The Books of My Life: The Disappointed

I was a student of radical religious oriented social movements in New England and the Burned Over District of upstate New York and north eastern Ohio for many years. I was, in particular, a student of Mormonism, the group I ended up writing my dissertation on, and, if much less intensely, the Shakers and the Oneida Community.

My interest was not in these sects, denominations, or new religious movements, or even in religion per se. It was in the role ideology and meaning played and plays in the social and cultural construction of identity and community in new social and cultural movements. The study of new sects or new religious movements, the study of new meaning systems in other words, in 19th century America, seemed as good a place as any to explore the role ideology played in the social and cultural construction of identity and religion. It also seemed a great place to explore how meaning systems, like social movements in general, routinise and institutionalise over time becoming, in the process, less charismatic and more bureaucratic in form.

Given my interest in the new sects and new religious movements of 19th century New England and especially New York it was probably only a matter of time before I would get around to reading about another one of the many sects that arose in New England, New York, and the Midwest, Adventistism or Milleritism. The edited collection The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarians in the 19th Century, edited by Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, second edition 1993), is a fascinating and enlightening collection of essays focusing on what we might call Primitive Adventism or Millerism from the 1810s to the 1860s. David Rowe's essay explores Primitive Adventist demographics showing, in the process, that the notion that millenarianism is the religion of the economically distressed is problematic when applied to nineteenth century Millerism. Wayne Judd's essay focuses on the father of Primitive Adventism, William Miller, the man who mathematically calculated when Jesus would come again in the 19th century. David Arthur's essay focuses on Primitive Adventism's Saint Paul, the evangelist, publicist, publisher, and spreading the word innovator, Joshua Himes. Louis Billington's essay explores the success of Adventist evangelists in Great Britain. Eric Anderson's essay explores Primitive Adventist hermeneutics of the apocalypse and its rereadings of earlier Adventist calculations relating to the end times. Ronald and Janet Numbers's essay explores the link between Milleritism and madness, something many contemporaries accused Primitive Adventists of bringing about. By looking at archival records from asylums in New England, upstate New York, and the Midwest, Numbers and Numbers find a more complex picture of the relationship between madness and Millerite millenialism than previously offered by apologists and polemicists. Ruth Alden Doan's essay focuses on the similarities between Primitive Adventism and mainstream evangelicalism. Mainstream evangelicalism was, Doan argues, modernising and liberalising at the time that Adventism arose and flourished and, as a result, modernising and liberalising evanglicalism emphasised the differences, particularly when it came to the millennium, between the two evanglical groups in order to establish clear boundary markers between the two movements. Michael Barkun's essay explores another somewhat similar process of boundary demarcation, in this case the one made by John Humphry Noyes's, the founder of the Oneida Community, to mark off his Oneida Perfectionist community from the Primitive Adventists so that Oneida Perfectionists would not be accused, as Primitive Adventists were accused of, of being mad. Lawrence Foster explores the similarities and differences between Millerism and Shakerism and focuses on one--there were more--Primitive Adventist who joined a Shaker community in Ohio after the great disappointment of 1843 and 1844, the disappointment that arose among Millerites after Jesus did not come again. Jonathan Butler's essay explores the transformation from boundless Primitive Adventism to consolidating Seventh Day Adventism, or, to use Weber's terminology, from charismatic sect to bureaucratic denomination.

Given my interest in Mormonism it should not be surprising that I tended to fixate on the similarities and differences between Mormons and Millerites as I read The Disappointed. The similarities first. Both social movements were apocalyptic and believed that Jesus was coming again soon. Both social movements were utopian in that they believed the kingdom of god would be established on earth. Both social movements were primitivist in that they sought to restore the true apostolic church to the world again. Both social movements were hybrid Hebraic/Christian restoration movements. Both social movements believed in continuing revelation and a god that acted in history. Both movements harvested the mission field of Great Britain relatively successfully. Both religious social movements had dietary reform aspects. Both social movements were attacked and "persecuted" by the vigilante mobs that were common in 19th century and 20th century America. The victimisation and martyrdom members and leaders of both social movements felt played an important role in the social and cultural construction of Primitive Mormonism and Primitive Adventism and Primitive Mormon and Primitive Adventist identities. As for differences both social movements differed in their conception of the second advent of Christ, the organisation of their apostolic churches, their visions of a utopian future, their Hebraic emphases, their emphasis on continuing revelation, and their dietary restrictions, pointing up the need to explore the role culture plays in social and cultural movements and the difference different culture brings to social and cultural movements.

I very much enjoyed my sojourn through The Disappointed. I recommend it to anyone interested in American history, particularly US 19th century history, meaning systems in general and the social and cultural construction of new meaning systems, in apocalypticism, in social movements, in theoretical approaches to social movements, and in American culture in general. After all, with respect to this last, one of the important building blocks of American culture has been religious and more specifically Protestant culture and ideology.

The Books of My Life: Joseph Smith (Bushman)

The name Richard Bushman really takes me back. Once upon a time I was in graduate school. In one seminar I took with Professor Barker-Benfield on some subject, probably history and gender since B-B fancied himself a specialist in that area, we students were supposed to read Bushman's recently published book The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). I already knew some of Bushman's work. I had read his From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: Norton, 1980) earlier and found its argument on the transformation of Puritanism interesting and its utlisation of economic and cultural theory to make the argument about the transformation of Puritan identity even more interesting.

In the seminar I quickly learned that B-B was not a fan of Bushman or his work. As I recall, B-B found Bushman's work too middle class, elite class wanna be. As someone born in England class, you see, was never very far from B-B's mind. I don't know whether B-B disliked Bushman for reasons other than class and class wannabeism: the fact that Bushman won a Bancroft Prize and he never did, the fact that Bushman held a distinguished professorship at a prestigious American research university that was a member of the elite Association of American Universities and he didn't, the fact that Bushman took a more social and cultural approach to psychology than his mentor Donald Meyer--whose work I find too reductionism--or the fact that Bushman was a Mormon believer and he was neither. What I do remember is that I thought B-B misinterpreted Bushman's book on American refinement. He saw it as a paean to the middle class and the civilising process. I, on the other hand, thought, still think, and stated in class, that the real heroes of the book were the dirt poor Smith family, the family of Mormon "prophet, seer, and revelator" Joseph Smith Junior. I still think B-B let his ideology get in the way of a valid analysis of Bushman's book. That, of course, has been and continues to be far too common occurence in intellectual and academic circles past and present.

