What I've Been Reading: Nonfiction

[mrissa]

I think I'm staying on hiatus from novel_gazing for awhile, but one of the things that means is that I haven't talked much about what I'm reading except in tiny bits and pieces, as it free-associates to something else. And I've just finished two more library books this morning, so it seems like time.

John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. Oh my goodness, this was lovely. Wallowing in Greek, for one thing. For another, I conceived of a personal affection for the author by the time I read the epilogue. You could just hear the exasperated impatience in his voice. The epilogue essentially said, "Look, you can argue that we shouldn't do this now. But you can't argue that no one ever did it before, because it says right here." He also has a firm grasp on things like how we don't know private behavior from public relationship, necessarily -- for any combination of genders, though, and he gets that part right. Read it, read it, read it. It's just boggling.

Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Celebration, U.S.A.. The subtitle of this one is something like "Living in Disney's Brave New Town." It was...a bit alarming, actually, what people would say to these writers even knowing that they were writing a book about life in that town. The groupthink and the willingness to totally surrender not just civil liberties but the later possibility thereof -- uff da. On the other hand, some of the things people were up in arms about are by no means unique to Celebration, FL. Not all neighborhoods have CCRs (codes, covenants, and restrictions -- although not all neighborhoods have Credence Clearwater Revival, either, I'd imagine), but many do. Agreeing that people will paint their houses within a certain color palette is one of the reasonable choices people can voluntarily make, and the fact that they had little to no say in their own public school system seemed like a source of a lot more concern than whether they could paint their house violet. And I say that as a person who chose a neighborhood where we could paint our house violet.

Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. Scary and important and scary. There were long, extensively footnoted chapters on different aspects of this problem in different regions, but there were truly global references. Laurie Garrett is one of those authors I will read no matter what she chooses to write about next.

Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People. wshaffer recommended this one many moons ago. It's about Burma/Myanmar and about the author's experiences there, compared and contrasted with another British man's experiences a century or so earlier. Not nearly long enough -- or rather, I'd like a sequel. Also it may have given me an epigraph for a section of Sampo. I haven't decided yet. I'll have to think over whether I want to find epigraphs for all the sections or not. Epigraphs are A Lot Of Trouble, different kinds of trouble whether you find them before or after the main writing of the book. (And no, Sampo will not feature a trip to Burma/Myanmar. It stays put in Finland, mostly.)

Ted Morgan, Reds. The subtitle on this one was something about McCarthyism, but Morgan defined McCarthyism in such a way that we were halfway through the book before McCarthy was even doing anything. But I suppose "idiotic and immoral ways to fight communism" is much more of a mouthful. Not a cheerful book, either, and interesting but often just grazing the edges of the things that actually interested me.

Ethel Johnston Phelps, The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World. I classify folktale collections as "nonfiction" if the editors thereof are writing them more as "look, here's a study of what stories people told" than as "here's a good story, you should read it!" I intended to use the Finnish stuff in this (like the title story) to triangulate how much Phelps had changed the stories to make them more suitably feminist, but mostly she hadn't. My problem was more with dumbing down certain bits for an Anglophone audience. Sure, some of you might have trouble pronouncing Lemminkainen, but it's worth the trouble to not rename him Bob. As you know, Bob, not everybody is named Bob. Everyone clear on that? Good. Move on with your lives.

Maureen Waller, Ungrateful Daughters. This dealt with Mary II and Anne more personally than my time in Eric's Tudor and Stuart history class did, and that was probably a good thing. Its organization was...not to my taste, let's say. For several chapters in the early part of the book, Waller was attempting to go with a chapter per major figure in the story rather than a chronological narrative -- but she kept having to talk about the other major figures anyway, as they interrelated, and so it felt more like pointless bouncing from my perspective.

