Link to a review by Michael Hudson of the book Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (2016) by William Goetzmann:
“A Travesty of Financial History: Bank Lobbyists will Applaud”
Category: Books
Michael Hudson – Killing the Host | Review
Michael Hudson – Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy (ISLET/CounterPunch 2015)
First off, it must be said that Michael Hudson offers one of the most astute conclusions about the cause of recent financial troubles in the United States (post-2007). The crux of his book Killing the Host is to explore the coded language used to push a particular political agenda under the guise of “objective” economic theories. The most compelling sections of the book are the play-by-play histories of actions by politicians and financial technocrats. He details how a pervasive attitude of “there is no alternative” (TINA) covers up pro-banking, pro-finance, anti-labor, anti-democratic policies (this explanation mirrors Jacques Lacan‘s notion of “university discourse”). He points to others who have reached the same conclusion, and some data (albeit a minimal amount of data) that policies alleged by their backers to produce one result actually achieve another. Hudson is at his sharpest when he calls out the peddlers of these theories as frauds, and occasionally as simply “useful idiots”.
The scariest aspects of the entire narrative is how much power is concentrated in the hands of so few. It is sort of common for progressives to criticize the prospects for voting to impact progressive causes. Howard Zinn, Robert S. Borden, Jean-Paul Sartre and others have made various claims to that effect. Yet Hudson’s book gives lie to that. For example, in the most gripping sections of the book, he reveals the enormous power that President Obama and his Treasury guy Tim Geithner (plus a handful of other close operatives) wielded after the 2007-08 U.S. financial crash. The entire economy and that of generations to come was wrecked by these few actors. Wait, read that last sentence again.
Unfortunately, this ends up being the least of Hudson’s recent books. Many of the chapters are brief summaries of things Hudson has written about elsewhere. The first part of the book discussing the history of classical economics is mostly subject matter covered in his Trade, Development and Foreign Debt. He also repeats his discussions of the role of debt (and “debt deflation”) that are explained more fully in The Bubble and Beyond. Later in the book he really extends himself to the limits of economics as such, but does not venture far enough to support his normative claims, which always seem intentionally withheld. Much of Hudson’s argument is that the financial industry has concealed or obfuscated accurate information about its actions and has captured regulatory apparatuses to prevent oversight and accountability. But doesn’t that call for an analysis based in political science, or perhaps sociology? When he talks about regulatory capture, the thing is he doesn’t really provide much evidence. He could cite the work of, say, Thomas Ferguson, to explain the “right turn” in politics in the neoliberal era, or any number of other non-economic scholars. The problem for the book is that Hudson will write a chapter detailing economic issues, or perhaps histories of political dealings. Then the chapter concludes with explanations that were not explored in that chapter. That approach is repeated throughout the book. For example, chapter 9 makes the comment, “Television news shows and the printed press tend to treat debt and prospects of defaults as a downer story that loses audience interest compared to the success stories of financial celebrities.” This seems plausible, but why? It highlights the crux of the problem with this book, in that it pushes the questions of financial exploitation to essentially political decisions made outside the realm of economics as such. Hudson tends to drop one-liners to explain why journalists offer no bulwark against this, without really bothering to support those theories. Why exactly do journalists side with the financial industry rather than provide useful information for readers? People like Robert McChesney, Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger have offered theories (Pilger appropriately calls some of them “Vichy journalists”). But readers of Killing Host are left guessing as to which theory or evidence Hudson bases his conclusions on — the evidence he gathers in each chapter tends to stop well short of substantiating his broader and more interesting conclusions. So time and again the deepest questions are simply outside his scope of expertise — or rely on a kind of “preaching to the choir” attitude that presupposes that readers agree with him on the (unstated) ideological level.
In chapter 25 Hudson rails against U.S. district Judge Thomas Griesa regarding Argentina’s sovereign debt crisis. The issue is whether a minority group of bondholders of sovereign debt can be bound by an agreement of a supermajority. This is one of the low points of the book. Hudson doesn’t cite primary authority, mostly secondary sources from the financial press. This hints that he perhaps is misinterpreting the legal rulings (or relying on journalists who misinterpret the rulings). But in any event, he strongly implies a kind of sinister judicial intervention into geopolitics that is preposterous — and backed by no evidence, other than a cursory discussion of how Judge Griesa reached a conclusion he and some others disagree with. Not to defend Griesa’s ruling necessarily, but Hudson offers little more than ad hominem attacks and normative policy gripes, while feigning to be just delivering the facts.
