My take on Hillbilly Elegy was that if it was the best possible take the exotic and curious Appalachian folk, then the best possible take isn't enough to convince me that I should give any energy or sympathy on their behalf.
I didn't actually read the book, but it's perfect that Ron Howard is turning it into a movie. Who can tell the story of a romanticized rural subculture that a successful middle aged man remembers through rose colored glasses? A guy who literally grew up on a Hollywood set depicting a romanticized rural subculture that a successful middle aged man remembered through rose colored glasses!
My current rage-inducing story is this: Aspen Pharmacare playing nasty in order to drive up the price of cancer drugs by up to 4000%. Even in enlightened topless Europe the bastards will fuck over patients every chance they get.
2 is a pretty great observation.
... if it was the best possible take the exotic and curious Appalachian folk
Von Wafer does not think that it is.
This book is David Brook's idea of a folksy rural heartland pretending to be a movie set pretending to be a folksy rural heartland. Or maybe it's the other way around.
OP.2: Just read a couple effective takedowns (LGM has linked a couple in the last few days) and then act like they're your own insight. Aside form saving you labor, you'll be helping your fellow readersclubmembers see through the BS.
I've been reading the takedowns in an effort to figure out if there's any reason I can harness to read the damn thing. Like, I'm actively looking for a reason to read it (and failing).
I want to vent indirectly about politics: I've been reading Atrios forever, and while Halford was right that he basically has been repeating himself for years now, I share a couple hobbyhorses, and at least he's pithy.
But now that I'm on Twitter, I kind of don't like him anymore. His content leans so heavily towards blame-the-Democrats stuff* that he's about 70% of the way to being a Russian BernieBrobot. I mean, he fucking approvingly retweets Glenn Greenwald, who IMO deserves to be persona non grata.
So that's kind of weird.
*much of which has always been part of his schtick, especially the blinkered DC-based consultant Dems
The impression I get from LGM is that it paints people in Appalachia as dumb losers whose problems are their own fault. I have no idea that's fair or not.
But now that I'm on Twitter, I kind of don't like him anymore.
If you stay on Twitter long enough, you won't like anyone anymore.
On a related note, did we talk about the KS4 special election? Reading Twitter before bed the night of, I thought it must have been a real nailbiter, such that just a few grand from the DCCC would surely have swung it. Absolute hysteria.
In the morning I finally look it up. The Dem lost by 8 fucking points. Sure, that was way closer than in the last election, but who fucking cares? Eight percent isn't close in any contest where the scoring is in the double digits.
But people are nonetheless writing articles all about the implications of this so-called close election: Vox had one referring to it as "razor-thin". The actual tally was 63k - 55k. You couldn't cut Jello with a razor that thick.
Don't get me wrong: it's great that the enthusiasm is out there, and if we can maintain it, it bodes very well. But people are acting as if A. just a little effort would have swung it, and B. there are ideological lessons (because Thompson was quite liberal, not just a red state Dem). But there's no evidence that the guy got even one vote from a non-HRC voter. So what's the lesson? Everybody knows that we're fired up. It wasn't Thompson who fired us.
I love that a book club in Texas is reading a book about how to understand those exotic and curious Appalachian folk. Do they realize they are* what others think of when bringing to mind 'rural Trump voters'? Aren't Texas towns dying in similar ways to Appalachian towns?
*not to say they really are
I remembered that Hillbilly Elegy was reviewed (as part of a group of books) in The American Prospect last year. I had forgotten just how negative their summary was.
Hillbilly Elegy turns out to be a very sly piece of work that professes to express great nostalgia and compassion for the hillbilly way of life. ("Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.") But Vance is on the trail of a bait and switch. Despite the down-home charm, he ends up sounding condescending to his neighbors and kin. Vance not only excelled at Yale Law; he is now at a Silicon Valley hedge fund. And, according to Vance, you could be, too--if you weren't so gol-durned lazy. If you weren't selling your food stamps, blowing off jobs, deserting your kids, and getting stoned on Oxycontin.
