What I’m reading (and you?)

I usually read only one book at a time, but for some reason I’m now engaged with four. That makes it hard, because I have to choose, of an evening, which one to continue; and unless I alternate them frequently, I forget what I’ve read a week ago. Here are the four, one of which I’ve not started; links go to the Amazon sites.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, by Tom Nichols (Oxford University Press, 2017). Nichols is a Professor at the U.S. Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School (Wikipedia adds that he’s “a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion”), and in this book examines why Americans are deeply suspicious of genuine experts while attracted to bogus experts like Gwyneth Paltrow. Unfortunately, it’s largely one long cry of “get off my lawn,” blaming the ignorance and unwillingness to learn of regular Americans on the devaluation of genuine experts (like himself: he’s a scholar of Russia and the former Soviet Union). Nichols is probably right, but there’s a lot of repetition in his argument and more than a whiff of curmudgeonliness.) There’s one chapter on the commodification of American colleges and students’ consequent attacks on free speech and on the expertise of professors, but if you’ve read this site, you won’t learn that much. I’d give it a 5/10.

Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White, by Michael Tisserand (Harper, 2016). Although I’m not much for comics, Krazy Kat, drawn by Herriman from 1913 to 1944, is an exception. (I also love Little Nemo.) Krazy was a bizarre strip with surrealistic artwork, and, well, let me pull up Wikipedia to give you the plot:

The strip focuses on the curious relationship between a guileless, carefree, simple-minded cat named Krazy of indeterminate gender (referred to as both “he” and “she”) and a short-tempered mouse named Ignatz. Krazy nurses an unrequited love for the mouse. However, Ignatz despises Krazy and constantly schemes to throw bricks at Krazy’s head, which Krazy interprets as a sign of affection, uttering grateful replies such as “Li’l dollink, allus f’etful”, or “Li’l ainjil”. A third principal character, Offisa Bull Pupp, often appears and tries to “protect” Krazy by thwarting Ignatz’ attempts and imprisoning him. Later on, Offisa Pupp falls in love with Krazy.

Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, the detailed characterization, combined with Herriman’s visual and verbal creativity, made Krazy Kat one of the first comics to be widely praised by intellectuals and treated as “serious” art. Art critic Gilbert Seldes wrote a lengthy panegyric to the strip in 1924, calling it “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today.”  Poet E. E. Cummings, another Herriman admirer, wrote the introduction to the first collection of the strip in book form. These critical appraisals by Seldes and Cummings were influential in establishing Krazy Kat‘s reputation as a work of genius. Though Krazy Kat was only a modest success during its initial run, in more recent years, many modern cartoonists have cited the strip as a major influence.

Matthew and I both love this strip, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you why. It features a cat of undetermined gender, and Matthew and I are both ailurophiles, but there’s not really a plot: week after week Krazy gets beaned by Ignatz and loves the mouse all the more. Here’s an example of the strip; note how the background changes from frame to frame:

I’m reading the book because Matthew brought it to my attention: it turns out that Herriman was half black, born to a Creole family in New Orleans, but hid it for his entire life because he looked white (he did have curly hair, which he hid under a hat). Had Herriman revealed his ancestry in that era, he would never have gotten a job with any newspaper.  Only recently did a researcher, who dug out Herriman’s birth certificate, discover this fact. And it explains a lot about Herriman’s obsession, throughout his cartooning life, with race and skin color. Early in his career Herriman was a straight-out racist (or at last catered to racism), drawing big-lipped “golliwog” caricatures of blacks, but his views got more complex when he started drawing Krazy Kat.

The strips are filled with strange language and allusions to classical literature, as well as big words, and it’s just a trip.

I’m only halfway through the book, when he starts drawing Krazy, so I can’t judge it as a whole, but it has held my attention. There is, however, a sad dearth of Krazy Kat strips reproduced. There should be at least one on every page!

Here’s one of Herriman’s early (non-Krazy) racist strips in which a black man tries to pretend he’s a Scot:

Practical Ethics, 3rd Edition, by Peter Singer (Cambridge University Press 2011). This is a modern classic of philosophy that’s used worldwide in ethics classes. As its title suggests, it’s not a dry analysis of “the meaning of meaning”, or an attempt to revise our conception of free will, but a compendium of hard and incisive thought on substantive practical issues like abortion, euthanasia, the eating of animals, how we should sacrifice to help the poor, affirmative action, and so on. His stand is unashamedly utilitarian and consequentialist (I agree), and his writing is crystal clear.  You may not agree with Singer on all issues, but he makes you think and reassess your own opinions—something that his kneejerk opponents adamantly resist. I give this a 10/10, and consider it the ultimate refutation of those who say that philosophy is of no value. I’m about halfway through, but I’m already willing to give it top marks.

Freud: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick Crews (2017, Metropolitan).  This book will be released on August 22, but I got a copy in the mail because Fred is a friend. A former professor and chair in the English Department of UC Berkeley, Fred has long studied and written about Freud as almost an avocation, but a deeply scholarly one. His work (and that of others) has shown that Freud was largely a charlatan, with psychoanalysis having many traits of a religion (a god-figure, the tendency to make stuff up and comport every possible observation with preconceived notions, etc.). Several of Crews’s critiques of Freud have been published in The New York Review of Books (see here, here and here, for instance), and he published a short book critical of Freud, The Memory Wars, in 1993. That one includes letters from those who wrote to the NYRB attacking Crews’s thesis, as well as Crews’s dismantling of these critics.

I haven’t read this book yet, but Fred is a terrific writer and I’m going to start it within a day or so.  (If you want a hoot, by the way, Crews’s Postmodern Pooh, a satirical series of chapters analyzing Pooh from various “lit-crit” points of view, is a classic. Crews clearly has no truck with postmodernism, and the book is hilarious.)

Here are the Amazon notes on the new book:

Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin―but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.

A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

Now it’s your turn. What are you reading, and what do you like?