Last night, I started reading Fear: A Cultural History
by Joanna Bourke. I’ve had my eye on the book for a few weeks now, and finally picked it up at Borders yesterday. It’s the type of book I like, because I enjoy writing that confidently integrates history with cultural studies. It also has some relevance to my History of Science and Technology in Western Culture class, as it discusses fears of science, technology, medical advancements, and military machinery. I’m only on page 50, and have already come across some fascinating ideas.
Bourke devotes the first section of the book to describing the fear of death and how it affected individual lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She illustrates how fear of death was intertwined with a fear of being prematurely buried – that is, buried alive. At the same time, she explains how closely fear of death was related to fearing poverty; and she notes how social welfare targeted at reducing poverty didn’t eradicate the fear, but only diluted its effects and changed in focus:
Rather than trembling about the effects of absolute privation, people shuddered to think about the consequences of relative impoverishment, such as being rehoused in a rougher area or forced to sell prized possessions. The providers of public assistance were determined to retain (indeed, even boost) this element of fear. After all, they reasoned, public assistance should not be made too easy in case people jettisoned all economic anxieties, thus damaging the economy. As a consequence, moral panics arose around unscrupulous individuals and groups who did not feel sufficiently apprehensive of the stigma attached to the receipt of poor relief. – pg. 27
Describing the use of fear as a public policy tool, and explaining how its boundaries were altered to reflect public reaction to policy or manipulate society, strikes me as a fairly unique perspective. I’m curious about the extent to which Bourke keeps these themes out in front, as she continues the discussion of the cultural parameters of fear.
Following Tyler Cowen, Ezra Klein states that of 140 blogs he subscribes to, he regularly reads only 20 to 30. I use Bloglines to keep tabs on around 230 blogs, but the number that I actually read is somewhere in that 20 to 30 range also. Like some of the folks commenting on Ezra’s post, I deal with the “information overload” by periodically throwing them all away, marking them all as read so they disappear from the feed list. The conversations go on whether I tune in or not; the small stress-point of feeling like I have this list of stuff I should get around to reading falls away nicely when the unread item count disappears.
Over the next few days (or weeks (or months)), I’ll be adding links to this site for those blogs that I actually do make a point to read. It will give you some clues (but they’re only clues, mind you) to my beliefs, interests, and background, and to the kinds of writing and imagery that I find consistently enjoyable. Relatedly (!!), I’m working on a short “About the author” page; but I’ve discovered that I’m not so autobiographically inclined, so it’s hard to say when I might get around to finishing that.
Update:
I used to use Bloglines. I tried NewsGator a few weeks ago, and like it a lot. By accident, I stumbled across a beta version of the online reader last week, so have been testing it and posting feedback to one of their forums. The beta’s very nice, very snappy, has a great interface, and is a lot of fun to use. If you’re interested, browse through the NewsGator forums for additional information.
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