![[Image is a photograph of a couple of tall bookcases. On one shelf the toes of a pair of black shoes are poking out from underneath some books.]
sendhlap:
shhh i:m hidng
Look, I made another ‘send hlap’.
In this one you get the additional pleasure of being able to inspect most of my book collection.
(Five zillion points for anyone who can figure out how my peculiar classification system works.)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m743kpqZmw1r2mvxto1_500.jpg)
[Image is a photograph of a couple of tall bookcases. On one shelf the toes of a pair of black shoes are poking out from underneath some books.]
shhh i:m hidng
Look, I made another ‘send hlap’.
In this one you get the additional pleasure of being able to inspect most of my book collection.
(Five zillion points for anyone who can figure out how my peculiar classification system works.)
Short version: patchy but good — four stars. Would recommend to anyone interested in Roman culture and / or in the history of clothing and how it’s used to play out both dominant and subversive narratives about gender, age, status, and wealth.
By the way, I’ve put a Goodreads widget in the sidebar of my tumblr, in case you want to keep an eye on what I’m reading and stuff. Woooooo.
woh-battameez replied to your post: The thing about academic books is that the end of…
I give you a tasty rant instead in defense of e-books, not related but highly amusing (thirdworldghettovampire…)
Heehee, yes, that was entertaining! Thank you! :)
The thing about academic books is that the end of the book often arrives unexpectedly. With novels — I mean paper copies, not e-reader ones — you can tell how much you’ve got left to read because the substantive content goes almost right up to the last physical page. But with academic books I always forget that there’s going to be an index, and probably some appendices too. Collections of essays are especially tricksy because you can’t even sense when the over-all argument of the book is nearing its conclusion: I often assume there’s one more essay to go and then find the one I’ve just finished was in fact the last one. And then I’m sitting there half-way through my lunch-break with no more book to read, and no new one to start because when I set off that morning I wasn’t expecting to need one.
I guess with an e-reader it must be hard even with novels because there’s no sense of the physical bulk of the book. But then again it doesn’t matter because one reader can have several spare books on it. I don’t know, I’ve never really tried an e-reader.
In a way that feature is quite attractive to me, at least for reading novels. I’m finding these days that I’m almost always slightly dissatisfied with the pacing at the end of a novel, and I think it must be because of the way I read. When I feel I’m approaching the end I start to rush, and it isn’t so much because of excitement as it’s just because I don’t want to have to stop reading with only a few pages to go and then have to pick it up again later with the flow interrupted. In effect, I’m worried about spoiling the pacing of the ending by interrupting it, so I reading it too quickly and then spoil it that way in stead. And then the ending always feels too abrupt.
I think I’m quite a submissive consumer of fiction. I like television, theatre, film, radio because I like to put myself in the hands of a creative team and give them as much control as possible over my experience. Whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience is up to them. With a novel the reader has a lot of control over the pacing, lighting, soundscape, &c., and I know some people really enjoy that about novels, but I don’t really want to do that much work and I worry about getting it wrong. What if this character’s hair-colour is important and I was told what it was but I fail to remember it? What if I skim over the scene-setting description (which I tend to do) and then later find that the whole chapter has been taking place at night when I’ve been imagining it as day-time? So sometimes I try to be a good reader and pay careful attention to everything, but I’m sorry, I’m just not that interested in the bits of a story that aren’t people interacting or doing stuff. I don’t want to spend several minutes making sure I’ve correctly imagined the colour of the sky and the clucking of the chickens and stuff that a dramatic medium would establish for me in seconds.
I’m not saying that novels are inferior or anything, just that I’m not very good at reading them and this is one of the reasons I prefer dramatic presentation to narration. (There are others — I’m generally more interested in personal interactions and large-scale interaction than in the sort of interiority that novels are good at, and I also dislike the way written prose is the default medium for fiction in Euro-American culture even though there are many stories that would be much better told in different media — but I’ll probably grumble at length about those some other time.)
