The Chicago Blog

Taking its inspiration from Ebert's own critical methodology as set forth in his new book Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, Tara Ison's review for the L.A. Times balances her critique of Ebert's work "between the bottom line and the higher reaches, between the answers to the questions (1) Is this [book] worth my money? and (2) Does this [book] expand or devalue my information about human nature?"

Her answers?

(1) Yes, this is a meaty and comprehensive collection of over 40 years' worth of impassioned film writing—not merely reviews but profiles and essays as well; and (2) Yes; Ebert indeed expands our knowledge of human nature through his incisive analysis of the 20th century's (arguably) primary form of artistic expression, of its evolution and its lure.

If Ebert's book can live up to his own stringent standards you know it's got to be good. Ebert's masterful blend of entertaining and intelligent essays on everything from Star Wars to Meryl Streep is truly an indispensable chronicle of the American cinema since the late 1960s.

Archived in Film and Media | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chicago poetry lovers will have a difficult choice to make tomorrow: Bernstein or Sereni? The work of both poets will be featured in events the evening of Thursday, November 30.

Language poet Charles Bernstein, author of over 30 books, including Girly Man, My Way, and With Strings is one of the most important figures working in the genre. He will be at the University of Chicago for a reading at 5:30 pm Thursday night in Rosenwald Hall, room 405, 1101 E. 58th Street. He will lecture on Friday at 1:00 pm in Classics, room 110. In preparation you can check out some Bernstein writings, including "Report from Liberty Street" and "Against National Poetry Month as Such".

Meanwhile downtown, Peter Robinson will present his English translations of the works of Italian poet Vittorio Sereni—one of the most important avant-garde Italian poets of the twentieth century—collected in the volume The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni: A Bilingual Edition. The event will take place at 6:00 pm at the Italian Cultural Institute, 500 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1450.

Choose your poetics, choose a poet, you must choose.

Archived in Author Events | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1909 Daniel Burnham authored The Plan of Chicago—a work that would prove to be one of the most important and influential documents in the history of urban planning. A lavish tome that re-imagined not only Chicago but urban space generally, it included proposals for many of Chicago's lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, Navy Pier, and other distinctive features of the city. But what lead up to its creation, and what were the factors influencing Burnham's revolutionary ideas? Enter Carl Smith's new book The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. As noted by a recent review in the November 24 New York Sun Carl Smith's new book is "a concise, splendidly accessible, and beautifully constructed introduction to [this] seminal work of American urban planning and its enduring influence on Chicago and other American cities."

Praising Smith's incisive take on Burnham's work the review continues: "[Smith] writes particularly well, without padding or academic jargon, and admirable self-restraint: He tells us just enough about the men and the times that created The Plan of Chicago to make us want to learn more on our own. One can offer no higher praise for a writer."

Illuminating the complex issues influencing the masterpiece of urban planning that was Burnham's Plan, Carl Smith's The Plan of Chicago is an indispensable contribution to our understanding of Chicago, Daniel Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What do public sculptures and murals have in common with sidewalks and trash cans? In New York, none of them can occupy city property without the approval of a single municipal agency. This colorful history of that agency, the Art Commission of the City of New York, tells the century-long story—involving artists, architects, business leaders, activists, and politicians—of how it shaped the way the entire city looks today. A former vice president of the ACNY, Michele Bogart narrates its history from an insider's perspective, tracing the commission's activities from its 1898 founding as an outgrowth of progressive reform to its role in New York's reconstruction after 9/11.

Drawing readers into the center of an art world that paralleled—and sometimes unpredictably intersected with—the more familiar realm of prominent architects, painters, galleries, and museums, The Politics of Urban Beauty tells a quintessentially New York tale that's of utmost relevance to cities everywhere.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
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One of theater's most enduring and perennially fascinating characters, Shylock was a breakthrough for Shakespeare, an early realization of the Bard's power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses—characters larger than the plays that contain them. But what explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare's plays? Kenneth Gross posits in this daring and revisionist book that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself.

Read the press release for Shylock Is Shakespeare.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of their 400th anniversary celebration of the birth of Rembrandt, the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam will host "The Jewish Rembrandt"—a collection of the Dutch artist's works that deal with Jewish themes. Rembrandt is popularly thought of as having a special affinity for Judaism, but this exhibition promises a more critical and in depth look at the impact of Jewish religion and culture on his work than ever before. The exhibit runs until February 4, 2007.

But even if you can't make it to Amsterdam, Steven Nadler's new book Rembrandt's Jews is a revealing exploration of Rembrandt's work along similar lines. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam, Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. Through his detailed analysis of the Rembrant's work, as well as that of several other prominant Dutch painters, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A towering figure in twentieth-century intellectual life art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-96) profoundly influenced the study of everything from twelfth-century sculpture to modern painting. He made his name as a young scholar, though, by helping to define and elevate the singular style of art known as Romanesque, and it was to the Romanesque that he returned when he was invited to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1967.

