The Problems of Book Addiction

 

I have a confession to make. I am an addict. I am a book addict.

I have been a book addict for years. I blame it on my mother who, out of love, first introduced me to the many joys of books and of learning from books before I even started school. 

My addiction to books was compounded by the fact that I was a sickly child. I got severe asthma when I was twelve, an illness that often immobilised me, often sent me to the hospital gasping for breath, and an illness which led me even further down the path of a devotion to learning and to book love and book collecting. 

As I have gotten older and even more infirm than I already was my substantial collection of books, a collection that has flowed when sedentary and ebbed when not, and there has been a lot of the not over my life, has become more and more of a problem beyond the simple mechanics of moving heavy them. One way in which they are causing me a headache these days is that the shear number of them are inhibiting me from extricating myself from the shitehole in which I live and the incompetent landlord I rent from, someone who is often economical with the truth and who can’t be fully counted on to actually take care of the problems associated with the place in which I live in a timely manner or sometimes any manner at all.

I currently live in Albany, New York less by choice than due to the fact that I got a job there and kind of got stuck in that old rust belt city as a consequence. It is, truth be told, not a horrible place to live though it has all the problems of a city negatively impacted since the 1970s, for example, by the usual suspects including deindustrialisation, White flight to the suburbs, increasing property taxes, and inflation, including inflation of real estate “values”. Needless to say all this points up several facts about post 1970s America and the core nation world including the fact that money has no inherent objective value, the arbitrariness of market mechanisms, the speculation that undergirds them, and the attempt by hollowed out cities to utilise rising real estate markets to increase their income, an income negatively impacted by White flight to the suburbs, via increasing property taxes, something that, in turn, drives up rents and restarts anew the seemingly never ending cycle of inflation (though, of course, the ideology of growth at all costs that undergirds dominant variants of capitalism does this as well). 

The neighbourhood I live in was once described as a poor area of the city with a mix of poor ethnics and bohemians and there is truth to that description of the neighbourhood I reside in. I live in the neighbourhood and the apartment that I do because by Albany standards it is cheap in all senses of the term. Neither the flat that I rent nor my landlord are that bad comparatively speaking, something that should tell you something about the reality of renting apartments on a limited income in Albany, New York. I live in an old house on Morton Avenue, a house that goes back at least to the 1850s and which has, to say the least, seen its better days. The house was apparently remodelled in the 1970s, an era which saw urban decline and attempts, largely failed attempts, to deal with tis urban decline by a host of mostly inappropriate urban renewal schemes all over the rust belt of the United States, schemes that, as they were intended to do, enriched some often if not always at the expense of others. The flat has little in the way of insulation, a problem in a Northeastern city that gets quite cold. Its windows are, to put it nicely, breezy and let in the dirt and dust from the busy road in front of the house. As a consequence I had to use rope caulk to try to inhibit cold and hot air from readily entering the apartment and had to purchase two air purifiers to clean the unwanted dirty air entering the flat. I wish I could say that these are the unintended consequences of a half-arsed job but they are not. They are standard I want to get rich with the least effort capitalism operating practise. It has rotting kitchen cabinets made of wood product not wood. The shower consists of tiles, mould bearing tiles, a none too wise design in a humid environment during the summer months. The carpet of ugly blue never seems to get clean despite repeated attempts to clean it and which bears the memories of hot irons and other heating devices laid on it at sometime in the past. All the showers in the house use the same system and the same water heater which means that taking a shower at almost any time of the day is an adventure in hot and cold inconsistent running water. The walls are paper thin and crack if you barely lean against them. The heat comes from radiators which barely heat the house in fall, winter, and spring and requires the addition of space heaters to keep the place warm. Needless to say this does wonders—I am being facetious here—for one’s ability to breathe through one’s nose and to maintain a moist mouth in the fall, winter, and spring months. It gets so dry in the flat thanks to the radiator and space heaters that a humidifier is essential to try, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to open one’s nasal passages when lying in bed. It has gotten to the point that the flat I live in is, I suspect, making me sicker than I already am. 

