The Books of My Life: Comic Visions

I am not a huge fan of sitcoms, American, British, or wherever. Nor am I a big fan of stand up comedy television shows, political comedy television shows, or comedy variety shows on television. I find most of them far too obvious in their targets and far too lowest common intellectual denominator stupid in their form and content. That said, there are some sitcoms I do really love. I love, for example, Fawlty Towers, the first three or four series Absolutely Fabulous, The League of Gentlemen, the first two seasons of Chapelle's Show, the television work of Julia Davis, some comedy sketch shows such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and some stand up comedians in the raw such as George Carlin. 

Rather paradoxically, I suppose, I do like some books on the history of television comedy. I quite liked, for instance, a book I recently read on. American television comedy, David Marc’s Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 1997), a book I found to be an excellent introduction to the history and culture of American television comedy of the sitcom and stand up variety.

Marc’s introduction to and synthesis on American television comedy in its sitcom forms (domesticoms, ruralcoms, magicoms, ethnicoms and racecoms, litcoms and the coms that mix and match those various subgenres), comedy variety (the product, as Marc notes, of music hall and vaudeville), and stand up, is grounded in almost a lifetime of studying and writing on American television and it shows. Marc does an excellent job of placing American television comedy and American television in general in their economic contexts (its commercialism, for example), their political contexts (censorship), their demographic contexts (ratings, market segmentation in the post-network era), and their cultural contexts (its structure; forms; political, economic, ideological, and identity correctnesses). He nicely explores the dominance of the sitcom in American TV land, something he attributes, in part, to its political, economic, ideological, and ethnic correctness and its, unlike much stand-up comedy, tendency toward the vanilla. 

Marc does a nice job of exploring the terrain of the history of American television comedy. He takes us from the ethnicom (The Goldbergs, for example) in the early days of TV, to domesticoms (Father Knows Best, for example), to magicoms (a variation on the domesticom, see Bewtiched for example), to litcoms (the short and brief dominance of shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show All in the Family, and M*A*S*H, all of which are historically important but, in my opinion, aesthetically bland), to the return of the not so repressed domesticoms like Family Ties in the 1980s, to chosen family domesticoms that celebrate American diversity such as Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, and to the parodic and satiric contained by economic and ideological correctness domesticoms like Married...With Children and The Simpsons, both of which seem more daring than they really are as Marc notes. Marc nicely explores the decline of the American television comedy-variety show and its banishment to late night TV (The Tonight Show). He does an excellent job of exploring the impact of cable on American network television, one that led to audience declines for the big three of CBS, NBC, and ABC, and the advent of “real” stand up (the daring comedy of George Carlin on HBO, for example) on premium cable channels like HBO and the endless reruns of old sitcoms on basic cable channels and commercial channels. He nicely explores the standard structure and form of American sitcoms. They began, as he points out, with the familiar status quo, followed by a ritual error, the ritual lesson learned, and the return of the familiar status quo. Most viewers do like their rituals of repetition after all.

There are some missing pieces in Comic Visions. Marc does not explore how viewers read television comedies, something that is multiple and quite complex, and the multiple ways viewers use television in general, which is quite complex as well. He does not explore dramedy “sitcoms" such The Wonder Yeare. He does not explore a sitcom, a teencom which some, though not me, find innovative (example: Square Pegs). These absences will not please everyone but then we should remember that all history is selective and Marc’s history of American television comedy is no different. 

All that said, Marc’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of America, the history of American culture, the history of American television, and the history of American television comedy. It is made even better by the fact that not only is the book grounded in sound exegesis and sound exegetical context analysis, but it is also, unlike many contemporary crystal ball textualist works on American literature, film, and television with their fetishisation of psychoanalysis, and sound hermeneutics, grounded in sound contextual analysis, in other words. Finally Comic Visions is—and I love this in particular—wonderfully acerbic in its homiletics. Very recommended.

The Books of My Life: Jesus and John Wayne

 

I, of course, have long known that Christianity, like other monotheistic “religions” or bureaucratised meaning systems such as theocratic Judaism and its predecessors and theocratic Islam, had and has a dark and intolerant side. I know about the Crusades, the execution of heretics, and the persecution of Anabaptists and Quakers, to choose three of the many instances of theocratic Christian paternalistic holier than thou intolerance. 

I also know Christian theocratic intolerance because I have experienced it in my life. One day, for instance, when I was walking through the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington I ran into one of the seemingly innumerable groups soliciting for ideological purposes in the Union. In this case the group soliciting for attention was, if memory serves, the theocratically oriented Catholic group, Opus Dei. I struck up a conversation—or perhaps better they forced a conversation on me—with them after they hooked me in. It was impossible for innocent me to avoid talking to them thanks to their tactics. The subject of abortion came up at one point. I told them that I was for a woman’s right to choose. As I stood there they lectured me in their tried and true paternalistic way on the evils and dangers of my pro-abortion ways as if I was a dangerous child because I was pro-choice. At one point during our “discussion" one of the female members of this group got as close to me as she possibly could. As our conversation continued she continued to yell at me and move closer and closer to me. In response I instinctively put my hands in self defence and pushed her back very lightly when she was literally almost upon me. 

Despite rare occasions like this in the 1970s, occasions during which I experienced the dangers of theocratic Christianity, I really didn’t grasp how dangerous theocratic Christianity could be and was until the 1990s when I moved to Utah and later to South Dakota. I had moved to Utah to study and research Mormonism. There were several things that struck “Gentile” me after I arrived in the Mormon Zion, things that clued me into the prominent presence of theocratic and right wing populist intolerance in the United States. There was, for example, the popularity of the book None Dare Call it Treason by the “born again” fundamentalist Christian, John Bircher, and Republican John Stormer, a book I repeatedly ran across in Provo’s used book shops. This book, which one of the city’s used bookshop owners told me was a popular seller, argued that America was being betrayed by pro-communist elites whose mission was to take over America by growing an activist American state. Sound famiiar? I soon discovered to my horror that a significant number of Mormons, including several of the Mormon elite, had ties to the John Birch Society including its president and prophet from 1985 to 1994, Ezra Taft Benson and his son Reid, who taught religion at BYU.

My next lesson in right wing theocratic Christian intolerance involved one James “Bo’ Gritz. Gritz was popular in certain circles in Utah and in the Mormon culture region (Utah, southern Idaho, parts of Arizona and even Southern California). Gritz, a retired US military special services officer who converted to Mormonism, had ties to the anti-US government Christian Patriot movement and right wing militias, militias that shared the anti-big government and anti-communist ideology of the John Birch Society. I later learned that Gritz had tried to mediate the dispute between Randy Weaver, a Christian separatist and survivalist who had ties to the White identity group Aryan Nation in Idaho. In 1992 Gritz ran for president (shades of Joseph Smith) of the United States on a platform of opposition to the New World Order, a populist rightwing catchphrase for the supposed one world government that some believed elite others were trying to secretly foist on unknowing and unaware Americans; opposition to US foreign aid, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the federal income tax, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the Federal Reserve Bank, still another populist rightwing favourite; and non-opposition to the reestablishment of a "Christian America”, yet another populist rightwing favourite. Gritz received 2.13% of the vote in Idaho, a state with a significant population of Mormons. In that election year Gritz garnered 10% of the vote in Duchesne County, Idaho and Oneida County, Idaho and 23% of the vote in Franklin County, Idaho where he almost pushed the Democratic Party nominee Bill Clinton into fourth place. He did even better in heavily Mormon Utah (Mormons constituted over 70% of the population of the state when I lived there in the early 1990s) where he received 3.84% of the vote or almost 30,000 votes. He received 7500 votes in Utah County, the intellectual capital of the Mormon version of the Bible Belt, home to Brigham Young University and seat of a goodly number of Mormon apologists and polemicists. I heard rumours, in fact, that Gritz actually did better than Clinton in several BYU wards where he finished second behind the Republican nominee and eventual president George Herbert Walker Bush.