Another example is in chapter 2, where he writes, “Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) wrote that bankers and tradesmen should earn enough to support their families in a manner appropriate for their station, including enough to give to charity and pay taxes.” (Hudson provides no cite to attribute that position to anything particular in Aquinas’ writings). Isn’t the entire question, though, what is bankers’ proper “station”? The political question at hand is that the finance sector clearly thinks its station is orders of magnitude above that of other occupations and economic sectors. Hudson thinks otherwise. But why? The answer, of course, comes from Hudson’s ideology. As much as he rails against bankers and their political allies as ideologues, Hudson is one too! Of course, his position is one that is based much more on equality and fair dealing. But he mostly takes those points as self-evident.
The piece that is largely missing from Killing the Host is the sort of stuff that sociologist Luc Boltanski has written about extensively and explicitly. And one can raise the same concerns that people have raised about Boltanski’s analysis: “Is it really possible to move beyond the particular cities and worlds to see them from without from a kind of objectivist no-where perspective as the authors try to do?” Replace “cities and worlds” with “economic doctrines” and read “authors” in the singular, and this is precisely the theoretical difficulty presented by Killing the Host. Hudson repeatedly lambasts bankers/financiers as if they are amoral frauds, but bankers and financiers don’t see themselves that way at all. The key is the way Hudson implicitly defines what constitutes public good. The problem is that we only get that moral judgment implicitly, not explicitly in his book.
Hudson has an awareness of socialist theory, but writes as if it can be applied in an analysis without an endorsement of socialist ends. One online reviewer said, “There is a leaning towards socialist values that I do not condone . . . .” It is of course irrelevant what that reviewer does or does not condone, but Prof. Hudson ultimately is preaching to the choir when he makes no real argument as to why socialist perspectives offer more than right-wing neo-feudal ones.
Consider this argument from 1919:
“Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of women, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited.”
That was a quote from Lenin. It is a form of the same argument Hudson makes. So is Hudson a Leninist? The introduction suggests that maybe he is. On the other hand, further into the book he alternates between talking favorably about economic policies that make nations “competitive” and criticizing disproportionate power and inequalities. This comes closer to socialist nationalism, and maybe the moderate socialism or civic nationalism of John Stuart Mill (or maybe even Alec Nove). Which is it then? He presents many of these concepts in a way that is never resolved in the book. Lenin, of course, said that there must be a global socialist revolution to achieve radical egalitarianism across borders. That is a resolution. But fostering national competitiveness like in the protectionist school of economics simply privileges some inequalities (so long as they are cross-border) over others, and ignores the threats posed by conflict between nation states. We might even start to call him the “Renegade” Hudson here, due to the ways such incongruous positions resemble those of Karl Kautsky (who turned Marx into a common liberal in Lenin’s eyes).
Furthermore, Hudson’s overarching metaphor about financial “parasites” who are “killing the host” ends up being completely incongruous with his most incisive economic critiques. Consider this dichotomy:
“for a populist, the cause of the troubles is ultimately never the system as such but the intruder who corrupted it (financial manipulators, not necessarily capitalists, and so on); not a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such but an element that doesn’t play its role within the structure properly. For a Marxist, on the contrary (as for a Freudian), the pathological (deviating misbehavior of some elements) is the symptom of the normal, an indicator of what is wrong in the very structure that is threatened with ‘pathological’ outbursts. For Marx, economic crises are the key to understanding the ‘normal’ functioning of capitalism; for Freud, the pathological phenomena such as hysterical outbursts provide the key to the constitution (and hidden antagonisms that sustain the functioning) of a ‘normal’ subject.” In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) (p. 279).
“let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.” “Occupy Wall Street: What Is to be Done Next?”
Doesn’t Hudson offer what looks like a socialist/Marxist/Leninist critique of the overall economic system as such (capitalism), but then abandon that critique in the end to rail against the corrupting financial intruders — at most a corrupt/parasitic sub-system or isolated glitch within an otherwise sound overall system? Hudson seems like yet another writer unwilling to follow his analysis through, instead softening and undermining it to avoid appearing like an advocate of socialist/communist policies. This looks like left populism, in that “left populism’s appeal rests mainly on a moral conception of the economy — pitting producers against parasites — rather than on a radical repudiation of capitalism itself.”