From that history class with Eric, I'm a good deal more interested in the Stuarts than in the Tudors, I think because I feel -- wrongly -- that the Tudors are more amply covered in spec fic. I don't know of much dealing with the reign of Henry VII, though, nor with the chewy gristly parts of Reformation England. But I think I can just wave airily at Bear and say, "Go to, dear," and muddle around in the romantic-repulsive-wrong-wrong-wrong period. Sort of.

The problem with history and geography -- and science -- and literature, if it comes to that, and the rest of art -- the world, really -- is that everything touches. (<--voice of a small child whose peas are in the gravy against her will) And I'm not disinterested in enough stuff. So I read Celebration, U.S.A., and not only do I want more stuff about that particular social experiment, my brain wraps it up with some of the motivations that led people to utopian communes in the 19th century, and with earlier suburban experiments, and it all rattles and sticks and jostles other things loose, and there's not enough time to read it all.

Also, does anybody know of a utopian or semi-utopian social experiment that appealed or appeals to large numbers of racial-ethnic minorities? The reasons why most such experiments didn't or don't appeal seem abundant (and, frankly, sensible on the part of the racial-ethnic minority groups in question). I was just wondering if anybody had managed to get past those reasons in the planning of their particular corner of utopia.

Comments

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

The question I'd want to ask the Celebration people would pretty much be: was your last wealthy suburb racially diverse? And you're different how? (Because what you quote makes me think that "black people" are going on the list with "good schools" and "nice houses" and "well-designed lots that encourage neighborliness"--things you design in, not people who shape the town.)

More theoretically, in my readings about utopias I tend to see two things: a financial requirement that rules out the working class, and an emphasis on community that leads planners to want a core group of people who are like each other. You have a really rigorous codification of values, and that's going to make those values both explicit and privileged. Some of those values will be so arbitrarily cultural that they'll end up being "white suburban values". And that's not just racial, either; most planned suburbs require lot sizes that make me, as a northeastern carless city girl, kind of creeped out.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Celebration, U.S.A. authors were pretty clear on the financial requirements. But they were seeing people dropping their lives to move to Celebration from all over the US -- but only white people. They were confused as to why this might be. I am not.

The lot sizes in Celebration are not at all typical of "planned suburbs," though: they're doing the New Urbanism thing. Sort of. They seem utterly un-self-conscious about claiming to be an alternative to suburban sprawl -- while not having a hardware store or a barber shop/hair salon in town. If most of the people in your enclave have to drive for basic services and to do their jobs, you haven't created an alternative to suburban sprawl, you have created more suburban sprawl.

I'm just wondering if anybody who says they want their perfect community to include racial-ethnic diversity has actually managed it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, and: Celebration's planners really thought they were designing in housing for a variety of income levels. They had apartments, townhouses, and three sizes of house. But the apartments were too expensive for the teachers in the Celebration School to live in, so you can judge for yourself how varied the income levels really were. It's more the "we have apartments for the single guy who runs the antiques and restorations shop!" level of economic diversity than "we have apartments for the janitors at town hall" level.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am interested in that. Thank you!

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Rev. Jim Jones too, I'm afraid.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Also, if you do aim for inclusivity, and incorporate really nice housing for the working classes, what happens is the middle class buy them up and community turns into enclave of privilege Hampstead Garden Suburb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampstead_Garden_Suburb). I notice it now has a significant Jewish population, but this article doesn't say anything about whether this was historically the case.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

But they were seeing people dropping their lives to move to Celebration from all over the US -- but only white people. They were confused as to why this might be. I am not.

Ah, that specific point is really interesting. Because to leave everything, that says you feel there's something profoundly wrong with where you are, in some very specific way that's addressed by the new community. That's something I wasn't even thinking about, how you have to all be defining the problem in the same way before you even get to the question of how you solve it. I visited Celebration once, when I was at a conference in that part of Florida. It just looked like...nothing. I stood on Main Street and it was pretty but as you say, it didn't have (what I think of as) the essentials of a real town. (Better example than my lot size, though you and I are optimizing for the same thing, I expect.) I guess I couldn't understand what problem it was solving.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Paolo Soleri's arcology ideas were, at least in theory, geared around affordability; he was aware that one problem with utopian schemes is that they tend not to be for the poor. His solution was to try to think compact, to put a lot of things in a small space.

