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UBC: books read while sick
This may become a Continuing Series, as I am, in fact, still sick. However.
Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.
This is right up there in the running for Weirdest Book I Have Ever Read (Wisconsin Death Trip is another contender). In 1954, having been royally fucked over by Harry Donenfeld, Joe Shuster was reduced to illustrating a low-rent BDSM pulp publication called Nights of Horror. The stories were badly written and riddled with clichés, the production values were so low as to be nonexistent, and there in the middle of it are Joe Shuster's b&w illustrations, drawn in exactly the same idiom as Superman. As Yoe points out, some of the characters look disturbingly like Clark Kent, Jimmy Olson, Lex Luthor, and Lois and Lucy Lane (although I'm not sure anything more can be read into that than Shuster's rather limited repertoire of faces). By modern standards these drawings are utterly tame; I find them stilted and passionless and frequently more than a little ludicrous. (I also get distracted by the fact that these naked or semi-naked distraught girls, in the middle of being flogged or spanked or tortured--red ants, Iron Maidens, creepy spiked oven mitts--have somehow managed to keep their exaggeratedly high-heeled shoes on their tiny perfect Barbie feet, but that's probably just me.) But Nights of Horror was fingered as the inspiration for the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, and in fact Shuster's drawings were presented as evidence in the April 1955 Senate hearings on "Pornography and its Effects on Juvenile Delinquency"--without Shuster himself ever being identified as the artist.
The flaw for me in this book is its attitude toward its subject matter. There's an introduction from Stan Lee bemoaning the depths to which Joe Shuster sank ("Whereas everything about the stories and artwork of Superman was positive and morally uplifting, the pages of Nights of Horror that appear in Secret Identity cater to the basest of man's character and morals" "Some of the material in the book may seem shocking; some figured strongly in censorship investigations in Congress; but all of it will certainly give you pause as you consider the consequences that can ensue when a gifted man is forced to lend his talent to the most sordid of projects"), and Craig Yoe's exposition has a kind of jokey prurience to it that I find off-putting. I don't--let me be clear--think that Nights of Horror itself deserves better, or that Joe Shuster had any personal inclinations toward BDSM (I would argue that his drawings indicate the opposite), but the underlying assumption that there's something wrong with BDSM (what "consequences" is Stan Lee talking about, exactly? is he buying into Dr. Fredric Wertham's assertions about causation? if Nights of Horror had been illustrated by a lesser talent, the Brooklyn Thrill Killers wouldn't have been inspired to beat homeless men to death?), that the sordidness of Nights of Horror is located in its sexuality rather than its cheap, exploitative attitude, frustrates me. I think someone coming from a BDSM-positive subject position might well have had more thoughtful and nuanced (though quite probably not less snarky) things to say about Nights of Horror and the 50s and the first notes of the McCarthy fanfare--and Joe Shuster's odd and passionless pornography.
And now, just to give you whiplash:
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.
This is a low-key book, sympathetic to its subject matter as many books about the Puritans are not. I found it useful for explanations of a number of things about the Puritans' conception of the family which I had not known (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala tells me this is because I didn't grow up in New England); it dovetailed nicely with Entertaining Satan in clarifying certain aspects of Puritan communities.
Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.
Although I don't agree with Starkey on many points, The Devil in Massachusetts makes a good point at which to begin one's reading about Salem. It is interested in forming a narrative of the witch trials, which means that it is clear and easy to read and compelling in ways that, for instance, Salem Possessed is not.
That said, I do disagree with Starkey, and if you begin with The Devil in Massachusetts, you would be ill-advised to end there. Starkey forthrightly blames the afflicted girls, and she does so with a misogyny that I find distinctly repellent. Moreover, making a narrative out of history inevitably warps the history around the narrative and encourages the selection/creation of heroes and villains.
Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.
This was one of those frustrating books that I agreed with but was not convinced by. Which is to say, I completely agree with Allert's thesis that the Hitler salute both reveals several very important things about Nazi culture and was (a very small) part of the formation of the culture of indifference in Germany which (again in part) allowed the Holocaust to happen, but Allert never showed me the links between his evidence and his ideas in such a way that I really believed him.
His evidence is fascinating. It includes Hitler figurines with movable right arms; illustrations for Sleeping Beauty in which the prince salutes Beauty as he wakes her; pictures of vacationers saluting a sand-portrait of Hitler, of a vaudeville performer teaching his chimpanzee the salute, of Richard Strauss caught in a moment of miserable ambivalence. He has wonderful anecdotal evidence of how the salute permeated German life. And I think he could have done a good deal more with why the Nazis imposed their salute on Germany (I found myself thinking about that more than once while reading The Psychopathic God [see below]). But he never manages to persuade me that his evidence connects to his abstract and abstruse sociological theories about the meaning of greetings.
Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.
This is a collection of primary source material from the Russian investigation into Hitler's death, including the reports from the soldiers who found the bodies and reports of the interrogations of various witnesses. I found it almost more interesting for the insights into the Red Army's bureaucracy than for its ostensible subject matter.
Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
This book has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. It is also very definitely a product of its times, as Waite's careful, literal, by-the-book Freudian psychoanalysis shows. I don't think anything he says about Hitler's childhood can be trusted (except that, yeah, the household of Alois Hitler was seriously weird), whether it's his speculations about the "primal scene" he thinks Hitler witnessed or his speculations about Hitler's monorchism or his putatively Jewish grandfather or any of the rest of it (including the coprophilia). Freud is least useful when you take him literally. But Waite's analysis of the adult Hitler I found very enlightening, in particular his [Waite's] patient refutation of Hitler's lies about his years in Vienna and the connections he makes between Hitler's private neuroses and his public performances.
Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.
This is right up there in the running for Weirdest Book I Have Ever Read (Wisconsin Death Trip is another contender). In 1954, having been royally fucked over by Harry Donenfeld, Joe Shuster was reduced to illustrating a low-rent BDSM pulp publication called Nights of Horror. The stories were badly written and riddled with clichés, the production values were so low as to be nonexistent, and there in the middle of it are Joe Shuster's b&w illustrations, drawn in exactly the same idiom as Superman. As Yoe points out, some of the characters look disturbingly like Clark Kent, Jimmy Olson, Lex Luthor, and Lois and Lucy Lane (although I'm not sure anything more can be read into that than Shuster's rather limited repertoire of faces). By modern standards these drawings are utterly tame; I find them stilted and passionless and frequently more than a little ludicrous. (I also get distracted by the fact that these naked or semi-naked distraught girls, in the middle of being flogged or spanked or tortured--red ants, Iron Maidens, creepy spiked oven mitts--have somehow managed to keep their exaggeratedly high-heeled shoes on their tiny perfect Barbie feet, but that's probably just me.) But Nights of Horror was fingered as the inspiration for the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, and in fact Shuster's drawings were presented as evidence in the April 1955 Senate hearings on "Pornography and its Effects on Juvenile Delinquency"--without Shuster himself ever being identified as the artist.
The flaw for me in this book is its attitude toward its subject matter. There's an introduction from Stan Lee bemoaning the depths to which Joe Shuster sank ("Whereas everything about the stories and artwork of Superman was positive and morally uplifting, the pages of Nights of Horror that appear in Secret Identity cater to the basest of man's character and morals" "Some of the material in the book may seem shocking; some figured strongly in censorship investigations in Congress; but all of it will certainly give you pause as you consider the consequences that can ensue when a gifted man is forced to lend his talent to the most sordid of projects"), and Craig Yoe's exposition has a kind of jokey prurience to it that I find off-putting. I don't--let me be clear--think that Nights of Horror itself deserves better, or that Joe Shuster had any personal inclinations toward BDSM (I would argue that his drawings indicate the opposite), but the underlying assumption that there's something wrong with BDSM (what "consequences" is Stan Lee talking about, exactly? is he buying into Dr. Fredric Wertham's assertions about causation? if Nights of Horror had been illustrated by a lesser talent, the Brooklyn Thrill Killers wouldn't have been inspired to beat homeless men to death?), that the sordidness of Nights of Horror is located in its sexuality rather than its cheap, exploitative attitude, frustrates me. I think someone coming from a BDSM-positive subject position might well have had more thoughtful and nuanced (though quite probably not less snarky) things to say about Nights of Horror and the 50s and the first notes of the McCarthy fanfare--and Joe Shuster's odd and passionless pornography.
And now, just to give you whiplash:
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.
This is a low-key book, sympathetic to its subject matter as many books about the Puritans are not. I found it useful for explanations of a number of things about the Puritans' conception of the family which I had not known (
matociquala tells me this is because I didn't grow up in New England); it dovetailed nicely with Entertaining Satan in clarifying certain aspects of Puritan communities.Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.
Although I don't agree with Starkey on many points, The Devil in Massachusetts makes a good point at which to begin one's reading about Salem. It is interested in forming a narrative of the witch trials, which means that it is clear and easy to read and compelling in ways that, for instance, Salem Possessed is not.
That said, I do disagree with Starkey, and if you begin with The Devil in Massachusetts, you would be ill-advised to end there. Starkey forthrightly blames the afflicted girls, and she does so with a misogyny that I find distinctly repellent. Moreover, making a narrative out of history inevitably warps the history around the narrative and encourages the selection/creation of heroes and villains.
Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.
This was one of those frustrating books that I agreed with but was not convinced by. Which is to say, I completely agree with Allert's thesis that the Hitler salute both reveals several very important things about Nazi culture and was (a very small) part of the formation of the culture of indifference in Germany which (again in part) allowed the Holocaust to happen, but Allert never showed me the links between his evidence and his ideas in such a way that I really believed him.
His evidence is fascinating. It includes Hitler figurines with movable right arms; illustrations for Sleeping Beauty in which the prince salutes Beauty as he wakes her; pictures of vacationers saluting a sand-portrait of Hitler, of a vaudeville performer teaching his chimpanzee the salute, of Richard Strauss caught in a moment of miserable ambivalence. He has wonderful anecdotal evidence of how the salute permeated German life. And I think he could have done a good deal more with why the Nazis imposed their salute on Germany (I found myself thinking about that more than once while reading The Psychopathic God [see below]). But he never manages to persuade me that his evidence connects to his abstract and abstruse sociological theories about the meaning of greetings.
Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.
This is a collection of primary source material from the Russian investigation into Hitler's death, including the reports from the soldiers who found the bodies and reports of the interrogations of various witnesses. I found it almost more interesting for the insights into the Red Army's bureaucracy than for its ostensible subject matter.
Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
This book has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. It is also very definitely a product of its times, as Waite's careful, literal, by-the-book Freudian psychoanalysis shows. I don't think anything he says about Hitler's childhood can be trusted (except that, yeah, the household of Alois Hitler was seriously weird), whether it's his speculations about the "primal scene" he thinks Hitler witnessed or his speculations about Hitler's monorchism or his putatively Jewish grandfather or any of the rest of it (including the coprophilia). Freud is least useful when you take him literally. But Waite's analysis of the adult Hitler I found very enlightening, in particular his [Waite's] patient refutation of Hitler's lies about his years in Vienna and the connections he makes between Hitler's private neuroses and his public performances.