Another thing I remember about B-B's graduate class was that there was a remarkably ignorant and moronic statement made in the class by one of the other graduate students in the seminar. The student, who will remain nameless because I have simply forgotten virtually everything about her, remarked, during one of our classroom discussions, that she found the Mormon sense of persecution irrelevant. I had and still have a number of problems with such a remarkable, not in a good way, jeremiad. First, such etic statements do not take culture seriously while culture, as social theory and social scientific analysis shows and has shown for a century at least, is important if not central to an understanding humans and human groups and, as a consequence, must be taken seriously, very seriously. As Max Weber and Clifford Geertz realised some time ago, you have to, in order to understand human groups and human social movements, go native. You have to go emic, in other words, to grasp the meanings that often motivate and underlie human actions. That this rather obvious methodology hasn't been understood and put into academic practise by one if not more academic wanna bes, not to mention many academics, tells you something about the dismal theoretical and methodological state of the discipline of history. This statement also ignores the fact that the persecution of Mormons was real, very real. Mormons were persecuted, discriminated against, faced mob violence, and even possible "extermination" in Missouri and Illinois. Such a statement ignores the fact that real violence against "others", such as the real violence aimed at Jews and others during the Holocaust, to chose one example, has had and continues to have an immense impact on human individuals and groups particularly on a cultural and ideological level. Just look at the continuing importance of the memory of the Shoah in contemporary Israel and the Jewish community worldwide and the use of the "holocaust" by some in the Jewish community in Israel and the US as a political weapon that Foucault would have found fascinating. The ignorance, moronicity, and  arrogance at the heart of such a dismissive statement shows that stupidity and anti-intellectualism are sadly not the monopoly of the populist masses but can also be found in the contemporary academy.

So why did all this spring to mind? Because I recently decided to take another spin through Richard Bushman's biography of the charismatic and patrimonial (in Weberian terms) founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) tries to walk the thin line between believing history and empirically grounded social scientific analysis if not entirely successfully. When push comes to shove, Bushman generally errs in the direction of a faithful interpretation of Smith's behaviour and actions and early Mormon history making Bushman's book more meaningful and valuable to the Mormon true believer than to the dispassionate social scientific analyst who seeks to understand Smith and early or primitive Mormonism in its broader cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographic contexts better. Additionally, Bushman's book has a failing far too typical of so much historical work and historical biography of the past and the present; it sometimes becomes an exercise in kitchen sink trivial pursuit.

So what did I, a "gentile", a non-Mormon who spent the 1990s and the early and mid 2000s engaged in the study of Mormonism, learn and relearn from Bushman's biography of Smith. I learned that in what was still pretty much a traditional world, honour, something that was central to the traditional culture of honour at the time and in the past in traditional communities, mattered. Smith was embedded in a world of honour and honour mattered to him. Smith wanted to be respected and accepted in a world where gentility was a sign of status. He wanted others to recognise him as a gentlemen, if a "rough" gentleman. I relearned that Smith, was born into a family that had difficulty escaping poverty in a world that was changing thanks to the spread of merchant capitalism, sought financial security. I relearned that attacks on Smith and on Mormons generally were part and parcel of the vigilante violence that was far too common in 19th century America as attacks on Masonry, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormonism show. Needless to say, these vigilante attacks by "true Americans" on "others", whether for political, economic, or cultural reasons, continued into the 20th century and continues in the 21st century, making the study of American ethnocentrism and xenophobia a central part of any dispassionate and critical study of the United States. I relearned that Smith thought of himself as Abraham, as Isaac, as Jacob, as Moses, as the prophets, and as Jesus, and that he saw the Mormons as a figurative Israel made literally into the new Israel. Mormonism, after all, was and is a fascinating mixture of, as Smith perceived them, Tanakh Hebraicism and New Testament Christianity. I relearned that culture, particularly Smith's interpretation of the Bible filtered through the economic, political, and cultural present, was central to the construction of Mormonism and the creation of Mormons.

Given that Bushman's book tries to put the Mormon prophet and Primitive Mormonism into its ancient environment--a context that is problematic for those of us who are not believers--and its 19th century economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ones, I can only recommend Bushman's biography to the Mormon faithful. It is likely to be and remain the standard work on the subject for 21st century believing intellectual Mormons for some time. I was, by the way, very annoyed by one aspect of the book. Bushman's footnotes cite only the last name of an author and a partial title of an author. This becomes a painful experience when one is looking for the footnote references in the bibliography where there are, for example, nine authors with the last name Anderson. Given this my award for the most difficult citation apparatus to manoeuvre through I have ever experienced goes to, moment of silence, Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith.

What a pity that Marvin Hill wasn't able to pursue his biography of Smith...

The Books of My Life: The Radical Right

In 1963 in an essay on the John Birch Society in the Daniel Bell edited collection The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1963), a revision and expansion of 1955s The New American Right (New York: Criterion), Alan Westin prophesies that this recent radical right group would be contained by business leaders, conservatives, and moderate and liberal figures in Republican Party. It is now 60 years later and the extreme right has not been contained like a domestic Soviet Union by business leaders, conservatives, or the Republican Party. Rather, the radical right has become, with the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, at least in part, the mainstream of the post-1960s Republican Party.

So how did we get from there to here? I had avoided long reading The Radical Right given its post-1960s reputation. In the mid-and late 1960s The Radical Right fell into ideological disfavour in certain quarters within the social sciences and the humanities communities. Conflict theorists and social and cultural constructionists like myself found its championing of centrist democratic liberalism and its occasional stereotyping and caricaturing of the radical right (the Monkey Trial effect) as far too ideological raising questions about the validity of the analysis of the essays in this edited collection. Many obsessed with the working class and its supposed apocalyptic role in world history found its portrayal of populists as authoritarian and racist fascists and its linking of populists and the contemporary paranoid right problematic. Given the current political crisis in the US I decided, however, that it was time to take a look at the essays in The Radical Right.

I actually began reading The Radical Right in October of this year because I was interested in the answer to the question of how and why the radical or extremist right had been mainstreamed in American political culture. When I got to Westin’s essay on the John Birch Society, however, I discovered that pages 214 to 226 were missing in the print-on-demand copy of the book that I purchased from Amazon. Thanks to a used bookstore from whom I purchased a paperback copy of the book, however, I have been able to finally finish this edited collection and it gave me a lot to think about. The essays in the The Radical Right, most of them by some of the best and brightest centrist stars in the end of ideology firmament of the era such as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Talcott Parsons, offer a largely unified perspective. Most of the essays argue that in the wake of World War II the economic interest politics that had dominated the US since industrialisation was replaced by status politics. For many of The Radical Rights's essayists, economic, political, and cultural forces, and the Cold War, in particular, created psychic status anxiety in many Americans and the resulting status anxiety about the Cold War and socio-economic positions in post World War II gave rise to movements like the anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940s and 1950s and the John Birch Society, which was also anti-Communist, and, importantly, a shill for free market capitalism and the notion that big American governments were tyrannical take awayers of "liberty".

The essays in The Radical Right, and particularly the most systematic essay in the collection Seymour Matin Lipset's 1955 article on the extremist right, argue, for the most part, that the anxieties released by changes afoot in post-World War II America, particularly economic and political changes, were not primarilly directed outward against the Soviet Union but were largely directed inward against supposed traitorous fifth columnists within the United States. Characterised by manicheanism and a conspiracy theory mania, the radical right found enemies everywhere within the US, fifth columnists and "traitors", who were, they raged, undermining the American way of life (read: The White Anglo Saxon Protestant way of life and the White way of life), be these "traitors" Republicans like Ike, who some Birchers saw as doing the communist will of his Soviet masters, or liberals, by which they meant New Deal and particularly East Coast and elite educated progressives, or members of the Communist Party in the US.