In the end, it's not about rapacious corporations and collapsing small-town economies. It's about values. For all of his idyllic reminiscences of small-town Appalachia, good old boy Vance, now also a columnist with National Review, is Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin. Hillbilly Elegy is a conservative infomercial, disguised as an affectionate memoir.
12: The discussion of that election was beyond confusing. I saw people claim the next day that the loss was only 1%, only to find out a day later that it was 8%.
"The impression I get from LGM is that it paints people in Appalachia as dumb losers whose problems are their own fault. I have no idea that's fair or not."
He's pretty much a squish on structure/agency questions:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/
On the other hand, as a conservative, I grow weary of fellow middle-class conservatives acting as if it were possible simply to bootstrap your way out of poverty. My dad was able to raise my sister and me in the 1970s on a civil servant's salary, supplemented by my mom's small salary as a school bus driver. I doubt this would be possible today. You're a conservative who has known poverty and powerlessness as well as wealth and privilege. What do you have to say to your fellow conservatives?
I think you hit the nail right on the head: we need to judge less and understand more. It's so easy for conservatives to use "culture" as an ending point in a discussion-an excuse to rationalize their worldview and then move on-rather than a starting point. I try to do precisely the opposite in Hillbilly Elegy. This book should start conversations, and it is successful, it will.
The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I often disagree with, has made a really astute point about culture and the way it has been deployed against the black poor. His point, basically, is that "culture" is little more than an excuse to blame black people for various pathologies and then move on. So it's hardly surprising that when poor people, especially poor black folks, hear "culture," they instinctively run for the hills.
But let's just think about what culture really means, to borrow an example from my life. One of the things I mention in the book is that domestic strife and family violence are cultural traits-they're just there, and everyone experiences them in one form or another. I learned domestic strife from the moment I was born, from more than 15 stepdads and boyfriends I encountered, to the domestic violence case that nearly tore my family apart (I was the primary victim). So predictably, by the time I got married, I wasn't a great spouse. I had to learn, with the help of my aunt and sister (both of whom had successful marriages), but especially with the help of my wife, how not to turn every small disagreement into a shouting match or a public scene. Too many conservatives look at that situation, say "well that's a cultural problem, nothing we can do," and then move on. They're right that it's a cultural problem: I learned domestic strife from my mother, and she learned it from her parents.
But to speak "culture" and then move on is a total copout, and there are public policy solutions to draw from experiences like this: how could my school have better prepared me for domestic life? how could child welfare services have given me more opportunities to spend time with my Mamaw and my aunt, rather than threatening me-as they did-with the promise of foster care if I kept talking? These are tough, tough problems, but they're not totally immune to policy interventions. Neither are they entirely addressable by government. It's just complicated.
That's just one small example, obviously, and there are many more in the book. But I think this unwillingness to deal with tough issues-or worse, to pretend they'll all go away if we can hit 4 percent growth targets-is a significant failure of modern conservative politics. And looking at the political landscape, this failure may very well have destroyed the conservative movement as we used to know it.
Here are bands more popular in WV than in TX on Spotify. A whole bunch of these are quite good and some others are guilty pleasures, so no help to you there I am afraid. I had never listened to the Mermen, but they're pretty good.
Like others, I have read reviews claiming the book has a sympathetic tone but is in substance pretty harsh. I wouldn't want to read it either.
The sainted Pater read Hillbilly Elegy so I didn't have to. He noted that, like almost every reviewer of the book, he reacted most strongly to the much-quoted passage recounting what's-his-name's primal scene: the rage of witnessing poor white trash taking advantage of the food stamps. The Pater suggested that there what's-his-name's true emotions are best expressed, or at least closest to the surface.
Vance, now also a columnist with National Review, is Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin.
Vance actually approvingly name-checks Murray's research in the introduction. Because of that, I didn't even bother finishing the Kindle Preview.
taking advantage of the food stamps
As in using them inappropriately, or using them at all?
18.1: Good to know that people 'round here still do The Safety Dance (#28 when I checked).