All this, along with the increasing rents on a rundown apartment in a rundown part of town and a landlord who has been unable to fully fix a shower in ten years and who has recently had to turn the electricity off in the entire house four times and who still hasn’t been able to fix the problem as I type, necessitates that I move and that I move soon. I am hoping to move into senior subsidised housing in the Albany area (though frankly I would rather be in Ashland, Oregon or even stone age Athens, Ohio), of which there are, thankfully, several options in Albany even if trying to get on and stay on the waiting lists of these is often a way too complex and way too Sisyphean task. 

One of the problems with moving, of course, are the thousands of books I own, These books are not only unwieldy and heavy to move, they also add to the cost of moving. One quote I got for moving with half of my books already packed in boxes last hear, was the sum of $2000 dollars, a large sum for someone with a limited fixed income. All of this mean that I really do have to downsize my collection of books.

As someone who loves books and treasures what one can learn from books it is hard for me to part with them, however. I have, despite this, slowly been parting with some of them over the last year and a half. I have been sending books to my son and to friends bit by bit. Despite this I have barely made a dent in my book collection and, of course, I still buy books thanks to my addiction. A few weeks back I tried to sell some books, including a large collection of beautifully produced Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House, Progress, and Raduga books to the Strand bookstore in Manhattan and to Powell’s in Portland but to no avail. The former wants me to drive several thousand books to Manhattan, something that I simply cannot do physically, while the latter uses a computer programme to buy books with ISBN numbers, something that makes Powell’s less of a real bookseller and more of an automated corporation that doesn’t really care about books to me. I did put in a few ISBN’s into Powell's Hal 2024 but they, or better the programme they purchased from some other corporation who, in what is now commonplace in global capitalism, makes money off of other people’s money, wanted so few of the books and offered so little for them (something that points up how low these profiteers and privateers will go) that it wasn’t even worth the effort to put the ISBN’s into the automated system in the first place. Welcome to the you do all the work and get little for it economy that has become so prominent since the revival of that religion known as neoliberalism in the United States.

So what to do? At this point it looks like I will be tossing the books into the rubbish bin. There really is little else that I can do. It makes me sad to think of doing it but this is the book economy that we have to live with in contemporary America. And for me nothing reveals what life is like in disposable consumer oriented America and in anti-intellectual capitalist America where scholarly and classic literature books are so unloved and unwanted, better than that. The microcosm as the macrocosm. Perhaps I should have bought comic books over the years instead; they might actually be sought after and worth something. Such is life in the upside down world of modern America.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out

 

You always know what you are going to find on social media. You know that you are going to find a lot of lowest common denominator nonsense about the usual suspects, for example, films, television, women (some scantily clad for the “adolescent” male gaze), politics, sports (including fabrications related to Caitlin Clark), banal and mundane sensationalist and melodramatic clickbait for fun and profit, and music. You never know, however, how low the rubbish you find on social media will go. I was reminded of this fact yet again while I was looking at books by Warren I. Cohen on Amazon, one of the lowest of lowest common denominator social media sites on the world wide web given its poor search engine, its limited and I suspect mostly bot curation of its comments page, a curation that looks for certain hot button words and phrases, and the limitations it places on actual scholarly reviews. Amazon seems to prefer “reactions” that are reflective of the widespread reality of attention deficit disorder in postmodern America and large parts of the core nation world.

I am familiar with Cohen, a specialist on American foreign policy retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County  and author of introductory books on American foreign policy, including his excellent and aptly titled A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations published by Columbia, his introductory work on US and USSR relations published by Cambridge University Press in its four volume history of American foreign relations series, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991, and studies of Asian-American foreign relations, which is why I went to Amazon to see what other books he had written.

What I also found and found as interesting as the other books Cohen had written, were the comments on his book America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991. Two of the four comments—the fact that there were only four tells you a lot about the contemporary core nation world—on the book were favourable. The other two comments, however, were negative.  Of course, you are going to invariably find negative comments on almost any critical history and analysis of American foreign policy because you are inevitably going to step on the toes and draw the ire of the many faithful churchgoers of the Church of America who believe in the dogma of American exceptionalism.

One of these negative comments, that by Josh, was more “substantive” than the other, that by Sol D. Josh’s “reaction" to the book—I hesitate to call it a review since it really isn’t a review as is the case with most posts on scholarly books on Amazon—whinged about what he believed was Cohen’s New Dealism and his supposed belief that the New Deal was the best of all possible American worlds. He complains that Cohen interprets American post-WWII militarisation and the rise of its national security state as something other than a response to Soviet imperialism. He whines about Cohen's book being too much of an introductory text, something the book, in fact, is.