In chapter 13 he provides a valuable history of the TARP bailout program following the 2007-08 financial crash. However, when discussing the government refusal to turn Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into public companies, he says, “This was euphemized as saving the economy from ‘socialism.'” The ironic quotes are Hudson’s, and they are the crux of the problem. Wouldn’t public ownership precisely be socialism? In other words, this is no euphemism. Hudson is advocating socialist solutions to some degree, but he doesn’t want to come out and admit it. In complete contrast, take
So long as Hudson dodges the questions of political ideology, his arguments will seem just as ideologically limited as those of the finance sector he criticizes. Though, in fairness, he is arguing for policies that would favor a larger segment of the world’s population than the policies of neoliberalism. He tries to defend Enlightenment-era rationalism against a counter-enlightenment view that has come to dominate. Hudson takes an explicitly broader view than most economists, but not that much broader. He likes to refer to the viability of a “mixed economy”. However, the precise balance of the so-called “mixed” economy he endorses is not spelled out in any meaningful way — it is simply somewhere in the vast middle ground between the most extreme ends of a spectrum. Such vagueness is troubling.
So, while it is worth repeating that Hudson is one of the economists most worth reading today, Killing the Host is a hastily argued work with sections of profound impact and others that are scarcely more than drivel in the mold of the “academic aristocrat” tradition. A primary limitation is the book’s oscillation between theory and observation, without those two being closely matched — there is theory offered without supporting factual observations and observations that seem offered in support of theories not outlined in the book. If the book was reduced to the just the historical/journalistic sections on the chicanery of Tim Geithner and the TARP bailouts, this book would have been better. As it stands, this is kind of minor footnote at best among Hudson’s books. Read his magnificent Super Imperialism (a modern classic), or even Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (quite a bit drier) or The Bubble and Beyond (good if sloppy) instead.
Carl Wilson – Let’s Talk About Love
Carl Wilson – Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (33 1/3 #52) (Continuum 2007)
Carl Wilson tackles Céline Dion‘s album Let’s Talk About Love. His approach is intriguing, based mostly upon the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (particularly as set forth in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste). In essence, Wilson asks whether his distaste for her music is really a way to distinguish himself from her fan base. While the basic premise of the book is worth reading about, Wilson stumbles a bit when going about applying the theory to the work of Céline Dion. For one, Bourdieu was insistent that the point of his analytic framework was to expose systems of domination in order to permit them to be challenged. Wilson, though, eschews that sort of purpose. He notes that aspect of Bourdieu’s theory but glosses over it in his own analysis. He instead ponders endlessly how her fame doesn’t make sense. But it does! The essence is that she supports modes of domination, providing a convenient coping mechanism for the victims of domination without challenging the oppression by the powerful. She is therefore supported and promoted by those who benefit from that domination (key to her having a huge Las Vegas show). Wilson skirts this issue. Take this passage concerning her penchant for sentimentality:
“Her songs are often about the struggle of sustaining an emotional reality, about fidelity, faith, bonding and survival — continuity, that is, in the destabilizing flux of late capitalism. While business and rebel-schmaltz stars alike tout self-realization, social negation and the delegitimation of traditional values, Céline’s music (like Nashville country) tends to prioritize ‘recognition and community,’ connection and solidarity. Granted, she also promotes overwork, ambition and luxury, which is to say she’s still a pop star. But in that matrix, sentimentality might be her greatest virtue.” (p. 127).
Wilson is right that the palliative aspect of her sentimentality can be seen as a redeeming quality, but in positively noting that perspective he deflects attention from who benefits from it. He recounts an amusing anecdote about how Jamaican gangsters often played her music loudly. Isn’t the core of gangsterism the direct, physical expression of domination, just as Céline’s music is a facilitator of it through the more subtle economic and political mechanisms of late capitalism? Gangsters liking it makes perfect sense when ideological alignment is considered.