21: Both, because what's-his-name did not, according to him, get food stamps and, if he had, he wouldn't have converted them to beer/pills/steak/Cadillacs/tickets to liberal Hollywood movies.
When I looked up the Kansas special election a few days beforehand, I saw an analysis from one of the regular Congress analysis places (maybe Cook, but maybe not?) say that the big shift towards the Democratic candidate moved it from strong Republican to leans Republican, which isn't really close.
When I saw it blow up on twitter I thought maybe there was some surprising news and then remembered: it's twitter.
We've got under 6 weeks to go til our special election. Should Bernie come? If he does, what should he do? The Republican is blanketing the airwaves with negative shit; would getting national Dem money be a net ls or minus? Or guy raised over $1 m in the first 5 weeks, average donation $40, which seems like a good narrative against a self-funding zillionaire.
That he cites Mr Scientific Racism, Razib Khan, is enough for me to hate him.
I read it immediately post-election (I think maybe the next day). I didn't hate it as much as most people, and even liked it mostly on finishing. If you can read it only as memoir with the concept "How I was dumb lucky enough to escape hillbilly hell and get a nice life as a coastal elite," it's fine. He doesn't really hammer much in the way of policy prescriptions in the text. But something didn't quite sit right with me about it. The bootstraps thing is kind of icky, but what got me in the end is that he really doesn't like these people. Like, the ones he's related to are family and he doesn't have a choice, but the rest are uncouth and sad and poor and dirty and violent. I mean, these are not my people, but he makes them sound awful. And dumb as rocks. The review Nick links gets perfectly at the self-loathing that took a while for me to register. It's an extremely quick read. You can marvel at the fact that he says he had no idea that exercise and eating vegetables would make him lose weight until the Marines taught him basic nutrition. Also, he's only 32, I think, so a bit young for nostalgia. I suspect he's a complete asshole, but I hope he manages to make some peace with his roots.
Dropping massive bombs
Why do we care about this?
@28 I suspect he is positioning himself for public office.
24: Didn't it go from like R+24ish at the election to R+8ish? If there are similar swings in 2018, that's more than 100 additional seats to the Dems. Admittedly that's a handwavy, heuristic argument, but it bodes well.
30: Luckily, the shiftless, spendthrift, Cheeto-stained electorate of his holler is too dumb to know when they're being talked down to . . .
25: I think the narrative of doing it without big money could be powerful. I don't have a sense of how Bernie would play. Have Bernie and Schweitzer ever hung out?
WTF is up with this? Is this real?
I read it and liked it as a memoir. Given that I live 30 miles from his hometown, I would say it's completely accurate. His own politics are fairly rightward, but as a portrayal of the region, it's spot on.
30: I keep hearing it's assumed he'll jump straight to governor. I haven't read it, though I have friends and acquaintances locally who identify as Appalachian plus friends in actual Appalachia. Plus, I suppose, sufficient connection with deeply dysfunctional and violent families to know that piece too. I'm very skeptical that he's generalizing things that are fair to generalize. But when he was a kid, America really stood for something and whatever. Dude, we can all remember the '90s so why even lie?
I have friends and acquaintances locally who identify as Appalachian
People should have to stick with how redneck they were on their birth certificate.
You're not in North Carolina anymore, Moby.
31: Yes, it bodes well. But there were people on twitter talking like the dems could have won and it was a close call that night, but the damn DNC didn't do enough. Bernie could have moved to the district and won.
36: The book itself isn't really full of generalizations and is extremely light on policy. I have no doubts the guy is an asshole, in case I'm not making it clear, since I feel like I'm defending him. The book is very much a memoir, and he muses about which government interventions worked within his family, which didn't and whether there was anything that would have worked, but it's certainly not the majority of the book. He's generally appreciative of drug treatment programs (despite his mother's repeated failures to get clean), the military, and a few other things I'm forgetting (Medicaid/Medicare?). He is troubled by child protective services, food stamps, and maybe housing assistance. He also muses about which siblings turned out fine and which ones struggled and why (his mother had three siblings, all of whose had stable, middle class lives). He observes the neighbors, his classmates, coworkers, trying to crack the formula and (unsurprisingly) fails. I bet he'll do really well politically because of his compelling narrative, but it's a fine line to walk for him. "You left and now you think you're better than us" is a hard sentiment to combat, and I think it will work against him. Looks like he's aware of that (starting a charity, setting himself up to be a "local boy makes good, comes home" story.
