#19th century scientific illustration my beloved

[wolveswithoutteeth]

any book recs? ✨

of course! my goodreads has more recommendations and i’ve created shelves for certain themes/time periods/genres but here are some favorites:

fiction:

the secret history by donna tartt

the goldfinch by donna tartt

red, white & royal blue by casey mcquiston

the song of achilles by madeline miller

the hours by michael cunningham

tipping the velvet by sarah waters

deathless by catherynne m valente

the round house by louise erdrich

ghost wall by sarah moss

on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

if we were villains by m.l. rio

normal people by sally rooney (the tv adaptation is now available on hulu!)

conversations with friends by sally rooney

lie with me by philippe benson

girl with a pearl earring by tracy chevalier

homegoing by yaa gyasi

trumpet by jackie kay

tin man by sarah winman

little fires everywhere by celeste ng

everything i never told you by celeste ng

burial rites by hannah kent  

the remains of the day by kazuo ishiguro

the underground railroad by colson whitehead

americanah by chimamanda ngozi adichie

young adult:

we are okay by nina lacour

everything leads to you by nina lacour

the grisha trilogy by leigh bardugo

six of crows by leigh bardugo 

the winternight trilogy by katherine arden

shatter me series by tahereh mafi 

i’ll give you the sun by jandy nelson

19th and 20th century american lit:

moby dick by herman melville

little women by louisa may alcott

behind a mask (and other stories) by louisa may alcott

cecil dreeme by theodore winthrop

the awakening by kate chopin

the house of mirth by edith wharton

ethan frome and other stories by edith wharton

giovanni’s room by james baldwin

all of toni morrison’s books! (i recommend reading her work in publication order if you can but my favorites are beloved and the song of solomon)

victorian:

the moonstone by wilkie collins

lady audley’s secret by mary elizabeth braddon

jane eyre by charlotte bronte

villette by charlotte bronte

wuthering heights by emily bronte

the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde

middlemarch by george eliot

bleak house by charles dickens

british modernism:

wide sargasso sea by jean rhys

good morning, midnight by jean rhys

voyage in the dark by jean rhys

mrs dalloway by virginia woolf

maurice by e.m. forster

the return of the soldier by rebecca west

collected stories by katherine mansfield

rebecca by daphne du murier

poetry:

devotions by mary oliver

crush by richard siken

war of the foxes by richard siken

collected poems by edna st. vincent millay

collected poems by christina rossetti

selected poems by edith wharton

undercurrent by rita wong

the wild iris by louise gluck

useless magic: lyrics and poetry by florence welch (if you’re a fan of florence + the machine, this hardcover book is beautifully published and includes poems, lyrics, illustrations, photography, etc.)

graphic novels:

all of isabel greenberg’s books!

through the woods by emily carroll (very spooky! and the art is beautiful!)

and the ocean was our sky by patrick ness 

short story collections:

the bloody chamber and other stories by angela carter

how to breathe underwater by julie orringer

by light we knew our names by anne valente

st lucy’s home for girls raised by wolves by karen russell

kissing the witch: old tales in new skins by emma donoghue

interpreter of maladies by jhumpa lahiri

the thing around your neck by chimamanda ngozi adichie

the last animal by abby geni

nonfiction/theory:

upstream: selected essays by mary oliver

into the wild by jon krakauer

hunger by roxane gay

braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants by robin wall kimmerer

playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination by toni morrison

in the wake: on blackness and being by christina sharpe

forms by caroline levine

touching feeling by eve kosofsky sedgwick

TBR books i’m excited to read as soon as this semester is over:

the starless sea by erin morgenstern

frankissstein by jeanette winterson

glass town by isabel greenberg

supper club by lara williams

the night watchman by louise erdrich

writers & lovers by lily king

her body and other parties by carmen maria machado

the library book by susan orlean

my life in middlemarch by rebecca mead

my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh

the lonely city by olivia laing

the women’s prize postponed their winner announcement to september so i’ll be reading from the longlist this summer (and some previous winners/longlisters to celebrate the prize’s 25th anniversary this year!) this year’s list is really strong but a few books i’m most excited about:

hamnet by maggie o’farrell

girl, woman, other by bernadine evaristo

a thousand ships by natalie haynes

weather by jenny offill

red at the bone by jacqueline woodson

lastly, support independent book stores (if you can!) i ordered two books last month that i’m excited to read:

crude by olivia laing

a little book on form by robert haas

#asks #books #recommendations #literaetures #reference #mine

[awildpoliticalnerd]

Book Review: The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. By Robert Wright. (1994).

Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal is a look through the field of evolutionary psychology--at least as it stood at the book's writing in 1994. It's a promising work with a lot of insight. However, it can best be analogized to the peacock: If it survives, it does so despite the massive disadvantage of some obvious maladaptions. In the case of the peacock, the adaption is its oversized tail (or "train" as it's often referred to). In the case of The Moral Animal, it's Wright’s own unexamined moral and ideological biases presented as fact that lowered its potential. 

The big sell of the book is actually a rather interesting premise: Take the most famous proponent of the theory of evolution (Charles “the Chuck” Darwin) and use his life to demonstrate the principles of evolutionary psychology. Want to illustrate the theory that men are less biologically inclined towards lifelong monogamy thanks to our disproportionately small part in the baby-making process? Highlight the fact that Darwin literally sketched out a cost/benefit analysis of getting married in his notebook. Want to argue that young siblings should be both predisposed towards rivalry and cooperation thanks to kin selection? Give some (admittedly adorable) examples of Darwin’s many, many children. Because of this, the book was part popular-science exploration of a then-burgeoning topic and accessible biography on one of the most important scientific minds to ever emerge from the primordial ooze. When done well, this was the book at its best. It was discursive, informative, and enjoyable. It kept me engaged over much of the book’s nearly 400-pages.

(Lest someone use the opening example as evidence that I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about later in the review, let it be known that I know that the mystery of the peacock’s train was solved with the insights of sexual selection--that peahens select males with large trains because possessing one shows that the males have got to be pretty dang "fit" to survive with such a glaringly obvious disadvantage. Writing thematically consistent introductions is hard; I claim some artistic liberties here).

There are two core ways that this plays out throughout the book. The first is the odd insistence that every possible point that Wright could conceive of making in this vast subject was exemplified by good ol’ Chuck. And there were times that this was very clearly a stretch. The way he pursued his eventual wife, Emma, is described through a very genetic lens instead of primarily cultural terms (part of a supposed genetic predisposition towards the “Madonna-Whore” dichotomy for those of us with that infernal y chromosome). His differential patterns of grief for the loss of two of his children (he reportedly mourned the death of his ten year old daughter far longer, and far more intensely, then that of his infant son) are couched as being primarily due to their proximity to prime fertility age. His intense anxiety about publishing what would be his scientific legacy (you know, apart from being the 19th century’s foremost barnacle expert)? It’s the genes! It’s genes, genes, genes all the way down. 

I’d like to say that the book was always like this. Or, apparently, my desire to want to say this, my inability to do so, and the considerable amount of sarcasm required to pen these last two sentences are because of my genes. At least that’s the culprit if we were to take Wright literally. At times, he is positively (and ironically) evangelical about the power of our genetics in dictating our behavior. And it is to the rest of the work’s detriment. 

I’m not some biological denialist. I believe whole-heartedly in evolutionary theory. And, of course, the potential for any and all physical actions have to ultimately originate in the code that facilitates every biological process we undertake. But, first off, since natural selection works probabilistically, what do you think the odds are that, of the billions of humans to walk the Earth, the theory’s first popular progenitor is an acceptable exemplar of all of these processes? It’s laughably small. Literally smaller than the first common ancestor of all life on this planet compared to the sun. I don’t think that this means that Wright had to abandon the mission of using Darwin as an illustration--again, that’s part of what made this book so interesting--but it would be far better served if, instead, Wright said something to the effect of “we can see an imperfect analogy to these processes in Darwin’s life.” A small change but, as Wright knows, small changes can have a large impact.

I suspect that Wright’s self-admitted zealousy on the subject was partially spurred on by the fact that this book was written before epigenetics (the process through which different parts of the genome are activated/deactivated in response to environmental changes, changing the genes’ expression) was more rigorously demonstrated. I recall him adamantly insisting, once or twice, that genes “can’t be changed” once we’ve been conceived. At the time, that was the belief commensurate with the best available evidence. Although epigenetics do not disprove this, the truth is that our genes are far more flexible than originally thought. If genetic fixedness is what you’re arguing, it’s pretty tough to say anything other than “everything Darwin did ever is totally explainable through evolutionary psychology.” Even if it's not true. So I’ve decided to chalk this up to scientific progress and its inevitable, unenviable ability to reveal certain pronouncements as utterly wrong. It’ll undoubtedly happen to me; it happens to any practicing scientist. 