There are many perspectives on Céline’s music that Wilson never quite considers. He comes close for some. He talks about how Céline appeals mostly to people who make use of her music, for weddings, events, and as the soundscape of life, not people (like professional critic Wilson) who scrutinize and analyze it. Joe Boyd in his memoir White Bicycles, wrote about how in the 1960s folk music scene there was a divide between those like archivist Alan Lomax who pursued “gregarious” music meant for social events — sing-alongs and such — and record collectors more interested in virtuoso performers. This is a very similar divide between Céline’s fans and Wilson and his cohorts. But he does not really go there in the book. Also, could it be that Céline’s music appeals to extroverts, while most music nerds are introverts? This is not to say that these other lenses are the correct ones, but rather that the way Wilson struggles to find an explanation for Céline’s appeal means that he never quite has the crucial insight that explains the divide between her fans and her many detractors. Put more simply, this is why Wilson’s approach is unscientific and superficial. He acknowledges that he lacks the funds to perform a large survey like Bourdieu (for that, look to the likes of Gerry Veenstra). He would be better off looking to the style of Thorstein Veblen, but he disses Veblen and misquotes him (flattering himself by trying to coin the phrase “conspicuous production” in a way that is already subsumed by Veblen’s original theory of “conspicuous consumption”).
There are many passages of great insight in the book. They unfortunately don’t hang together into a whole, and are offset by unfortunately blunders. For instance, Wilson contrasts Céline with the Carpenters. And yet, the Carpenters are actually credited by many with creating the genre of pop power ballads (“Goodbye to Love”) that are the core of Céline’s repertoire.
The extensive personal anecdotes that Wilson injects throughout the book are a distraction. While those sorts of things can orient a reader to the ideology and perspective of the writer, Wilson is not as candid as he claims to be (for one, he points out that he writes for leftist publications, but his endless claims about misunderstanding Céline’s music is purely centrist liberalism). The book would have been better without those digressions. It could have stood to go much further into the application of Bourdieu’s theories as well. What’s more, his eventual “review” of Let’s Talk About Love is limp and uninteresting.
In spite of its limitations, one hopes that Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste still encourages other writers to take up a similar approach to criticism. There are few more intriguing ways to look at the nature of criticism. (Actually, David Lee‘s The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field is a much more substantial book applying Bourdieu to jazz music and practice, or look to various French writers who have done this in the past).
Astra Taylor – The People’s Platform
Astra Taylor – The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books 2014)
“There is a war between the ones who say there is a war /
And the ones who say there isn’t”
Leonard Cohen, “There Is a War” from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974)
Filmmaker and sociologist Astra Taylor has written an excellent and much-needed book about Internet technology, culture and economics, critiquing the so-called “Web 2.0” phenomenon. In the beginning of the book, Taylor sets up the supposedly false dichotomy of the debate about the Internet: tech-boosterism that sees everything about the Internet as great vs. Luddite anti-technology naysayers. However the rest of the book reveals that dichotomy to be kind of a slight of hand distraction. Taylor spends most of the book talking about how mainstream discussion of the Internet and its political and economic implications tends to be framed as a debate between the political center and the political right, with positions of the political left excluded. Taylor tries to inject a leftist position. So she critiques the likes of Lawrence Lessig for advancing what amounts to a Standard Liberal Position (i.e., the political center): finding the “right” amount of inequality. Taylor, on the other hand, advances the (largely blacklisted) Standard Left Position, which seeks an egalitarian society. She sees too much in common between the liberals, the fascists, the royalists, and the libertarian right, and therefore offers a politically different perspective, one that many people probably would agree with, except that they never hear it in the mass media.
She particularly objects to the neo-feudal aspects of “Web 2.0” that are premised on a neoliberal, techno-libertarian obsession with creating tycoons and massive inequality, without a democratically-controlled government to act as a check on private power, and tries to reveal the mechanisms those boosters try to conceal. This is the essence of social science. She fits into a long line of writers from Thorstein Veblen to Peter Drahos to Nicole Aschoff. Perhaps most on point in a general sense is Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello‘s influential The New Spirit of Capitalism, where they make the argument that corporate capitalism is co-opting the empowering rhetoric of the past (the New Left 1960s especially). Aschoff explicitly cites Boltanski on this point in The New Prophets of Captial. Taylor just adopts that same argument (perhaps reinventing the wheel a bit). But Drahos’ Information Feudalism is quite apropos too.
