BA.XO.LA.SÁ.ßA.NAS

Read two books a month, publish another movie review, publish a short story

Just read another banger off the Bancroft Prize list.

This book was hard to finish. Only 266 pages but I was fighting for my life. Took me 2 months. The book consists of cases disputing land ownership, mills, and contracts between 1780-1890. His elevator pitch for this book is that: “one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal not tax system… which had major consequences for distribution of wealth and power in American society.” (pg. xv) 😱🫡

It was written in 1977 at a time when historians were arguing that the role of the government is to serve the public good. Horwitz, instead, asks “what even is the public✌️good✌️?”. The short and sweet is that courts who decided that “public good” meant economic progress. Chapters on the establishment of the lawyer profession, contracts, and others trace how British Law to benefit the merchant class business activity in the USA for private gain. It's a good read for understanding the birth of capitalism. One thing that i wish he spent more time on was the fact that these cases were happening during the rise of positivism and individualism. Both of these modes of thought factored in a great amount in the usa’s emerging conceptions of two arguably major foundations of contemporary capitalism, that is the modern contract and the market.

Very legal-jargon heavy. I was constantly taking out my phone to look up words I thought I knew but clearly know nothing about ("injury" and "property" and “futures,” etc.???). Reading this was like watching a time lapse of a plant growing leaves. Little by little, page by page, the reader starts to see a body of rules taking shape where they never exited before. He ends the book with discussing how this transformation gave way to legal formalism which set in stone business friendly laws that lock up wealth with only a few rather than redistribute wealth as the legal system was originally designed to do.

This book was helpful for me as a law librarian because understanding the origin of American law contextualizes the resources being put in my care.

But also for any informed citizen, I think this book is essential reading for action. If you are willing to entertain rabbit holes about feudalism and mercantilism while looking up concepts, it helps us understand that we can influence more than our politicians , but also our lawyers and the court system to make it work for fairness and for equitable provision of services to people. i highly recommend.

The author's writing style is interesting as it's got this repetitive pattern or flow to it. To sum it up:

He starts his argument by describing the facts of a certain legal case, then dives into how said case might have been interpreted under previous legal theories which he then goes on to compare to the legal theories emerging at the time of the case in question. Finally, he returns to the case in question and dives into how it was handled under the newly formed legal theories. The flow looks sorta like:

case facts > old legal theory vs. new legal theory > case outcome

This line of argument does a great job of revealing the thinking and gabbing that must have taken place in court rooms to literally invent American laws. Imagine putting this activity into words.

For its thoughtful treatment of a polemic subject, I can totally see this book being a Scorsese movie. What an important story it is.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about money and I cannot shake the fact that it is the foundation of this country.

Of course as an educated "American" or whatever I know this. But when you take a Marxist approach to the way everything runs, a spell is broken and it becomes clear to see that the historical struggles of this country are largely due to the unintended consequences of the market. You start to clock that there is no villain, just human nature. So you start to understand people more, idk, compassionately.

So, then, in anticipation of the country's 250th anniversary this July, I compiled a list of movies to compassionately explore how film reflects on the relationship between the USA and the commerce:

killers of the flower moon (done)

there will be blood

wolf of wall street

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is proof that we should not be so quick to write off black and white movies as old, as being from a time when "genre" was still in its infancy. While by the standards of today's rapidly evolving movie world A Girl might be called old but it also reflects newness, an era in which genre is not only fully matured but also a feature to be mixed and blended and played with.

The plot of A Girl centers around a vampire (Sheila Vand) who stalks and kills men in town doing bad things to women. After her chance encounter with Arash, a guy dressed as Dracula for a costume party the two begin to fall for each other.

I've been wanting to see A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) ever since seeing Sheila Vand in the horror flick The Rental (2020). I didn't know who she was before that but I was instantly captivated by her gaze. She's just got this air of sophistication about her, i don't know. I thought this vampire movie was going to be scary, maybe because I looked it up while watching The Rental? Or maybe because while there are several scary scenes where she kills people in that classic blood-sucking vampire way, many of the other scenes leave you perplexed about what kind of mood you should be in. Many different genres are present, EG crime/mystery, that 20-teens house party tumblr girl era, western, and the subtle chick flick undertone. There's a lot going on with that buuuut like I said, the director blends everything so artistically that you are glad to eat it up. I, as a child who discovered America through pop culture, can relate to Ana Lily Amirpour's blending of genres in this movie and feel like it's an immigrant child's choosing to transgress culture shock.

The chick flick undertones show up about halfway through the movie and for me, is what won me over. In easily my favorite scene of the whole movie, during her first encounter with Arash, they stand in her tiny apartment surrounded by her band posters, listening to New Wave rock. In what feels like a scene that's about to be scary bc she looks like she is going to bite him instantly becomes tender and melts your heart as her crush in him is palpable. They embrace without a kiss. Oh the tension!

The ending is my second favorite scene when the two lovers drive away from the town forever, the white car contrasted by a pitch black sky. Dracula pulls the car to the side of the road once he begins to piece together that she killed her father. Once he pieces it together, they slowly look up and smile at each other in this really tender way, which reminds me of the ending scene in Love Lies Bleeding, of how sick and twisted love can be.

