"Pleasure Reading"

Having a self-imposed respite: not reading any scholarship directly related to my main research areas of interest (ie. Native Americans, sheet music, and especially musicological gender studies.) Meaning I have time for "pleasure reading." And hopefully, I'll be getting to those Dickens and Austen books I've been postponing for a while, right now I'm gradually assimilating my reading, getting back into a more leisurely reading framework, with this book. The scholar, Steven Biel, writes in a style that seems very similar to my own writing. And so it is quite relaxing to read scholarship that feels like I wrote it (or helped edit it perhaps). The book is not without its faults, but it does finally give me a book on the Titanic that doesn't tell me what happened (let's hope I'm aware of the facts, after reading about it for 20 years). Biel tells me what it meant in cultural history and how it was interpreted in its day. The following passage was particuarly wonderful:

What emerged in the days after the disaster was a myth--- not because it was false necessarily but because it located a disturbing event within routine structures of understanding. "Myth," as Richard Slotkin has written, "is invoked as a means of deriving usable values from history, and of putting those values beyond the reach of critical demystification. its primary appeal is to ritualized emotions, established beliefs, habitual associations, memory, nostalgia." In the case of the Titanic the myth of first-cabin male heroism appealed to conventional understandings and sentimental notions of gender roles that involved a series of oppositions: strength versus weakness, independence versus dependence; intellect versus emotion; public versus private....Out of the conflicting stories and disparate details came confirmation that the disaster had not disrupted the normal relations between the sexes. (pg 24-5)

Okay, yes, this is still along the framework of my turn of the 20th century gender issues. But the entire book is not all about women. Hence why this is a gradual assimilation back into the idea that I can read something that doesn't necessarily go into a research project the next day.