Anyway, what was I talking about? Yeah, I finished my book unexpectedly on Wednesday and didn’t have a spare with me and it was slightly bothersome. ’Cool story, bro’, &c., &c.
Hey, remember a zillion years ago when I asked what Octavia Butler I should read next and then I immediately stopped having internets?
pareidolalia answered your question: So I’ve set up my Goodreads to tell Twitter and…
Parable of the Sower is wonderful. If you want a nice sampler of her work, Bloodchild is a great collection of her short stories.
leterel replied to your post: So I’ve set up my Goodreads to tell Twitter and…
EVERYTHING! For aliens theres Liliths Brood series, for dystopian stuff theres Parable of the Sower and Parable of the talents, and yeah just read all her books! I did and looooved it.
dominicandarwinism answered your question: So I’ve set up my Goodreads to tell Twitter and…
Dawn
woh-battameez replied to your post: So I’ve set up my Goodreads to tell Twitter and…
:D
Thanks all! I shall put them all on my ‘to read’ list, with the ones you’ve mentioned specifically at the top.
So I’ve set up my Goodreads to tell Twitter and Facebook automatically when I finish a book but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent widget for Tumblr so I’ll try to do it manually. (Because I’m sure you all care deeply about what I’m reading.)
Yesterday I finished Kindred by Octavia Butler. Four out of five stars (meaning ‘really liked it’ on Goodreads’ scale).
I hadn’t read any Butler before and didn’t know anything specifically about Kindred. I was vaguely expecting something a little more sci-fi, but didn’t enjoy it any the less for that. Very gripping and readable: I got through it in six days, which is the quickest I’ve despatched a book for some time. Would definitely like to read more by her. Any recommendations?
Summary: Neil Gaiman says positive things about ‘piracy’ of books and I have some reservations. Longness warning: pretty long.
“When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”—
Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web (X)
Ugh, I’m so uncertain about all this stuff.
Downloading an electronic book is not the same as borrowing a paper book. When you borrow a paper book the lender is unable to use the book during the time when you have physical possession of it, and when you give it back the lender can use it again but you can’t use it any more. When you download it, the person who has the original can still use the original and you can use the new copy. The book hasn’t been passed on, it’s been reproduced. Downloading is not borrowing. It also isn’t stealing, for exactly the same reason: when you steal a paper book, the person you stole it from can no longer use it, whereas when you download a copy you don’t deprive that person of the use of their book. Downloading is not theft. Downloading is a new thing that is not the same as anything any previous generation has done with books, and that’s exactly why there’s no consensus about it. False analogies don’t help anybody.
But to give Gaiman credit, I think what he’s mainly saying is that the effect downloading has on the book-market is the same as the effect that the lending and borrowing of paper books has on the book-market. Which may well be true, and certainly seems to be substantiated by his experience and semi-scientific experiment. And that’s an extremely important point and a very good counter to one of the main arguments of the ‘downloading is theft’ camp.
Then again, Neil Gaiman is Neil Gaiman. He is a famous, popular, and (I think) wealthy author. He personally, and his publisher professionally, can afford to pull stunts like putting up a book for free on their website. When I say they can afford it, I mean two things. First, they can afford to take the risk that letting people read the book for free will not in fact increase sales and thus turn out to be profitable in the long term. But secondly, and more importantly, they can afford to have a profitable long-term marketing strategy that involves making no money for a month. What if you can’t spare a month’s royalties, especially on top of all those months you spent actually writing the book, plus the cost of web-hosting and other associated costs needed to put up a book for downloading, even if in the long run it will triple your sales? And this goes for publishers and editors as well as authors.
Can we really expect that downloading won’t to change the book industry? It may not hurt big well-established authors, editors, and publishers, but will it make it harder to break into those professions? I don’t think it’s especially helpful for people like Gaiman to just say that it’s all okay and we should relax. I’d like to see people putting forward some kind of alternative. If the way forward is not SOPA / ACTA / WHATEVA (which I agree it probably isn’t), then what actions should we be taking to ensure that people can still make a decent living from writing and editing and publishing good books?