After I left Utah with a friend in order to travel and hike our around the US and Canadian Wests I ended up living in Rapid City, South Dakota for three months while my touring and hiking companion worked at the Indian Health Service hospital in Rapid. With time on my hands I decided to do ethnography at a local Mennonite Church, a Mennonite Brethren church, a fact to remember since there is a great diversity theologically and ideologically among American and Canadian Mennonites. The Mennonite Brethren are Mennonites who immigrated to the US and Canadian Wests from Russia and who have since been heavily influenced by pietism and later evangelicalism and fundamentalism, both of which tend to make Mennonite Brethren politically conservative and less enamoured of historic Mennonite pacifism or non-resistance. The pastor of the church, apparently feeling that I needed to know what a real man was, urged me to attend the Promise Keepers meeting at the church. The Promise Keepers were then and are now an evangelical men’s group founded by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney—something that points up the links between football, evangelical Christianity, and the Christian manhood movement (we haven’t gotten to the links with the US military yet and won’t)—dedicated to “traditional values” and to melding masculine strength with the what have traditionally been the female values of nurturance, churchgoing, and marital fidelity.

What I saw of the radical populist religious right in Utah and beyond frankly ended up scaring the bejesus out of me. In fact, the fear I felt as I moved amongst the radical populist right and the radical Christian populist right in the Intermountain West (see also Alberta) was akin to the fear I felt as a Jew when I lived in blood and soil nationalist Russia where Jews could not really be blood and soil Russians save by dispensation, usually fame, and where I heard on several occasions statements that were clearly anti-Semitic. By the way, the Russia I lived in was not only a place of anti-Jewish prejudices, it was home to anti-Gypsy sentiments. One day while I was at a market buying food to eat near the Universitet metro station I witnessed an attack on Gypsies by the militsia, the police. 

My experience of Russian blood and soil nationalism made me sensitive to the similarities and differences between blood and soil nationalism like that of Russia and other Eastern European and Western European nations and American White Christian nationalism. Like blood and soil Russians (and their kin in other parts of Europe and across the known universe) the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right in Utah, South Dakota, and beyond delineated and delineate between the elect or chosen, those with the right mentality, themselves, of course, and those who were not one of them, whoever the them might be—heretics, communists, socialists, New Dealers, liberals, you fill in the blank. For the radical populist right the US was and is their nation, not the nation of liberals, socialists, communists, or recent immigrants (paradoxically they, of course, are the children of immigrants themselves). Like much blood and soil nationalism the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right was and is militantly patriarchal and misogynist thanks to their patriarchal cult of domesticity ideology, a cultural system in which males were leaders and women were groomed for marriage and hence the domesticated helpmeets of their husbands. Like blood and soil nationalists the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right were and are nationalist and even fascist, seeing the nation, their nation, as a extension of their chosen church. For the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right the US was and is the promised land, a promised land charged with a messianic mission not only to the nation itself but to, in a very parochial form, the world (something remarkable given that Christianity in its infant form was internationalist), a world that, they believed, must be a mirror image of the US economically, politically, and culturally. Nationalist Russians, of course, believed and believe their nation has a messianic mission to save the world as well. 

There have been a number of excellent books on nationalist, militant, militaristic, misogynist, and “literalist” White evangelicalism. No one, however, has helped me understand the ins and out and twists and turns of the culture and cultures of blood and soil, authoritarian, misogynist, and cherry picking "literalist" White evangelicalism than Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, edition with a new preface, 2021) by Kristen Kobes Du Mez. In Jesus and John Wayne Calvin College historian (Calvin is a conservative Christian Reformed college located in Grand Rapids, Michigan) Du Mez takes readers on a journey into post-Cold War  militant White evangelical culture, its subcultures (for example, complementarian, dominionist, Zionist, an ideology that links American nationalism with a support for Israel, Calvinist, Southern Baptist, Independent Baptist, intellectual), and the battles for hegemony within this social movement between the various cultural identity groups each of whom, to a great extent, create overlapping if somewhat different ideologically grounded realities (Americanism, anti-abortion, anti-femisist). 

No one I know of has done a better job than Du Mez of taking readers into the White nationalist evangelical countercultural media bureaucracies (for instance, publishers, bookstores, schools, camps, parachurch organisations and interest groups). No one I know of has done a better job of  exploring the saints superstars and stars of the movement, the chilvarous Knights of the golden mediaeval and Christian past, including John Wayne, Rambo, and Oliver North (a fascinating mixture of the fictional and factual, many of the factional, of course, made somewhat fictional by the saint making practises associated with the movement), and the history of the failings, foibles, and hypocrisies—including bullying, wife abuse, the abuse of children, sexual abuses of adults and children, the abuse of power, and hubris—of several of these White right evangelical superstars and stars. Given this discourse it should not be a surprise that White right evangelicals would find politician “cowboys" like Ronald Reagan appealing. It probably does not need to be said at this point that many of these Christian nationalists have rallied behind a bully, a narcissist, a con man, a xenophobe, and a perceived strong man named Donald Trump and adopted him as one of their own.

White Warrior Theocratic Christian evangelicalism, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere, creatio ex nihilo, as Du Mez shows. We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore social movements  have been around for a long time and they are not going anywhere soon as there is always something that people can whinge about. Du Mez notes, for example, one longue durée precedent for White right evangelical Christian nationalism and anti-modernism, Billy Sunday, the avuncular anti-Communist and anti-evolutionist and anti-modernist Biblical criticism former baseball player (there is that sport connection again) and evangelist. 

It is here, in this genealogy of the forebearers of White right nationalist evangelicalism, that I had a problem with Du Mez’s book. There were important others, many of whom Du Mez unfortunately elides, who are cut from the same intolerant ideological cloth as the Cold War “Christian” warriors Du Mez focuses on. There was more recently than Sunday, for example, Gerald L.K.Smith. Smith was yet another former supporter of the New Deal who, like Father Coughlin, morphed into a rabid right wing anti-Communist and anti-Semite White supremacist Christian nationalist crusader and evangelist populist. In 1943 Smith founded the isolationist America First Party and ran for president of the US as its nominee in 1944. Later he would run as the presidential candidate of the Christian Nationalist Crusade Party. In 1948 Smith instituted an annual passion play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas modelled after one at Oberammergau, Germany, which many considered anti-Semitic until changes were made to to its script after World War II. There were and are the White right wildcat oil men from once Confederate Texas who helped fund the White populist right evangelicals and build their counterculture, subcultures, and parachurch organisations (on this see, for example, Darren Dochuk’s Anointed in Oil). 

There are other problems I had with Jesus and John Wayne. Du Mez does not explore, in as much detail as I would have liked to have seen, the links between Mr. Potter style prosperity capitalism and its ideology of godly winners and losers (shades of Donald Trump and his ilk), an ideology comparative historian and social scientist Max Weber linked to modernisation and the de-Calvinisation of Puritanism, something that eventually linked up with extreme individualism, narcissism, and hedonism in the modern and postmodern world. She downplays the role of geography, specifically the strong presence of White populist Christian nationalism US South, including Texas, and in the intermountain and far West, and the intersections between it and racism (Jim Crow, anti-Asian ethnocentrism). She downplays the echoes and the influence of the 19th and 20th century muscular Christianity and the Christian health reform of the 19th century (think the Seventh Day Adventist Kellogg) on White right populist evangelicals, some of whom clearly assume consciously or unconsciously the greater fitness of Whites and who are as conscious of the food they eat as the heirs of the countercultural hippies they so often despite and slur in order to be the strong men and obedient women god intended them to be. She downplays the fact that the cult of domesticity, the notion that males should be the head of household and the protectors of the family and by extension the nation (a notion one also finds in fascism) which maintains that women should be queens of their household and nurturers of their family, has a long history elements of which go back to the Victorian era, an era so much of White right Christian evangelicalism draws on and from (and an ideology that may even go back to hunter-gatherer societies and cultures). She does not explore the impact of romanticism with its nationalisms, its revival of chilvaric warriorism (Wagner's Parsifal, for instance), and its nationalist hiking group excursions into nature, on American populist White right evangelicalism (on this and the intersections between romanticism, nationalism, fascism, and ethnocentrism see George Mosse’s superb The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries).

Despite these underemphases and lacunae Jesus and John Wayne (did she want to write a more popular academic book for a broader intelligent audience and not burden it with information overload perhaps?) remains one of the best books I have read on Cold War nationalist and patriarchal evangelicalism. It should be on the must read list of anyone interested in American history and how America got to the Donald Trump now. 

The Music of My Life: Georges Bizet Edition

 

I have been listening to music since the mid-1960s. Memory is fuzzy here but I think I have been listening to art music or classical music since the 1960s as well. I probably heard it first in films and cartoons, specifically Looney Tunes cartoons, and fell in love with it. I have never looked back.