 

If a lot of this sounds frighteningly familiar, it should. This radical manichean, conspiracy theory, apocalyptic, raging, fear mongering, ahistorical, scapegoating, and hysteric right is still with us today and how. What is different, as I noted earlier, is that in the wake of the so-called Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party, which was once a regional Northern political party with an ideology centred around free soil and free labour, has been Dixiefornicated. The Republican Party, in other words, has, thanks to a number of factors including the rise of the Sunbelt, the tendency of many and particularly many Whites who move to the Sunbelt to conform to Sunbelt conservatism, neoliberalism with its small government polemics and its taxes as tyrannical mantras, the increased acceptance of the belief that progressive liberals are dangerous fifth columnists akin to "commies" before them, the revolt against the federal government control of large pockets of land in the American West, the movement of White evangelicals from the Dixiecrat Party to the Republican Party and their re-emergence into American politcal culture, and the kindler and gentler discourse the radical right used and uses, a rhetoric that wasn't overtly racist and anti-Semitic, morphed into the Dixiecrats and, as a result, the radical right has gone mainstream.

The Radical Right was an interesting read particularly in the context of the takeover of one of the US’s major political parties by the contemporary radical right between the 1960s and Trump. It raises a lot of interesting questions and issues worth pondering given the mainstreaming of the radical right. In particular I found Westin’s essay on the early history of the Birchers fascinating, Hyman's comparative analysis of the US and Britain interesting, Lipset's 1955 essay well argued, and Peter Vierick’s two essays on a conservatism that is flexible to the dynamics of history, interesting and intriguing. There were some things I disagreed with in the book. I don't think there has been a decline in White supremacist and anti-Semitic sentiments in the US. Rather I suspect that these have been submerged into a kindler and gentler discourse which those in the know could easily and readily decode. I appreciated The Radical Right's emphasis on social factors (class fractions, new business interests, education, region, political party) and social psychological factors (the authoritarian personality and the social construction of fear and anxiety) but would argue that these have been unfortunately emphasised at the expense of cultural explanations (many of the essays do touch on religion and, if too briefly, on ideology) for the rise of the extreme right in the US. I did not find the books occasional emphasis on a national character grounded in a national psychology particularly compelling. Still I highly recommend this collection particularly to anyone interested in American politics and the American political and ideological right.

The Books of My Life: Film Performance

In Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower, 2005) St. Anne's College, Oxford, film scholar Andrew Klevan explores film performance in relationship to position and perspective--the film performers relationship to the camera and their position within the shot-- location--the relationship of film performers to décor, furnishings, and objects within the screen frame--and plot--the relationship between film performer and the narrative development of a film--by analysing ten films from the "golden age of Hollywood".

To be honest, I am not sure what to make of this brief monograph. On the one hand it is a well written close analysis of sequences from ten golden era Hollywood films that yields interesting and sometimes insightful, if perhaps overinterpreted and not entirely compelling interpretations of film performances and film meanings. On the other hand, since the analysis is grounded solely in textual analysis (crystal ball textualism) and doesn't make use of archival materials, interviews with Hollywood performers and other craftspeople, including the producers and directors who made the films, it remains speculative, and ultimately can be seen as an example of one person's--one person embedded within academic and broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts-- response to what the sequences within ten films under the glare of the academic gaze, mean.

The Books of My Life: The Star System

The Star System: Hollywood's Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower, 2000) by Paul McDonald is the best short synthesis I have seen on the economics and symbolic economy of the Hollywood studio system and the Hollywood star system from its beginnings in the early 1900s, to its zenith in 1930s and 1940s, and finally to its transformation in the 1960s and 1970s. McDonald does an excellent job of introducing readers to the workings of the Hollywood studio system and its transformation in the wake of the US government's anti-trust suit against the Hollywood studios forcing them to divest of exhibition arms and practises in the United States in the post-World War II period. He also does an excellent job of exploring Hollywood's stars as forms of labour and capital in the vertically integrated Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, as forms of labour and capital in the horizontally integrated world of corporate Hollywood in the wake of its divestment of its theatre chains, and as images and brands, forms of symbolic capital, in both eras.

I highly recommend McDonald's book to anyone interested in the economy and symbolic economy of Hollywood and in the Hollywood star system. I do have a few minor quibbles. There is no bibliographic entry for Janet Staiger or Richard Dyer though McDonald references the work of both on several occasions. The Staiger references have been subsumed under Judith Stacey while the Dyer reference is under Paul McDonald. Still, a great book.

The Books of My Life: The Star Machine

 The Star Machine (New York: Knopf, 2007), by Wesleyan Film Studies scholar Jeanine Basinger, author of a previous book on silent era film stars in 1999, explores a number of aspects of the classic Hollywood star machine that arose in the 1910s and was at its zenith between the late 1920s and the 1950s. In The Star Machine Basinger looks at the economic and cultural workings of the studio era star making machine in part one, explores how the star machine dealt with stars who malfunctioned, stars who were disillusioned, and stars who were disaffected in a series of interesting case studies in part two, explores the oddities and character actors of the Hollywood studio system who occasionally took star turns again in a series of interesting case studies in part three, and, in a conclusion, looks at the similarities and differences between the classic sound era star system and the neo-star system of today.

There is a lot I found to like in Basinger's study of sound era Hollywood star system. The book represents a lifetime of watching Hollywood films and overhearing what those who went to cinemas to see Hollywood films thought about them and their stars. This adds a historical and audience response dimension to Basinger's work that is often missing from the film analysis of many ultimately ahistorical contemporary film scholars who haven't seem many films beyond the "classics", retrospective "classics" at that, and who do not do much if any analysis of how real audiences responded or respond to Hollywood films and Hollywood stars. Basinger's book explores both the economic and cultural aspects of the Hollywood star making machinery. She looks at how Hollywood "discovered" stars, schooled them, groomed them, remade them, when necessary, sold them, and branded them, and how, despite all this machinery geared to earn studios a profit, it was, in the final analysis, audiences, film goers who wanted to look like stars, live the lives of stars, and even be stars, and to some extent luck or fate, that ultimately made Hollywood's stars. Basinger's book is wonderfully attentive to things like costumes, camera angles, lighting that went into and were essential to the manufacture of a Hollywood star in the studio star making machinery. Basinger's book nicely notes that, given the retrospective nature of much modern film scholarship, that those who aren't seen as stars today and who aren't, as a result, extensively studied by so many modern day film scholars, a star like Deanna Durbin, for example, were stars in their era. Durbin, as Basinger notes, accounted for around 15% of Universal's box office in the 1930s. This economic fact alone means that contemporary film scholars should be studying Durbin. Basinger nicely explores the changes in audiences response to stars in the depression era differed from how they responded to stars in World War II. During the depression audiences revelled in the glamour and fashion of the films while in World War Ii audiences wanted to escape the fears and tensions of the era and so helped create zany, exotic, girl and boy next door, and democracy on the march film stars. Basinger nicely notes that Hollywood manufactured stars for both the female gaze and the male gaze, stars like Lana Turner and Tyrone Power, through schooling, grooming, remaking, clothing, and lighting. Basinger points out that films were often made with certain stars in mind. The star as auteur? Basinger nicely explores the role the Hollywood star machine played in creating younger stars in the 1940s, younger stars who became more prominent in the 1950s and lead, or so some argue, to the juvenilisation of Hollywood cinema in the 1980s and after.