In 2000 another Neil, Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy, came to talk at my university. When he took questions from the audience, somebody asked him why the band had chosen to re-record The pop singer’s fear of the pollen count as a single for their ‘best of’ compilation. He said they’d thought it would make a good single when they first recorded it for Liberation in 1993 but they didn’t have the money to release and promote singles back then. Then a while later, in response to some other question that I can’t remember, he was commenting on Radiohead’s recent release of Kid A and the huge success it had had even though it had had no singles or promotional videos or any of the usual hoopla. He said it was amazing seeing people queuing up around the block on a cold October night to buy he album as soon as it came out at midnight. ’But,’ he said, ‘You know, they’re Radiohead. They’re huge enough to do that kind of thing. We couldn’t get away with that. Back in ‘93 we couldn’t afford to release singles. Now we can’t afford not to.’
And of course in 2007 Radiohead would go on to release In rainbows as a download that cost whatever you wanted to pay, including nothing at all. The point is, what works for Neil Gaiman or Radiohead may not work for people lower down the ladder of fame, success, and income. I don’t want to know whether Neil Gaiman is okay with downloading because I’m confident that he’s going to be okay whatever happens. I’m not worried that one day I will suddenly not be able to read any more Gaiman because he’s too poor to write or his publisher is too poor to publish. The people I’m worried about are the people who will be my favourite authors in ten years if they can manage to make a living as writers right now. I want to be reassured that downloading is not hurting them. If we’re not sure about that, we need to not only resist reactionary crackdowns driven by big media companies but also work positively for a new artistic economy that uses digital technology, and the new things it can do that are not the same as theft and are also not the same as borrowing, to support creators.
(Source: roominthecastle, via hypotheticalthalamus)
“This page was created because I got tired of being “ambushed” by books and movies with triggering topics. This list was compiled by survivors and allies to warn survivors about triggering material. This is by no means a list of books and movies to avoid, as many are wonderful and can help you on your healing journey. Of course, some of them are crap. Either way, it is important to prepare yourself for what you are going to see or read.”
(Source: feministfilm, via ladysaviours)
I know at least a couple of you (including you, the person who reblogged something on this sort of topic within the last 24 hours that is actually what reminded me I wanted to do this post, and also you, the person who started a tumblr specifically about this) may be able to help me answer at least one of the following questions, all of which concern…
The questions are as follows:
- How awesome does this look?
- Have you read it?
- If you answered ‘yes’ to question 2: is it as awesome as it looks?
- If you answered ‘yes’ to question 2: how advanced does my grasp of queer theory have to be before I can get any benefit out of it?
- If you answered ‘yes’ to question 2: how advanced does my grasp of Shakespeare have to be before I can get any benefit out of it?
- If you answered ‘no’ to question 2: doesn’t this look awesome?
- Is it too much that the title of this post is a pun on the title of a book that’s already another pun?
Thank you very much for your assistance with these inquiries.
1. SO AWESOME.
2. I’ve read most (not all) of the essays. (And I own it, so.)
3. Some bits are less awesome (the section on Julius Caesar in particular was most disapoint), some bits are MORE AWESOME THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE (Cleopatra is a fag hag to her eunuchs; Perdita is the indirect child of Leontes’ and Polixines’ never-consummated lust).
4. Not advanced at all. If you read the introduction before the rest of it, it will fuck your shit up (“OH GOD I DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS WHY AM I READING THIS BOOK”), but when you read the actual essays they’re quite user-friendly.
5. You should probably have read, and have a decent understanding of, whatever play about which you are reading the essay of. You don’t have to be PhD-level genius, just know what happens and who the characters are.
7. NEVER.
8. I hope we can be friends.
Look, look, everyone! Cross has the answers!
This is really helpful, thanks! I shall add it to my reading list. And I am definitely going to have to seriously consider following you, even though I am already following about as many people as I can cope with, because Roman republic.
