Category What I'm reading
-
What I'm reading—monotype and fossils
Alice Spawls, LRB, At The Type Archive:
Part of what makes the Type Archive unusual is that it has machines and tools from every stage of the process: those that were owned by Monotype and those owned by the printers who used its system. One room contains the original patterns (metal templates) for different typefaces, the giant machines used for pressing the punches and the pantographs that reduce the size of the template to the desired point or pica. (The floors were long ago reinforced for the animals the building once accommodated, so can bear these many-tonned iron beasts.)
Matt Castle, Damn Interesting, Chronicles of Charnia:
Like Mason, Tina realised the frond’s potential significance, and decided she should ask someone in authority. Her parents were supportive, but lacked geological expertise or convenient contacts at local proto-universities. So she mentioned the strange “fern” to her geography teacher at school the next day.
“There are no fossils in Precambrian rocks!” was the teacher’s reply. Tina said she was aware of this; indeed, that was why the find was so perplexing. “Then they are not Precambrian rocks,” her teacher shot back, closing down the discussion.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading: Folk Horror, Utopian Centrism, Art Deco Planes
Morgan Jones, The Social Review: The Labour Campaign for Folk Horror
The key beats of folk horror are the sense of time and the sense of the land- the relationship between place and past. It is perhaps a stretch to call the ways in which the genre thinks about these things “anti-capitalist” – but only slightly. For the protagonists who fall foul of the weird and the old and the powerful and the land itself, their demise is often as a result of an attempt to own, or to exploit, or to regulate, or even just to comprehend the things that have been there for a long, long time. In folk horror, to monetise is to antagonise…
Hush-Kit, 12 ravishingly beautiful aircraft from the Art Deco era, and one from far later
Louis Bechereau’s racing masterpiece: this is the most important aircraft barely anybody ever talks about today, designed by arguably the most important aircraft designer of the Great War (who hardly anybody talks about today). A flying machine to prove that heartbreaking bloodbaths are not necessarily a requirement for advancing our sense of style or our design and engineering skills.
Chris Dillow, Technocrats and class
At impressionable ages we are brought up to believe that success comes from knowledge and intellect. We thus believe this even in contexts where it is wrong. We’d be better prepared for politics if teachers gave top marks not to the brightest students but to the school bullies.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading (foreign politics and foreign policy)
Andrew Cockburn, Like A Ball of Fire (LRB)
But when you look more closely at the history of the Cold War and its post-Soviet resurgence, you see that a very different process is at work, in which the arms lobby on each side has self-interestedly sought capital and bureaucratic advantage while enlisting its counterpart on the other side as a justification for its own ambition. In other words, they enjoy a mutually profitable partnership...
Pam Campos-Palma, November Revolution, Fellow Travelers Blog
To that end, a few things I’ve observed this cycle keep me up at night. One is the continued lack of understanding by political operatives, think tankers, and wonks of the populist moment we’re in after decades of increasing wealth inequality, systemic corruption, and institutions failing everyday people. A prime fuel for the populist turn in politics are elite, insular institutions who refuse or are very slow to acknowledge their lack of race-class-gender analysis has been a liability. Foreign policy and national security institutions embody this problem, arguably to an unparalleled extent. One of the few political articles of faith left for the mainstream foreign policy community is the arrogant and ignorant belief that everyday Americans either do not care or aren’t educated enough to grasp matters of foreign policy.
Euan Graham, The Pitfalls of Pragmatism, The Strategist
Australia’s roustabout China policy debate is intense and polarising, but largely exogenously framed. Beyond former prime minister Tony Abbott’s celebrated ‘fear and greed’ aphorism, not a lot of thought seems to be directed at why some Australians—and here I’m excluding those solely in it for the money—appear willing to resign themselves to falling within China’s orbit.
Theirs may be the more durable wisdom for all I know. But it leads me to wonder whether a predisposition towards fatalism and pragmatism may be cultural in origin—a trait shaped by Australia’s geographic isolation and colonial past...
...I suspect that the drivers behind fatalism and pragmatism go beyond Abbott’s binary reduction, tapping into deeper, historical currents running through the national psyche that also inform Australia’s ‘strategic personality’. It may be a stretch to draw a colonial connection, and as a wandering Brit who has pitched his tent here, I probably shouldn’t go there.
But my gut feeling is that there are enduring habits of deference (less kindly, the ‘cultural cringe’), and an associated tendency to ‘go with the strength’, which hark back to the early period of European settlement, when the governor was the absolute authority of all that he surveyed, and paths to opportunity meant being on good terms with the power of the day.
