pagesofjulia

Man, this Object Lessons series has been really up-and-down for me. I’ve found some transcendent books (Sock, Souvenir), but also some that failed to impress. And now this: Hair pretty much kept me angry throughout. I really thought it would be a DNF, but I just kept reading. I think I was curious to see if it would get better or if this was really it. Also, these books are short.

Scott Lowe turns out to be interested in social customs, and religion in particular, at the expense of science, or the uses of hair as object, for example. And these Object Lessons are explorations of objects from whatever angles (generally multiple ones); no foul here, but if I’d realized that Hair was a relatively single-lens study, and that that lens was religion, I might have passed. This is not my greatest criticism, but it makes the whole thing a little less appealing.

My problem was that Lowe tries to be funny, and his humor I frequently found misplaced if not offensive. Did Bloomsbury read this book before they printed it?? I found him funny one time, and made 10 notes where his treatment of race, gender, and non-Western cultures upset me (in 125 pages). I wish I could get this time back. Luckily, only 125 pages.

For the record, I’ll give a few examples. Lowe takes the time to deconstruct the myth that Jesus had long hair. But does not address the fact that Jesus was not white, and thus his hair would not have looked the way it’s frequently depicted in our culture, no matter the length? The House of David’s long-haired men’s baseball team played (as spectacle) against a short-haired lesbian women’s team, and “probably the cleverest part is that the lesbians would openly cheat, spiking and elbowing the Israelite team and engaging in outrageous dirty tricks, with the calculated effect of turning the crowds’ emotions… [toward] the House of David team to sympathetic support. It must have been great theater”! What fun, hating on the lesbians together, har har! Also women with beards are good for a laugh. Women should be uncomfortable with their furs as sex appeal (but no mention of men’s roles in this whole setup). Juxtaposition of “we moderns” against the behaviors of “a friend from Ghana, who was raised in a modern, educated Christian family.” (Nobody caught this in editing?) And probably the number one reason I read this book to the end: I was in a sustained state of disbelief that Lowe was just not going to handle the remarkable world of Black Americans’ hair. “Rather than address African hair in general,” he deals with Rastafari and Nation of Islam in a whopping 7 pages, and brushes his hands together and moves on.

I’ll try another few of these, I guess: when they’re good, they’re so good! But I’ve been frustrated a few times now. And I’m paying for each volume. You’re on notice, Bloomsbury.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: essays, nonfiction, Object Lessons, objects |