(Soleri is alive but I have reasons for putting his major ideas in past tense.)

Unfortunately affordability is one of the things which bit him in the ass, I think. The amount of money needed to build Arcosanti in anything like a reasonable timespan would have meant that he'd have had to get his costs back somewhere else, probably from the people who wanted to live there. Instead - and also partially because Soleri is someone for whom the fun ends when the design phase is over - the construction has trickled along, will surely never be finished or even anywhere near complete, and the people who do live at Arcosanti are trying to make a living from tourism events and the sale of Soleri-designed wind chimes.

This is germane, even if you don't consider his arcologies a utopian idea, because whenever I read about utopias and planned communities, even fictional ones, I think, "Wow, this looks expensive." Who pays for the initial outlay of Walden Two and how do they make it back? (And Skinner's - being basically a politically informed kibbutz - was one of the more plausible ones.)

Actually, the kibbutzim are important here, now I think on it, because they are generally occupied by people who are fairly poor, although collectively some of the farms are quite prosperous. Are they utopian? They are definitely planned communities.

I realize I'm thinking in terms of money and not race/ethnicity (do pardon my woolgathering), and I am not sure whether that connection is a strong one here, but I don't think it's irrelevant either. If I had to answer the question exactly the way you asked it, I would say "no," but I don't think it's impossible. What I'm getting at is that white, pie-in-the-sky utopias are dreamed up by white, pie-in-the-sky thinkers, and to find something that is more ethnically and racially forgiving you have to go look at projects which are both more achievable and more modest - but also less classically "utopian."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Actually, Celebration, U.S.A. does a pretty good job of answering what problems people hoped to solve by moving there. There's a certain disdain in it for people who thought Disney could manage their lives the way it did their vacations (but what else was Disney selling, really?), but it hit on some other points with more respect. Celebration had five core values defined (see here (http://www.celebrationfl.com/community/community.html) for their publicist-speak version of it -- although the implementation has changed a fair amount since the initial discussions), and they were all aimed at resurrecting what the designers and residents thought were the good features of a small American town prior to WWII -- something like the SCA version of it, was I think the goal. "Times when people knew their neighbors," etc.

Is it any wonder that most racial-ethnic minorities in this country said, "Return to the values of 19th and early 20th century American small towns? Golly! Thanks but no thanks!" Even without that impetus, I wouldn't find it particularly appealing. Growing up as close to Ralston as I did rubbed all the shine off of "traditional small town life" for me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Or to put it another way: I think that the atomization of American life is a lot less of a problem than many people do. I like being being able to socialize with people I have things in common with rather than whoever happened to buy the next house over. I like having my neighbors leave us alone instead of peering into all the details of our private lives. Etc.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, this was noted in Celebration, U.S.A., too: that while the price points were initially set at various levels, middle-class people wanted to live there enough to push the prices up, even for a one-bedroom apartment.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's relevant, actually.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So do "white" and "pie-in-the-sky" go together inherently, rather than "middle-class" and "pie-in-the sky"? If so, are parts of the world without a white middle-class free of utopianism, and why would that be? If not, do other middle-classes come up with utopian notions for their own locales?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

The epilogue essentially said, "Look, you can argue that we shouldn't do this now. But you can't argue that no one ever did it before, because it says right here."