The second theme, though, is less able to be chalked up to the inexorable march of progress. That is the distinct, but related, assertion interwoven throughout the text that literally everything can be explained by evolutionary psychology. Moral codes? Evolutionary psychology. Selective memory of our own moral failings? Evolutionary psychology. Western social structures and the necessity of political and economic inequality? Survey says: Evolutionary psychology. 

These assertions are often manifest through what I call “cover your ass” language. We all know it; we all, regrettably, deploy it. It comes when the authors use absolute terms for the vast preponderance of the work and then say “now, do I really think that this explains everything? Of course not! But…” and then proceeds to make the exact same points, just with a couple of words interjected to signal intellectual humility. A few careful words do not erase the other 98% and the frames they collectively construct. Wright is arguing that evolutionary psychology alone can explain just about every social phenomenon, from the simple to profound. But the fact of the matter is that evolutionary psychology would be hard-pressed to understand why people on vacation with their families would bother to leave tips at restaurants despite the fact that they do, more often than not. (Seriously. Reciprocal altruism’s out since you’ll never see that server again. Odds are they weren’t related, so kin selection’s out too. Peacocking wealth contrasts with women’s supposed preference for mates who don’t needlessly divert resources away from her children. Tipping is a tough nut to crack for rational-choice-esque theoried like evolutionary psych). If it can’t explain something so banal as this, I have strong doubts of the deterministic account Wright explicates here. He will, almost begrudgingly, admit that social and environmental forces play a part in genetic expression. But he does not seem prepared to admit that it plays as big of a role as even the available evidence at the time did.

The more I read it, the more I felt that this book was symbolic of a lot of evolutionary science at the time: It contains real, interesting insight on genetic processes and their role (however expansive or limited) in complex interpersonal phenomena. These shouldn’t be undersold or ignored; I learned a great deal reading this book. The problem is that these insights come paired with uninterrogated moralizing, steeped in contemporaneous social events, passed off as timeless, objective Truth. The most obvious example (because of how often Wright returns to it) comes in the aforementioned asymmetry in male parental investment. Or, rather, the seemingly inevitable end-result: Divorce. This was often curiously paired with hand-wavey discussions of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. Apparently, men who manage to have sex with women earlier in the relationship feel less inclined to see her as a viable marriage partner. Should a quickly-pairing couple (referring to the speed in which they decide to do the act and not, hopefully, the duration of the act itself) wind-up married, men are more likely to ditch the women--and ditch them for similar "kinds" of women. This discussion would often lead to Wright lamenting how women are engaging in sex earlier and earlier in romantic relationships. Things were better decades before this promiscuity was socially acceptable. Like back in Victorian England when Charles wed his beloved Emma. And the evidentiary linchpin, at times explicitly mentioned while only obliquely inferred at others, is the sky-high divorce rates that, Wright argues, came as a consequence of social structures being poorly designed considering our inherent genetic predispositions. 

Of course, we now know that the high divorce rates of the 90s were a temporary thing. First-marriages are lasting far longer than they did (on average) in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 00’s but divorces are just as easy (if not easier) than ever before. If it was entirely because of early sex and our baser nature, the pattern should continue. The fact that it doesn’t is both evidence that evolutionary psychology is more limited than Wright suggests and that the urgency imbued in his analysis was shaped by his own moral sensibilities rather than those seen in society as a whole, inculcated by natural selection.

This wasn’t all of the social critique Wright was inclined to wade in. All fields and theories have their critics. Good authors often anticipate common objections and address them in the text. He saw his most likely critics as less scientifically driven as ideologically so. Lofty prose to the contrary, he was on the attack far more than on the defense; Darwin found himself a new bull dog. His target: Those dastardly post-modernists. He often panned “post-modernism” for their critiques of evolutionary psychology, often claiming (without much evidence) that it stemmed from the post-modernists’ universal and fundamental ignorance about biology. Honestly, the way Wright so derisively talked about them, I was surprised that he didn’t bust out a couple of verbose “yo mamma” jokes. 