I have been buying classical records since the early 1970s. The first one I bought, if memory serves, is the 1970s Bohm performance of Beethoven’s Ninth.

At the time I started buying classical records the big boys included the late lamented Philips Classics, which was my favourite since they had the glorious Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon (DG), and EMI. At the time all these giants of the industry seemed to have been run by people who actually liked classical music and who, while they saw it as a commodity, did not, as the people who run these labels seem today, to see it as little more than something similar to a Serta bed or a Cadbury’s candy bar. 

Between the 1960s and the early 2000s these labels released tonnes of great, good, and adequate performances of classical music, mostly the hits: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and all that jazz. Today, Philips is gone. It was gobbled up by Decca, who, like Philips and DG,  was gobbled up by the megacorporation Universal. EMI went belly up and is now part of that other bureaucratic giant of the classical music industry, Warner Classics. Today DG and Decca don’t release much in the way of art music. Presumably, it isn’t a big enough seller for them to warrant the release of new performances unless of course, a performance is given to them by some conductor or symphony orchestra and they don’t have to pay for the recordings. They are releasing old music, much of it in the form of monster conductor boxes like those of Herbert von Karajan, the pride of DG and perhaps the best known conductor, along with Bernstein, of the 1970s and 1980s. 

The action in classical music these days is with the independents though even those are getting gobbled up by the big boys. The wonderful English independent Hyperion was recently purchased by Universal making its future an open book. The wonderful Swedish independent label BIS recently got gobbled up by Apple making their future open and raising the question what does Apple want with a label that has recorded tonnes of Scandinavian music? We still have Naxos and other independents like Brilliant Classics, thank god. Naxos and Brilliant are perhaps the most interesting labels today given how much interesting music, including art music outside the mainstream, they record and release.  

Of the big boys my favourite label at the moment is Warner Classics. I love to buy composer box sets and recently Warner Classics has been releasing a number of interesting one. I have their wonderful Mendelssohn and Prokofiev box sets, for instance. But the box sets I love the most from Warner are those of French composers. Erato and EMI France, which are now part of Warner, have recorded some wonderful French art music over the years, and Warner is slowly but surely collecting it, collating it, and putting it in box sets for release. I have their Berlioz, Dukas, Faure, Franck, Pierne, Poulenc, and Saint-Saens box sets, all of which are wonderful. I recently purchased their Bizet box set.

I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the Bizet box set. It contains some wonderful stuff in good and very good performances. However, it does not contain several EMI and Erato recordings of Bizet that should be in the box. The box contains two performances of Carmen: the Pretre/Callas and the Rattle, both of which are good (I actually preferred the “original” edition conducted by Rattle to the Pretre). It doesn’t, though it should have, contain the Beecham, Mazel, Plasson, and Burgos performances of the opera, an opera that is one of the most popular in the repertory. It has the Pretre Pearl Fishers but not the Cluytens. It has some of the Plasson Bizet but should have it all. The Plasson performance of the L’Arlesienne incidental music is complete unlike the Gardiner in the box set making one wonder why the curators of the set chose the Gardiner instead of the wonderful Plasson. It has no Martinon Bizet but should. As for the concern that this might be too much repetition in the set, I say the more the merrier.

I hope Warner keeps releasing box sets and particularly French classical music box sets. I am praying for uch needed Chabrier and a Chausson box sets from then. Here’s hoping.

Life as Crisis Management: The Food Stamp Renewal Kiada

 

There really is no escaping Murphy’s Law, Kafka’s Law, or Voinovich’s Law, call it whatever you will. This is a lesson I learn every month if not every week.

Because of the increasing cost of my medical bills last year—I am now the proud owner of irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, asthma, arthritis, and sinus issues—I decided to apply for food stamps. I was trying to find anything within reason to keep me financially afloat. 

Recently, I got the form that would allow me to renew my food stamps (or SNAP, as it is now known). So, I filled out the form, both in electronic and paper form, and sent the latter back to Albany County Social Services.

Within this packet of material was a date and time I was given for an interview. Unfortunately, the date and time conflicted with an appointment I had at Albany Ear, Nose, and Throat, an appointment I made six months previously, today at 9:30 am. So when I sent in my paper application for SNAP I noted on the sheet they sent me on which I could notify them about any problems with the date and time that the date and time I was given for an interview conflicted with my doctor’s appointment. I never, of course, received confirmation either that my application was received electronically or in paper form and never received any confirmation that the office received my I have a problem with the date and time form.

Assuming the worst, I went early too Albany ENT today and waited for the 9:30 am call. 9:30 am passed. 9:43 am passed so I headed into the doctor’s office assuming they got my message. When I got home at around noon guess what? You guessed it, I had a message from Albany County Social Services that I had just been called by them for my interview. The message told me to call them as soon as I could.

And that is what I did as soon as I could. As soon as I could, however, was when the office was out to lunch. So I called after 1 pm, typed in the 2 in to speak to a SNAP operative and waited and waited. Eventually a message came on telling me the volume of calls was massive and to leave a message which is what I did. I am still waiting. I have, by the way, called and left a message asking for a call back with Albany County Social Services before and got no return call. So the question is: will I get anywhere this time or will I have to call and call and call?

The answer to that question is no, I did not get a call. I did, however, get a very pleasant representative at Albany County Social Services who did my interview and renewed my food stamps, which don’t amount to very much but every little bit helps in these retirement days. I managed to get through at around 1:45 pm on Thursday (a good time to call?). Before I go I want to note something that should be obvious: those involved in the SNAP programme everywhere, particularly in the era of Mr. Potter style capitalism, are no doubt overworked and underpaid both of which help me understand why it is so hard to get through to them by phone and makes me appreciate even more than I already do everything they do.

The Books of My Life: John Sayles (Molyneaux)

Modern and postmodern life is inherently absurd. Since human life is absurd it is also, as the reflecive person grasps, sometimes annoying. One of the most annoying aspects of human life, in my humble opinion, are critics, particularly literary, film, and television critics.

Critics, of course, come in all shapes, sizes, and flavours just like toothpaste and Jello. There are, for example, at least since the rise of the new digital media that can be used to make money, the casual amateur reactor who reads books and watches films and television programmes and reacts to them for money”. As a general rule the reactors to books are the best of this digital age species.

There are the fanboy and fangirl critics many of whom actually know something about the production aspects of what they read and watch because as fans they scour the  world for primary source material about the writer, director, and creator of the novels, films, and shows they adore. They generally turn the writer of the book, the director of a film, or the writer-creator of the show into a saint (and a sinner once he or she sins like all humans invariably do). Much of their knowledge, their cultural capital, about the making of a novel, a film, or a television show, comes from interviews with those involved with whatever they are reading or watching along with second hand sources such as biographies.

Then there are the academic critics. Academic critics come in several stripes. There are those, a minority, who actually do primary research on an author, a film director, or a television show creator. Generally speaking these critics try to put films or television shows into economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts. As I said these literary, film, and television historians, these social scientists, of art and commerce, are few. 

There are the crystal ball textualists of which there are, these days, many. Crystal ball textualism, the dominant or hegemonic strain of literary, film, and television theory academics have been socialised into and trained in these days, is not grounded on extensive contextual descriptive analysis. Crystal ball textualism assumes that everything you want and need to know about a novel, a short story, a film, or a television programme, can be found in the finished text itself. The finished text is what these wizards with special knowledge peer into in order to immediately decipher any text by teasing out the psychoanalytic dream worlds, the ethnic aspects, the racial aspects, and the gender aspects of the text they are peering at. They are aided and abetted in this task by the theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches they have been socialised into. This means that they, unlike more intense fan boy and fan girl critics, generally pay only limited attention to primary source materials beyond the text.

Each of these critic cultures are fundamentally cultural and ideological. They are strongly normative and value laden though many would not admit this. Some critics, many of whom seen to be wanna be writers of books and wanna be makers of films and television programmes tend to whinge and whine about movies they find too talky and with too little camera movement and editing. For them such talky and static movies are theatrical, a term of derision for them, and not cinematic because they are too talky and have too few cuts and camera movements (both of which seem to become moral forces for them). The fact is, however, and to the contrary, anything put on film is a moving picture, is a piece of cinema. Moreover, there is nothing inherently evil about a film with intelligent talk and limited editing, limited cuts, and limited camera movements. See Rear Window.