This jars with that more easy-going depiction of national character: the anti-authoritarian, non-rule-abiding ‘larrikin’. Yet one of Australia’s best-kept secrets is how extraordinarily rule-bound and subtly hierarchical it is as a society.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading: from ideology to knitting
William Davies reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology, The Guardian.
Capital and Ideology is an astonishing experiment in social science, one that defies easy comparison. In its ambition, obsessive testimony and sheer oddness, it is closer to the spirit of Karl Ove Knausgård than of Karl Marx. It alternates between sweeping generalities about the nature of justice and the kind of wonkery that one might expect from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, often in the same paragraph. It is occasionally naive (it will bug the hell out of historians and anthropologists) but in a provocative fashion, as if to say: if inequality isn’t justified, why not change it?
Martin Filler, Trump's Towering Folly on Federal Architecture (New York Review of Books).
Because of the thoroughgoing threat to democracy signaled by the Republican Party’s abject capitulation to Trump, I’ve heretofore thought it frivolous to address the aesthetics of the current regime, mindful of that old saw about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That was my attitude until February 4, when Architectural Record broke a news story about a proposed executive order that would make it mandatory for all new federally sponsored buildings to adhere to a Classical style. This effective ban on modern architecture commissioned by the US government is horrifyingly reminiscent of Hitler’s insistence that public buildings in the Third Reich hew to the Classical tradition (though usually a stripped-down version of it) and that modern design, except for some industrial uses, was streng verboten (strictly forbidden).
Aleesha Paz, Raise Your Needles, Public Books (originally published in the Sydney Review of Books)
Historically, knitting wasn’t linked to any particular gender. This gendering only developed in the last couple of centuries, but ever since it became a women’s activity knitting has struggled to be recognised as valuable, skilled work. To knit in public is to cast off any shame associated with the craft, and seeing other members of your community engage in this transformative process legitimises knitting for the crafty individual and also normalises its presence in public places.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading (declinism)
'"Collapsologie", constructing an idea of how things fall apart'. Harrison Stetler, New York Review of Books.
But if one delves into the texts of these writers, and listens to their castigation of the modern world, it’s hard not to get the impression that a lingering form of anticipation—not to say, outright excitement—lies beneath their prophecies of collapse...
'How "Big Law" Makes Big Money'. Adam Tooze, New York Review Of Books.
On the one hand, the law codes the original violence of enclosure, such that something that was everyone’s becomes one person’s legally protected private property in perpetuity. On the other hand, the law is the conjurer of a delusion. By creating securities out of debt, the law preys on our desire to believe that something is ours that is not real at all, that value can be created ex nihilo.
'College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics'. Eitan Hersh, The Atlantic.
...political hobbyists have harmed American democracy and would do better by redirecting their political energy toward serving the material and emotional needs of their neighbors. People who have a personal stake in the outcome of politics often have a better understanding of how power can and should be exercised—not just at the polls, once every four years, but person to person, day in and day out.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading (corporations)
Aaron Timms, 'Jet Age Capitalism Redux': The Baffler
In their new skins, these buildings usually see history relegated to the corner—an earnest commemorative plaque here, a terse historical recap there—if not forgotten altogether. The TWA Hotel makes the building’s history—or rather, a saccharine slice of it—a core part of the new venture’s branding. The structure is as much corporate museum as hotel. Exhibits assembled by the New-York Historical Society lovingly recount the nostalgia-drenched story of TWA—both the airline and its terminal—as a triumph of Jet Age imagination and daring. In the process, the true history of TWA, the U.S. airline industry, and the deregulatory pains that followed the 1970s is erased, even as the hotel’s exhibits strain to maintain the cheery lie of capitalism’s “good years” after World War II...
Doni Gewurtzman, 'Let Us Now Praise Corporate "Persons"': Public Books
A nuanced form of corporate humanism flows through Winkler’s and Greenfield’s timely accounts of the Constitution’s long and rocky relationship with corporate America, spotlighting the actual people that own, manage, work for, and represent corporations. Best of all, they both explore the counterintuitive idea that treating corporations as independent “persons” might, in fact, actually advance progressive ideals and make it easier to regulate corporate America.