Except that it doesn't. I'm neither religious nor against same-sex marriage, but the ritual Boswell discusses isn't a form of marriage, but a form of spiritual "blood brothering" for lack of a better term. (That ritual, unlike Orthodox marriage rituals, lacks betrothal and crowning, which are the essential witch-doctory tools for turning two souls into one, or marriage.) It's all oog-booga at any rate, but one needs to confront history, not rewrite it, to achieve social change.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Have you read the book so that this is just the summary of your disagreements, or is this your disagreement with the summary or some sub-section? Because he discusses more than one, and he discusses the distinctions in language from blood-brothering, and also he discusses the times when blood-brothering and socially recognized homosexual relationships use similar terminology, so "it was a blood-brother ceremony" and "it was the legal union of two people of the same sex" aren't really antithetical.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Summary of the disagreements stated generally. There are actually many types of blood-brothering (the church came late to getting in on the blood-brothering action; it was a way for tribes to operate and make deals outside of the church, and the church wanted its cut) so the weakness is Boswell's, when he says that there is something in the ritual which makes it NOT blood-brothering by comparing it to other forms of the same. I could dig up the book again, reread (I read it 12 years ago, when it came out) and come back to you in a week with more than a summary if you're truly that interested.

You're right that "blood-brother ceremony" and "legal union of two people of the same sex" aren't antithetical, but it is also true that "legal union of two people of the same sex" and "gay marriage, given the stamp of mafia church approval" aren't synonymous. There is more than one type of union, and more than one reason for people to engage in such a union. And there are only a few things a church will rubber stamp.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I thought Boswell was pretty careful to note that 1) the church(es) would not have labeled these marriages, even though they had many similar features in ritual and in function; and 2) it didn't mean that the church had approved any particular sexual behaviors between the participants, and we didn't know whether such behaviors existed in all or even most such unions. But you needn't dig it up for finer points of discussion; I'm pretty sure you have better things to do with books that are new to you.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Excellent questions. I am cynical enough to wonder if there truly ARE other middle classes; the existence of a middle class strikes me as a G8 phenomenon (and an endangered one in this country to boot). But I concede bias. Part of my brain wants to say nastily, "sure, this is a white phenomenon because poor black people (for example) do not have the time or energy to dream of these things, they're too busy struggling to survive" - that utopianism, in short, is a luxury of a privileged and somewhat clueless class.

I offer you the traditional grain of salt.

It does strike me that when utopianism has struck, say, poor parts of the African continent it has either been brought in by a crusader (eg Father Divine) or someone with some other kind of agenda (Jim Jones). This feels to me like a confirmation that if you are dirt poor in Uganda you don't want a utopia, just food shelter clothing will do, thanks much. But, again. Salt. Proffered copiously.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's a feature of specifically what we call utopian? I took a class on mostly-medieval utopias a couple of years back, and that's a very specific European literary history geared to specific European ideals. So that would get you white. But of course anyone writing in the 12th-17th centuries would be at least middle-class as far as that was meaningful.

I realize you're talking about planned communities rather than simply literary genre, but I think they inform each other very strongly. They're an ideal of the powerful, the people who believe that they can productively isolate themselves from the outside world and create their own lives. That's a belief that you're not going to find among minority groups, by definition. So maybe you would have to look at other countries.

And, you know, thinking about that: look at ideological revolutionary leaders/philosophies/movements. (The literary history of utopias is incredibly violent, and I think maybe it has to be.)

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I should note (can't edit) that there are plenty of poor white people too. Let me try more clearly. Here's the thesis, restated, plus salt:

- If you are poor you do not have time for utopias.

- When utopias have been attempted among the poor, they have been brought in by someone who is somewhat higher up than they are on the income/means ladder (the crusader). [Exception for possible counterargument: Kibbutzim.]

- In America and industrialized European nations, it is far more likely that a white, European/Caucasian person will be above poverty levels than someone of another race. So this muddies the water and causes me to associate the utopian ideas primarily with white people, but on analysis I think it's really a money or class issue plain and simple.

So, by this theory, if there were a place with, say, a substantial black middle class with the time and energy for pie in the sky, then there would probably be some pie in the sky among them.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Oh! I remember that now. Yeah, that's exactly the sort of "utopia" that doesn't address the problems or provide for the needs of quite a few people. And I was already thinking about how different my ideas of privacy and community are: a good city community is one where you don't get too close to your neighbors, where everyone understands the form of that relationship.