Another thing academics, particularly academic crystal ball textualists whinge and whine about as they study novels, short stories, films and television, shows is that aren’t politically and ideologically correct their politically and ideologically correct. For them any novel, short story, film, or TV show that isn’t anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-classist is inherently bad if not evil at least to some extent. For them progress is tied to a decline in racism, sexism, and classism. And while I agree with Richard Roud (“Introduction" to Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980) that all criticism has normative aspects to it and while I have no problem with critiquing and criticising various forms of ethnocentrism in media texts, all cultural analysis, in my opinion, should be tempered by and grounded on sound descriptive analysis and primary documentary evidence before one moves on to interpretation and homiletics. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that all forms of criticism are equally normative and equally ideologically correct. The critics with the least cultural and ideological baggage are those historians and social scientists who do have the capital or at least some of the cultural capital to explore the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of “texts” and who do engage in primary research, film historians and social scientists like Gerry Molyneaux whose book on the independent film director, writer, and actor John Sayles I recently read. Molyneaux’s John Sayles: The Unauthorized Biography of the Pioneering Indie Filmmaker (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000) was, for me, a welcome antidote to the crystal ball textualism that dominates academic criticism these days and the ignorance is bliss reactions of YouTube reactors. Molyneaux explores Sayles’s life from birth to his latest film, which was, at the time the book was published, Limbo (1999). He takes readers on a journey that starts with Sayles’s birth in upstate New York through his work on Roger Corman films through his life as a writer, script doctor and through his life as a film director. He rightly notes that Sayles and others of an independent bent were stimulated by the fiercely independent cinema of writer, director, and actor John Cassavetes who, like Sayles, often wrote and acted in order to make money to fund his own cheaply, by Hollywood standards, made films, that were accused by some of being too talky and too primitive cinematically by some at the time.

What sets Molyneaux’s book apart from many other film studies monographs past and present is its focus on the broader social contexts of Sayles’s life and work. Monlyneaux nicely explores the economic contexts of Sayles’s films all of which were made for six million dollars or less, sometimes a lot less. He nicely explores the role Sayles’s partner, Maggie Renzi, played in obtaining funding for these independent films in an economic context that was often dynamic making raising funds difficult. He notes that Sayles often financed all or a good part of his films himself. He points out that whether Sayles’s films made a return on investment—often they did not—this translated into further difficulties  for him and Renzi to get money to make the films he wanted to make. He nicely explores what might be called the leftist political orientation of Sayles’s films such as the pro-unionism of Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988), the ethnic focus and ideological complexity of Lone Star (1996), and the humanism of Men With Guns (1998). He explores Sayles’s commitment to making films his way. He explores Sayles’s sometimes problems with the suits that ran the Hollywood studios and Sayles as scriptwriter and script doctor for hire, sometimes for the studios. Sayles, for instance, as Molyneaux notes, made Baby It’s You (Paramount, 1983) and he was the creator and show runner of short lived television show Shannon’s Deal (NBC, 1989-1990) for NBC,  the former, in particular, left a bad taste in Sayles’s artistic mouth. He explores Sayles’s career as writer of short stories and novels. He explores Sayles as actor. All of these—Sayles as a script writer, Sayles as a script doctor, Sayles as a writer of novels and short stories, and Sayles as an actor—helped Sayles make monies to fund his own films. He explores the theme of community in Sayles’s work and the complexities and ambiguities of Sayles’s work. He notes Sayles’s interest in race, in ethnicity, in class, and in unions, something that should earn Sayles a legion of politically and ideologically correct academic fans but doesn’t seem to have. In Sayles’s films so much if not all is on the surface and crystal ball textualists generally prefer directors who make them dig beneath the surface given that they perceive themselves as kind of cine-psychoanalysts with a social conscience.

Sayles has gone on to write further novels and films and direct further films since Molyneaux’s book was published foregrounding the fact that Sayles is still an artistic work in progress and that analysis of Sayles’s work is also a work in progress and so any conclusions about his work must remain tentative. He limitedly explores the criticisms of Sayles as a dialogue director rather than a cinematic director though he notes rightly that financial realities place limits on the equipment one can obtain and the film stock one can use, something that many of the critics who seem to think that films are made in an economic vacuum forget. Many if not all of these critics still think of art and the artist in romantic terms, as unsullied by the real world. Whether Sayles and Renzi will be able to put together what is necessary for Sayles to make another film remains an open question as I type given the realities of contemporary big money Hollywood film making and the difficulties in making independent films and getting them distributed these days. Perhaps streaming will come to the rescue. Only time will tell.

Molyneaux’s book on Sayles may not be as academically and intellectually sexy as books that come from the crystal ball textualists (some clearly find crystal ball textualists work sexy). It nicely lays out the actual economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of Sayles’s film. It provides a sound base line for further studies of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of the work of writer, director, and actor John Sayles even if, like fanboy and fangirl criticism, it tends to be too often more laudatory than critical. And while we like what we like—and I admit I like Sayles’s films a lot—what we like needs to be grounded in an analysis of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of life. Finally, Molyneaux’s book raises that eternal question about books on film directors: couldn’t it have done what it did in article and hence less repetitive form?
 

The American Health Care System Sucks Kiada, Part One

 

There is a lot, for rational and reasonable reasons, to dislike about the US Health Care System. There is the fact that so much of the health care system is for profit, skanks making monies off of other people’s health problems. There is the fact that its pharmaceutical sector is controlled by a cartel. There is the fact that health insurance is largely available only through employers and too expensive for the common man and women to get through some of their employers or if they are independent. There is the attendant fact that millions of Americans have no health insurance and pharmaceutical insurance at all. There is the fact that waiting times to get into see specialists is sometimes way too long—months— forcing the unhealthy to go to emergency rooms, hardly a cost effective “strategy". The US health care system, in other words, is irrational, idiotic, looney, moronic, and, of course, profitable.

One of its irrationalities is something I had to deal with recently, prescriptions that last only one year. I recently called CVS to refill my Linzess. I had five refills left which is why I told my Gastro-Intestinal doctor when I saw her earlier this month that I did not need a new prescription. Unfortunately, I did not notice that the prescription just expired today. Long story short, I could not get a refill. So now the doctor has to be contacted—she is not in today—and a new prescription has to be sent. Unfortunately, I only have three more pills and Linzess is a medicine I need because I have a chronic condition, irritable bowel syndrome. 

Wouldn’t it be more rational for those with chronic conditions to have prescriptions that don’t expire since they have chronic and often dangerous chronic conditions? Well not in the US.

Life as Crisis Management: The CVS Telephone Automated Prescription Refill Kiada

I think of myself as a pretty libertarian kind of guy. As long as you don’t tread on me with any theocratic bullshite I am, to quote Faith, five by five, and won’t tread on you. 

Unfortunately, I presently live in the United States of America where there are a shitload of theocratic interest groups, some with power, who want to tread on me with their theocratic bullshit. Needless to say, I am disturbed and disgusted by these theocrats, secular and religious, and have to admit that I have grown, as a result, to hate them.

This is a big change for me. As a scholar of culture, ideology, and religion, a meaning system and, in some instances something that took an organisational form, I have long tried to be dispassionate and fair in my study of religious groups like the Quakers and the Mormons and I think I was fair in studying religious groups like the Quakers and the Mormons. Recently with the upteenth resurrection of White evangelical Christian theocratic nationalism and their coming to power, however, my dispassion and fairness have worn thin given that they want to tell me what I can think, what I can read, and how i must live. I have, in other words, grown to hate these arrogant self-righteous, and remarkably Un-Christian groups and their most recent messiah.

White nationalist evangelical theocrats are not the only things I hate. I have CVS, yet another American mega-corporation out to take over America and the world, and its seemingly endless derivatives including CVS Health, CVS Silver Script, and CVS pharmacies. I hated the latter so much I took my business to a local independent pharmacy until it became impossible for me to continue to purchase prescriptions at that pharmacy in part because skanks like CVS are squeezing these independent pharmacies trying to put them out of business. 

I have had problems with CVS Health and CVS Silver Script, the latest their decision not to refund me for a prescription I over paid for thanks to a bureaucratic error. To make matters worse, the local pharmacy did refund me for my second filling of the medicine. I am still appealing this sensationally moronic decision but I don’t imagine that will solve the issue given who I am dealing with.