What makes his vituperative swipes so ironic 25 years later is that the post-structuralists were right. Many evolutionary scientists were predisposed towards advancing biologically deterministic theories of human behavior. Any practicing geneticist worth their salt today would tell you that human behavior is so dependent on genes' interactions with the social and physical environment that even things we take for granted as “hard-wired” (such as one’s sexual preference) has been persuasively shown to not be the consequence of singular genes--or even wholly the consequence of complex genetic interactions. This is a far, far cry from Wright’s portrayal in the book; I honestly think he would be aghast at this suggestion, as if it surrenders precious ground to heretical forces in the battle for all of science’s soul. And the post-modernists are consequently vindicated in questioning what kind of power is made manifest, and towards whom is it ultimately directed, when these assertions are given the pop-science stamp of total veracity. (Actually, despite it being basically their entire deal, I can’t recall a moment when Wright discussed power when issuing his disses of post-modernism. Instead, he discussed them in the same kind of shifting, ephemeral manner that paints them as boogeymen with accusations that were often equally grounded in reality. I think he would find his own intellectual horizons broadened if he allotted the same serious attention to their intellectual contributions as he demands for his subject). 

To shoehorn in a personal complaint that I had, the book was heavy in evolutionary theory but very, very sparse in social-psychological insight. Spare a chapter where Wright tried to rehabilitate Freud’s reputation (as successful attempt as one’s going to have considering how uphill that battle is), most of the psychology was relegated to sexual pairing preferences and over-general suggestions on morality and social bonding. The former was interesting and insightful; the rest woefully underdeveloped. I may be spoiled by books like Behave and How Emotions Are Made (part of these phenomenal works both touched on how evolution may bring around specific cognitive processes), but I think Wright could have comfortably fit interesting, more specific insights if he shed the weird moralism and extensive post-modernist vendetta.

I hate closing reviews with negatives, no matter how well deserved. Presumably that’s in my genes as well. So I’d actually like to conclude by saying that I well and truly learned a lot from this book. Some of it was less novel so much as it was a refresher (I have read a number of prominent books on evolutionary theory, including the oft-referenced Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins), but some insights were well and truly new to me and illuminating. The one that stands out the most at the moment is the game theoretic accounts claiming that monogamy ultimately serves men (while institutional polygyny would be better for women) and the argument that people are more rude in spaces with fewer permanent interpersonal ties. I also thought the point that adherence to cultural values are an expedient for environmentally contingent reproductive success was well argued. I don’t buy these arguments entirely, but I think they and other points are worth mulling over to extract the useful bits. But in order to get to these bits, you have to be attentive and willing to parse through a lot of things that, in the rat-race of ideas, deserve to be thoroughly out-competed. 

#reviews #book review #evolutionary psychology #books #psychology #nonfiction

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A Cartoonist’s Dazzling History of NYC

From Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz (all images courtesy Hachette Book Group, Inc.)

When cartoonist Julia Wertz left California for New York City in 2007, historians had just marked its creaking subway system’s 100th birthday. A few rainstorms flooded the archaic drainage network and crippled almost every single one of its lines that year, but the Metropolitan Transit Agency’s trains were relatively punctual compared to now, when a daily ridership that nears six million people is subject to about 75,000 wholly aggravating delays every month. Back then, the L shuffled smoothly between Chelsea and Brooklyn, where Wertz parked herself after a stint in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood.

“The first time I visited New York, prior to moving there, the subway was my first experience of the city,” reads Wertz’s all-caps narrative copy in Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City. Her chronicling of the subway is just one part of this big, new black-and-white book of comics, fastidious drawings, and nonfiction passages about America’s most densely populated metropolis.

Cover of Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz (all images courtesy of Hachette Book Group, Inc.)

Dazzling depictions of old tokens and “historic entrances,” which hover fluidly on the page, feature Brooklyn’s early 20th-century era Atlantic Avenue station and in Manhattan, an above-ground transit entrance that was called the “72nd street control house” when it opened in 1904. Both were crafted by architects George Lewis Heins and Christopher LaFarge. Wertz lovingly sketches each inch of these structures’ decorative arches and fanciful wrought iron in her singular black line. Her homage to these still-standing behemoths, which look far more like Heins and LaFarge’s famed cathedral designs than train stations, underscores the sensibility of her stirring project. It was years in the making.