I highly recommend Basinger's The Star Machine to anyone interested in film, Hollywood, the economics of Hollywood, Hollywood and culture, and the American economic system in general. One can certainly argue compellingly that stars and the notion common among film goers that they could become like stars and live like stars was and is one of the opiates of the consumer capitalist masses in the era of consumer capitalism. That alone makes the study of how Hollywood created and made stars important.

The Books of My Life: Restless Souls

The heart and the motivating force of Leigh Eric Schmidt's Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), is a critique of the critics of contemporary American spirituality. Schmidt, a professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton, takes the critics of American spirituality to task, whether critics of the academic apologetic and polemical sort like Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton in their Habits of the Heart (1985), the critics of the political punditry sort such as David Brooks in his Bobos in Paradise (2000), or "critics" of the we are OK if you want to be OK you need to be like us "orthodox" Christian sort such as James Herrick in his The Making of the New Spirituality (2003).

Schmidt argues that despite their ideological differences the apologetic and polemical critics of the new American spirituality share similar views on the "otherness" of the new American spirituality. The new American spirituality, they maintain, is new or novel (I would add that they share the notion that American spirituality is not quite "American") and that it has, since its rise in the wake of the culture wars of the mid and late 1960s, resulted in an increase in mass narcissism and world rejecting mysticism that is undermining American values, American duties, the American community, and American authority and, as a result, is hazardous to the continued survival of America.

Schmidt, in his wonderfully written and nicely researched book, however, shows that the "new" American spirituality isn't that new. Schmidt traces this liberal and radical American spirituality back to mid 19th century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, and through late 19th and 20th century spiritual seekers or wayfarers like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Rounseville Alger, Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier, Felix Adler, Ralph Waldo Trine, Sarah Farmer, founder of the Greenacre spiritualist retreat and school, Max Ehrmann, Quaker Rufus Jones, Quaker Thomas Kelly, both of whom played prominent roles in the Quaker retreat and study centre Pendle Hill, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Hurd, Huston Smith, Howard Thurman, and Oprah. Schmidt finds the historical roots of this not so new American spirituality with its emphases on mysticism, solitude, the unity of all peoples and religions, and, worldly benevolence, not only in Transcendentalism but also in the metaphysics movement, mental healing, the new thought movement, Vedanta Hinduism, Buddhism, Liberal Protestantism, Liberal Social Gospel Protestantism, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism, Reform Judaism, the health reform movement, the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, and nineteenth century anti-Calvinism.

In his sympathetic, empathetic, and "going native" history of American spirituality Schmidt is willing to concede to the critics of American spirituality that American spirituality is a product of a modernity and postmodernity characterised by globalisation, increasing narcissisms, increasing individualism, and its fetishisation of the status quo, factors that gave rise in the American spirituality, as Schmidt notes, to the seeming contradictions of mystical disciplines for quieting self-realisation versus mystical world changing ideologies and paternalistic particularism versus somewhat paternalistic intellectual openness. He does not concede and he amply demonstrates that the new American spirituality led to quietest world rejection, however. As Schmidt notes, many American spiritualists were abolitionists, health reformers, peace activists, activists promoting women's rights, critics of colonialism, and critics of capitalism.  I would add, by the way, that White American Conservative Evangelicalism with its universalisation of modern American capitalism, modern American nationalism, and modern American WASP culture is as modern if not more modern than American spirituality. American White Conservative Evangelicalism is also, I would argue, far more dangerous to the survival of the US and the globe as a result of these fetishisations than American spirituality will ever be.

I highly recommend this wonderful book to anyone interested in culture studies, intellectual history, the history of spirituality, and the history of religion, particularly in the United States.

The Books of My Life: Anna Akhmatova

I have mentioned before that I have a strong interest in Russian culture. It is not surprising, therefore, that at some point I would get around to reading Roberta Reeder's massive biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna Akhmatova (New York: Picador, 1994). Reeder notes on page 484 of her biography, critical analysis of Akhmatova's poetry, cultural and intellectual history of late Tsarist and Soviet Russia, and study of those in the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia who intersected with Akhmatova over her life, that Akhmatova was not a saint but a human being. Despite this claim, however, Akmatova comes off as yet another one of those saintly suffering Russian women in Reeder's book.

On the plus side Reeder's book is the most thoroughly researched biography of Akmatova in the English language that I know of and her analysis of Akhmatova's poetry--and what wonderful poetry it is--is quite impressive and quite compelling. On the "bad" side, Reeder's book reads more like a dictionary of somewhat related chapters rather than a tightly woven biography and cultural history largely because Reeder seems to throw everything she knows about Akhmatova into the book regardless of whether it is significant or not. As a result Redder ends up falling prey to the historian's folly and fallacy of trivial pursuit. On the ugly side, Reeder gives us an Akhmatova who is a romantic and prophetic suffering servant making her book more akin to the hagiographies of earlier epochs than a critical biography of the 20th century. Reeder's saintly "realist" approach means that the author lacks the requisite critical distance from her subject that would allow her to write a critical biography of Akhmatova.

Despite all its warts I still recommend Reeder's book particularly if you are interested in Russian culture, Russian literature, and Russian poetry. Reeder's book is likely to remain the authoritative biography of Anna of all the Russias in the English language for some time.

Why I Quit the "Coop"

After working at Honest Weight for five years, five years that sometimes felt like ten, I decided to resign from the "Coop". The primary but not only reason I resigned was the fact that I was bullied, harassed, and embarrassed by a staff member at the “Coop” one not so wonderful Thursday evening.

The harassment happened during my shift on 16 August 2018. One of the new front end supervisors, let’s call him N after that Russian tradition where the guilty are made anonymous thanks to the letter N, asked me, in front of a customer, why I did not come and get him to deal with an expired coupon. I didn’t because I have never been asked to do this by management and had never done this during my years at Honest Weight. My understanding was that once a coupon had expired it had expired. Later during the same shift, N, as I was bagging at another register being run by NN, walked up to me and muttered  "you decided to actually work tonight". First of all, joking or not joking aside, doing this in front of a customer and in public is very unprofessional and unacceptable, at least in my book. Then, a minute or so later, I asked the same customer I was bagging for, if she wanted another shopping cart since her cart was full and I had to put a bag on top of other bags that contained soft items like bananas. N made fun of me for asking this question of the customer.