I have had problems with three local CVS pharmacies for years. The latest involves their automated call prescription refill service. The last three times I have called to refill prescriptions, which apparently can’t be automatically refilled, I have gotten a message that my Famotidine is up for refill. The problem with that is that it this is bullshite; the Famotodine cannot be refilled since I picked up a ninety day supply on 22 June 2025. Interestingly and annyoingly, the prescription that I can refill, Pregabalin, doesn’t automatically come up in the automated system when I put in my account information so I have to do that refill by hand.I have to type in the prescription number. Let’s hear it for high tech.

By the way, after three denials of a refund that should have been seen as obvious, I am told that a cheque is on its way reimbursing me for the overcharge as I type. Now I none to serenely await the next muck up by the CVS corporation.

 

Musings on The Twilight Zone Episode "He’s Alive”...

 

I really didn’t watch that much television when I was growing up until we moved to Dallas. For some of you out there this might seem a bit paradoxical since my father worked for Philips, a maker of televisions and other electronic equipment (not to mention a great and, now that it is gone, a much lamented classical music label).

The television we had in those days was one of those typical big and heavy black and white TV’s of the era. Me and my sister would sit as close to it as we could get. We did eventually get a colour television, though I don’t remember exactly when. It was probably sometime in the seventies.

The main reason I watched TV in those halcyon days was for the movies. As I have mentioned before in these blogs there were movies galore on Dallas’s five TV stations: CBS, NBC, ABC, and, in particular, on the two independents that broadcast in the city.

I did not like most of the shows on the network prime time schedules of CBS, NBC, and ABC during the 1960s and 1970s. I would watch Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, which my sister kind of liked,  but they weren’t my cup of tea. I watched The Ed Sullivan Show and other shows of that ilk for the music. I was there, for example, when the Beatles appeared on Sullivan. I watched The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for the same reason, for the music. I simply put up with what came before and after on these in order to see the week’s musical guests because I was a hard core pop and rock musicoaphile at the time. 

What I really liked on Dallas TV, beyond the movies, were the older shows on the independents and the local schedules of Dallas’s network stations. I loved and still love The Dick van Dyke Show. And I loved and still love The Twilight Zone. To me The Dick van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone were and are amongst the few shows on American over the air commercial television that can be spoken of in the same breath as the great British and English television shows. 

I was reminded of just how good and just how prophetic The Twilight Zone was and is recently during the Heroes and Icon (H&I) network's Rod, White, and Blue Twilight Zone marathon. There are, of course, many episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone that I have found memorable over the years. there was the episode centring on a operation on a woman’s face because she thought she was ugly (“Eye of the Beholder, 1960). There was the episode in which Billy Mumy thinks people into the corn field ("It’s a Good Life", 1961). There was the episode in which aliens use that good old time human fear of the other amongst those living on the all-American Maple Street ("The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", 1960). There was the episode about a concentration camp commander (Death’s Head Revisited”, 1961). And there was the episode about an American Adolf Hitler (He’s Alive”, 1963).

Like so any episodes in The Twilight Zone “He’s Alive” is deeply allegorical. In "He’s Alive” Dennis Hopper plays Peter Vollmer, who, as a boy, had a difficult childhood abused as he was by his father and neglected by his mother. He finds comfort in a Jewish neighbour who had survived the Dachau concentration camp and meaning in Naziism. With the aid of an unseen figure Vollmer becomes the head of the local Nazi movement thanks to the rhetorical and strategic skills (creating martyrs) he learns from his unseen mentor. Under his leadership Vollmer’s fascist movement goes from being a joke to being a serious movement. The twist—one always finds a wonderful twist at the end of a Twilight Zone episodes—is that the unseen figure is the real Adolf Hitler (listed as Adolph in the credits).

The allegory that is at the heart of this episode, of course, changes with the changing times. Today, thanks to changing history, the allegory in “He’s Alive” has taken on a different interpretive life. What does not change with the changing times, however, one Rod Serling, who wrote the episode notes, is that Hitler, the allegorical Hitler, the metaphorical Hitler, is always with us. 

And he, of course, is always with us in some way, shape, and form. Today in the United States we have yet another, to quote Serling’s introduction to “He’s Alive”, “little man who feeds off his self-delusions and who finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet.” Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man was abused as a child. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man imagines himself as a man of steel. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man feeds off the adoration of the masses. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man uses fear of devilish others including immigrants, to spread his gospel of hate, sometimes unsubtly subtly). Unlike Vollmer but like Hitler this little man is a bully boy of the seventh grade order. Unlike Vollmer and like Hitler this bully boy little man has achieved power and is increasing his power as the countervailing power of courts, the legislative branch, the universities, the corporations and the media either aid and abet him or step aside allowing him, by doing this or remaining silent, to do his will. As Sterling predicted in 1963, in other words, what Hitler represented is always with us in the real world not just in the twilight zone.

On the isn’t it ironic side of the ledger, the actor who played a Nazi in “He’s Alive” and who was Jewish would go on to play a gestapo officer in Hogan’s Heroes. Additionally, Paramount, which owns CBS now, recently settled a legal suit with the litigious and blackailing Trump over the editing of an interview with Democrat presidential candiate Kamela Harris on its 60 Minutes series despite the fact that the suit has little in the way of merit. Paramount, you see, has a mega-dollar merger deal they want the President-King's assent to. This means that Paramount, like  Columbia University, Indiana University, and several legal firms, has become a Vichy like collaborator. History ever repeats?

I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night

 

Like virtually everyone I have dreams when I sleep at night, multiple dreams that always, over the last two or three years, wake me up. I usually don’t remember, as I have said before, most of them. I wouldn’t have remembered this one except for the fact that I wrote it down immediately after the last dream I had last night woke me up this morning.

In my dream I was milling around Flinders Station in Melbourne. I was doing ethnography. I was trying very very had to notice and pay attention to the people around me. 

And there were lots of people around me. There were a lot of people milling around Flinder going into it and coming out of it. I noticed that one in three people I saw were wearing red t-shirts with Zero Culture stamped in white on a black circle in the middle of the shirt. I interpreted this as a celebration of Melbourne’s trams, trains, and buses. 

There were celebrities who I did not recognise. Some of these celebrities seemed to be trying to hide themselves perhaps bashful of what they had become. Or perhaps they were trying to hide from the celebrity chasers who were out in force and who were chasing the celebrities.

Finally, there were people I recognised as spies. These spies were chasing other spies who were chasing other spies. Everything was becoming a swirl.

And then I woke up.

The Books of My Life: The Essential HBO Reader

 

In my book both forthrightness and bluntness are virtues, virtues of the highest order in fact. So, let me be forthright and blunt. I don’t think HBO is, particularly when you put it in comparative context, all that innovative or aesthetically remarkable. I will explain why I think that later. but now, I want to take a closer look at a book I read recently, Gary Edgerton’s and Jeffrey Jones reader on HBO, The Essential HBO Reader (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008).

The editors of the book—one presumes it was them—divide The Essential HBO Reader into four genre categories they assume HBO has played a prominent and important role in: drama, comedy (including stand-up and series), sport (translation: boxing), and documentaries. They have commissioned authors, including themselves, to write overviews of those genres along with essays on specific programmes such as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and America Undercover, within these four genres. Sport, despite its importance particularly in terms of the bottom line, income, only gets an overview. Many of the overviews provide information on the history of these genres on HBO. Many of the essays on individual shows are celebratory in nature praising the network for its hiring of auteurs like David Chase and David Milch and giving them the space to strut their stuff, HBO's supposed progressive mentality, and HBO's supposedly new model of operation. Many of the essays, however, tend to follow the party line that it’s HBO  not TV, not “normal” TV anyway, making many of the essays in the book basically academic versions of fanboy and fangirl "analyses". That said all of the essays are interesting, informative, and enlightening particularly the overviews of sport and documentary which take a more critical approach to HBO’s programmiing.

Though The Essential HBO Reader is focused on HBO programming particularly in the areas of drama, comedy, sport, and documentary, they don’t ignore the important broader economic, political, and cultural aspects of the network. Most of the authors of the various and sundry essays in the book argue that HBO has pioneered in a new model of television, subscriber television, a model of TV which, given that they are a pay TV network, allows the network to broadcast oodles of nudity and profane language, all things that make HBO different from commercial over-the-air television claim most of the essayists. The essays also note that HBO’s programming, save perhaps sport, was aimed at those who with the requisite cultural capital who came to believe that HBO was different and that it had brought quality to US television. HBO, in other words, was the network for high brow TV watchers looking for some stuff to talk about at the water cooler (now that's branding!).