(I have this debate all the time with people from other regions or town sizes. "No one says hello on the subway?" "Why would you say hello to strangers? They're just trying to get to work in the morning, for crying out loud.")

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest that he wasn't nearly careful enough, as his book is cited time and again as proof that, "Aha, gays married under the pre-schism church and, later, in the East!" I think the book is fairly clearly an intervention into the debates of the mid-1990s.

Coming in with the chorus

[zalena.livejournal.com]

We have a New Urbanist development in Squaresville. (http://www.prospectnewtown.com) It won some big award at the Cooper Hewitt design biennial several years ago. It has the same problems you mention above, it is expensive, and it does not have access to ordinary goods and services. It's also kind of cramped. Since the idea is to have people NOT drive, but people must drive to get access to goods and services, there are a lot of cars (and big ones, at that) crammed into spaces not designed for them.

Also funny is that it is designed to mesh with old neighborhoods in Squaresville, which means they copied the plans of old Sears Roebuck mail order homes to make it look "old timey." The irony of that gets me every time I go to "Prospect" for the only truly good thing they have in their neighborhood: some of the best ribs I've ever had this side of the Mason-Dixon line.

(The restaurant has also suffered in its location since no one wants people drinking on the patio after 9 PM.)

Of course, don't get me started on one of my favorite topics of hate/envy: the yoga moms that live there.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Theres's actually a pretty significant middle class in developed Asian countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and while the PRC's middle class isn't exactly a large percentage of the population, it's numerically quite large. A certain kind of backwards-looking Confucian utopianism is quite common in those societies too.

That said, I suspect that the particular *brand* of small-town utopianism exhibited in the creation of Celebration is specific to the white middle class of the U.S., as very few non-white people are going to want to go back to a system of community relations that predates the civil rights movement...

minority Utopias

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

In a sense, aren't Native American communities that are trying to hold on to their tribal culture and language a form of Utopia? Or the Sea Island Gullah communities off South Carolina?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's obviously a social interaction with lots of gray areas, and I'm glad different people can find their comfort zones in different places.

It really bothered me that to make eye contact and smile on BART was tantamount to a pickup line. It bothered me not to have pleasant chat with a grocery clerk that didn't go into the intimate details of our lives. It bothered me that timprov and I went to the same coffeehouse for a year and a half and the baristas didn't ever start to recognize us. But I recognize that all of those things are personal preferences, not moral absolutes -- and it would also bother me if everyone on BART had had to converse with me at length about what I was reading, or if the baristas had started asking personal questions the first time we went in.

timprov teases me because I have personal relationships with our grocery clerk and bagger, but I'm in there at least once a week, and two points are key for me: the relationships are limited, and they developed slowly. It's a "good neighbor" kind of relationship, and we all understand its boundaries.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Confucian utopianism! Oh my. I should look into that.

What amazes me is the number of women who want to go back to a system of community relations that predates the civil rights movement. Of course, a fair number of the communities I've read about don't seem to realize how much those community relations depended on women being home and available for last-minute community stuff. And lo and behold, living in the right kind of houses in the right kind of neighborhood doesn't mean that these institutions spring up without people putting in the work. Astonishing. Who'da guessed.

Re: Coming in with the chorus

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, "Let's simultaneously discourage and require cars!" Ahhh, America.

Re: minority Utopias

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Maybe. I'm not sure. My current guess is that some people within those communities treat them as utopian experiments, and others treat them as though they were practical, flawed communities already in progress, simply preferred to other current existing structures.

[(Anonymous)]

Reading the comments on utopian societies in minority communities made me think about Zimbabwe and what's going on there. From what I understand, it was started as an ideal on how to end poverty and get back to the wonderful way things were x number of years ago, before the white man came and subjugated the black man.

Heathah