In a labor of love, Linda Seidel—who attended Schapiro's Norton lectures and came to know him through her own work—spent years transcribing and editing the originals to produce this long-awaited, handsomely illustrated volume. Combined with Seidel's illuminating introduction placing these works in context and telling the story of their long journey to publication, Meyer Schapiro's Norton lectures provide exciting new paths toward comprehending the depth and breadth of the master scholar's original vision.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How can a building speak? Look, through Anthony Alofsin's eyes at Budapest's Royal Postal Savings Bank: its technologically advanced construction says modern no less clearly than the spoken word, while its references to Hungarian folk culture proclaim its historical roots. Revealing how such visual languages can express the conflicted identities of entire nations, in When Buildings Speak Alofsin leads readers on a lavishly illustrated tour of overlooked architectural brilliance.

Featuring more than 150 color photographs specially commissioned to highlight the neglected yet rich architecture of Central Europe—from national theaters and crematoria to apartment buildings and warehouses—this study offers a new understanding of how people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states expressed their cultural and political autonomy by tapping into the limitless possibilities of art and architectural styles.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nadia Abu El-Haj is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Barnard College. She previously taught here at the University of Chicago where she was affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Before her position at Barnard she was in residence for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is coming up for tenure. Typically the process of granting tenure receives no public input or scrutiny. But these are unusual times for some scholars in Middle Eastern studies; Abu El-Haj has received a good bit of public criticism over a book that we published five years ago, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. With the support of partisan groups, Barnard alumnae are being urged to write letters to the president of Barnard in an effort to deny Abu El-Haj tenure.

Very few people who get swept up in such crusades ever bother to read the material in dispute. Here's a place to start:

An excerpt from Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society by Nadia Abu El-Haj

In 1971, Amos Elon, an Israeli journalist, first wrote of "the extraordinary appeal of archaeology as a popular pastime and science in Israel." As he explained, "Israeli archaeologists, professional and amateurs, are not merely digging for knowledge and objects, but for the reassurance of roots, which they find in the ancient Israelite remains scattered throughout the country." The first generation of Israeli archaeologists dug in search of Israelites, an "ethnic group" that presumably entered Palestine in the transition from the late Bronze Age to the early Iron Age. The primary question of archaeological importance after the founding of the state and, in particular, to be answered by the major work and excavations of the 1950s concerned the character of the ancient Israelite conquest of the land of Canaan. It was by that issue that the field would long be dominated, and by the divergent convictions regarding the nature of that historical process by which it would long be divided.

There were two schools of thought in this argument. Yigael Yadin, following the work of the American biblical archaeologist William Foxwell Albright, defended the historicity of the tale of conquest put forth in the Book of Joshua, which was the story of a quick and decisive Israelite military victory over the Canaanite city-states. Yohanan Aharoni, for his part, argued that the archaeological evidence supported a different story, which was that of the Israelite settlement told in the Old Testament's Book of Judges. That story, long defended by a German biblical scholar, Albrecht Alt, recounted a more gradual process of settling the land of Canaan, which was followed only later by the military defeat of the Canaanite city-states. This theory came to be known as the school of "peaceful infiltration" in this settlement debate.

This dispute has been understood as a reflection of the multiple social imageries and interests then pervasive in Israeli society. As Neil Silberman argued, "These were more than dispassionate scholarly alternatives. In their differing reconstructions of the Israelite conquest, Yadin and Aharoni both implicitly expressed their own understandings of modern processes of territorial conquest and nationhood". For Yadin, who had previously been head of the operations branch of the Haganah, chief of operations of the Israel Defense Forces in 1948, and then the IDF's chief of staff, the story of a decisive military victory achieved under the unified command of an innovative leader resonated with his own understanding of Israeli victory in 1948. Aharoni, however, was rooted in the kibbutz movement. He was allied with the left wing of labor Zionism, which had envisioned land seizure via settlement as preferable to seizure through war. Sovereignty would be achieved over the whole of the land of Israel not through "political declarations or formal statehood," but, rather, through "hard work, pioneering and steadily expanding settlement." Or, as Shulamit Geva has argued, Yadin's version of events resonated in a society preoccupied with issues of military security and in a national culture that upheld the soldier as national icon, thus, his victory in both the scholarly and the popular imaginations.

Social imagery may well resonate in historical arguments, but there are far more fundamental ways in which the debate about the Israelite settlement was intertwined with the practice of nationhood. The quest for "facts" and the epistemological commitments that underwrote that quest illustrate the dynamic relationship between empiricism and nationalism and demonstrate how a commitment to the former gave credible form to the latter, not just in narrative, but, even more powerfully, in material cast.

The debate over the character of Israelite settlement and the work of generating an empirical body of evidence to prove or disprove one or another of the accounts (historical hypotheses, one could call them) established a paradigm of archaeological practice that guided disciplinary work for decades to come. No longer the pre-paradigmatic archaeology of the pre-state period, this dispute consolidated, to borrow Thomas Kuhn's term, "normal science." Archaeological practice would henceforth involve puzzle solving, which continually extended the empirical basis of the original theory, a practice in which key background assumptions, nationalist and nationalizing, were never questioned. Simultaneously, this scholarly debate is perhaps best understood as an ongoing practice of settler nationhood, one that repeatedly reenacted and reinstantiated the "national collective" in empirical form, facts of positive science that emerged as an independent evidentiary basis upon which the work of archaeology itself would henceforth rely and within which the ancient Israelite nation would emerge as visible. I trace the work through which three conceivably autonomous fields of discourse and practice—nationalism, archaeology, and the Bible—converge, each stabilized and grounded through one particular scholarly dispute.