Management, of course, did its due diligence. It investigated the report I submitted on this incident. N apparently denied remembering anything. NN, apparently did a Sgt. Schultz saying she knew nothing, heard nothing, and saw nothing. I know, by the way, that NN heard the third of N's school yard performances because she looked right at me and gave me one of those WTF quizzical looks.

Here was the rub. For the first time in my volunteer and staff work life at Honest Weight I didn’t feel comfortable working or even coming into the store. After all while one bullying time may be an accident, two bullying times is not a charm, and three bullying times is a pattern of behaviour.
I would, by the way, have stayed at HW for a few more years if management had changed my schedule so I didn't have to work with the bully, but they refused, so I quit.

After all that happened way too much proverbial water had passed under that proverbial bridge. Additionally, I really don't need to work at Honest Weight to make it economically. Add to this my health problems--asthma, sinusitis, osteoporosis, and degenerative musculoskeletal arthritis, all of which were affecting me more and more at work--and it was was perhaps the right time to go.

For the most part, I enjoyed working at Honest Weight over the years. It has, of course, always been a crazy place to work with its petty and silly political cold and hot wars and its quite evident inconsistencies and contradictions. Still I will probably miss it once in a while.

The Books of My Life: Return From the Natives

Peter Mandler's Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (London: Yale University Press, 2013) is a superb archive driven and theoretically aware exploration of the role Social Scientists played in World War Two and the Cold War. At the heart of Mandler's book are Cultural Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Social Anthropologist, linguist, Semiologist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, and neo-Freudian Geoffrey Gorer. Though Mead, Benedict, Bateson, and Gorer are centre stage in Mandler's book other famous and not so celebrated Social Scientists, like Claire Hold, Elizabeth Hoyt, Métraux, Clyde Kluckhohn, Nathan Leites, John Dollard, Samuel Stouffer, Edward Hall,  Robert and Helen Lynd, Erich Fromm, David Reisman, and Ralph Linton--who comes off as a misogynist macho jerk--make important cameo appearances as well.

Mandler's Return from the Natives, which is part biography, part history of the Social Sciences, part social and cultural theory critique, part biography, particularly of Mead, Benedict, Bateson, and Gorer, is an important and nuanced corrective to much contemporary history of Social Science analysis that sees the Social Scientists who served their countries in World War Two and the Cold War as top down social engineers. Mandler argues, rightly I think, that there was more than one type of social engineering during World War Two and the Cold War, top down social engineering and social engineering for a respect of global diversity and a respect for other cultures. Mead"s and Benedict's engineering for cultural diversity with its Boasian anti-racism and cultural relativism, falls into the latter category.

On the theoretical level, Mandler's book is an exploration and critique of neo-Freudianism, the attempt to contextualise Freud more broadly in sociological, ethnological, and ethnographic terms. In Mead's, Benedict's, and Gorer's case this neo-Freudianism led to the development of the culture and personality school of 1930s to 1960s Cultural Anthropology, and particularly in Gorer's case, gave rise to the notion that national character was the product of swaddling and toilet training processes that took place during infancy. As Mandler notes such and approach saw culture in holistic and ultimately static and I would argue functionalist terms, and had little place in it for the role economic, political, and cultural factors played in national character, or perhaps better national identity, and social and cultural change.

On occasion, Mead, Mandler notes, did contextualise her work more broadly. Mandler notes that the Mead edited collection Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, which was written for UNESCO, prefigures the critiques of international development as imperialism (economic, political, cultural) one finds in post-Vietnam era Social Science.

Finally, Mandler notes that Mead, particularly during the Cold War, often had one foot in the engineering in the name of American nationalism camp and the be wary of nationalist social engineering relativist camps as a result of her attempt to gain government funding for Cultural Anthropology in the wake of World War II and in her effort to promote cultural relativist sensitivities in the American government and its intelligence apparatuses.

Mandler's book is one of those books, like Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic--a book which had an immense impact on my intellectual life--that I would put in the pantheon of published works that I have read. It is a book that, in my opinion, should be read by every Social Scientist and Historian. I would also recommend that it be read by everyone in government service as a cautionary tale. I can't recommend Return From the Natives more highly.

The Books of My Life: The Poltics of Rage

If you want to understand how the Republican Party of today morphed into the Dixiecrats of yesteryear there is no better book you can read than Emory historian Dan Carter's The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Carter's book, which is part biography and part history of post-World War II American politics, explores the role Alabama politician and former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace played in what Carter calls the Southernisation of American politics or what I call the dixiefornication of American politics.

Wallace, in the 1960s and 1970s, as Carter shows, used the politics of White rage and resentment (negative emotions are easy to manipulate) over integration, busing to achieve integration, federal government "tyranny", the "tyranny" of the federal courts (both of which were pushing integration at the time), high taxes, welfare freeloaders and cheats (a code word for Blacks), the lack of law and order (code words for dissidents, civil rights activists and Blacks protesting in the streets), along with the rhetoric of states rights (a code word for keeping your hands off of our Jim Crow and our local schools), the far too great expansion of the federal government and government spending (code word for welfare spending on Blacks), anti-communism, anti-counterculturalism, and anti-intellectualism to achieve political prominence and notoriety not only in his Deep South home but also in the American North and West in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the appeal of these issues to Southern Whites, angry White Southern evangelicals (custodians of the lost cause living the myth of being poor poor persecuted Christians), angry suburban Whites, angry Catholic Ethnic Whites, and angry blue collar Whites.

Republican Richard Nixon and strategist Kevin Phillips would, of course, steal Wallace's thunder in order to appeal to the same White rageoholics Wallace did, helping, in the process, to create a new Republican Party that today is dominated by perhaps that most dixiefornicated of New Yorkers, President Donald Trump, who is, in many ways, channeling the ghost of George Wallace right down to his ties to the KKK, White Supremacists, and his use of manichean rhetoric to stir up his "saintly" supporters against the "demons" of the press and "liberal" protesters in his audience, who, like those at George Wallace political revivals, were also physically attacked. Sometimes, it seems, history runs in cycles. 

While I found the political history of the book more compelling than the biographical parts I still highly recommend Carter's excellent and insightful book. If you have an interest in the history of the Republican Party particularly in the post WWII period or a history of the dixiefornication of America, check it out.

The Books of My Life: John Wayne's America

Over the years I have watched a lot of films including films starring the Duke, Marion Morrison, John Wayne. Recently I watched several movies starring the Duke, that I had never seen before, the Warner Brothers B Westerns Ride Him Cowboy (1932), please no jokes, The Big Stampede (1932), Haunted Gold (1932), and The Man from Monterey, two war pictures Wayne starred in, Back to Bataan (RKO, 1945) and Operation Pacific (Warner Brothers, 1951), and one war picture Wayne both starred in and directed, The Green Berets (Warner Brothers and Batjac, Wayne's company, 1968).

The Warner's B Westerns were, by and large, formulaic like all genre pictures. In most of them the Duke and his horse Duke were sent to some town, generally to take care of the bad guys. In good formulaic genre fashion the Duke defeated the bad guys, found the girl, who generally had some relationship, with a crypto bad guy, and eventually, one presumes, got the girl. Of the four Warner's B Westerns I watched  I found Haunted Gold to be the most interesting thanks to its attempt to marry the Western genre to the Gothic genre. That said, I don't think I would watch any of these films again for entertainment or educational purposes.