One more thought: I bet he has spent the past fifteen years or so answering friendly questions about policy in Appalachia from fellow students or friends. Some of it reads in the form of answers I'd expect to hear. "Well, Program A might have been well-intentioned, but it didn't seem to help us. On the other hand, Program B made sure we had heat in winter (or whatever." Without solid data, those questions can't really be answered fairly, and it's not that kind of book.
I'm just getting this from skimming descriptions and reviews, but doesn't it seem like there's some major regional elision between Appalachia and Rust Belt going on in both the book and most discussions of its topics? FWICT this guy may have been born in Kentucky, but he and his parents were raised in Middletown, which is solid Rust Belt but no kind of Appalachia. Most of his book is about Middletown too. (It looks like rural Kentucky was his grandparents' hometown, but his grandparents were the ones who moved for steelwork; he just spent summers there.) Obviously both regions have a lot of poor whites but I suspect mentally merging them creates a lot of analytic problems.
I went to gifted kids summer camp in Eastern North Carolina, and we actually did a giant ongoing study of Appalachian culture, of which I only remember bits and pieces - third "a" is soft, not hard, we were told often, Where the Red Fern Grows, Blue Ridge Parkway, TVA, etc. A lot of that is locked in geographically.
But aside from the parts that are geographically rooted in mountains and hollers and so on, what is the difference between the Rust Belt and Appalachia? I never went to Rust Belt Camp. Just the difference between the Coal Dust vs. Industrial Rust? What are the differences that would show up in a reflective memoir about the 90s like this?
That's where my knowledge ends, but I think of Appalachia as closer to true-rural with the coal industry having historically been at most a shot in the arm, whereas the Rust Belt was moderately dense industrial urban development with rail and everything. Probably much more populated then and now, in particular.
The rust belt has way more Italians and black people.
Just generally more diverse, including different types of white people. We're like snowflakes.
In large numbers, we can clog the streets and make it hard to drive around.
42: You are correct, and this is discussed a bit. He says that because of the proximity to "home," the cultural overlap was high. His grandparents were part of a migration from his area that led to a large influx of Appalachians to Middletown. He mentions particular highway that was jammed by people going home for holidays like Thanksgiving. I am not familiar with Southern OH, but it sounded pretty believable. His grandparents, if I remember correctly, continued to own a house there (that was robbed and vandalized and squatted in) after his great-grandmother's death and were part of large extended families.
45 is pithy but right. 44, too. I'd say Rust Belt is more suburban than urban. Detroit, for example, was never really population dense like the East Coast; it's a bunch of smallish postwar homes with lawns. I mean, there were apartments, but not large ones, maybe 6 units per building,
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I thought about submitting this as its own post, but I didn't think it could wait.
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I'm developing a theory about the livability of cities as a function of the portion of white people that are Italian. They seem to do urban living better than Irish people for reasons that I'm going to speculate aren't just because the Italian side of my family grew up in cities and the Irish side on farms.
49 is sad. I had supposed that if anybody was mostly harmless, it would be furries.
Coal Appalachia and non-coal Appalachia had very different economic trajectories (and the Rust Belt a very different one).
Maybe more later.
Coal and Not Coal might correlate with my Italian theory.
Probably more of a Rust Belt vs. Appalachia thing actually.
And your living in the area where you get to see Coal Appalachia meet Rust Belt. With ample Italians. (Parts of NE Pennsylvania do as well, but with harder coal and less "Appalachia.")
I have decided all that other stuff is spurious and my theory is causal.
I don't know about American Appalachia, but I did live in the Appalachia of China for two years. There was no coal mining, so maybe the analogy isn't great. It was poor and mountainous though. There was way less opioid addiction than I'd imagine you'd find in actual Appalachia.