"Few questions in Israelite history have interested so many people from so many different points of view," Yohanan Aharoni wrote in 1957 in his account of the debate concerning the Israelite conquest. As he explained in the preface to The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Upper Galilee, "The history of the Jewish people in the full sense of the word commences only in the Land of Israel, with the beginnings of the settlement in ancient Canaan." The archaeology of Israelite settlement was very much a search for national origins, that is, a quest for material evidence of the emergence of ancient Israel in their land. It is the character of the early phases of that settlement process—when and how the Israelites first entered and conquered "ancient Canaan"—with which I engage here, by focusing on the nature of evidence, reasoning, and argument brought to bear on the dispute.

In the fall of 1958, the Israel Exploration Society (IES) held its fourteenth yedi'at ha-Aretz conference in Safed, which was attended by approximately 1,400 persons, including, among others, the speaker of the Knesset, the head of the Jewish Agency, and the mayor of Safed. This was one forum in which Yadin and Aharoni publicly staged their dispute. Under the title "Safed and the Upper Galilee," the theme that year, the conference's sixth session was devoted to a discussion of the Israelite conquest and settlement in ancient Galilee. It was with reference to the excavations at Hazor that Yadin clarified his position in the debate.

With Yadin as director, excavations began at Hazor in 1955 under the joint auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Exploration Society. The excavations focused on the exploration of what came to be identified as two cities: the Upper City (located on the tell itself) and the adjacent Lower City. The Lower City, Yadin explained to his audience, 700 dunams in perimeter, was founded in the middle Bronze Age (i.e., the first half of the second millennium BCE, suffered a massive destruction in late Bronze I, was rebuilt on a smaller scale, and continued to exist through the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. The very same history of settlement and destruction was found on the tell itself, Hazor's Upper City. Those, however, were not the destruction levels on which the Israelite settlement debate would focus. Rather, above the destruction level of the last Canaanite-city, and beneath the strata of "Solomon's city," excavators had identified remains of "a small Israelite settlement." In that early-Israelite stratum, Yadin explained, they had discovered a pottery assemblage containing the same ceramic forms characteristic of the Israelite settlements in Upper Galilee (surveyed by Aharoni a few years beforehand) that had been dated to the twelfth and eleventh centuries. Given the dates Yadin assigned to these two strata—the last Canaanite city and the first Israelite settlement (thirteenth and twelfth-eleventh centuries, respectively)—he concluded that Israelite settlement in the Galilee had to have begun "after the conquest of Hazor."

What all this archaeological evidence verified, for Yadin, was the historicity of the story of conquest presented in the Book of Joshua. In other words, the empirical evidence excavated at Razor confirmed his historical hypothesis. Given the material evidence, he insisted, there was no reason to suppose that Joshua did not conquer Razor. Moreover, if the "time of Deborah" was fixed, as Benjamin Mazar suggested, to the end of the thirteenth century, the excavations at Razor did not contradict that biblical story either. He believed he had laid bare archaeological facts that disproved what he identified as the two "extreme" positions: dating the destruction of Hazor to the fifteenth century (as had John Garstang, who conducted trial digs at Razor in the 1920s) or to the end of the twelfth. Neither date was supported by archaeological evidence.

The latter position—dating Hazor's destruction to the end of the twelfth century BCE—was a reference to Aharoni's position in this conquest debate. And it was Yohanan Aharoni who spoke next. He laid out the contours of his argument on the process and dating of settlement and conquest by the Israelite tribes in the ancient Galilee: "The Bible, the external sources, and archaeological research prove that the Tribes of Israel settled initially mostly in the mountainous regions and did not have the power to conquer the tells of the Canaanite valley." In other words, it was on the basis of three bodies of evidence, each presumably independent of the other two, that he had developed his position on the history of settlement at Hazor in relation to that of Upper Galilee more broadly. The destruction of Hazor did not precede the process of Israelite settlement in the region. Rather, it succeeded it. The dating of each element in this historical tale (the destruction of Hazor, the initial process of settlement in the ancient Galilee) would have to be reconsidered.

Like Yadin before him, Aharoni was forced to grapple with the question of biblical chronology. According to the Book of Joshua, after all, Hazor's destruction did not conform to Aharoni's sequencing of these historical events. It was destroyed in the days of Joshua, that is, at the very start of the era in which the Israelites crossed the River Jordan and entered the Land of Canaan. Aharoni, however, saw a clear resolution to this apparent contradiction. The Bible had corrected this impression by its mention of the fact that Hazor still stood at the head of the Canaanite alliance during the days of the war of Deborah. The question remained of how then to account for this chronological inconsistency. The war of Deborah, after all, presumably followed Joshua's conquest. The Bible's editors, Aharoni explained, passed on events with precision. The same could not be said about chronology (something about which they did not always know, he clarified): "The Israelite wars in the Galilee described in the Book of Joshua chapter 11 are wrongly attributed to Joshua." In fact, we learn quite clearly from Chronicles that Hazor was destroyed only in the era of Judges, "that is to say, during the 12th century."