Sol D’s “substance” is also a statement of faith. Sol D’s faith is more clearly than that of Josh that hybrid mix of Christianity and America that has long been prominent in American culture and American life. He spends his reaction whining about Cambridge histories being the product of apologists and polemicists for “butt kissing atheist-Marxist tyrannical dictatorship”, a dictatorship, he claims, killed 200 million of its own citizens (today, of course, any self respecting empiricist would have to number many of the corporate and entrepreneurial elite, particularly in places like the Silicon Valley and Austin, amongst the tyrannical dictatorship of the mediocretariat). He ends his diatribe by stressing his devotion to his lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

Both of these comments reveal, as I noted, a faith in America, a faith some theologians would argue is a form of heresy and blasphemy. The faith of both is ultimately grounded in metaphysical and metaphysical manichean presuppositions that some humans are good guys, generally the group, clique, community, state, or nation, in this case the United States of America, that one belongs to, and that other humans are bad guys, that other whoever the goods mark themselves off against, the USSR in most of the mid-to late twentieth century, and, after the fall of the USSR, those liberals and “New Dealers” who are seen as “commies” and, paradoxically, fascists, by many and are categorised as “commies” and fascists by demagogues looking for leverage to gain political, economic, and cultural power. They are grounded, in other words, in the notion that some humans are good and some humans, them, are evil. They are grounded in the dehuhamisation of these others.

And this last—dehumanising the other—is one of the fundamental problems with these manichean politically and ideologically correct ways of seeing. Contrary to such manichean faiths humans, to varying degrees, are characterised by their better angels and their less better angels Humans, real humans, be they Hitler, Stalin, those who ordered bombs dropped on civilian targets in the name of victory, or true believers in monotheistic religious inquisitions, are, as history shows, complex and contradictory. They are neither inhuman incarnations of pure evil or cliched and stereotyped incarnations of pure goodness. Those who see the world in such manichean hues, of course, can’t admit the fact that humans, particularly those humans in positions of power (the power corrupts prover ), are the same every where and at every time for if they did they would have to admit that Cohen and other empirically grounded analysts like him are right and that both American and Soviet powers that be are neither evil incarnate of good incarnate and that humans can and do make mistakes and, of course, they can be socialised for moronic ethnocentric conformity. Cognitive dissonance, as it often does, however, in these cases, often ends up making the faith of true believers  even stronger than it was despite empirical facts to the contrary because in so many cases fiction, created reality, trumps, as it does with Trump and his ilk, real reality.

The Books of My Life: The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas

I am not, as I have written before on this blog several times, a big fan of biographies. Most of them—the worst of the bunch, in my opinion—are little better than hagiographies and provide us less with a full understanding of the subject of the biography than a glimpse into the mythic and censorial mentalities of those who write hagiographical biographies and those who buy them and read them. The better biographies, on the other hand, may present a flesh and bones subject rather than a somewhat fictionalised saint but they, for my money, far too often get mired in the quicksands of gossip and insignificance, the latter something sadly common in the writings of far too many historians who focus far too often on the trees rather than the forest. 

Historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s biography of M. Carey Thomas, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Knopf, 1994), gives us a flesh and bones portrait of a significant figure in American and Western intellectual and particularly American higher education history. Thomas, who was amongst the first Americans who undertook their graduate education in Germany and German Switzerland, was, to use a probably overused metaphor, the mother of Bryn Mawr College, the ostensibly Quaker women’s college located in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. The scion of a Gurneyite Quaker family, Thomas was Bryn Mawr's second president. 

Thomas was not only the president of what became one of the elite women’s colleges in the US—one of the now mythical seven sisters—but was also, as Horowitz reminds us, an important figure in the history of American education, in American higher education, in American higher education for women, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century suffrage and feminist movements, in philanthropic movements, and in the intellectual life of the era in general. 