The coal mining is mostly in Manchuria, which is called the Rust Belt of China.
I decided to not mention that in the spirit of passing things over.
50
Italians have better food and get drunk less often than Irish. Ireland is on the whole less corrupt than Italy, I'd imagine. Seems like which would be better for urban living is a wash.*
*As an anthropologist, I'm allowed to truck in broad ethnic stereotypes.
The trick is to stop drinking before you get too wasted to remember to offer/ask for a bribe.
61
IME in Northern China people get the bribery out of the way and then move on to the heavy drinking.
People in Southern China don't drink that much at all. Possibly because there's greater prevalence of the alcohol allergy gene in Southern Chinese populations. This is another difference between the Appalachia of America vs. China.
Ireland is on the whole less corrupt than Italy, I'd imagine.
I'd be interested to see a competition between them.
But to derail less, I haven't read the book but anyone who is an apprentice/acolyte of Peter Thiel's is in my black book. I'm also way less impressed now that I know he's younger than me.
But also, I get kind of annoyed by people who assume that blue states don't have poverty or that there's something unique about white conservative poverty that isn't true of nonwhite poverty or white liberal poverty. Like, I grew up around poor white people and was raised in part by my working class white* grandparents, but no one seems to be interested in the white working class of the urban PNW.
*well, immigrant, so maybe doesn't count as 'real' 'Murican.
Italians have better food and get drunk less often than Irish
There's an excellent folk song (lyrics) which includes that stereotype.
They work upon the railroad, they shovel dirt and slush,
There is one thing in their favor, Ey-talians never get lush.
They always bring their money home, they drink no beer or wine.
That's something I would like to say about your old man and mine!
[chorus]
Then cheer up, Missus Reilly, don't give way to the blues.
You and I will cut a shine, with bonnets and new shoes.
Hear the young ones cry, neither sigh nor sob,
But I'll wait till times get better and McGuinness gets a job.
58: Have you read James C. Scott on highland SE Asia? You were further north than his area, but I've been wondering what you would think.
Italians have better food and get drunk less often than Irish
I've heard this stereotype on catering Jewish vs. goyish weddings: goy wedding, skimp on the food but not the alcohol; Jewish wedding, skimp on the alcohol but not the food.
66
I've read parts of Seeing Like a State, and I am supposed to have read the whole thing. I'm also supposed to read The Art of Not Being Governed, but I haven't yet (and I was crazy busy when y'all posted about it). It's up there on my to read pile. I was quite a bit away from that area, which as I understand is much more the Wild West, and part of the Golden Triangle of opioid smuggling.
67
This is my main problem with spending Thanksgiving and Passover with my college roommate's family: I'm supposed to get through hours of family holiday with no more than two glasses of wine, lest I be viewed as some sort of lush. Sometimes I would sneak off to top up my glass in the kitchen so it just looks like I'm drinking as slowly as everyone else.
I heard the same thing but Catholic vs Protestant.
Conversely, at Finnish family gatherings, it's completely acceptable to drink yourself into a stupor. Time for armchair theories on socially acceptable amounts of talking vs. alcohol consumption.
I'm tired of stopping before stupor.
I read somewhere that the alcohol allergy gene is also found in relatively high frequency in Ashkenazi Jewish populations, which would also explain the lack of heavy drinking.
Maybe no sad historical events to drink to forget?
This is my main problem with spending Thanksgiving and Passover with my college roommate's family: I'm supposed to get through hours of family holiday with no more than two glasses of wine, lest I be viewed as some sort of lush.
Four glass for Passover, surely.
76
Unfortunately, that bit has been rewritten to mean "sip" rather than downing the whole cup.
That... is very different from how my family celebrates the holiday.
58: Surely Guizhou is the Appalachia of China? Poverty, hills, and distilling?
78: Never use the Lutheran Haggadah.
"Why is this night different from all other nights?"
"I'm not sure. Extremely bland carb-based food is pretty much every night. Maybe the horse radish?"
In fairness, my family is partly Irish.