According to Aharoni, archaeological evidence, that is, empirical facts, had not yet established with certitude the precise time of Canaanite Hazor's final destruction. Nevertheless, it was certain (on the basis of the presence of Mycenaean pottery, which was imported during the thirteenth century) that the destruction of the penultimate Canaanite city (of the Lower City) could not have occurred before the thirteenth century. On top of that late-Bronze I city, moreover, excavators had revealed a more recent Canaanite city; on the tell itself, they had isolated two Canaanite strata that also postdated that thirteenth century date. Thus, Aharoni concluded that even though an exact date for the destruction of the last Canaanite city at Hazor could not be established, there was no reason to "assume that it was destroyed before the 12th century." (In other words, the circa 1250 BCE date that Yadin had set could not be correct.) While the chronological problem could not yet be settled definitively, Aharoni pointed out two important historical questions for which the excavations had produced indisputable proof: First, the account in Joshua that "among all the cities of Canaan in the North only Hazor suffered a complete destruction" was accurate. The historicity of that biblical tale had been confirmed by empirical evidence. Second, the excavations proved that the tribes of Israel who settled on the Canaanite city's ruins used "Israelite pottery," the same pottery discovered during his archaeological survey of Upper Galilee.

This argument between Aharoni and Yadin was truly acrimonious and was represented in a rather tongue-in-cheek Ha'aretz article. After viewing the various Bronze Age destruction and building levels, with Yadin at his side to explain, journalist Shimon Tzabar wrote, they finally arrived at the central historical question: "And suddenly Joshua came and destroyed it all. Before Yadin said the name Joshua, he looked left and right to see if Aharoni was listening because Aharoni gets extremely angry when he hears that." The disagreement polarized the two archaeologists to such an extent that Aharoni ultimately moved to Tel Aviv University. Students and colleagues were forced to take sides, and very few managed to work or maintain good relations with Yadin and Aharoni at the same time.

But for all the irascibility of the dispute, this was in effect an argument over details.. The debate concerned questions of chronology, sequence, and, thereby, the character of the historical process known a priori as the Israelite settlement. Both schools of thought shared far more than they disagreed about: the historicity of the biblical tales, the "fact" of an Israelite nation that entered ancient Palestine during the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition, the criteria of evidence, argumentation, and archaeological practice. Nevertheless, the work through which answers and positions in the dispute were produced crystallized the epistemological, methodological, and historical architecture of disciplinary debate and practice.

It was precisely through this dispute over details that a tale best understood as the modern nation's origin myth was transported into the realm of history—that an ancient Israelite social collectivity emerged as historical fact. Throughout the argument, the oft-repeated moral lessons and divine interventions that form the context of those events that Aharoni claims the Bible's redactors passed on with precision are elided. In their place, historical events that proceed linearly ''as part of a chronological or causal series" emerge, themselves compiled through a "naïvely realist" reading of and attitude toward the biblical texts. In analyzing the relationship between this excruciatingly detailed scholarly argument over particulars of chronology and sequence and the concretizing of the (colonial-) national imagination's most fundamental historical grammar in empirical form, it is helpful to focus on the three linchpins that together composed the scaffold of scientific practice and historical inquiry shared by Yadin and Aharoni alike: texts, dates, and pots. At the heart of this analysis rests the most fundamental question of all: What is it that makes particular historical eras and specific forms of material culture—in this instance, a distinctive class of pottery—Israelite?

Both Aharoni's survey of Upper Galilee and Yadin's excavations at Hazor, which relied on Aharoni's prior work, invoked empirical facts as the basis for verifying or falsifying, proving or disproving specific aspects of the Bible's textual accounts. But the empirical basis of disciplinary practice itself had textual roots, as can be shown through W. F. Albright's initial identification of "Israelite pottery." Once released from its initial genealogy, this archaeological data took on a life of its own, enabling paradigmatic practice to take shape, stabilizing the Bible as a historic document, and generating a body of evidence in which the ancient—the historical—nation would henceforth inhere.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jean-Noel Jeanneney's Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge is a startlingly incisive diatribe against the Google Library Project—Google's initiative to digitize and electronically distribute the holdings of several of the world's major libraries. Yet, as several recent reviews have noted, standing in the way of Google's multi-billion dollar enterprise is not likely to make you popular—or rich. Writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer Carlin Romano praises Jeanneney's subversive project remarking that Jeanneney provides "a take on world Googlization that you're not likely to get from your broker." And indeed David Ng writing for Forbes magazine seems to agree when he writes:

Every conversation needs at least two voices. This slim volume…provides a crucial dissenting opinion in a world where the mere mention of Google (or, rather Google's money) can act as a conversation ender. The Google war chest has all but secured dominance over smaller library efforts, like the author's own project to digitize the French National collection. History judges societies by how they treat their most disadvantaged members. This book asks only that the Google economy be held to the same standard.