Horowitz’s biography does what all good biographies should do: It puts Thomas’s life in broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts. Horowitz does a nice job of exploring Thomas’s 19th century Anglo-Saxonism with its ethnocentrism and Social Darwinism. She does a fine job of exploring Thomas’s seeking after power side. And she does an excellent job of exploring Thomas’s romantic—she was devoted to romantic artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne—and her romantic cultural criticism side, Thomas's passionate side, Thomas's Anne Shirley side, if you will. Horowitz also gives us a lot of information—I would call it gossip—about Thomas’s “smashes", the trials and tribulations of those “smashes", Thomas’s upstairs manor house mentality, Thomas's devotion to wealth and what it could bring, Thomas’s more Machiavellian and scheming side. This last side of Thomas, by the way, seems essential for someone embedded in higher levels of corporate bureaucracies like America's colleges and universities who has ambitions beyond being a cipher of the real powers that be, many of them businessmen (or conservative Quaker businessmen and “local leaders” in Bryn Mawr’s case for most of Thomas’s reign), in America’s educational bureaucracies who serve on the boards of directors of America's colleges and universities.

While I liked Horowitz’s contextualisations I found her polemical argument that by formulating a more egalitarian feminism that called for equal opportunities for women Thomas stood outside of her time to some extent and thus that we can condemn her, from a late 20th century vantage point, for her late 19th and early 20th century ethnocentrisms (moral presentism?), problematic. Thomas's egalitarian feminism, after all, as Horowitz notes several times in the book, was ultimately, grounded in Anglo Saxon Social Darwinism, something she took initially from Herbert Spencer, making it and her very much the product of its and her time. Nor did I find Horowitz’s attempt to argue that Thomas’s anti-Semitism was a projection of her own conscious or unconscious attitudes about herself particularly compelling. Ethnocentrisms of all varieties, in my experience, are generally tied to conceptions of usness and themness or otherness, with the other often demonised, a phenomenon that is less psychological projection and more a social and cultural construction of identity and communituy that is embodied, thanks to primary and secondary socialisation throughout one's life cycle.

As someone interested in the history of higher education and British settler society religion I enjoyed Horowitz’s biography of Thomas. She and her siblings and cousins, many of whom moved in the lofty circles of the North American and European intellectual culture of the era, represent, at least to me, someone who has had a long interest in the history of Anglo-American Quakerism and the increasing secularisation of Gurneyite Quakerism particularly on the east coast of the United States. More broadly, Horowitz’s  The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas restores Thomas to the important position in American intellectual history and the history of American higher education she held and holds, something that should not be but far too often was forgotten.

 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: In the Kingdom of Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest?...

 

I should know by now that every time humans seem to take one step forward in the development of “new" communications technologies and technologies in general that there is, for the most part, no corresponding step forward in the use of those technologies by the masses. In fact, it often seems instead that most humans take several steps backwards when technological change occurs. I was reminded of this indisputable fact yet again today.

This morning I was looking at the 2017 Penguin Classics deluxe edition of Anne of Green Gables by the Canadian author L.M. Montgomery. I try to take a look at any new critical editions of Anne because Anne of Green Gables remains, long after I first read it in my youth, one of my favourite and most treasured books. Perhaps that is one of the joys or one of the curses for anyone who grew up, if in my case only in part, in English Canada. 

It actually took me several searches on Amazon to find the Penguin Classics edition of Anne. After several unsuccessful attempts—something that is quite common when searching for books or classical music CD's on Amazon these days—I finally found the book but only by going to the Penguin Random House page for the book and clicking on their link to Amazon. 

I must admit that I was rather disappointed in the new Penguin Classics edition of Anne. I was hoping that it would be more like the rival Broadview Editions and Norton Critical Edition editions of the book, but it wasn’t. The editor of the Penguin Classics Anne, Benjamin Lefebvre, a L.M. Montgomery specialist who directs the online L.M. Montgomery site on the world wide web, according to the Penguin classics author blurb, did write an introduction to the book, did write a textual note to explain his editorial decisions regarding the text of the book, and did provide suggestions for further reading on Montgomery and Anne for those interested in doing further research on the book and its author just as do the editors of the Broadview and Norton critical editions of Anne. However, the Penguin Classics Anne does not, as do the Broadview and Norton editions of the text which are also edited by Montgomery specialists, Cecily Devereux of the University of Alberta for Broadview and Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston of the University of Guelph, home of one of the important archives for Montgomery Studies, for Norton, offer annotated notes that provide essential context for the book. Given this, I won’t be purchasing the Penguin Classics edition of Anne of Green Gables.