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"Then Greg came through with his offer from Forest Trail. I did some research on the internet, and it looked like a really legit website. I knew my boy would be taken care of."
http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/19136428/the-downfall-america-first-sport-only-college
Some people are vulnerable to grifters. I'll bet this guy would be posses at us if we told him beforehand that Forest Trail Sport University was a scam. And these people vote.
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The first time I ever went to a Seder was also the first time I got drunk. I was in high school, and my friend (father Jewish, mother WASP) invited me over for their family's huge raucous Passover. They didn't bother with Manischewitz, poured out full glasses rather than sips, and eventually when the wine ran out they switched to brandy.
If I ever go to a Seder, I won't have any idea how many times I've been drunk before.
I wonder if any of the liquor stores here carry slivovitz.
As a data exercise, I'm trying to get a sense of the different reported ancestries of people in Appalachia vs. the Rust Belt, by ACS county data. It turns out there is definitely plausible overlap, if I started with the ARC's generous categorization. So I started with their county list, then for Rust Belt took all the MSAs for the cities listed here. Overlap was all of the Pittsburgh, Youngstown, and Charleston areas, and part of Canton (Carroll) and Cincinnati (Brown and Clermont). I decided to call Charleston Appalachia but all the others Rust Belt, tentatively. About to be able to report data.
Percentage of population reporting X ancestry (including as one of multiple ancestries), Rust Belt / Appalachia
Irish: 12.9% / 12.1%
Italian: 7.8% / 4.4%
German: 21% / 14.4%
Any E. European: 15.3% / 5.3%
Any British Isles except Irish: 10% / 15%
Any Scandinavian including Finnish: 2.4% / 1.3%
"American": 5.4% / 15%
Rust Belt here includes all of Chicagoland and the St. Louis areas, but I did an alternate version without the Chicago metropolitan division (meaning keeping Elgin and Lake-Kenosha) and without any St. Louis, and that didn't change the above very much. In that smaller Rust Belt, Irish went up to 13.5%, Italian up to 8.5%, German up to 22.7%, EE up to 15.9%, British up to 11.4%, Scandinavian down to 2.2%, American up to 6.2%.
I went to gifted kids summer camp in Eastern North Carolina
I went to gifted kids summer camp at Appalachian State, but Boone is largely just a normal college town that happens to be in the Appalachians.
88, 89: Thanks. I suspect differences would become more significant if you took PA and NY out of the Appalachian data.
Boone's Farm is what I remember from normal college towns.
Does the town Von Wafer lived in briefly count as Appalachia or is that just another college town?
68.1: I think reading parts of it would be a lot more efficient. It looks to be me as if the main value will be in the bibliography, but I haven't started in on that yet. (Because Teutonic Knights, courtesy teo.)
Because Teutonic Knights, courtesy teo.
Are you to the Baltic chapter already? I just finished it. (I read slowly.)
Huh, 97 was me, obviously. Not sure what happened there.
I suspect rum was involved, though. The liquor store I went to didn't have slivovitz.
I finished God's War and followed the notes to The Northern Crusades, which is shorter and more readable. Because I read quickly, in between stretches of not reading at all.
100: I am fascinated by them, and would like to learn more. (They didn't accept Christianity until 1386, and even then just because their king inherited the throne of Poland.) My great-grandmother emigrated to the US from Lithuania, so I have a personal interest as well as an intellectual one. She was Jewish, but I'm sure there are some gentiles in the family tree.
101: Ah, okay. I saw The Northern Crusades in Tyerman's notes and am glad to hear it's shorter and more readable.
Ha. I should definitely check out the Bartlett.
It only counts if it comes attached to a book you wrote yourself.
I have also been reading Robert-Henri Bautier's The Economic Development of Medieval Europe, mostly because it's more airplane-friendly than God's War. It's quite interesting, regardless.
107: I'd be concerned by the age. AIUI there have been massive advances in exploiting documents since the 70s.
Hey, this reminds me, I have a book recommendation question. Can someone recommend a good book on the history of the Middle East covering up to maybe pre-W. Bush, or even more recently, but definitely starting back before the 20th century and preferably further back than that? Years ago, I planned to read Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples, but that was published so long ago* I wonder if it's too dated.
