’t even make them up, such as the Union leader, a roundly shitty dude, who is on the front cover of this book and is also named Odon Guitar (??!?). I think the most surprising things about this book were 1) the actual extent of lawlessness in Missouri/Kansas at the time which was apparently total and complete, even among the command structures of the Union army, and 2) the way that the James/Younger gang AND America’s first bank robbery were direct extensions of Confederate guerilla activity, ideology, brutality, chauvinism and all. I feel like 2) is pretty obvious in retrospect but it’s just startling to see how thoroughly and omnipresent the looming of Jesse James is over the whole outlaw culture in a fairly neutral way while realizing that he wasn’t just a guy who *had* been a Confederate in the war. I was recently driving through Missouri on my way to California and there was billboard after billboard advertising Jesse James roadside kitsch. Especially given other books I read recently, it’s mind-boggling to think about the imperviousness granted by mythology to people who would be eight-o’clock cable villains in our own time. I think one of my next endeavors, especially since I’ve been watching more movies lately, has to be into the interactions between crime, media, and folklore in America. I already hate John Wayne so that’s a start.
“Travels in Hyperreality,” Umberto Eco --> I mainly read this for the first essay, with the same title as the collection, but I really enjoyed the entire thing. Eco seems like he would be one of those nutty and enjoyable humanities professors who sit on their desks and are genuinely interested in trying to understand pop culture. Additionally this book is actually a good starting place for an American folklore deep dive, because it’s all about the appeal to Americans of the hyperreal--the better than, the larger than life, the tall tale. Eco is DISGUSTED by Disneyland, and by malls built to look like cities, and Colonial Williamsburg, Hearst Castle, wax museums, and circuses. He identifies what is so compelling in the aspirational tackiness of the “real fake,” the commercialism inherent in turning life into entertainment, history and art and experience into something you can possess, and probably buy at a shop somewhere.
“The ideology of this [the hyperreal] American wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the bad ... Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destiny is heaven or hell, and so will consume new promises.”
"From a Taller Tower: the Rise of the American Mass Shooter," Seamus McGraw --> This book made me so irritated that I could barely finish it. First of all, the writing is pretentious; the motif about the "silence between the gunshots" growing shorter over time or whatever is really just a chunk of repeated text and not as good a one as the frequency it appears with would imply, and it's not as if the meaning isn't obvious the very first time it's brought up. Also, while I think pretty much every style guide at this point directs media to avoid naming shooters when possible, choosing to do the same thing here leads to the use of lots of weird and cartoony nicknames--the angry and violent one, the depressed one, the homebound loner, the disturbed young man. It's a bit of an odd choice because I can't imagine anybody who is interested enough to pick up this book in the first place wouldn't be able to immediately identify most of the individuals in question, as well as making the text a bit confusing. Also, it lends to McGraw's bizarre insistence throughout on emphasizing how awful and terrible all these people were, what messed-up losers they were, on and on, again as if that's something his audience would be unsure about, and as if turning the names of terrible people into unspeakable curses in a low-print-run university published book gave them less power instead of more.
Structurally, most chapters are set up by referencing two or three shootings that are described as being similar in some way. Unfortunately, this is pretty much as far as the book's thesis ever gets: these two events were similar ... and mass shootings are a cultural American problem ... with no kind of connective logical tissue spanning the gap. Basically I think the point this book was making is a good one and probably an accurate one: that these kinds of stylized violence are the result of lax gun control and mental health issues but also of some kind of wider societal rottenness specific to American culture. The problem is that this isn't at all a novel thought and the "some kind" in question is never elaborated on in any way whatsoever which makes this entire book kind of pointless. It's the sort of book that makes me easily turn contrarian and I couldn't accept anything in it without getting annoyed and posing unanswered questions. Such as: if the problem is *America*, why start with Charles Whitman? Did he think up this particular template of violence? Where did he get it? Why is he so writ large in a book that otherwise obsessively diminishes these criminals at every turn, except that the author finds him a useful through-line for the other shootings he describes? Why does the author think, in a gratingly jingoistic chapter, that heroism is in the DNA, when he clearly doesn't think the same of evil?
The thing is, I DO think there's an argument, and many books, to be written about the complex stew of American media, history, sociology, and celebrity culture which coalesces into the stew from which these sort of events emerge. The whole time I kept thinking of events and figures other than Charles Whitman who could have served as much more interesting and useful keystones for this book: what about literally any of the huge names of the televised media trial era? What about the military industrial complex and the nuclear era? What about context in the history of violence in the American mass media: Lee Harvey Oswald, depression-era gangsterism, Bonnie and Clyde, Robert Ford, Billy the Kid, Quantrill and Anderson, John Wilkes Booth, John Brown, John D. Lee? It's ironic that McGraw takes a shot at "Natural Born Killers," even though it absolutely deserves one, because even the car-sickness-inducing newsreel flashes in that film cast a wider net for any kind of explanation of a distinct American violence than he does. I don't think anybody pretends to know the *answer* to this topic, or suggests that an author must come up with one, but with all the pretension and thudding solemnity of this book at least a thesis that the average person who watches CNN couldn't come up with from the top of their head would be nice.
Currently reading:
"Basin and Range"
"The Hatred of Music" (400000th time's the charm!!)
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