The unfortunate limitations of the Penguin Anne wasn’t the only thing that I found interesting on the Anne of Green Gables Penguin Classics page on Amazon. Below in the “comments” section I happened upon a “review”of the Penguin Anne, a “review” that is actually a “reaction” rather than a review, something posters on Amazon and on YouTube, confuse and conflate, which I found even more interesting than the edition of the book itself. In this “review” "Laura from Spain" complains that the pages of the Penguin Deluxe Edition of Anne were not properly cut claiming, as a consequence, that the book was bad. 

"Laura from Spain’s” reaction—a “reaction that parallels most of those I have happened across on social media—to the Penguin Anne points up the fact that “Laura" was unaware of three empirical facts. First, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the history of books and the history and variations in how book pages have been cut across time and space. Second, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that all Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, which are done by Penguin US, have pages that are intentionally cut that way, that are cut in deckled fashion. See also the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Third, she seems blissfully unaware of the history of the deckled style of book pages, something she could have ascertained very easily by letting her fingers do the walking on the world wide web.

Ron once agaiin shakes his head in disbelief...

Life as Crisis Management: Going to the Grocery Store

Life is, like everything else, a double edged sword. On the one hand, living offers one the opportunity to learn and keep on learning throughout one’s life course. One can learn, for example, how to think critically, which books or newspapers to read so to expand one’s knowledge, how to critically observe life going on around one,  and that one cannot escape, at least in the core nation world, bureaucratic institutions that are the kissing cousins of high schools with their petty paternalisms, their socialisation for conformity, their petty gossip mongering, their petty rules, and their never ending lowest common denominator banalities.

Amongst the several things I have learned over the course of my life is that life is Sisyphean. Life is, in other words Sisyphean. It is about managing crises that never seem to end. It is about managing the proverbial stones that always seem to rolling downhill and threatening to crush us. 

This, the fact that life is crisis management,  is a lesson I relearn every week. This week I learned it after going to the grocery store. A bit of backstory first. A couple of years ago I stopped eating gluten. I had a negative reaction to a home made gluten pizza crust that caused me immense stomach and abdomen pain and the feeling that this might be it sending me scurrying to the emergency room at a local hospital. And while these stomach and abdomen pains and bowel movement issues continue I do think that stopping eating gluten has helped. It has, I think, diminished the pain in my knees, for instance.

Not eating gluten is difficult to say the least given that so many cereals, so much pasta, so many snack foods, and so many meat alternatives like Field Roast, for example, all things I have been eating for years, are made, at least in part, out of gluten. This meant that I had to find gluten free alternatives. So, I, for example, upped my consumption of gluten Beyond Meat and gluten free fake fish, increased my intake of vegetables, particularly kimchi, and fruits, found a non-gluten pizza crust, and looked for gluten free buns for Beyond Meat "burgers". The best gluten free buns I have found thus far are Schar’s multigrain ciabatta buns.

The problem with Schar’s multigrain ciabatta buns is that they are not as readily available as the less tasty white ciabatta buns. I initially found them when I went over to Pittsfield, Mass at Big Y. Later I found them at a Price Chopper that was about five miles away and a Price Chopper close to me. Then I found them at the Coop.

I prefer to buy the Schar Multigrain ciabatta at the Coop for a number of reasons. They are more than a dollar cheaper at the Coop compared to Price Chopper and I get an additional discount on them when I go to elderly discount Wednesday’s at the Coop. There is—I am shocked, shocked—a problem in buying the ciabatta from the Coop: they are often not in stock on Wednesdays when I go to shop at the Coop even when they are on sale as I learned to my annoyance last week. Given this I decided to special order a box of the buns, something one can do quite easily at Honest Weight. 

This Wednesday when I asked if they had come in. They had so I bought a box of five. When I got home and opened the box later that day, however, I found that the label saying they were the multigrain chiabatta was wrong. They were instead Schar white ciabatta. So, I had to get in the car and drive back to the Coop for the second time that day. Thankfully, I was able to get the two packages of the multigrains that were on the shelves so I have some breathing space before I have to get more. 