But was HBO really that different? Most of the essays in the book argue that it is. A few, and particularly the essay on sport, argue that it really isn’t. The thing is HBO may be innovative if one is looking exclusively at the American scene and one ignores PBS. One has to forget, in other words. PBS’s pioneering role in documentary programmes, cooking programmes, news programmes, children’s programming, and fiction programming in the American scene. PBS, after all, at its zenith, when, it in other words when had the monies to do so, PBS showed excellent fictional programmes in its American Playhouse series and its WonderWorks series (the series the broadcast the highly regarded Sullivan and CBC Anne of Green Gables series), which was aimed at young people, along with programmes like its and Channel 4s adaptation of Tales of the City, which thanks to the centrality of gays in it along with its nudity proved controversial and damaging to PBS’s funding, its Ursula Le Guin adaptation The Lathe of Heaven, and its interesting TV movie Prototype. PBS in other words, at its height, was a bit like a poor cousin of the CBC and the BBC, Canadian and British public television.

And it is here that another problem I have with many of the celebratory essays in The Essential HBO Reader surfaces, namely, its lack of comparative focus and, apparently, comparative knowledge. When looking comparatively at television across the world it becomes apparent that HBO is rather like the BBC. Its subscription model bears some similarities to the licence fee in the UK. The BBC has, historically speaking, pioneered in comedy. One essayist in The Essential HBO Reader goes so far to claim that for him Seinfeld is the greatest comedy made, well perhaps for those not familiar with the Beebs Fawlty Towers, Absolutely Fabulous, Worst Week of My Life, and Monty Pythons Flying Circus and E4s Inbetweeners, all of which, in my opinion, better than Seinfeld. Its programming bears similarities to the quality programmes commissioned and broadcast by the Beeb, ITV, and Channel 4, both of latter, of course, have been impacted by the BBC. British television has produced some of the best programmes on television such as its adaptations of the Brontes, Austen, Le Carre, Shakespeare (the BBC Shakespeare adaptations of every play remains a benchmark in TV and Shakespeare broadcast history), and Agatha Christie, and shows like Upstairs Downstairs, the adaptations of the Forsyte Saga, Wolf Hall, Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley, At Home with the Braithwaites, I Claudius (HBO’s The Sopranos is is some ways a kind of remake of this superb show), Scott and Bailey, The Naked Civil Servant, Shoulder to Shoulder, Red Dwarf, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (which first appeared initially on BBC radio), Gentleman Jack, Broadchurch, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse, Lewis, Spaced, Prime Suspect, Cracker, The Jewel in the Crown, The World at War (arguably the greatest historical documentary ever made), and the Up series, to name just a very few. Finally, we should remember that nudity and fouler language can be shown and heard on British TV during the adult hours.

When HBO is looked at in the context of American commercial TV it is not that different or exceptional either. Like them it cancels shows that don’t get the viewing numbers the suits at HBO think they should. For instance, HBO recently cancelled its brilliant Gentleman Jack, which it, and let me emphasise this, co-produced with the BBC. Shades of ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. I suppose one could argue that in the post-Game of Thrones era, an era in which HBO dedicated lots of monies to the kiddie corn that dominates Hollywood films these days and is increasingly dominating HBO, HBO has to worry about low ratings given its increasing dedication of millions of dollars to shows like Game of Thrones, which seems aimed at the pimply faced fantasy and science fiction crowd that likes its shows to have some misogyny and a lot of female nudity (dicks mostly not allowed), the same crowd Hollywood adores and aims its comic book kiddie corn at. And let’s be clear, HBO uses sensationalism, nudity, and sports, which as it has on network TV here and in the UK, played a major role in making HBO economically solvent by drawing eyes to it making it similar to US network TV which uses sensationalism and sports, if not nudity for legal reasons, to draw viewer eyes.

On a normative aesthetic level I have to say that by and large I have found the HBO shows I have seen to be less than “quality” TV shows. I found The Sopranos and Game of Thrones overhyped and overrated. I did like Chernobyl which it co-produced with Sky UK, The Wire (probably the most interesting of the bunch), Sex and the City, and Big Love (I study Mormonism so I had to watch it and did notice some mistakes). I didn’t find the ones I liked, however, to be in the league of the great British quality” TV series like Lewis and The Jewel in the Crown, however. I didn’t even like them more than the CBC’s Heartland or Twitch City, the truly innovative and remarkable US series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or series like those of Julia Davis in England or the BBCs The League of Gentlemen, comedy series that are more innovative, in my opinion, than anything on HBO I have seen.

But back to The Essential HBO Reader, I liked it even though much of it was academic fanboy and fangirl gush (which made me blush). As one of the few books out there on this important, from an American perspective and increasingly from an international perspective, thanks to the media of the brave new digital world, anf given HBO's global reach and hefty finances (the US with its population makes size matter). Anyone interested in contemporary television history, economics, and culture should give it a look.

 

Musings on Buying Used Books in an Era Where Ideology Seems to Create Reality

 

In the early 1990s when I was in my 40s I worked at a used bookshop, Walt West Books in Provo, Utah part-time and then full-time. It was one of the best jobs I ever had. The other was a library job at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. 

One of the things I learned from Walt West, the wonderful owner of Walt West Books, when I worked there was how to classify used books, something that helped me a lot when I bought books customers brought into the store to sell.  I, of course, had, given my browsing in used bookshop, a sense before I got a job in a used bookshop, that used books varied by quality. Some were good, some were not as good, and others were not very good at all. Walt taught me that one could and should classify used books as like new or fine, very good or near fine, good or mediocre, acceptable, and, of course, by whether a book was ex-library or not. Walt, if memory serves, never bought ex-library books that had been de-accessioned. or “borrowed”. 

For us at Walt West Books a like new or fine book looked like it could have been sitting on the shelves of a new bookshop. It had no underlining, little if any damage to the cover, and little if any damage to the pages of the book. A vey good or near fine used book was not underlined, did not have spine damage, and had minimal damage to the cover and the pages of a book. A good book had underling and noticeable damage to the spine and cover of the book. An acceptable book had extensive underling and extensive damage to the cover, spine, and pages of the book. The spine of the book, for example, was cracked, the cover exhibited several bumps and cracks, and the pages had extensive foxing,  An ex-lib book, which we did not buy because it had stamps, pockets or check out lists, and labels, could not, as a consequence, rise above the good category because of those stamps, pockets, and labels.

There are in the current used bookshop marketplace, whether brick and mortar, or online, a great variation in how bookshops categorise books. The categories remain the same as those Walt taught me thanks to mass sellers like Amazon, which has a marketplace which allows anyone, if they meet certain criteria, to sell items including books. Amazon classifies books into like new, very good, good, and acceptable categoris. It does not, and this is an unending problem when buying books on Amazon, have an ex-lib category though quality booksellers on Amazon note this in the description of the books they have for sale. Non-quality booksellers on Amazon don’t always note that a book is ex-lib and don’t often note anything about the book in the description field. Welcome to the wacky upside down world of used bookselling online.

Among the best used book sellers on line are long-existing brick and mortar stores. When you buy a used book from Midtown Scholar of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for example, you know that you are getting a like new book, a very good book, a good book, and an acceptable book whether you buy from them via Amazon or from their online store.

When you buy from other used booksellers online, a situation in which you as a buyer are dependent on accurate description, you don’t always know what you are getting. Take Thriftbooks which bills itself as the largest online bookstore, for example. I have bought used books from Thriftbook for years and I still have no clear idea of the condition of the book that I am buying from them until the book physically arrives. Sometimes a Thriftbook like new book is like new. At other times it isn’t even very good. Sometimes a good book is very good at other times it is acceptable. Sometimes an ex-lib book is listed as ex-lib sometimes it is not and sometimes an ex-lib listed or not listed is classified as like new or very good, something that boggles my mind. When you buy from Thriftbooks, in other words, it is like playing Russian roulette.