The Duke's war films I watched were really not that different from his Western films. The Duke and his band of merry good guys beat back the bad guys (be they the Japanese or the Vietnamese) with the help of their buddies (be they Filipino guerillas or the South Vietnamese) at, in the case of The Green Berets, the appropriately named Dodge City, pointing, in the process, up the close ties between the American Western and the American war film.

After watching these films I decided to read Garry Wills's book John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), a book I have wanted to read for some time.  The book, by the way, was published as John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity by Faber and Faber in the UK and Australia.

For Wills "John Wayne" is an American symbol grounded in several American myths including the key American myths of the frontier with its wide open spaces, uniqueness and exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and wilderness where some American men, like "Wayne" go in order to remain untrammeled and free to roam men.

It took years, as Wills notes, for Marion Morrison to become the American symbol "John Wayne". Three directors would, according to Wills, play major roles in the creation of the mythic Duke: Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, and John Ford. In Walsh's 1930 film The Big Trail, the first film "Wayne" got star billing in, Walsh created a "Wayne" who was at ease in the wild, so at ease, as "Wayne's" physical movements show, that he was almost a part of the wilderness of the American West. In Howard Hawk's Red River (made in 1946 but not released until 1948, Monterrey Productions, Hawks's company, and United Artists), a film that gave birth to the post-World War II symbol of the "Duke", Hawks created a "John Wayne" who was melancholy and weighed down by a sense of responsibility. In the 1950s and 1960s "Wayne" became the symbol of Cold War American imperial power, thanks, in part, to John Ford films like The Searchers (Warner Brothers, 1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Paramount, 1962), and the anti-communist action adventure film Big Jim McLain (Warner Brothers, 1952), a film in which "Wayne" stars as a HUAC investigator.

When I was a postgraduate student at the University of Notre Dame I sat in on an American Studies seminar offered by Wills while he was a visiting scholar in South Bend. It was a very interesting experience. So was reading his cultural historical study of "John Wayne" the symbol, the John Wayne who went to war only on celluloid--something for which, John Ford, who did go to war, apparently never forgive "Wayne" for--and the "John Wayne" who became the very symbol for many Americans--Wills calls them Wayneoliters--of America itself, of American individualism, of American destiny, and of real Americanism.

There were several things I liked about Wills's book including his emphasis on culture, the interplay of culture, politics, and biography, his emphasis on "Wayne" as an actor, and his emphasis on "Wayne's" celluloid body movements and speech patterns. There were a few things that annoyed me about the book. Wills poo pahs auteurism at one point noting that film is a collaborative medium. At the same time, however,  he praises and explores the themes of directors like Walsh, Hawks, including Hawks's role in reworking the scripts of Red River, and Ford, making the case for auteurism in the process. Additionally, there were times I felt Wills got a bit off the beaten track such as when he went on for several pages about the history of the Alamo in his chapters of "John Wayne's" film The Alamo (Batjac, United Artists, 1960). It was and interesting digression but a digression nevertheless.

Some Wayneoliters, by the way, have been critical of Wills's book. But for them "Wayne" is not a symbol. For them the myth is the "reality".

Recommended.

Musings on the Big Cube

Recently I watched the 1969 American and Mexican film The Big Cube. I didn't think it was a particularly good film. I did, however, think it was an interesting film. It seemed to me, as I was watching The Big Cube, that the best way to categorise the film is as a rare example of an Acid Noir film. In the film, Johnny (George Chakiris) is what, I suppose, we might call a narcissistic homme fatale. Johnny, you see, is using LSD not only recreationally but also as a weapon, as a means to drive the step mother,  Adriana (Lana Turner), of the woman he wants to marry, Lisa (Karin Mossberg), mad so that she can inherit the wealth of Lisa's rich recently deceased father and he, Johnny, can become rich. As is often the case in genre films Johnny gets his comeuppance at the end of The Big Cube as he is driven mad thanks to taking way too much acid one one delirium tremens night. As for Adriana, she is saved just in the nick of time from a life of forgetful madness by Lisa and Adriana's playwright friend, Frederick (Richard Egan), who Adriana, of course, marries at The Big Cube's happy end.

The Books of My Life: Isaac and Isaiah

I have long had an interest in culture, ideology, the social and cultural construction of identity and community, social and cultural movements, and culture wars. David Caute's Issac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (London: Yale University Press, 2013) serves up these and more.

On one level Caute's Isaac and Isaiah is a biography of the Isaac and Isaiah of the title, Polish born Marxist Issac Deutscher, author of well-known biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, and liberal political theorist and Russian born Isaiah Berlin. But Caute's book is more than just a biography of Deutscher and Berlin. Both Deutscher and Berlin, in Caute's book, serve as key symbols around who a host of noted others, including George Orwell, E.H. Carr, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and Hannah Arendt, a host of noted Cold War events, and a host of familiar Cold War controversies, intersect and swirl. Caute's book is thus part history of the Cold War and the roles Deutscher and Berlin played in it, part cultural history--it explores the culture of Marxism and liberalism--part intellectual history--it puts Deutscher and Berlin in broad intellectual contexts--part academic history--Berlin was a fellow at All Souls, Oxford and Deutscher lectured in universities in Europe, the UK, and the US--part Jewish history--both Deutscher and Berlin were East European Jews who escaped from Hitler and Stalin respectively settling in England and who had personal and political interests in the Israel--part history of communism and anti-communism--Deutscher saw himself as a renegade Marxist who saw Stalinism as a detour from Leninism while Berlin had a hatred of Soviet communism and saw Stalinism as a continuation of Leninism--part critique of Deutscher, Berlin, and the Cold War, and part expose of Berlin's black balling of Deutcher's appointment in Soviet Studies at the new University of Sussex in 1963. By books end neither Deutscher or Berlin come off as saints though Deutscher was never the purveyor of ad hominems that Berlin, in private correspondence, was and who, on several occasions, expressed his hatred of Deurscher, who he regarded as the worst sort of apologist and polemicist imaginable

I enjoyed Caute's Isaac and Isaiah immensely. I highly recommend it particularly for those with interests like those mentioned above and for those interested, in particular, in the history of the Cold War and its ideologies.

The Books of My Life: Down and Dirty Pictures

Given that I had earlier read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls it was inevitable, I suppose, that I would read his sequel or follow up to that muckraking book, Down and Dirty Pictures Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), at some point.  Down and Dirty Pictures is, as Biskind states (p. 1), a sequel to Easy Riders Raging Bulls because the independent cinema of the auteur as independent artist, was, to some extent, one of the legacies of the movie brat auteur oriented cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, the cinema Biskind explored in Easy Riders.