I had managed yet another Sisyphean crisis in my life. And while I am not a prophet I can offer this full-proof prophecy: there will be more boulders rolling down the mountain that I will have to deal with. There always are.

 

Musings on Writing a Book and Publishing a Book: Another Chapter in Life as Crisis Management

As I have grown older—I am now retired, am sixty-nine, and will be seventy in November—one thing that has become quite clear to me is the fact that life, or more specifically a significant part of life—involves managing a never ending series of life crisis. Looking back I can see that a lot of my after I became a teenager was about managing crises: relationship crises, financial crises, and intellectual crises. All of these crises were made even more daunting by the fact that I have long been humanophobic, I have long had health problems, by the fact I lived and live in a core nation that transitioned from a modern industrial capitalist economy to a postmodern capitalist with all that entailed including deindustrialisation, globalisation, bureaucratic downsizing, and by an increase in poor paying and short lasting jobs. My England, Australia, Canada, and America was not my Dad’s England, Australia, Canada, and America

One of the many crises in my life, one that ebbed and flowed between the early 1990s and the early 2020s, involved a book I began writing on Mormon Studies in 1991 or 1992. It ebbed and flowed for a number of economic and cultural reasons including the fact that it is a book as much if not more about social  and cultural theory than it is about Mormonism, something that made my book project an even more daunting and difficult project particularly after I switched from graduate work in Anthropology and Sociology, social science disciplines with a strong emphasis on theory, to a discipline that is a social science to a few and a human science to the many and which has little interest in theory, History.

Another reason the project ebbed and flowed was technological. When I began work on my book the computer and its word processing programmes was in its infancy and had only recently replaced the typewriter, typewriter paper, and liquid paper for typewriter paper. Can you feel my pain? I initially learned computer on a Mac in the 1980s. Because I was a graduate assistant on a newsletter in Latin American Studies which was done on a PC, however, I had to learn PC and its Microsoft programmes. I would later learn the PC version of WordPerfect. I remained wedded to the PC until the early 2000s when, after a number of crises associated with PCs and particularly a Dell PC—I got an error message when I turned it on for the first time—I went back to Macs, a decision I have never regretted though it easier to do these days—now you can get Word for Macs, for instance—than it was in the early primitive days of computers. 

Doing my book at first on a PC led to a number of crises. Initially my book was typed in Microsoft Works. When Microsoft Word replaced Microsoft Works I transferred my book into Word. In the process, however, I lost every other of several hundred footnotes and parts of the text itself were sometimes made into an ugly mess. Don’t you just love it when one product of a corporation isn’t fully compatible with another product of the same corporation? To fix this problem, of course, required, the expenditure of a good deal of time, time limited by the fact that I was a graduate student and worked part-time because I needed the money. Despite the limitation of time and despite the fact that I had to use computers in a computer lab on campus since I did not own a computer, I did begin to try to reconstruct the missing footnotes.

Another crises related to the book was associated with the fact that I have never really been all that enamoured of graduate school education. I knew given my age—I started college late in life, something I am glad I did since I really wanted to go to college when I went and was serious about it—and left college because of relationship, financial, and intellectual crises related to that bureaucracy on several occasions. My ambiguous feelings about academic bureaucracies was the product of several things including the too often soap opera, Machiavellian, and limits on valid critical discourse atmosphere of post-graduate education, by my alienation from a bureaucracy where what one did was regarded as more of a job than a calling, by my alienation from the higher education stratification system, by a dramatic decline in my romanticism about academia, by the fact that I knew my chances of getting an academic job given my cultural capital was about nill given my post graduate educational background—I really didn’t want a full-time job in the academic beast anyway—and by the fact that I got a job as an acquisitions editor at a university press in 2000. All of these contributed, along with the technology issue, to me putting my book on hold in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

After getting a job in academic publishing my intention was to make a career of publishing. However, as I have written about elsewhere, my life in publishing was cut short thanks to the economic downturn after 9/11, and thanks, I suspect, to my ideological iconoclasm, an iconoclasm that didn’t play well in the publishing corporation in which I worked any better than it did in academia, As one of the last hired I was one of the first to be let go by the press. 