A rather similar observation about growing neo-feudalism has been made by the economist Michael Hudson, who has noted how the “free trade” of classical economics was meant to promote an economy freed from feudal aristocracy, rentiers, and any other predatory interests who sought to siphon off wealth through special legal/social privileges, whereas the neoclassical economics of the neoliberal era seeks to set up an economy free for predatory interests to set up wealth-extracting privileges akin to setting up private tollbooths on otherwise public thoroughfares.
Taylor’s book sets out a kind of narrative that maps rather well onto Hudson’s theory. For Taylor, the problem is that (a) Internet technologies are praised for the socially beneficial possibilities they suggest, with those possibilities backed by lots (!) of paid advertising. Despite considerable media attention, (b) little attention is paid to whether there is empirical validation for the theoretical possibilities that Internet technologies suggest. It is assumed that internet technologies produce positive results without many people bothering to check. Most importantly, (c) only those internet technologies that bolster concentration of wealth and capital are supported — those who do check up on empirical circumstances and report on the disconnect between theory and reality are marginalized and ignored. This last point is crucial. Usually the internet technologies that succeed are not the ones that actually provide the benefits they suggest, but rather ones that meet the dubious criteria of venture capitalists and Wall Street, which are — quite intentionally — never listed as being socially beneficial, because they tend to be parasitic and socially corrosive. It’s a shell game. Attention is drawn to dead ends and pipe dreams while the real and often repugnant drivers of the widespread adoption of these technologies drift into the shadows, away from public view and scrutiny. Taylor re-frames the question, away from that of the mainstream media and tech-boosters (often one and the same people), and toward the vetting process that lurks in the shadows. She instead asks the great question of the ancient Roman Consul Lucius Cassius: “Qui Bono?” (“to whose benefit?”). The answer to that question is usually a small minority, often morally repugnant violators of user privacy and owners of parasitic platforms hosting content by those whose labor is exploited. In many ways, Taylor’s analysis also mirrors that of Jeffrey Reiman‘s “Pyrrhic Defeat” theory in criminology: while a Pyrrhic Victory is a victory that comes at such a great cost that it amounts to a defeat, “Pyrrhic Defeat” is a nominal “defeat” of stated objectives in which those with power to alter the system benefit from the actually-existing conditions of “defeat” (something sort of related to the notion of “gaslighting”).
One key debate involves those who want the Internet to be a free-for-all, and those who want draconian control over it. While it is unsurprisingly a small but vocal minority that adopts the draconian approach, there are flaws in the other, free-for-all argument too. Taylor cites Elinor Ostrom, Peter Linebaugh, and other defenders of the commons against those who frequently take a right-Libertarian view of the Internet as a (market-based) “commons”, pointing out that, “In reality, differing circumstances, abilities, assets, and power render some better able to take advantage of a commons than others.” (Taylor doesn’t touch on it, but Michael Hudson has again written about “free trade” theory as causing economic polarization in much the same way). Taylor suggests that having a commons is socially-beneficial but to succeed requires regulation and enforcement of democratically-determined regulations. In other words, she once again sees the mainstream debate as being between the political right and the center-right, to the exclusion of a politically left position, which she adds to the debate.
Much like Aschoff, Taylor picks apart the fundamental insistence on neo-liberal capitalism embedded in “Web 2.0.” Drawing from the writings of Alice Marwick, she notes how online “self-branding” and relentless self-promotion is really about an insistence that neo-liberal political values be internalized. Any other views are marginalized. A similar argument was taken up by Miya Tokumitsu with her book Do What You Love, exploring how the injunction to do work that you love masks promotion of inequalities, victim-blaming, and anti-labor sentiment. Or for that matter, long before the Internet era, Erich Fromm theorized a “marketing” character orientation. This topic has also been the subject of some in-depth writing on the so-called “sharing economy” subsequent to Taylor’s book.
The book is written in a “journalistic” tone, but unlike most books of that sort that rely on dubious citations (if any) and anecdote without a coherent underlying theory, The People’s Platform is much, much more informed. Yes, some of the citations are still a bit light (many are digressions rather than clear support for her statements). Perhaps the biggest issue is Taylor’s injection of her subjective perspective as an independent documentary filmmaker into the book. This proves useful, in that it allows the reader to clearly identify her own point of view, given that every writer has one (some just refuse to admit it). Mostly Taylor’s own personal narrative provides examples to illustrate concepts she develops more generally. She does an especially good job conveying the nuance of the debate over intellectual property, and especially copyrights, noting how creative workers rely on it for income, while the “Web 2.0” companies use Internet software platforms to develop audiences that are sold to advertisers without any feeling of obligation to pay a living wage — or in many cases, anything at all — to content producers whose works are distributed on those platforms. Those who want everything to be free and open tend to be those who don’t depend on such compensation to survive.