Shedding new light on the darker side of Google, Jeanneny's book is a timely and important comment on the digital age.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Altman died yesterday at the age of 81. To mark his passing and his profound influence on contemporary film, we reprint Roger Ebert's interview of Altman as published in Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert.

I think I’ve interviewed Robert Altman more often than anybody else in the movie business. That has something to do with his method of making a movie, which is to assemble large groups of people and set them all in motion at once. There are always visitors on the set. Altman presides as an impresario or host. He likes to introduce people. I wonder if he dislikes being alone. Kathryn, his wife of forty years, is always somewhere nearby, a coconspirator.

Once we both found ourselves at a film festival in Iowa City that was held only once. We both thought Pauline Kael was going to be there, which was why we’d agreed to come. Pauline later said she’d never been invited. Bob and I sat on a desk in a classroom and discussed the delicately moody Thieves Like Us, one of his most neglected films. Other times, I visited the sets of Health, A Wedding, and Gosford Park, and watched him rehearse the Lyric Opera adaptation of A Wedding years later.

He marched to his own drummer. After the Sundance premiere of his Gingerbread Man, he sat at a reception for a thousand people in Salt Lake City, contentedly smoking a joint. In his screening room at his original Lions Gate in Westwood, he screened rough cuts for just about anyone who wanted to come. Twice Chaz and I joined the Altmans for dinner in Chicago with mayor Richard M. and Maggie Daley; the mayor likes movies and can talk about them, and the two men had an easy rapport. Entering the restaurant on a winter night after he’d wrapped The Company, Robert swept in with him the snowy air and the aroma of marijuana. Daley looked at me and lifted an eyebrow not more than an eighth of an inch, and smiled so slyly you had to be looking for it.

Altman told me once he didn’t mind a bad review, “because without them, what does a good review mean?” He added that in my case all of my negative reviews of his work had been wrong.

CANNES, France—Yes, it was very pleasant. We sat on the stern of Robert Altman’s rented yacht in the Cannes harbor, and looked across at the city and the flags and the hills. There was a scotch and soda with lots of ice, and an efficient young man dressed all in white who came on quiet shoes to fill the glasses when it was necessary.

Altman wore a knit sport shirt with the legend of the Chicago Bears over the left pocket: a souvenir, no doubt, from his trips to Chicago to scout locations for A Wedding. He was in a benign mood, and it was a day to savor. The night before, his film 3 Women had played as an official entry in the Cannes festival, and had received a genuinely warm standing ovation, the most enthusiastic of the festival.

Because his M*A*S*H had won the Grand Prix in 1970, Altman could have shown this film out of competition. But he wasn’t having any: “If you don’t want to be in competition,” he was saying, “that means you’re either too arrogant, or too scared. So you might lose? I’ve lost before; there’s nothing wrong with losing.”

He was, as it turned out, only being halfway prophetic: three days later the jury would award the Grand Prix to an Italian film, giving 3 Women the best actress award for Shelley Duvall’s performance. But on this afternoon it was still possible to speculate about the grand prize, with the boat rocking gently and nothing on the immediate horizon except, of course, the necessity to be in Chicago in June to begin a $4 million movie with forty-eight actors, most of whom would be on the set every day for two months.

“I’d be back supervising the preparation,” Altman said, “except I’m lazy. Also, my staff knows what I want better than I do. If I’m there, they feel like they have to check with me, and that only slows them down.”

Lauren Hutton drifted down from the upper deck. She’ll play a wedding photographer making a sixteen-millimeter documentary film-within-a-film in A Wedding, and Altman’s counting on her character to help keep the other characters straight. “With forty-eight people at the wedding party, we have to be sure the audience can tell them apart. The bridesmaids will all be dressed the same, for example. So Lauren will be armed with a book of Polaroids of everybody, as a guide for herself, and we can fall back on her confusion when we think the audience might be confused.”

Fresh drinks arrived. Altman sipped his and found it good. His wife, Kathryn, returning from a tour of the yacht harbor, walked up the gangplank and said she had some calls to make. Altman sipped again.

“It’s lovely sitting on this yacht,” he said after a moment. “Beats any hotel in town.”

The boat is called Pakcha? I asked.

“Yeah,” said Altman. “Outta South Hampton. It’s been around the world twice. Got its name in one of those South Sea Islands. Pakcha is a Pacific dialect word for ‘traveling white businessman.’”

He shrugged, as if to say, how can I deny it? He sipped his drink again, and I asked if that story was really true about how he got the idea for A Wedding.

“Yeah, that’s how it came about, all right. We were shooting 3 Women out in the desert, and it was a really hot day and we were in a hotel room that was like a furnace, and I wasn’t feeling too well on account of having felt too well the night before, and this girl was down from L.A. to do some in-depth gossip and asked me what my next movie was going to be. At that moment, I didn’t even feel like doing this movie, so I told her I was gonna shoot a wedding next. A wedding? Yeah, a wedding.

“So a few moments later my production assistant comes up and she says, ‘Bob, did you hear yourself just then?’ Yeah, I say, I did. ‘That’s not a bad idea, is it?’ She says. Not a bad idea at all, I say; and that night we started on the outline.”