Though I tried to get another job in academic publishing and had two interviews with publishers my lack of success in getting another job in publishing led me to give up the search for another publishing position. As a consequence I decided to return to teaching as an adjunct and eventually I decided to finish my doctoral degree. By 2011 I had earned my doctorate and had a published a papers on the culture war surrounding the 1969 Woodstock Festival and on the theoretical problems associated with Buffy Studies, both of which required extensive effort and both of which I remain very proud of today. Another paper I wrote on Downton Abbey was slated for publication but I pulled it out of consideration for the anthology when the editor of the collection drained, from my perspective, all the life and soul out of my prose in his edits.

During my adjuncting years I started work again on the book, mostly because the manuscript was there, when breaks from work and energy permitted. It was work I did without support from foundations, the US government, or the administrative staff at the college at which I taught, perquisites that full time faculty sometimes get. The pandemic in the early 2020s helped me get the manuscript into shape. Footnotes were reconstructed and rechecked. Text was checked and rechecked, written and rewritten, and moved from one place to another. I then started to send the manuscript around to publishers. 

Several publishers were interested in it. Mormon Studies, after all, is a money maker for academic presses particularly for those that also target faithful demographics with what amounts to polemical and apologetic work. A few sent it out for review. As peer reviews sometimes are, one was one of the oddest I ever read but then so much criticism is not about the book someone else wrote but about the book the reviewer would have written.

Finally a publisher accepted the book for publication. There were some problems, however. My health has never been good. I have had serious asthma that hospitalised me regularly before the advent of Advair and Singulair, which have allowed my asthma to be finally controlled and allowed me to lead somewhat of a “normal” life. Additionally, once I hit my fifties and sixties I have been beset by muscular-skeletal arthritis, acid reflux, increasing difficulty breathing deeply because of chest and abdomen tightness, increasing vision problems, and bowel problems, all of which complicated working on the manuscript in a number of ways. Isn’t old age wonderful?

With the manuscript approved for publication I sent it in. The publisher wanted me to change the manuscript's English into American. I did it though I found this a ridiculous demand since academics are used to reading English English as well as American English given the global nature of the academy and intellectual life. This along with the occasional idiocy that is spell check, my haste due, in part, to the college I worked at eliminating my access to Word after I retired (my reward, along with the meagre remuneration I received for twelve years of teaching 100 and 200 level classes), and my problematic eyesight—I should have increased page size—made fixing the errors in the manuscript difficult if not impossible even though I did have someone else read the manuscript as well. It is always difficult, particularly with computer manuscripts, to see the errors of one’s manuscript ways. 

My haste to finish the manuscript also meant that I did not add material on anthropological studies of Mormonism that I wanted to particularly once I gave up hope, given how physically and intellectually exhausting doing this book was, that I would or could write a follow up book on Anthropology and Mormonism. There were also other things I wish I had added to the manuscript. Speaking of manuscripts, one can acess a more cleaned up and expanded version of the book in English English in the BYU Special Collections at the BYU Library. I am quite proud of this manuscript and regard it as the authoritative version of the book.

The book has now been out for almost four years. It has not gotten much critical attention though I have gotten three royalty cheques so presumably someone or some institution is buying it which is not a bad thing I suppose though it does make for more work at tax time. This state of affairs has not been unexpected. I am not an insider-insider, an insider-outsider, or an outsider-insider in Mormon Studies. I am not a member of the Mormon History Association or any other “professional” organisation and I am retired. I really don't want to be identified as a Mormon Studies scholar anymore than I want to be identified as an academic. I am, as I was in academia, an iconoclastic outsider-outsider and I like it like that.
 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Musical “Expert” on Social Media

 

Over the years I have noticed that there are what I would call several subspecies or subgenres of reaction videos on the social media giant YouTube. One of the subspecies of music “reaction" videos  offered for “sale”on Patreon and YouTube are those by “experts" in vocal performance and music performance. The Charismatic Voice (Elizabeth Zharoff), Beth Roars, Maggie Renee, Aaliyah Capili, the Fairy Voice Mother (Lolli), and the Vocalyst (Bethany Hickman), for instance, are trained singers or singers in training who regularly break down the vocal performances of popular songs on YouTube. Another of the subgenres of YouTube “reaction" videos are those of classical musicians and classical composers who, like their vocal performance “reaction" video colleagues analyse popular music videos and performance for fun (or so one hopes) and profit. This group includes “reactors" like Doug Helvering and Virgin Rock.