Down and Dirty Pictures tells the tale of the rise, success, and decline of the American independent cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s. At the heart of the book, as the subtitle to the book makes clear,  is Miramax, the Sundance Institute with its filmmaker labs and film festival, and a host of other initially independent film "studios" of the era. In Down and Dirty Pictures Biskind argues that Mirimax, in particular, which began as a buying or acquisition house and distributor of independent films, transformed movie making in the US in the 1990s. Mirimax, Biskind contends, led the way in transforming film distribution in the American cinema of the 1990s, arranged the shotgun marriage of independents and big corporate studios, created the infrastructure of the American independent film industry, and brought American independent films, as a result, to a broader audience including those audiences who went to see films at America's cookie cutter mall based film chains.

Where Mirimax led, others--think Max Weber and isomorphism--like October and New Line, followed. By the mid and late 1990s once independent institutions like Mirimax, had become part of the studio system. Disney, for instance, bought Mirmax in 1993. October was purchased by Universal in 1997. New Line became part of Turner in 1994, part of Warner Brothers when Turner and Warner's merged in 1996, and was merged with Warner Pictures in 2008.

Success, as it often is, was, as Biskind makes clear, a double edged sword for American independent film industry. Mirimax, now part of a larger studio, was able to bid more for the right to distribute independent films and increasingly moved into the film production business and began to produce films just like the studios before it built around Hollywood stars with their big salaries, all of which drove up the cost of "independent" film acquisition and film production in the process. By the 2000s independent cinema, particularly mid-budgeted "independent" cinema, was on life support. The now studio owned independents were increasingly struggling and it became increasingly clear that the studio owned "independents" were of really of limited interest to the studios who owned them. The studios proved to be more interested in film by the numbers comic book films, broad comedy films, sequels to both, and nostalgic reboots of 1960s and 1970s TV shows, all of which continue to dominate Hollywood studio big budget equals big profit oriented filmmaking today. As a result low cost independent auteur films were almost back to square one.

Biskind's book doesn't neglect the dark sides of the captains of the American independent film industry. Harvey Weinstein, co-owner and  head of Mirimax with his brother Bob, is shown for the angry, intimidating, back stabbing, film editing (not always wrongly), user of completed films as leverage, bullying and belitting of employees, directors, producers, journalists, virtually everyone and anyone, make money at all costs flim flam man he was and is as recent events have shown once again. Redford is shown to be inconsistent and indecisive. Jockeying for power with its almost inevitable back stabbing is shown to be at the heart of American film corporate culture just as it is in broader capitalist corporate culture today.

Recommended particularly for those interested in how the Hollywood film making industry really works. Annoyance: Descriptive passages that read more like a work of fiction than a work of non-fiction. Caveat: the same caveats that applied to Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls.

The Books of My Life: Star Trek

I have a vague recollection of watching Star Trek sometime in either 1967 or 1968 on WBAP TV, NBC, Dallas, Texas. It must not have done much for me because, for whatever reason, as I didn't continue to watch it. I really began to watch Star Trek, or as it is not called, Star Trek: The Original Series, in reruns sometime in the 1970s and 1980s. I found it interesting though it never became an obsession of mine. In the 1980s, while I was living in Athens, Ohio, I began watching Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) thanks to a Parkersburg, West Virginia TV station and came, particularly after the third series, to like TNG a lot. I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine pretty religiously after it debuted in 1993. It remains today by far my favourite Star Trek series. By the time Star Trek: Voyager debuted in 1995 and Enterprise hit the airwaves in 2001 I was Star Treked out so I only watched Voyager on rare occasions and never watched Enterprise beyond the first episode. In the intervening years I have watched episodes of both and have come to like both though not as much as I like TNG and DS9. I still, by the way, hate the theme song of Enterprise.

Recently, I read Ina Rae Hark's book on the Star Trek television franchise (Star Trek, BFI Film Classics, London: BFI, 2008) and quite enjoyed it. Hark, a fan scholar of Trek does an excellent job of putting the Treks in their context: The Cold War for the first series, the end of the Cold War for the second, postmodernism for the third, fourth, and fifth, and liberal humanism for them all. Given these different histories, as Hark points out, each of the Star Trek series have somewhat different themes. TOS, for instance, focused on the Kirk, Spock, McCoy dynamic, emphasised the need for embodied consciousness of both the rational and emotional kind, and focused on a fear of human stagnation. TNG focused on its professional Starfleet officers of both the empirical and intuitive kind who, at least in part, went around the galaxy engaging in diplomacy, conflict resolution, mediation, statecraft, and, here is where some condescension comes in, determined who was ready for Federation membership and who was not. DS9 emphasised relationships, power and its asymmetries, religious tensions, military tensions, and the darkness at the heart of the Federation. It is, as Hark notes, not a surprise that DS9 mirrors a world of increasing ethnic and religious tensions. Voyager emphasised that life, this life, was too short not to stop and smell the roses. Enterprise went back to before the beginning and explored the tensions that were present between those peoples who would form the Federation, the big government that works, of the Star Trek universe.

Thematics are not the only thing Hark explores in the Trekverse. Hark does an excellent job of pointing out the different things different writers brought to Trek. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the show, saw intervention and war as sometimes necessary. Gene Coon, who ran TOS for much of the second and third seasons, put a greater emphasis on diplomacy and peaceful coexistence. Brannon Braga, particularly in his years as showrunner of Enterprise, was more a plot than a character kind of guy. Hark does an excellent job of noting the differences between the shows. TOS, TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise went where no earthling had gone before on state of the art military, scientific investigation, and exploration oriented spaceships while DS9, which was more gritter, darker, and less utopian than the other series, took place largely on a immobile space station. DS9 had more arcs and character development than the other series.

As I said, I quite enjoyed Hark's book. I remain, however, more of a Whovian than a Trekkie or Trekker. Recommended.

The Books of My Life: Seinfeld

I didn't watch much television in the early and mid-1990s. I didn't have a telly until 1991 while between 1993 and 1995 I was travelling and hiking my way across the Canadian and American Wests with my then friend Lea Danielsen. As a result I didn't see Seinfeld when it debuted on NBC in 1990 and I didn't watch Seinfeld when it was at its height of popularity as one of the shows that was part of NBC's Thursday night "Must See TV", shows that helped make NBC America's top network for a time, from 1992 to 1998. In fact, I didn't, in fact, watch Seinfeld until it was in reruns in the mid-1990s.

I liked Seinfeld. I still do. I also enjoyed reading Nicholas Mirzoeff's critical study of Seinfeld (Seinfeld, BFI TV Classics series, London: BFI, 2007. Though Mirzoeff's book is not grounded in interviews with the shows creators--Mirzoeff says it makes one less critical of a text, which is a fair cop I suppose--and is like so much television, film, and literary criticism today, text centred. Still Mirzoeff has a lot of interesting things to say about Seinfeld.