3 Women itself had an equally unlikely genesis, Altman recalled: “I dreamed it. I dreamed of the desert, and these three women, and I remember every once in a while I’d dream that I was waking up and sending out people to scout locations and cast the thing. And when I woke up in the morning, it was like I’d done the picture. What’s more, I liked it. So, what the hell, I decided to do it.”

The movie is about . . . well, it’s about whatever you think it’s about. Two of the women, the main characters, seem to undergo a mysterious personality transfer in the film’s center, and then they fuse with the third woman to form a new personality altogether. Some viewers have found it to be an Altman statement on women’s liberation, but he doesn’t see it that way:

“For women’s lib or against? Don’t ask me. If I sat here and said the film was about X, Y, and Z, that restricts the audience to finding the film within my boundaries. I want them to go outside to bring themselves to the film. What they find there will be at least as interesting as what I did . . .

“And I kept on discovering things in the film right up to the final edit. The film begins, for example, with Sissy Spacek wandering in out of the desert and meeting Shelley Duvall and getting the job in the rehabilitation center. And when I was looking at the end of the film during the editing process, it occurred to me that when you see that final exterior shot of the house, and the dialogue asks the Sissy Spacek character to get the sewing basket—well, she could just walk right out of the house and go to California and walk in at the beginning of the movie, and it would be perfectly circular and even make sense that way. But that’s only one way to read it.”

Altman said he’s constantly amazed by the things he reads about his films in reviews. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think the critics take their lead from the statements directors themselves make about their films. There was an astonishing review in Newsweek by Jack Kroll, for example, of Fellini’s Casanova. It made no sense at all, in terms of the film itself. But then I read something Fellini had said about the film, and I think Kroll was simply finding in the film what Fellini said he put there.

“With 3 Women, now, a lot of the reviews go on and on about the supposed Jungian implications of the relationships. If you ask me to give a child’s simplified difference between Jung and Freud, I couldn’t. It’s just a field I know nothing about. But the name of Jung turns up in the production notes that were written for the press kit, and there you are.”

The problem, he said, is that people insist on getting everything straight. On having movies make sense, and on being provided with a key for unlocking complex movies.

“It’s the weirdest thing. We’re willing to accept anything, absolutely anything, in real life. But we demand order from our fantasies. Instead of just going along with them and saying, yeah, that’s right, it’s a fantasy and it doesn’t make sense. Once you figure out a fantasy, it may be more satisfying but it’s less fun.”

For reasons having something to do with that, he said, he likes to take chances on his films: “Every film should be different, and get into a different area, and have its own look. I’d hate to start repeating myself. I have this thing I call a fear quotient. The more afraid I am, going in, the better the picture is likely to be.” A pause. “And on that basis, A Wedding is going to be my best picture yet.

“I like to allow for accidents, for happy occurrences, and mistakes. That’s why I don’t plan too carefully, and why we’re going to use two cameras and shoot 500,000 feet of film on A Wedding. Sometimes you don’t know yourself what’s going to work. I think a problem with some of the younger directors, who were all but raised on film, is that their film grammar has become too rigid. Their work is inspired more by other films than by life.

“That happened to Godard, and to Friedkin it may be happening. To Bogdanovich without any doubt. He has all these millions of dollars and all these great technicians, and he tells them what he wants and they give it to him. Problem is, maybe when he gets it, it turns out he didn’t really want it after all, but he’s stuck with it.”

Altman has rarely had budgets large enough to afford such freedom, if freedom’s the word. Although he’s had only one smash hit, M*A*S*H, he keeps working and remains prolific because his films are budgeted reasonably and brought in on time. For example, 3 Women is a challenging film that may not find enormous audiences, but at $1.6 million it will likely turn a profit.

“I made a deal with the studio,” he said, “if we go over budget, I pay the difference. If we stay under, I keep the change. On that one, we came in about $100,000 under budget, which certainly wasn’t enough to meet much of the overhead of keeping this whole organization going . . . but then of course you hope the film goes into profit.”

He always makes a film believing it will be enormously profitable, he said: “When I’m finished, I can’t see any way that millions of people won’t want to see what I’ve done. With The Long Goodbye, for example, we thought we had a monster hit on our hands. With Nashville, my second biggest grossing film, we did have a hit, but it was oversold. Paramount was so convinced they were going through the sky on that film that they spent so damned much money promoting it that they may never break even. It grossed $16 million, which was very good considering its budget, but they thought it would top $40 million, and they were wrong.”

But, of course, A Wedding will be a monster hit?

“I really hope so. If things work out the way I anticipate they will, it will certainly be my funniest film. I mean really funny. But then funny things happen every day.”

The man in white came on quiet shoes, and there was another scotch and soda where the old one had been. Altman obviously had a funny example in mind.

“I had this lady interviewer following me around,” he said. “More of that in-depth crap. She was convinced that life with Altman was a never-ending round of orgies and excess. She was even snooping around in my hotel bathroom, for Christ’s sake, and she found this jar of funny white powder in the medicine cabinet. Aha! she thinks. Cocaine! So she snorts some. Unfortunately, what she didn’t know was that I’m allergic to commercial toothpaste because the dentine in it makes me break out in a rash. So my wife mixes up baking soda and salt for me, and—poor girl.”