Sometimes these social media “experts” tell us why they are “experts” in the field of music analysis. In every reaction video Maggie Renee does on YouTube, for instance, she makes sure to tell viewers, some of whom vote via polls on Patreon as to what piece of pop music Maggie Renee will react to next, that she is a Juilliard trained opera singer and this training at one of the elite music schools in the United States, along with her opera performances in less well known regional opera companies, something noted on her personal website, makes her an “expert" in the field of vocal performance. In her welcoming video to her YouTube page Elizabeth Zharoff, The Charismatic Voice, says she has degrees in voice, opera, and music production, According to Wikipedia Zharoff graduated from Oberlin and Curtis (also see her recent “My Story and Where We Go From Here” YouTube video where she recounts her burgeoning interest in pop music and shills for funding for her research). In her welcoming video to her Virgin Rock YouTube page Amy Shafer, LSRM, FRSM, and RYC, tells us that she is a trained harpist, pianist and teacher, and director of piano studies, and assistant director of harp studies at the Harp School, Inc. On rare occasions these “experts” tell viewers that they still have a lot to learn about both classical and popular music. Capili for instance, notes that she is a young Gen Z opera singer in training and, as a consequence, still has much to learn about the ins and outs of musical and vocal performances, something rare and refreshing in the social media world as far as I can tell from two years of ethnographic study of the medium.

Many of these reactors also use their YouTube pages to promote themselves and their careers. Virgin Rock, for instance, on her YouTube welcome page, offers viewers the opportunity to study one on one with her. The Charismatic Voice posts videos asking for monies to support vocal research (“The Most Important Video You Will Ever Watch”). Beth Roars’s "Symphony of 131 Nations” shows her performing this symphony with others presumably representing the 131 nations referenced in the title of the piece.

What is remarkable about several of these trained experts in music performance and composition, from whom one can indeed learn much about vocal performance, music performance, and music theory, is that so many of them appear to do little research on the music and the musicians they are “reacting” to and “analysing” and several of them seem to have little sense of popular music history. Interestingly, they also tend to ignore issues of technological manipulation including pitch correction and live not live “musical” performances, both of which are quite common in the world of pop music today, making one wonder whether this lack is a product of the fact that they don’t want to offend their revenue generating audience, most of whom, I suspect, are fan boys and fan girls rather than dispassionate analysts, with the truth (see Zharoff’s "My Story and Where We Go From Here" video retrospective on YouTube). I was recently reminded of this lack of historical knowledge and attention to historical context when I watched Shafer’s reaction to the 2001 System of a Down song “Chop Suey”

Shafer admits during the course of her reaction video to “Chop Suey" that she was confused by the song’s lyrical content. She gets the dynamic alterations in the song and comments on its alternation between its more folkish and calmer moments and its moments of speed and intensity. In the video Shafer mistakenly assumes that the song is parodic and humorous, a mistake that could have been avoided if she had actually done a bit of research on the band and the song before jumping off of a contextless hermetic interpretive cliff (the music studies variant of literary studies', film studies', and television studies' crystal ball textualism). Research could have revealed to Virgin Rock that System of a Down have been deeply influenced by Armenian folk musics, so she could have added heft to her been more general the statement that the calmer moments in the song have a folk like quality. Research might also have enabled her to grasp the biblical references ("Father into your hands I commend my spirit”, Luke 23:46) in the song, something that points up the fact that so many today no longer get a well-rounded humanities classical education which might enable them to grasp historical references including those from the Christian Bible. Additionally, research might also have enabled Shafer to understand that the title of the song was System of a Down’s response to real or perceived record company resistance to the original title of the song, "Suicide" according to one of the members of the band, or “Self-Righteous Suicide”, according to the producer of the record. “Suey”, (which band member Serj Tankian is seen presumably eating in the official video), one of the band members said, is suicide chopped in half. Knowing all of this might have helped Shafer understand the serious intent of the song and to better grasp the serious nature of the song’s dynamics. And it is so easy to do in the brave new world of digital media like the internet.