lection gilbert

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lection's "new and noteworthy" page is named after Gilbert, in Oscar Wilde's "Critic as Artist," who opines:

To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form.

On the lection gilbert page, I present occasional brief notes on recent books that I've picked up and tasted. I try to read enough of each book to deliver some sense of its "vintage and quality," while at the same time some sense of why I didn't keep reading. My not keeping reading is not to be counted against a book, of course. Vita brevis . . .

february 2012

Seeing through Music: Gender and modernism in classic Hollywood film scores. Peter Franklin. Oxford UP, 2011. I often join my local classical-music station mid-broadcast and think "that sounds like a movie score." It usually isn't; it's Brahms or Tchaikovsky instead of Korngold or Rósza. But the Romanticism of early film scores is a distinctive adaptation of high Romanticism in music generally. I picked up Seeing through Music intrigued by a possible discussion of this lush music and its thematic relationship to the movies. And it's there somewhere; it's just well-padded beyond an extensive literature review that stakes out Peter Franklin's intellectual territory among the other academic books on film music. There's nothing wrong with this kind of writing; I suspect this is a fine academic book. But it points to the essential difference between academic and general audiences. General audiences want to know about a topic; academic audiences want to know where you stand rhetorically vis-à-vis other academic commentators on a topic. The proportion of meta to matter in such writing deters me more and more as I get older and more thirsty for knowledge. [02.02.12]

january 2012

Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The oceans' oddest creatures and why they matter. Ellen Prager. U of Chicago P, 2011. I would seem to be the target audience for a book about sex, drugs, and sea slime, but unfortunately not for Ellen Prager's book about all three. Prager writes engagingly and knowledgeably about everything under the sea, but the book is hard to slog through precisely because it's about everything under the sea. She deals with dozens and dozens of interesting creatures, devoting about two pages and not enough illustrations to each one. The result is a compendium of topics without the energy or coherence (or style) that can redeem such compendia. [01.18.12]

JFK Assassination Logic: How to think about claims of conspiracy. John McAdams. Potomac, 2011. On a roll after reading Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, I picked up John McAdams's JFK Assassination Logic expecting to be edified on many small points and large theoretical implications that I hadn't gotten from Bugliosi's magnum opus. Come to find that McAdams, while very sharp and very sensible, adds almost nothing to Bugliosi's analysis. In fact, he only refers to Bugliosi once, in qualified terms (175), even while debunking many of the same conspiracy theories that Bugliosi debunks, in similar terms. This is not to suggest that McAdams's work is cribbed from Bugliosi's. (Or vice versa; though Bugliosi claims rather crabbily not to own a computer, he cites McAdams's splendid website The Kennedy Assassination approvingly from second-hand knowledge, and Bugliosi's treatment is far-ranging and independently sourced.) If you don't have time for Reclaiming History or even its redaction Four Days in November – or, perhaps, if you are taking a different tack on the JFK assassination, like treating it in terms of logic for a college course – JFK Assassination Logic is a useful book; but it brings little new material (as of 2011) to the discussion. Though perhaps its virtue is just to add more weight to the anti-conspiracy side of the scales. [01.13.12]