*It was relatively recent, by academic history standards, back when I intended to read it.
107,108: But "it is magnificently illustrated"!
If we've moved on to books, do any of you recommend a good E. Nesbit biography?
108: Yeah, definitely, but it was $2 at my local used bookstore's warehouse clearance sale, so worth a shot. I suspect medieval history ages better than a lot of other fields in any case.
109: I read the Hourani years ago. It's good, but very high-level. Lapidus might be a better bet in terms of detail (though I haven't read it myself), but not necessarily more up-to-date. A Peace to End All Peace is very good but focused on a very narrow timeframe.
110: Published by Thames & Hudson (as part of the same series as Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity), so yes, of course.
Nah, I was just being rhetorical.
I don't remember much about The World of Late Antiquity anymore but I remember enjoying it.
113.2: I remember looking at the Lapidus around the same time but the Hourani was the more recent. Except now I see Lapidus has put out new editions. Given how little I actually know about Arab societies and about Islam, high-level is not bad for me, and probably I should read more than one book.
118: In that case I'd say start with the Hourani; it's a good overview. Then maybe move on to whatever the latest edition is of the Lapidus.
I figured, but I'm not actually picky.
Bautier is definitely a much more awkward fit than Brown for T&H, which is very much an art-focused publisher.
The Hourani is good. Unfortunately it may be as dated as my knowledge of modern Middle Eastern history as I also stopped keeping current around 200-2001.
The Hourani is good. Unfortunately it may be as dated as my knowledge of modern Middle Eastern history as I also stopped keeping current around 200-2001.
My knowledge of double posting on the other hand is very up-to-date.
As long as you have your priorities straight.
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The pope allowed Andrew to consecrate a bastard as bishop of the 'new plantation', since nobody else wanted the job. It was said to be more likely to entail martyrdom than earthly honours.
Turkey. Damn. Damn. Damn.
Brexit. Trump. Turkey. I don't like the way this has been going one bit.
Dodged a bullet in the Netherlands and Austria but still....
Turkey looks like seriously bad news. What is the matter with people?
It's really fucking close.
So much like Brexit. Let's base the future of the country and the lives of millions on a 51/49% split. Madness. Sheer madness.
Its' no way to run a planet, that's for sure.
Is there any confidence in the election process there at all at this point?
132 Good question, there was some last minute decision to allow unsealed ballots, so no.
133 OTOH that has me thinking she may win again so maybe not so cheery after all.
I enjoyed the Hourani too, having no expertise of my own against
which to judge it.
Book-wise I keep thinking about lw's "it is possible to lead a good life in bad times" and want to read up on China, a very weak area for me. While I wait for interlibrary loan on the Zhou Mengfu book, anyone happen to have recommendations for others? I'm interested in the Yuan but also other bad times (Sixteen Kingdoms, An Lushan, the Tang collapse), especially from a cultural/arts perspective though political blow-by-blow is ok too.
136: Mark Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants is fascinating, but it's ecology and agriculture.
Also Spence, God's Chinese Son, about the Taiping Rebellion. Not so good though.
Spence's The Search for Modern China, on the other hand, is stellar, and covers plenty of turmoil.
Thread on different subject now, but my weekly but my ongoing stance continues to be that we are in a desperate race which escalated last week with Trump becoming more familiar with his military toys.
Latest "acute" WTF is Stephen Miller (the dead-faced motherfucker who they briefly put on TV after Kellyanne had lost her shine) weaseling his way in with the nepotocrats:
The 31-year-old speechwriter is now working closely with Kushner's Office of American Innovation, as well as on family leave, child care and women's issues with Kushner's wife, Ivanka Trump, according to several people involved.
Apparently there's always another white nationalist Steve in the banana stand.
137: Oh, thanks for the reminder; lurid read Retreat of the Elephants back when, and has a lot of good to say.
Here's a moment: Chris Arnande and JD Vance together in a McDonald's in Portsmouth, Ohio.
