Why did Obama overwhelmingly win a stretch of Southern counties in 2008? Johnson sees “a longer story: from the ancient geological forces that deposited that crescent of black soil, to the appetite for cotton stirred up by the shopkeepers of London, to the brutal exploitation of the plantation system engineered to satisfy that new demand.” Galloping onward, Johnson uses this extraordinary connection - do protectionism and misogyny always go hand in hand? A question for this election, even - to explain, well, everything. “None shall be thought/A more scandalous Slut/Than a taudry Callico Madam” went the “Spittle-Fields Ballad,” named for a neighborhood of English wool weavers. Calico demanded global markets - and protectionists, wouldn’t you know it, were able to paint calico fans as nothing less than sluts. It seems the women of the 17th century who loved calico for its sweet appearance and sweeter texture - its fun, as Johnson has it - were once considered, of all things, anti-England, since the wool growers of Albion could not slake their thirst for softer textiles. My absolute favorite passage in “Wonderland” comes in a section about the delight furnished by printed cotton. “You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun,” Johnson writes, and damned if the human capacity for dawdling over Candy Crush and skipping after shiny objects isn’t convincingly ennobled here.
If “Wonderland” inspires grins and well-what-d’ya-knows of legitimate wonder - and it does - it also liberates its audience to wantonly savor them. Who needs a footnoted analysis of “the ludic,” as play is known to the terminally unplayful? Barnumism of the Johnson kind is much, much more fun. Red wires connect haphazardly to blue, and sparks fly. Marvelous circuits of prose inductors, resistors and switches simulate ordinary history so nearly as to make readers forget the real thing. Steven Johnson’s “Wonderland” makes a swashbuckling argument for the centrality of recreation to all of human history. WONDERLAND How Play Made the Modern World By Steven Johnson 322 pp.
0 kommentar(er)