I hope it does not seem like I am overly picking on Thriftbooks. I am focusing on it because I buy regularly from them because their books are cheap. The are the online equivalent of Goodwill or Deseret Industries the difference between them and Thriftbook being that you cannot see and touch the book you are buying from Thriftbooks. I also know that Thriftbooks is not the worst offender online—I have had experiences with others that are unbelievably bad, and that they have gotten better over the years in terms of book classifications. They still have a way to go, however.

For example, just today I received a book from Thriftbooks that was described as very good. I don’t know what Thriftbooks means by very good if it is a book, like the book I received today, God’s Schools, it means a book that is highlighted throughout, has a soiled cover, has a 2 cm gash where the cover meets the spine, and has several bumps on the cover and on the pages of the book. This state of book affairs is not very good by any objective let alone by a quality subjective measure. What this classification of the book shows is a lack of quality workmanship by some Thriftbook employee. It shows a Thriftbook employee who isn’t paying attention or who doesn’t care perhaps because he or she isn’t paid a living wage like I was when I worked at a used bookshop. Ain’t that, one might argue, service sector America.

One thing you quickly learn from buying books online is that there are some booksellers who hue closely to the same used book classification taxonomy as Walt West did. Others are much less analytical and consistent in their classifications of used books. It almost seems that these less than quality booksellers are not cognisant of used book categories, are lazy when they classify books according to the dominant taxonomy, don’t care enough to categorise books accurately, are letting their own used book categories grounded in their own ideologies of what a used book category should be, or all or many of the above. Regardless, it makes one wary of buying used books from certain sellers in an age where reality often seems bent to the will of those doing the classifying and selling. I guess one could say that such booksellers are the snake oil salespeople of the brave new digital world.

Addendum: For those able to read between the lines of this essay it should be clear that I love books and that my life, including my life in academia, has been grounded on a love for books, a love for books that drew me to libraries, library work, bookshops, and bookshop work. A love of books, by the way, is not necessarily congruent with a life in academia, something I learned particularly in my graduate school years, just one of the things that cured my romantic outlook about academe.

Among the Mormons, 1991 to 1993

 

Sometime in the mid-1980s I became interested in Mormonism. I blame it on Jan Shipps whose book on the early history of Mormonism I read and loved.

At the time I had completed a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. For the latter degree I, of course, took four comprehensive examinations in Archaeology, Linguistics, Bioanthropology, and Cultural Anthropology and wrote a thesis on Quakers as a social movement rather than as a reform movement contra Charles Tilly. I decided, however, against completing a doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology, a decision I occasionally regret.  I felt strongly, at the time, that Anthropology needed to have a strong historical dimension and component to it but didn’t even though that was beginning to change somewhat thanks to scholars like Eric Wolf. Despite this increasing historical consciousness and an increasing reflexivity among Cultural Anthropologists, a reflexivity that often was more text than context oriented, I still found Cultural Anthropology too ahistorical for my liking, too focused on moments rather than broader contexts.

At the time I still wanted to take a Ph.D. I was still caught up in academic romanticism (oh my). So, I thought I would give Sociology a try instead of Cultural Anthropology. Because of my interest in Mormonism I decided to apply to Brigham Young University to do doctoral work in Sociology. BYU had a doctoral programme at the time and I thought where better to study Mormonism socially, culturally, and historically than at BYU.

I was, I have to admit, as I was applying taken aback by the fact that I, a non-Mormon, a never Mormon, a “Gentile" in Mormon terms, needed to go see a Mormon Bishop as part of my application package to BYU in order to pledge to him that I to abide by the rules of BYU’s honour code. I did this even though I could not believe that BYU as a large university with a good graduate school was serious about all of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I had no problem keeping most of the rules of the honour code. I did not drink caffeinated coffee except in emergencies when I, an asthmatic, needed a epinephrine like kick. I did not drink sodas given the health issues associated with them. I was not interested in a relationship. I did not like or wear shorts. I did not want a beard. As for the hair length that was a problem since during much of my adult life I had longish hair by BYU standards. Hair length issues aside, at least for the moment, I headed for Utah and BYU after I was admitted to study for a Ph.D in Sociology.

I was lucky in getting a flat only a few blocks from the Y, a nickname for BYU I quickly learned, and even fewer blocks from downtown Provo and a grocery store. What I did not fully grasp at the time was that the award I was given by the Sociology faculty only covered tuition for one term instead of two. Getting a teaching gig in Sociology and working at Walt West Books, both of which actually furthered my opportunities to study Mormons ethnographically, helped with that. As for BYU students they were the best students collectively that I ever taught and in some cases rivalled students at Oxbridge. What a rare and wonderful pleasure it was to teach such committed and more than prepared students.

I had, as I noted, studied Mormonism and Mormon history before I arrived at the Y. Upon arrival I began to do ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Mormons. I talked to students, 93% of whom were LDS, and learned, for example, their ethno-categories for male and female Mormons (which included, for the Mormon women I talked to, "returning missionary" and "weird returning missionary") and what their Mormon faith meant to them. In the process I got a sense of what was symbolically central in Mormonism, namely, the Plan of Salvation. I talked to my neighbours who were all Mormons and BYU students. I talked to returned Mormon missionaries who were at the Y some of whom seemed to have been liberalised by the experience. I talked to some of the student activists in VOICE, a feminist organisation on campus and had five of them come to talk to my Sociology class. I went to ward meetings in Provo and Salt Lake with my neighbours and got, in the process, a sense of what Mormon rituals were like. I went to a Family Home Evening on the BYU campus thanks to two student friends. I talked to and observed ex-Mormons, one of who was a Quaker peace activist and co-founder of the peace encampment near the nuclear test site in Nevada. I talked to Jack Mormons or cultural Mormons. One, a female BYU student, told me that she still believed Jospeh Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, was the prophet even though she no longer believed in every tenant of contemporary Mormonism.  I talked to BYU faculty becoming particularly close to one, an archaeologist teaching while finishing up his Ph.D at the University of Michigan. It was he who dragged me to the Tanner’s in Salt Lake and to the FARMS brown bag talks held once a week in the Spencer W. Kimball Tower, the SWKT, where the Sociology and Anthropology faculties were at the time.

One of the things that struck me about these FARMS brown bags as I listened to scholars like Royal Skousen and Lyndon Cook was how what seemed to me like polemics, at least on one level, was grounded in scholarship like you would find in any intellectual and academic community on another level. I have to admit that I admired the scholarship of those like John Sorenson, who argued in a scholarly fashion that the Book of Mormon lands were actually in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Even though I could not accept Sorenson’s conclusions I admired the scholarly way he got there. 

It was this scholarship and the interest in scholarship that I most admired and continue to admire about BYU. It was a place, my ethnographic research revealed, where students were deeply engaged with their academic work and with the intellectual life, something that is rare as I would discover later during my part-time teaching sojourns—I hate bureaucracies of all types so a full-time position even if I got one, which was unlikely, was out of the question—at the University at Albany and SUNY Oneonta. RPI, where I also taught, was somewhat different in that the students at that institute were engaged but their engagement with academic work and intellectual culture was much narrower in focus than the students I met, talked to, and taught at the Y.

Another thing that struck me about students and faculty at the Y was how deeply engaged they were in what I would call social ethics. Many of those I met were deeply engaged with social issues. One of my neighbours, who knew English, German, and Dutch was so deeply committed to her feminism that she engaged the most conservative or traditionalist faculty and defenders of the Mormon faith in the Religious Education Department. I met a faculty member in Sociology who had become a pacifist—he was influenced by the Catholic Workers and Quakers—and who was involved with protests against nuclear weapons testing around Easter in Nevada. He took me and four Mormon students at the Y down to the Quaker eEster weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas, where we stayed in a Catholic Church and were fed by members of the Catholic Workers. All five of us had what might be called a mystical experience or, if you prefer a more secular explanation, a betwixt and between symbolic and ritual experience, while there. We five would later form the core of the Mormon Peace Gathering, a group that planned and implemented a Mormon weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site the next year.

My involvement as the only “Gentile” in the Mormon Peace Gathering gave me further entree into Mormon intellectual culture. I met Eugene England, Steve Epperson, and a host of other intellectual and intellectually “liberal” Mormons thanks to the Mormon Peace Gathering. It was all a heady and exciting experience. I learned from this experience that, at least for me, one of the factors, if not the central factor, that seemed to separate “liberal” Mormons from “conservative” Mormons was “continuing revelation”. Faithful Mormons believe that the prophet in Salt Lake received revelations periodically from god. The “liberals”, it seemed to me, differed from the “conservatives” in that for them only revelations received by the prophet in Salt Lake and which were signed by the First Presidency were authoritative revelations. “Conservatives”, on the other hand, believed, it seemed to me, that any revelation the prophet received was authoritative. So, for them, if Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson counselled women to stay at home and take care of the house and the children, it was an authoritative revelation that had to be obeyed.