Here are some thoughts on a book I just read. Reach out to me if you have read it. I would love to discuss:

Made me want to check out next the following two books - The politics of mass digitization, The known citizen

Like meat-packing in the late 1800s, organizing information is just one symptom of our "inescapable need to service debt" as historian William Cronon in Nature's Metropolis rightly says about the corporatization of like American society

P. 15– idea of “the Data Complex” first emerges

P. 40– rich private families (Carnegie) funding the creation of public libraries after being advised by John Billings to do so. Makes me wonder Carnegie’s motivations

P. 40– data preservation and organization emerged during the era of the rise of public hygiene and standardization 

P. 44– chemists attempt to settle the question of the permanence of paper is a fundamental attempt at answering the most important preservation question which remains unanswered

P. 45– industrialization demanded a higher amount of paperwork than ever before while at the same time exacerbated its deterioration. Industrialization= “Engine of the data complex…” Because paper was how businesspl could keep track of profits and losses on a grand scale, larger than one needed to track for oneself.

53– in the 1930s, USA govt did not know where all of its records were. Question: what motivated the Gov to consolidate?

56– … over time, as ppl practiced data preservation “they absorbed the beliefs reflected in them—namely, that saving more data could save the world.”

I disagree here.

P. 71– the fields of archives and then records mgmt emerged around 1920-1940s. Question: was it a result of the growth of corporations (during and?) after industrialization?

P. 75-76– author rambles on about a eugenics leader in California whose team invented a gas to fumigate books in order to make a connection between eugenic views of hygiene at the time and data sterilization for preservation. Interesting idea but should have been an endnote!

P. 79, ideology framed as preservation! This part is a little good!

P. 103, in the year 1955, records mgmt was pitched to become a” new science.”

“Operation time capsule” was a new records mgmt system against the battle of bulk of paperwork that was growing rapidly at the time resulting from US testing to discover how to survive bombs!

P. 107, the value of vital records made people synonymous with corporations (we are the corporations)

P. 110, Emmett Leary is also the inventor of the concept of “lifecycle of records," referring to information as a “body” like it is alive

P. 121 and 122, fascinating

Iron mountain is a monopoly born in the Cold War era as IMASC

the US bombed itself to see how it would survive bombing attacks, which never happened, thus ironically becoming the most nuclear-bombed nation on the planet. The haunting of fallout materialized in architecture at the time: “vaults, underground facilities, redundant power supplies at sites like IMASC”

Speculation is fascinating. Just as investor speculation led to the creation of Chicago, so too did military and corporation speculation in the midcentury form “the basis of a media revolution—digital technology and information networking…”

Generally, author interestingly suggests that the Cold War era is the beginning of networked data… connected, aggregated American records. 

p. 141, “We have now repurposed this infrastructure in ways that reflect our current fears, hopes, and persistent impossible desires for permanent data …” 

P. 141, preservation of DNA is interesting. Why did this become a thing in 2013?

P. 142, our irrational attachment to data is melancholy (“which is different from mourning,” the author adds…).

Prehistory of the cloud. Book to read 

Interesting to think about the different generations of American information preservation. The projects of each generation’s data preservation, fears associated with such preservation projects, infrastructure developed for these projects…

P. 147, neo-categorization! digital selves are not the same as the other rest of the duplicates of data created in microform or other unstructured forms; instead digital selves are “algorithmic measurable types” that change constantly based on . See eg earlier in the page about a young woman described as an old man

“Neo identities” is interesting and sci-fi sounding. Could the issue of gender disparity be solved if we started describing ourselves by the gender of our data body?

p. 150, defunct malls turned into data centers! one example closeby is the Armory in STL potentially being turned into a chip factory or some shit

As of 2020, Amazon is in talks with Simon property group about moving to the property group’s “constellation of dead malls that stretches across the US and Canada.” 

P. 166, no such thing as progress within “the data complex”

P. 168-169 ish, nanofiche method is the digital era’s version of “archiving” stuff. Tiny etchings are made onto disk in this modern version of microfilming. What anxiety does this reflect? Author says it reflects our ambivalence about investing about digital tech. 

p. 169, idea that we return to analog, as for example, when backing up digital, when we talk about digital.  “Even our language for describing digital is not new…”

p. 172, “bitcoin’s security schemes remind us that analog data and digital data are not opposites nor stages in a progression, but rather two elements in a backup loop of data preservation.” Analog formats like magnetic tape have become increasingly important, eg, Google once recovered lost distal data from their own backup system on magnetic tape!

P. 179, so important actually! “Every emergent data format that becomes dominant does so as it corresponds to and grows materially out of the prevailing economic mode of production….” Seems like an obvious statement but worth looking into to discover what the prevailing modes of production led to… whether it be a particular format or procedure, etc.

While it’s true, historically, that first came paper and then came digital, going ”from paper to digital“ as a practice is a myth; both paper and digital practices exist simultaneously in a sort of “backup loop” as the author suggests, possibly due to human anxiety about losing one or the other.

P. 180, further, if a new format were to enter the chat, eg, DNA, it would enter into a thickened constellation of data formats providing insurance for one another in massive feedback loops.

P. 180-181, In regard to 21st century fears of AI, author says that “the end of humanity will not occur through a loss of information (which was the 20th century fear), but from an overabundance of it…”

P. 191, companies exploring the idea of mining outer space for resources to power machines to explore and colonize outer space and beyond… (in the name of what?!?!?!)

Running out of cold on earth to preserve data and maintain power for data centers so we go seek it in outer space 

P. 194, George church and DNA experiments. Weird stuff here…

P. 196, bill gates investing shit tons in DNA data storage. 

I had a history professor who one time told us in class that a good answer is "both” and a better answer is "both because..."