He lifted his glass and toasted her, and Cannes, and whatever.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media
Posted by DB at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Don't miss a chance to see some of the greatest minds of the century engage in fierce debate over one of the most enduring questions in human history: latke or hamantash? The 60th annual Latke-Hamantash Debate will be held tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Mandel Hall, 5706 S. University Ave. on the University of Chicago campus. The debate is free and open to the public. Tickets to the reception, where latkes and hamantashen will be served following the event, will be sold at the door for $5 each.

The intellectual and cultural extravaganza that is the Latke-Hamantash debate has been a University of Chicago tradition for over sixty years. What began as an informal gathering is now an institution that has been replicated on campuses nationwide. Highly absurd yet deeply serious, the annual debate is an opportunity for both ethnic celebration and academic farce. Chronicling the delicious, not to mention humorous history of this debate, Ruth Fredman Cernea's The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate collects the best of these performances, from Martha Nussbaum's paean to both foods—in the style of Hecuba's Lament—to Nobel laureate Leon Lederman's proclamation on the union of the celebrated dyad. Both the latke aficionado and the hamantash devotee will find this humorous collection of essays indispensable.

We also have an online feature for the book that includes Ted Cohen's metaphysical lecture of 1976, "Consolations of the Latke"—both as text and in an audio file—as well as two great recipes for, you guessed it, latkes and hamantashen.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago
Posted by TXM at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A recent review in the Chicago Sun-Times calls Paul D'Amato's Barrio: Photographs from Chicago's Pilsen and Little Village "a beautiful and troubling warts-and-all portrait of the city's largest Mexican-American neighborhoods." Chronicling the 14 years he has spent photographing Chicago's "Latino strongholds," Mr. D'Amato's work is a profoundly empathetic vision of the human struggles of a community that might otherwise remain hidden behind cultural and economic barriers. Kevin Nance, reviewing D'Amato's book for the Sun-Times seems to agree when he writes:

Certainly few of the images here are likely to make their way into tourist brochures; Pilsen, the book's ground zero, is shown as a gritty landscape of littered streets, dilapidated buildings, gang violence and spray-paint artists. At its best, however, the book transcends politics, offering images of the human condition—especially those having to do with relationships between the sexes—that penetrate the surfaces of ethnicity, class and geography.

With a foreword by author Stuart Dybek that places D'Amato's work in the context of the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods that Dybek has elsewhere captured so memorably, Barrio offers a penetrating, evocative, and overall streetwise portrait of two iconic and enduring Hispanic neighborhoods.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frankly, we don't know what the late, great Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko thought about Verdi, Rossini, Puccini, or any of the other icons of Italian opera. (We'll look through his collected columns.) But in a review of Philip Gossett's Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera Marc Geelhoed from Time Out magazine draws a direct comparison between Gossett' s first-hand account of the opera and Royko's famously shrewd journalism. Geelhoed writes:

Mike Royko had an instinctive love for the theory of how the deal went down, but what mattered most was seeing first hand how the theory played out in the real world. Musicologist Philip Gossett has spent his career at the University of Chicago, but his scholarship resides in the Royko school of street-smart reporting. Gossett isn't content to leave a groaning shelf of unread books as his legacy; he's gotten out into the Opera house and made a difference in the performing world. With Rossini's operas in particular, opera houses have relied on Gossett's expertise to coach singers and assist conductors with regard to style before a production opens. Opera lovers of all levels of musical knowledge should rejoice that his recollections are now available for their perusal.

Enlivening his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe Operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro, Divas and Scholars will enthrall both aficionados of Italian opera and newcomers seeking a reliable introduction to it—in all its incomparable grandeur and timeless allure.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Music | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On November 9, President Bush awarded Meryle Secrest the National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House, one of ten writers and scholars so honored for 2006. Secrest is noted for her biographies of some of the seminal figures of modern art and music including architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Joseph Duveen—the premier art dealer of the twentieth century. Secrest's biographies combine her comprehensive and detailed historical research with engaging narrative that reviews in publications like the Economist and New Republic have praised for expertly drawing out the connections between the lives and the art of her subjects. Bringing her readers into intimate contact with the rich history of the arts, Secrest's work is an invaluable contribution to the scholarly study of modern art.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | History
Posted by TXM at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have just learned of the death today of Milton Friedman. Friedman's contributions to economics and the public economic policy of the United States were extraordinary. Stephen Chapman wrote in the Chicago Tribune: "It is a rare professor who greatly alters the thinking of his professional colleagues. It's an even rarer one who helps transform the world. Friedman has done both."

Friedman's analysis of the Great Depression transformed not only our understanding of the causes of the economic turmoil of that era, but current monetary policy as well. The policies of the Federal Reserve Bank are guided by Friedman's theories on the linkage between inflation and the money supply. His analysis of currency markets prompted the practice of floating exchange rates. He was a principal founder of what has come to be known as the Chicago School of Economics. He was, as well, a great public champion of laissez-faire capitalism, influencing the economic policy decisions of every U.S. president of the last 30 years, as well as economic policy in governments around the world. Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976.