Most of the Mormons I hung out with were of the “liberal” persuasion. I did meet more “conservative” Mormons during my years in Utah. One of the students in my Social Inequality class, for example, believed that anything the prophet said was divine and he held “conservative’ views on a host of social issues including capital punishment, homosexuality, and abortion. Another friend of mine was somewhere in between on the “liberal” and “conservative’ continuum. He went to the Quaker protest with me and was initially involved with Mormon Peace Gathering planning but he dropped out early in the planning stages finding that what the MPG was doing conflicted with parts of his Mormon faith, what parts I no longer recall (I can’t look at my field notes because they have been destroyed).

What I have never forgotten about in the wake of my interactions with Mormon culture in Utah was the important fact that BYU was not representative of Mormons in general. It was representative, I think, of mainstream Mormon intellectual culture, a culture I was very impressed with. I really did not have much interaction with Mormons beyond BYU. Beyond campus I met academic to be scholars like Dennis now Kelli Potter while I worked at Walt West Books. I met non-Mormon academics interested in Mormons at the bookshop like Stephen Kent, a professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta at Walt’s. I even met the actor Edward Herrmann at the bookshop one day; he bought an SOED and a book on Catholicism as I recall. I met Mormons who were not academics but who were intellectuals deeply interested in Mormon Studies and Mormon history who I met at Walt West Books when I worked there including a book buyer for Seagull Books who showed me a first edition of the Book of Mormon. I was so impressed that amateurs, most of them who seemed to work at the computer software firms in the Provo area and most of whom where “liberals", were interested in and in some cases writing impressively on Mormon history. I met some in the Mormon fundamentalist community, both practitioners and ideological fellow travellers, at and through the bookshop and during my visit to a fundamentalist community south of Salt Lake thanks to a fundamentalist fellow traveller. I helped put together and write for the short lived Deseret Free Press. 

There were things that, as I became more familiar with BYU, that troubled me and troubled me deeply. I was at the Y, for example, when David Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr were fired for ideological reasons. I was there when the Brethren, the powerful leaders in Salt Lake, told members not to attend Sunstone conferences, Sunstone being a Mormon magazine for those of the “liberal” Mormon persuasion, “liberals” who, generally speaking, made use of historical and social scientific methodologies some “conservatives” saw as inherently “secular" and even possibly “anti-Mormon”. I was troubled by the Mormon policy on homosexuality. Given this I was and am proud that I, at the behest of the Y Sociology Club of which I was the faculty representative, was involved in bringing a group founded by the parents of gays which had a positive attitude toward homosexuals to campus. I was troubled by by the fact that I was turned in to the Honor Code Department by someone for bringing a book by the Tanner's on the changes in the Mormon temple ceremony to campus. After I wrote opinion pieces condemning the firings of Knowlton and Farr for the Utah Valley newspaper in Orem, arguing that the Y was more like Bob Jones and less like to Notre Dame (which I did attend briefly), after getting in trouble for some ethnographic experiments, and after Sociology proved as problematically ahistorical as Cultural Anthropology, I decided to leave the Y.

Given my conclusion that History was central to the human studies enterprise I decided to apply to doctoral programmes in History. I was accepted at several places including my dream school the University of Toronto. Though my dreams did not fully come true and it took me years to do so, thanks to financial problems and, when writing the dissertation, problems with my computer files, I finally finished my Ph.D and wrote my dissertation on Mormon Studies. Eventually that dissertation would be published after much blood, sweat, tears, and gnashing of teeth, by McFarland. Though it isn’t perfect—the writer’s cut which is in my possession is better and the authoritative version of the book—I am proud of the book and the research that went into it. 

I am no longer as interested in Mormonism as I was and as my book makes clear, I was more interested in broader questions of identity construction, identity, the origins of social movements as examples of how things are socially and culturally constructed and then fetishised or universalises than Mormonism per se in the first place. I had simply used Mormons to explore and get all of those broader issues. Social media, however, and specifically Mormon Stories and Mormon Discussions on YouTube, has peaked my interest if only slightly in Mormonism and Mormonism as a social and cultural movement again. Perhaps one day I may even get to tell my Non-Mormon Mormon Story on one of them.

“Get Out Before It is Too Late”: An Open Letter to the Lawmakers of New York State

 

What happened in Minnesota over the weekend—the assassination of a Minnesota Democrat lawmaker, the attempted assassination of other Democrats, and the planned assassination of others who were politically and ideologically incorrect in the eyes of the assassin—should remind us of the history of political violence or terrorism in the United States since its inception. 

It should remind us of the attacks on and cleansing of Loyalists during the American War of Independence and the confiscation of their property without recompense. It should remind us of bleeding Kansas with its guerrilla wars between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces, wars that were brutal and terroristic. It should remind us of the Quantrill’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederate raiders and their brutality which included the massacre of “civilians in places like Lawrence, Kansas. I should remind us of the racist Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of terror and terror killings after the Civil War. It should remind us of White supremacist attacks on those who are not them. It should remind us of anti-abortion attacks on abortion clinics and abortion doctors. It should remind us that Timothy McVay bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in response to what he saw as government terror in Waco, Texas. 

The immolation of members of an Adventist religious group by, at least in part, the US government should also remind us of government sponsored violence and terrorism, federal, state, and local, over the course of US history. It should remind us of the US government’s actions against rebellions in the early years of the Republic. It should remind us of the use of militias and the military against labour actions and socialists, communists, and anarchists. It should remind us of Waco. And it should remind us of the terrorists who attacked the US Capitol in 2021 under the delusion that their man, Donald Trump, actually won an election he lost. And it should remind us that in his first days in office President Donald Trump pardoned those convicted by juries of attacking the Capitol looking for lawmakers to, what, lynch?

Of course, none of these will remind most Americans and most American lawmakers of the history of violence, including state violence, that has erupted over the course of US history. Most Americans, after all, prefer to live in a Disneyish world of mythhistory rather than in the world of real history. Bright colours painted over dark ones do make the ideological world go round in the United States.

I remind you of this history because now that Donald Trump has returned to office we are seeing an uptake in non-state and state political violence and terrorism in Minnesota and in California. We are seeing an uptake in the power of executive branch of the government. We are seeing an uptake in executive branch deportations of immigrants and rumblings that the executive government may deport Americans who are not politically and ideologically correct in Trumpian terms. We are seeing the executive branch trying to avoid and undermine the rulings of the court, the third branch of the US government. We are seeing increasing “arrests” of Democrats by ICE, masters of Trumpian chaos and intimidation, which seems to be trying to prove that it is Trump’s own little Gestapo. 

Trump, of course, thinks of the American state as his corporation, He has no problem or compunction about using this corporation, a corporation which he controls and rules over,  for his personal financial benefit and gain. He is also using this corporation to further a political agenda that is arguably fascist.

As one of the three American academics who fled the United States and Yale for the University of Toronto in Canada told the Guardian yesterday there are important lessons one should learn from the Nazi takeover of the German government. Getting out earlier than later before it is too late is one of them.

In this spirit, I urge the lawmakers of New York to consider two proposals. First, to form a Union with California, Oregon, Washington state, and the New England states independent from a United States, a nation that should actually be called the Confederate States of America. Alternatively, I would urge New York lawmakers to consider petitioning Canada for admission as a province in that nation, Can we be the tenth. I would urge lawmakers to consider these two proposals before it is to late.

While Democrats seem to be treating Trump Mach Two as business as usual and as something that will end I don’t think one can treat what is happening as normal and I am not sure that Trump will willingly leave office. He may even want to pass his the US on to his son and heir. We are clearly, as many academics and intellectuals have pointed out, on the road to fascism, on the road to a White supremacist, literalist, misogynist, and terroristic fascist United States governed by the leader of a new religion, a theocratic cult, Donald Trump, a cult that brooks no political ideology, economic ideology, or culture other than its own. Do something before it is too late. Hoping that all things must pass is not doing something.