And yet, Taylor does kind of overlook an old argument of the Standard Left Position. In the Nineteenth Century, the third best-selling book in the United States was Edward Bellamy‘s Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle tale about a man who goes into a trance in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find an essentially socialist utopia. What is interesting is that in that fictional socialist utopia Bellamy suggests that novelists are not compensated. They raise their own funds to publish — though there is a job guarantee so every citizen has a right to other gainful employment in a socially useful occupation. The key difference is that Taylor assumes (without explicitly discussing it in her book) that it is socially desirable to have “professional” creators of cultural/creative works. Bellamy suggested that an ideal society should not have such full-time content creators, but instead such things should all be done on an amateur basis, albeit in a society that provides ample leisure time and guaranteed income to enable substantial self-directed work to be performed. The idea there was later echoed in W.E.B. Du Bois‘ famous assertion that all art is propaganda, as well as in the work of various Frankfurt School scholars. This is a small loose end, though, in an otherwise thorough treatment of the topic.
In terms of the suggestions for the future, Taylor (implicitly at least) draws form the likes of Richard Wolff in suggesting cooperatives online, Robert McChesney in suggesting that media delivery companies should be taxed at full market value to eliminate the advantages that their natural monopoly or quasi public utility positions give them (e.g., for exclusive broadcasting licenses), and that content producers should be directly subsidized by the government. While many books like this that critique and criticize the existing state of affairs tend to fall down by making a bunch of absurd and/or unrealistic policy recommendations, Taylor is thankfully brief and vague about specifics, but offers a multitude of general suggestions that point toward improvements that could be pursued individually or all together. They aren’t really new suggestions but they are meaningful alternatives. She does, however, stop short of suggesting that neo-liberalism or capitalism as a whole be jettisoned, even though that is implicitly (and obviously) where her arguments point.
Andrew Smolski – Drug War Capitalism: An Interview with Dawn Paley
Link to an interview of Dawn Paley, author of Drug War Capitalism (2014), conducted by Andrew Smolski:
Morris Berman – The Twilight of American Culture
Morris Berman – The Twilight of American Culture (WW. Norton & Co. 2000)
Disappointing. I ended up just skimming through a lot of this. Berman presents an interesting topic, but this feels like a five page essay spun out to book length. His analysis is pretty superficial. In describing the decline of American culture he seems to be “preaching to the choir” as they say. The best parts are his personal anecdotes about teaching experiences, but those alone don’t support his premise.
Marc J. Soares – 100 Hikes in Yosemite National Park
Marc J. Soares – 100 Hikes in Yosemite National Park (Mountaineers Books 2003)
Lacking in detail, and generally worthless other than as a list of some of the trails and directions to where they begin. The Falcon Guides book on hikes in Yosemite is superior, with elevation maps and in-depth discussions of trail difficulty and conditions.
Joe Boyd – White Bicycles
Joe Boyd – White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent’s Tail 2006)
Joe Boyd is a music and film producer, and onetime club operator. His name is all over a lot of curious music from the late 1960s and early 1970s (and less conspicuous music after that), mostly folk, folk-rock and psychedelic rock. White Bicycles is his memoir of that time. He describes a trip to Great Britain in early 1965, saying, “I loved the feeling that I was in a foreign place, and the more alien the better.” (p. 65). This works as a concise summary of his musical tastes as well. Always keen for the most exotic sounds — especially if they can also be labeled “authentic” — he was kind of a collector of musical trophy experiences. At least, that he how his memoir White Bicycles reads. He provides only the barest details of anything about his life that isn’t a brag, or used as a discrete counterweight to give a more punch to an extended brag — like the story of walking away from the rights to ABBA‘s publishing before they got huge is really an excuse to claim he was in on the band’s appeal before the rest of the world. But he certainly did rack up an impressive resume of musical acquaintances, record production credits (or co-credits), and scene caché.