Matthew Willis, 'The worst British aircraft company? Blackburn – a history of infamy': Hush-Kit
Blackburn seems alone in the largely awful reputation of its products. No UK aircraft manufacturer has escaped its share of unfortunate aircraft – much of the latter designs of Supermarine were clumsy, dangerous and had a loss rate that made them virtually disposable. Avro, meanwhile proved itself incapable of designing an airliner bigger than a regional feeder machine that didn’t kill frighteningly high numbers of passengers. In most cases this didn’t define the company. With Blackburn, it seems, all the mud stuck.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm Reading: 'the problem of coming up with suggestions for alternate ways to be'
On Heteropessimism, in the New Inquiry (by Indiana Seresin):
Quite often framed as an anti-capitalist position, heteropessimism could be read as a refusal of the “good life” of marital consumption and property ownership that capitalism once mandated. Yet this good life, which was always withheld from marginalized populations, is now untenable for almost everyone. If the couple was the primary consumer unit of the past, today this has collapsed, or more accurately been replaced by a new dyad, the individual consumer and her phone…
…As we are living now, when privilege unravels it goes out kicking and screaming, and people lose confidence in how to be together, uncertain about how to read each other, and incompetent about even their own desire…It seems, though unacknowledged, a companion piece to Amia Srinivasan’s Does Anyone Have The Right To Sex? in the 22 March 2018 edition of the LRB.
It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies…
Finally, a pair of articles on Achewood, my own problematic fave, by Keith Pille (discussed in a lengthy thread at Metafilter): The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood, and Ray Smuckles: Nobody’s Role Model.
Hemingway’s books serve as vivid indictments of what we now frame as toxic masculinity (I think Hemingway knew that something was bad about what society expected from men, but was too trapped in his own time and culture to be able to formulate it in an explicit way, instead just sort of accidentally smearing a composite portrait through his entire body of work). The same thing is going on in Achewood, except with a touch more intentionality and with a little bit of progress on the problem of coming up with suggestions for alternate ways to be.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm Reading (late August)
THE AMERICAN AFFAIRS JOURNAL was at least until quite recently a safe haven for political ideas of the American conservative-establishment Right and was ambivalent, at best, about the election of Donald Trump. It smells of cigars, well-heated offices, and careers full of sinecures.
A pair of articles in its most recent edition, though, show the kind of sharp swing to the left normally associated with a football winger, stepping inside a defender to pass. The italics are mine:
The Financialisation Of The American Elite:
Many structural reforms are necessary to change this. With regard to education, it is time to reform the top MBA programs. These schools shape our business culture, and, in so doing, exert an outsized influence on the business practices and the career pursuits of some of our most talented young people.
The schools should begin with an explicit renunciation of shareholder capitalism. This will be the easy part.The New Gilded Age Or Old Normal:
The longer-term trend toward more inequality in capitalist economies, which prevailed before this period, has resumed after it. That leads us to conclude that there may well be no technocratic or tax policy fix for capitalism’s tendency to generate ever more inequality. This conclusion is obviously less optimistic than the one reached by Thomas Piketty in his seminal 2014 study of income inequality, which argues for ameliorating income share outcomes by raising taxes on the rich.
Irving Kristol, the neoconservative, famously described the turn of his intellectual life as that of a ‘liberal mugged by reality’. Read closely and there’s a lot more mugging going on.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading (August)
HERE IS A PAIR of articles by Will Davies, both on Brexit, but both also on a broader sense in which negotiation and politics are now strangers to each other.
England’s new rentier alliance
This suggests that Johnson/Farage is a symptom of prolonged financialisation, in which capital pulls increasingly towards unproductive investments, relying on balance sheet manipulation, negative interest rates and liquidity for its returns (aided substantially by quantitative easing over the past decade). To put that more starkly, these are seriously morbid symptoms, in which all productive opportunities have already been seized, no new ideas or technologies are likely, and no new spheres of social or environmental life are left to exploit and commodify.
For the time being, Britain appears to be heading towards one of two negatives: ‘no deal’ or ‘no Brexit’. The inability to convert Brexit into an agreed set of tolerable policies tells us something crucial about what sort of thing Brexit is: an ideal of withdrawal that is at odds with basic realities of government and politics.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading
A City Plans For War (Emma Shaw Crane, Public Books):
Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring not only the usual modernist improvements—development, growth—but also peace. Yet in postconflict Beirut, planners, developers, and architects, instead of designing for a peaceful city, plan for the war yet to come.
It's time to let Canberra picturesquely decay (Ian Warden, Canberra Times):
When Australians, in their endearingly muddleheaded and inarticulate way, complain that there is something “artificial” about their nation’s capital, one of the things they mean (without being able to put a muddleheaded finger on it) is that Canberra has no ruins.
Conspiracy Theories (David Runciman, TLS):
...for the conspiracy theorist the absence of truth can only be explained by some sinister forces having decided to conceal it. And of course that is a conspiracy theory that many liberals find hard to resist. Why did people vote for Brexit? Because the ignorant voters were misled by nefarious forces. The same with the election of Trump. What are those forces? Take your pick...
Posted | Author Liam Hogan