“Moving to New York is an unparalleled experience that you only get to do once, and you either make it or you don’t,” wrote Wertz in Drinking at the Movies, her hilarious and occasionally gutting Eisner-nominated 2010 graphic memoir about moving to New York City. Amid its self-deprecating and smart, personal strips, a love of architecture is borne out in diagrammed apartment floor plans and depictions of leafy sidewalks near Greenpoint’s McGolrick Park. The Koyama Press 2015 edition of Wertz’s book included a “New York City Sketchbook,” which heralded the fruitful route taken after she quit drinking (as well as comics, for a time).

From Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz (all images courtesy of Hachette Book Group, Inc.)

For a couple of years, Wertz broke into closed hotels and abandoned hospitals to explore, photograph, and draw forgotten, trash-strewn crooks of the city and elsewhere. “It’s very physical,” the artist said of her “running through the woods, running from cops” in a 2016 Cometbus interview. Her ever-morphing storefronts and nonfiction “Then & Now” comics about New York City — punched-up with wildly improvised dialogue — ran in Harper’s and the New Yorker and sometimes starred Wertz herself, depicted as a diminutive figure whose broadening eye sockets and apple cheeks sit under a black helmet of hair. This minimal exaggeration looks nothing like her because drawing people isn’t Wertz’s strong suit, and because her cartoon portrayal was perhaps conceived to distinguish her comics self from the actual struggles with alcoholism that threatened her health and suffocated her artistically. Heavy drinking confined Wertz to her compact Brooklyn apartment, but when she found a path out of her front door, she produced a body of work that feels peerless for its distinctive storytelling and visual splendor.

From Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz (all images courtesy of Hachette Book Group, Inc.)

Wertz’s glossy magazine assignments and more are included in Tenements, Towers & Trash. Row home backyards and brownstones are expansive and magnified, finally getting the space they deserve. Long-gone theater marquees, snack carts, and the immense hand-painted typography of age-old signage are acknowledged with affection for the city that Joan Didion compared to one’s first lover. There are sporadic comic strips on pizza or street cleaning, too — Wertz is just as committed to producing technical diagrams of street sweepers as she is to sketching piles of festering 19th-century era garbage. 

In the West Village, an origin story for C.O. Bigelow Apothecaries (New York City’s oldest functioning pharmacy), takes shape in grandiose exterior studies and comics panels that flaunt its lofty cupboards and aging oak cabinets. Wertz’s swirling strokes detail imperfections in the wood grain from floor to ceiling. Uptown, she pays similar tribute to the Dakota residence, “an architectural amalgamation of styles” per her annotations. An exacting full-bleed illustration of the edifice — once home to Roberta Flack, John Lennon, and the couple in Rosemary’s Baby — gets textured domes and blackened spires, each built out in Wertz’s precise draftsmanship. How might this have looked if restricted to magazine format? It’s enormous in this coffee table-styled volume, the building’s impossibly sloped roof and wiry black iron rails crashing into the generous page borders. These images, and Wertz’s “Then & Now” series in general, are as romantic as they are scientific — an almost painful exercise in their portrayal of how rapidly our beloved buildings are altered irrevocably, bulldozed, or just left to fall into disrepair.

From Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz (all images courtesy of Hachette Book Group, Inc.)

I moved to Brooklyn from the Philadelphia suburbs in 2006, close to when Wertz arrived. My partner and I eventually lucked into a Manhattan Avenue apartment that neighbored one of the now-shuttered Polish restaurants drawn in Tenements, Towers & Trash. We drank cheap beer at Motor City and went to parties at Black Betty or Savalas. On Sunday mornings, we quieted hangovers at Roebling Tea Room or Greenpoint Coffee House. Those places are gone, and I’m still getting over it. But I feel fortunate that when she lived here, Julia Wertz was keeping all of this in a sketchbook.

In 2016, the cartoonist was illegally evicted from her Greenpoint apartment and finished the book in her mother’s attic in California. Her devotion to New York City never wavered.

“During my last years in the city, I spent all my time drawing buildings, researching and writing, and wandering through different neighborhoods,” Wertz writes. “I’d always loved long walks, but it wasn’t until I started obsessively drawing NYC when I started to really see it — the architecture, the people, the history — and to really love it.”

Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City is now available from Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.

The post A Cartoonist’s Dazzling History of NYC appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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