(via odysseiarex)
I know at least a couple of you (including you, the person who reblogged something on this sort of topic within the last 24 hours that is actually what reminded me I wanted to do this post, and also you, the person who started a tumblr specifically about this) may be able to help me answer at least one of the following questions, all of which concern…
The questions are as follows:
Thank you very much for your assistance with these inquiries.
Hi all. Kyra is giving away a lot of books and has asked me to spread the word, which, failfully, I am doing a bit late.
If you’re in Oxford or would go to Oxford to get free books, or possibly if you’re in London or would go to London to get free books, this is how to process works and these are the books.
[Trigger warning for oblique discussion of suicide, violence, and abortion. Nothing very triggery, I think, but you never know.]
I’ve been reading Undoing gender for some time now. In fact I’m currently having a break because I got to a paragraph that I found so impenetrable it broke my morale and I haven’t had the grit to try again. But early in the book I stuck bookmarks in a couple of places that prompted some thoughts, and now that I’ve got a day off (because ill blergh) I’ll put some of those thoughts down here. I imagine this is nothing that hasn’t already been said, and probably better, but still.
The following quotation contains cissexism.
Of course, “life” has been taken up by right-wing movements to limit reproductive freedoms for women, so the demand to establish more inclusive conditions for valuing life and producing the conditions for viable life can resonate with unwanted conservative demands to limit the autonomy of women to exercise the right to an abortion. But here it seems important not to cede the term “life” to the right-wing agenda, since it will turn out that there are within these debates questions about when human life begins and what constitutes “life” in its viability.
(From the introduction, Acting in concert, by Judith Butler, 2004.)
What struck me when I read this is the contrast of bare life — life being the quality of not being dead, that property which a being will lose as a result of falling out a cold and mysterious cave thirteen miles above ground level — with viable, livable life. Butler uses the idea of the viable or livable life quite a lot, and as is her custom doesn’t seek to give any formal definition. It’s a slightly tricky concept but essentially the livable life seems to be one that is sustainable rather than precarious, a life that a person can live without any imminent threat that it will become impossible to go on living. A life can become impossible because material necessities like food or shelter are not available or because the life is ended by violence or because the person concerned ends their life because it has become intolerable.
A related concept in Butler is intelligibility or recognizability. Someone is intelligible or recognizable when others (in particular the dominant social group) can grasp what the person is and comprehend their identity without serious error. To be unrecognizable or unintelligible is to be marginal in a particular way. The rich have some understanding of what poverty is. They often don’t understand what it really means, how it works, how intolerable it is, how they perpetuate it, how it is created, and so on, but if you say to them ‘I am poor’ they have some reasonably accurate idea of what you are saying. Similarly white people know approximately what non-white people are, men know what women are, heterosexual people know what homosexual people are, thin people know what fat people are, adults know what children are, and so on. These categories are all actually more complex than most people think, but broadly speaking to be, for example, black or gay is to be intelligible. Doesn’t stop you being oppressed, but it means you’re within the comprehension of your oppressor and can begin to address them.
Other marginal groups are still unintelligible to most people. Most ‘western’ people have heard of trans* people but can’t really be said to understand with any accuracy what a trans* person is. They may think that a trans* woman ‘used to be a man’ (which of course some did but most did not) or that someone isn’t trans* until after surgery or that trans* is a ‘third gender’ or that trans*ness is a type of homosexuality. Similarly many people with disabilities or neuroatypical people will find that people have heard of their ‘conditions’ but have no real idea what they are or, possibly worse, have a distorted idea of what they are. And genderqueer people are still so far outside the realm of intelligibility for most people that they are literally unthinkable (another word Butler likes): people can’t conceive of the possibility of someone being neither a man nor a woman and, even having grasped that concept, struggle to treat the person concerned in an ungendered way because of the depth to which gender is embedded in our collective assumptions. Unintelligible people have to struggle to be recognized as what they are and to have what they are recognized as something a real human being can be.