As a writer, Boyd is kind of an expert con man. He has a journalist’s flair for witty one-liners and turns of phrase. He also has a deep appreciation for how the universal can be explained though isolated examples, betraying that universality in a memoir that seems to suggest (implicitly) that everything universal about the 1960s had something to do with him. It isn’t that he lies or exaggerates. The man was there for a lot of important countercultural milestones, though he should earn no credit or applause for it because anyone with the opportunities and resources that he did should have been obligated to do at least as much. For instance, he suddenly is helping manage the Newport Jazz Festival, but we read nothing about how he managed to get the job. We hear about how he stretches his resources and empty pockets when in college, though a moment’s pause might remind the reader that Boyd is in an Ivy League college in the first place, with room and board, and still able to travel and devote any earnings toward discretionary travel and musical investments.
Boyd is at his best doing hit-and-run synopses of particular artists and musical sub-cultures, from the sympathetic perspective of someone who “was there.” When it comes to autobiographical details, his accounts are thin and self-serving. There is no shortage of name-dropping. Yet that’s also the reason anyone reads this book, to find out about the seemingly unending roster of musical luminaries that crossed paths with Boyd at one point or another. But his little synopses are quite engaging, like one about the music of his teenage years:
“The years 1954 to 1956 were the great cusp, when black music was discovered by white teenagers and sold millions of records. The horrified guardians of the nation’s morals feared the underclass world it represented and the miscegenation implied in its rhythms; major record labels hated it because they didn’t understand it, putting them at a disadvantage with buccaneering independents [he mentions a few, none from the South, leaving out Sam Phillips at Sun]”. (p. 8)
He does sum up the book on a sober point about music in the 1960s:
“The atmosphere in which music flourished then had a lot to do with economics. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium. *** In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time. *** The tightening of the fiscal screws that began with the 1973 oil crisis may not have been a conspiracy to rein in this dangerous laxness, but it has certainly worked out to the advantage of the powerful. Ever since, prices have ratcheted upwards in relation to hours worked and the results of this squeeze can be seen everywhere.” (pp. 267-68).
This is all true, to a point. But your frame of reference has to be that of middle and upper-middle class white people. This book will appeal most if you are one of those too. It also must be mentioned that the way that things have changed such that the 60s experiences can’t be recreated a half-century later just happens to emphasize the rarity of Boyd’s experiences, and that privileged rarity is what he plies to his own advantage.
In the end Boyd manages to paint vivid portraits of scenes and incidents from his life. He is nothing if not articulate. Whether these portraits, and their point of view, is of interest, though, is kind of a separate issue. Boyd doesn’t emerge from the narrative as the sort of chum you are likely to find endearing. There is an elitism and off-putting self-importance to much of his chosen narrative. This is to say Boyd stops short of making any kind of existential realization that the achievements he boasts about are just as silly and arbitrary as anything else, and they stand in the way of the benign co-existence he claims to have fostered through music — in a way, therein lies the seeds of the downfall of 60s ideals. Your interest will probably peak if you have heard a lot of musical acts that Boyd was involved with: Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, Nico, Vashti Bunyan, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, etc.
Lenin – An Appraisal of Tolstoy
Link to an article by V.I. Lenin:
It seems like one thing Lenin fails to mention about Leo Tolstoy is his remarkable ability to craft psychologically consistent characters. There are few writers capable of such deeply realistic characters as Tolstoy. And yet, Lenin’s point is essentially that the steadfast commitment to realism is what dooms Tolstoy in a political sense, in that his failure to step outside descriptive portrayals through realism means that he never really explores potentialities and never really challenges the status quo.
But in another article Lenin made his most basic criticism of Tolstoy, which seems apt:
“Tolstoy reflected the pent-up hatred, the ripened striving for a better lot, the desire to get rid of the past—and also the immature dreaming, the political inexperience, the revolutionary flabbiness. Historical and economic conditions explain both the inevitable beginning of the revolutionary struggle of the masses and their unpreparedness for the struggle, their Tolstoyan non-resistance to evil, which was a most serious cause of the defeat of the first revolutionary campaign.”
Terry Eagleton – Utopias, Past and Present
Link to an article by Terry Eagleton:
“Utopias, Past and Present: Why Thomas More Remains Astonishingly Radical”