Mirzoeff, drawing on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Raymond Williams concept of flow, Aristotle's theory of comedy, Sigmund Freud's theory of displacement, Gustav Faubert's realism, Harold Pinter's theatre of the everyday, and the history of Jewish comedy, argues that Seinfeld is visually traditional and verbally innovative, that Seinfeld was meant to make money through advertising revenue for NBC, that Seinfeld is a comedy of manners, a comedy of social rules and social behaviour, a comedy of relationships, a comedy of the absurdities of everyday life, a comedy of spite, rather than a romantic comedy like most other American situation comedies, and a comedy heavily influenced by vaudeville and the Yiddish theatre that is focused around "four adolescent infants" trying to figure out the social rules of everyday life in the era of the Oslo Accords. This "too Jewish" comedy reflects, Mirzoeff asserts, the Jewish movement into the White American mainstream beginning in the 1950s and a late twentieth century concern about masculinity and gender. It depends for its comedy, Mirzoeff maintains, on its audience getting the get, as he calls it, involves the audience, in other words, filling in the social and cultural intertextuality or references.

One of the things I thought about as I was reading Mirzoeff's book was the current state of television and film theory. As some of you may know television and film theory has been grounded, at least in part, in Freudian theory and Lacan's reworking of Freudian theory, thanks to the notion quite common in academia that television and films are akin to a dream that can be decoded by the in the know analysand. I have never, however, found Freudian theory and its Lacanian variant particularly compelling and I have never believed that television and film are akin to a dream. I think it more useful to take a more sociological approach to television and cinema than a psychoanalytic one. It is obvious, to me anyway, that, sociologically speaking, all societies, their culture, their forms of socialisation, of which the media is one, are socially and culturally constructed and, as such, reflect the social and cultural ideologies, the civil religion or the myths, at the heart of that society and culture. It is obvious to me that these ideologies, this civil religion, and these myths have been fetishised by specific societies and cultures. It is thus not surprising that the media, including television, mirrors these societies and cultures and, on occasion, the fractions--class, gender, ethnic--within those societies and cultures. We need less Freud or Lacan in the exploration of television and more Marx and Weber and their heirs to help us understand the nature and function of television.

As I said, I enjoyed Mirzoeff's book and recommend it to intellectuals and scholars interested in American television and American situation comedy. I did have one historical quibbles with the book. Historically speaking it helps, I think, to put Seinfeld within the context of earlier "too Jewish" television shows like Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950-1954) and The Dick van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961-1966, which was created by an alumni of Your Show of Shows. The Dick van Dyke Show, in particular, had elements of the comedy of relationships, the comedy of manners, the comedy of the absurdities of everyday life, and the workplace comedy which it shared with Seinfeld and I wish Mirzoeff had explored these precedents more.

The Books of My Life: Cracker

I have been watching British television since the 1960s. One of my favourite British TV genres has long been the crime or detective genre, a genre that British TV seems to have perfected over the years. Some of my favourite British crime shows include ITV's Inspector Morse, ITV's Prime Suspect, ITV's Lewis, and ITV's Cracker, all of which number among my favourite TV shows of all time.

Cracker, the subject of Mark Duguid's excellent monograph in the BFI TV Classics series Cracker (London: BFI, 2000), whose three series ran on ITV between 1993 and 1995, and which had specials broadcast in 1996 and 2007, starred Robbie Coltrane as Edward "Fitz" Fitzgerald, a psychologist who helps the Greater Manchester Police investigate and solve a series of difficult and heinous murders in that city. "Fitz" is not only a gifted psychologist, as Duguid notes, but is also an arrogant, self-centred, and selfish gambling and alcohol addict, who, because of his narcissism and addictions, is not only a genius of Holmesian proportions, but is also someone who has sometimes difficult and disastrous personal relations his wife Judith (Barbara Flynn), his two children Mark and Katie, and the other cops he works with.

As Duguid notes Cracker was created by producer Gub Neal and Liverpudlian writer Jimmy McGovern, both of whom were interviewed by Duguid for his book. During its run McGovern wrote six of Cracker's 9 episodes and two specials. Paul Abbot, later the creator of Clocking Off (BBC), State of Play (BBC), Shameless (C4), and Hit and Miss (Sky), who became a producer on Cracker in series two, wrote three episodes of Cracker including the "White Ghost" special. Thematically, argues Duguid, Cracker is centred around the themes of justice and injustice, Catholicism--"Fitz" like McGovern is a lapsed Catholic--moral choices, the impossibility of pure motives, and confession, in both the criminal and Catholic senses. In Cracker, as Duguid notes, ordinary people are often driven by circumstances, by hopelessness, despair, poverty, grief, and resentment, to commit  heinous crimes that reveal the dark recesses of their souls, dark souls that only "Fitz" seems to comprehend and understand.

Cracker proved popular during its run on ITV not only with viewers but with critics. The show rose from almost ten million viewers during its first episode to a high of 15 million in later episodes. Newspaper critics on the left, in the middle, and on the right, praised the show when it was first broadcast though its occasional explicit violence, its occasional political incorrectness, its sometime lack of realism, and its emphasis on social issues, including the Hillsborough tragedy as seen through the eyes of a grieving and angry working class Liverpudlian socialist (someone a bit like McGovern himself), were condemned by some groups, some critics, the police, and the punditocracy at the Daily Mail. Over its initial run Cracker was nominated for 14 BAFTAs winning seven including BAFTAs for best drama and three consecutive best actor BAFTAs for Coltrane.

I highly recommend not only Duguid's book but the television show itself. If you haven't seen it watch it as soon as you can. In my opinion, it is one of the great English language TV shows ever.

The Books of My Life: Star Wars

I first saw George Lucas's film Star Wars in the fall of 1977 in Muncie, Indiana when I was taking classes at Ball State University. By the time I saw it I had seen several Alfred Hitchcock films, several Howard Hawks films, Forbidden Planet, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. To put it bluntly I was not impressed with Star Wars, which seemed like kiddieporn to me. I was never into film or television serials. Nor was I impressed with the cult mania surrounding the film.

Written some thirty years after Star Wars debuted in American cinemas Will Brooker's Star Wars (London: BFI, 2009), argues that Star Wars needs to be taken seriously echoing a point made by Robin Wood about Alfred Hitchcock some forty-four years earlier. In the book Brooker compellingly argues that too many critics have seen Star Wars and Lucas's earlier film American Graffiti (which I did and do like) and Lucas's college and post-college experimental films as too dissimilar and discontinuous. Brooker notes, as have others before him, that Lucas borrowed or referenced several other films in Star Wars including David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, World War II flicks, which Lucas and company used as a guide for the dogfight sequences in Star Wars, Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, and even Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Booker notes that Star Wars is much less optimistic when seen from the vantage point of all the sequels and prequels. Brooker compellingly argues that Star Wars reflects in its rebels and its Empire Lucas's split personality of rebel with an undermine traditional Hollywood cause and emperor of the assembly line that became Lucas's film company.

So why did I read a book about a film I really have little aesthetic interest in? I wanted to see what Brooker would make of Star Wars. Brooker's Star Wars was a quick read and his assertion that the two sides of George Lucas is represented in Star Wars itself is an interesting argument. I also agree with Booker that Star Wars, like any significant and influential artifact of popular culture, needs to be explored by historians and social scientists.