All oppression attacks the livability of life. It often attacks it materially, by making it harder for people to get food, accommodation, and work, and physically, by subjecting people disproportionately to violence. It also attacks psychologically. For intelligible people the psychological attack is often on self-esteem: sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, albeism, body policing, ageism are forces that tell particular categories of people that they are worthless in various ways. Another form of psychological attack that affects all marginal people but especially unthinkable people is erasure: being implicitly told by the dominant culture that you are unimportant, don’t need to be catered for, don’t even exist. Often erasure and attacks on self-esteem go together when you’re told that being what you are makes you like something else which is in turn a bad thing: if you’re trans* then you have a psychological disorder, which is a bad thing because psychologically atypical people are bad (cissexism + albeism); if you’re a gay man you’re like a girl, which is a bad thing because girls are bad (heterosexism + sexism); if you are Ethiopian then you must be poor and starving, which is a bad thing because poor people are bad (racism + classism). Any and all of these attacks can make life unlivable.
Everything I’ve said so far has been about being oppressed, which is something I normally try not to write about because I’m extremely privileged and nothing I have to say about the experience of oppression is anything other than repetition and rephrasing of things I’ve heard from people who actually have that experience. But I needed to set it all out in order to establish how slightly less familiar concepts like livability and intelligibility fit into the ones we’re more familiar with. Having done that, I can now write about something I do have experience of, namely privilege.
And what struck me when I read the quotation I started with was that perhaps the gap between bare existence and livable life is connected to the gap between the way privilege sees the world and the way others see it. Because the thing about being privileged is: life is good. Life is good. You are recognized and catered for. You’re the person advertisers are trying to appeal to, the person films and books are made for. You have a job, or you can get one pretty easily. You know where your next meal is coming from. You’re educated in the things people expect you to know about. Machines and buildings and tools are designed for you to use. Clothes fit you, people in magazines look like you, your elected representatives come from the same sort of background as you and speak your language. You can hold hands with your lover in the street without fear, and one day you can get married. You have the energy to do the things you want to do. You’ve probably always had all these things. To be alive is to have all these things, either actually or at least within your grasp. Your life is the livable life.
So you don’t understand that there’s a gap between the life you live and just being alive. That for some people life is precarious and a struggle and sometimes doesn’t seem worth it. That for some people being alive doesn’t even mean being recognized by others as a logical possibility. Life for you is an absolute good. That’s perhaps one reason why it’s easy to be ‘pro-life’. Even if you understand it intellectually, you don’t understand viscerally from your own experience that simply being born will not guarantee every child a tolerable life. You can talk about the point at which a foetus is ‘viable’ by looking for the point at which it can physically sustain its own not-dead-ness. You don’t consider whether its life will be viable in the sense of being sustainable and preferable to not-life. Similarly it’s much easier to be a conservative in general when your life is good because, well, what more do people want? They’re alive, aren’t they? As long as you’re alive, how bad can it be?
Of course few people are oppressed on every axis and few people are privileged on every axis. Many people can appreciate to some degree that life is not always a bed of roses without always feeling that it could end at any moment or that they want to opt out of it altogether. But I do suspect that the more privilege one has, the harder it is to conceive the gap between livable life and mere existence and thus the harder it is to perceive the need to act positively to bridge that gap.
A friend has lent me a book of some of Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories. I’ve just finished reading Jeeves and the unbidden guest and there’s a passage near the end that I feel one or two of my followers may enjoy, especially if they imagine the parts played by Fry and Laurie.
The context is that Jeeves and Bertie have had something of a silent falling-out over Bertie’s choice of clothes; Jeeves has nonetheless rescued Bertie from a scrape, and in a fit of gratitude Bertie has acquiesced to Jeeves’ wishes in the matter of his wardrobe.
I felt most awfully braced. I felt as if the clouds had rolled away and all was as it used to be. I felt like one of those chappies in the novels who calls off the fight with his wife in the last chapter and decides to forget and forgive. I felt I wanted to do all sorts of other things to show Jeeves that I appreciated him.