Maka America throw up in its mouth again.
I am proud to say I don't know who either of those people is.
Quick academic bleg:
I submitted an article to a journal yesterday at 4 pm, and this morning at 7 am, I received an edited version from the editor, fixing minor bits of sloppiness (e.g., "you cite A as using X term, but they borrowed it from B, so you need to cite B," or "you use [Y technical term] but isn't it really [Y' technical term]?"), as well as some nitpicky formatting stuff. He's asked me to clean these bits up before sending it for peer review. Is this a standard practice at journals?
The journal was founded by one of my committee members and the editor is a former student of his, so it's highly probably there's an element of nepotism involved, but I'm not sure to what degree.
Any journal with such rapid turnaround times is self-evidently disreputable.
Is this a standard practice at journals?
It sounds a bit cosy and insider-ish, sure, but it doesn't mean it's disreputable. I think you should make the changes and see your article published. You can worry later about corruption in the academy or whatever the f*ck, just get yourself published in the first instance.
I'm glad to hear it's nepotism, and not that my paper sucks so much it has to be cleaned up before it can be sent for peer review (not that that can't be the case as well.)
Also, half the "you need to cite X" are places where I used jargon coined by the editor but didn't directly cite him. (In retrospect, I feel like a bit of a chump because I should have predicted that he would want me to cite him there.)
Fucking citations. Is it not enough to sprinkle them at random through the paper?
150
Apparently not.
I realized the journal is sort of in the corner where my discipline meets analytic philosophy, so you have that level of pedantic commitment to precision on all levels. (E.g. This guy also copy edited my works cited list, making notes where I forgot the page numbers for book chapters in edited volumes. I figured that was the sort of thing some underpaid grad student would be made to do after the thing had been accepted for publication).
While we're doing truth-in-article-writing, the way most people do references is to write what you already know then go back and fill in the reference, right? It's not like you're sitting there with a stack of references as you write and only writing a statement if you have the reference in front of you? Aside from specific detailed facts or figures, I'm guessing most references are either a "everyone in the field knows this, here are some reviews that say so" or "I know someone made this claim that I read so I'll state it and flag to put in the exact reference later."
152: That's certainly my impression from reading scholarly articles. I have no experience writing them, though.
144: speaking as an outsider, it sounds like you've got a really good editor there. Send him a thank you note.
154
Yeah, it's impressive. And some of what I thought were minor quibbles in citation actually led me down a rabbit hole of sourcing that actually helped me to clarify some theoretical points and make them better/more accurate, which is the sign of a good editor.
The only downside is I feel I need to demonstrate a similar turnaround time, so it's 5 am and I've just spent all night working on the paper.
152
That's mainly how I write. Sometimes if I know someone has a definition I want to cite, I'll look it up while I write, but usually I'll write the broad strokes and then add detail later. If I know the text I'm citing is very dense or confusing, I might pull it out to make sure I've got the argument or terminology correct.
Lots of times I'll rely on previous work, so, drawing citations from an earlier thing I've written. This has the danger of continuing or amplifying previous mistakes, especially if the earlier thing was less formal and my citations were a bit sloppier (e.g. dissertation chapter rough draft vs. journal article).
Teutonic Knights above as in Sienkiewicz, or someone else?
I wonder if I could find my old syllabus (such as it was) from the seminar I took on the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Hm.
Two of my managers neither of whom has direct authority over the other are feuding.
If you don't like Malcolm Gladwell you may like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaTRrKOVYng
OT: Watching Werner Herzog documentary because there's no good way I can excuse showing "Tropic Thunder" to a ten year old.
Somebody who didn't even own a pencil could draw animals much better than I can.
I think we should start a movement to reintroduce the rhinoceros into France in honor of the cave-drawing people.
Mossy, thank you. I love his Trilogy, but I kinda bounced of The Teutonic Knights the last time I tried.
Yes, as in I'm reading about the Knights referred to by Sienkiewicz. I'm reading Christiansen.
I can't imagine why anyone would think of recommending Polish historical fiction in a politics thread.
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