In 1962 we published Capitalism and Freedom one of the most influential books, in any subject, of the past 50 years. In 1998 we published Two Lucky People, the memoir by Milton and Rose Friedman of their joint lives and work. In reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review, David Brooks wrote: "This is a book that restores your faith in reasoned discourse.… There really are people who believe in scholarly exchange as a way to discover truth."

We also published Essays in Positive Economics (1953), Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money (1956), and Milton Friedman's Monetary Framework: A Debate with His Critics (1976).

More information should be available soon from the University of Chicago News Office.

Archived in Economics
Posted by DB at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An article in today's New York Times reports that historian John Hope Franklin has been awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. The Times calls the million dollar award "the prize that Alfred Nobel forgot … specifically intended for areas that the Nobel Prizes do not cover like history, political science, sociology, and philosophy." Franklin, currently emeritus professor of history at Duke University, will split the prize with Yu Ying-shih, a professor of Chinese history at Princeton.

The New York Times writes that "Franklin is widely regarded as among the first scholars to explore fully the role of African Americans in the nation's history." Some of that scholarship was published by the University of Chicago Press. We published Racial Equality in America (1976), George Washington Williams: A Biography (1985), and Reconstruction after the Civil War, now in a third edition.

This is the third year that the Kluge Prize has been awarded by the Library of Congress. Franklin is the fourth UCP author to receive the prize; previous winners include Jaroslav Pelikan, Paul Ricoeur, and Leszek Kolakowski.

Archived in Awards | Black Studies | History
Posted by TXM at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Sunday's Chicago Tribune featured a prominent review of Carl Smith's new book The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Writing for the Tribune, Lois Wille—a journalist and historian of Chicago—praises Smith's account of Daniel Burnham's sweeping plans to remake the city of Chicago. Wille writes:

The story of Burnham's plan has been told many times before but never in a more appealing or succinct style than in Carl Smith's modest little book.… What sets this book apart from other Burnham histories is Smith's attention to the filthy, miserable, 19th century city that repelled and motivated Burnham, and the extraordinary promotional effort led by the Commercial Club of Chicago, that sold his plan to the public.

Delivering a comprehensive examination of the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Smith's insightful book is an indispensable addition to our understanding of Chicago, Daniel Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.

Lois Wille is the author of Forever Open, Clear, and Free: The Struggle for Chicago's Lakefront.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In reviewing Roger Ebert's new book Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert for the online magazine Blogcritics, blogger Nick Dirga poses the question, "can you be America's most well-known movie critic, a television star and household name, and still be kind of underrated? If you're Roger Ebert," Dirga contends, "quite possibly."

Though Roger Ebert is one of America's most popular movie critics, Dirga's review points out that Ebert's fame often overshadows his important critical contributions to American cinema. According to Dirga, "Awake In The Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, serves as a fine way to remind us that Ebert is [more than just a popular TV personality,] but "first and foremost, a gifted writer." Dirga continues: "Some of the strongest writing in Awake In The Dark is a look inside Ebert's thoughts on the nature of film. 'A movie is not about what it is about,' [Ebert] writes. 'It is about how it is about it.' His celebrity may overshadow what a fine teacher he is."

Awake in the Dark is a treasure trove not just for fans of this seminal critic, but for anyone desiring a fascinating and intelligent critical discussion of contemporary American cinema.

Archived in Film and Media | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the most popular artists of the last century, Norman Rockwell specialized in warm and humorous scenes of routine small-town life. His countless illustrations of ordinary middleclass Americans for the Saturday Evening Post are still among the most indelible images in all of postwar art. Today, opinions of Rockwell vary from uncritical admiration to sneering contempt, but those who love him and those who dismiss him do seem to agree on one thing: his art embodies a distinctively American style of innocence.

Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence reimagines Rockwell as an American Freud, or a canny and remorseless diagnostician of the purity in which we bathe ourselves. Richard Halpern here argues that Rockwell's works might look like innocent portraits of everyday life, but if you look a little bit closer and probe beneath their banal veneer, you'll find a lot of them teeming with perverse acts of voyeurism and sexual desire. For Halpern, Rockwell is an artist who we have not yet dared to see for the complex creature that he is: a wholesome pervert, a knowing innocent, a kitschy genius, and an unexpected influence on more contemporary visual artists such as John Currin, Frank Moore, and Eric Fischl.

Read the press release. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In October, after decades of stormy courtship, Chicago's two major futures exchanges announced a historic $8 billion merger. The leaders of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had long wanted to join forces and finally make Chicago a global financial capital on a par with New York or London—but it almost didn't happen. In fact, few realize how two key developments saved the exchanges from going the way of the dinosaur before the deal could even take place. By going public, the exchanges were able to garner the capital necessary to make the merger happen, but by also embracing new information technologies and electronic trading, the exchanges were able to dramatically increase their business volume, and sustain themselves in the face of fierce competitors abroad.

In Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, Caitlin Zaloom takes us down to the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade where she worked for several years to give us a first hand account of this digital transition and how it's changing the way traders do their business. As the Chicago Board of Trade increasingly switches to online trading, that iconic image we all share of the floor of the CBOT—of the hustle and bustle of traders shouting and waving their arms in a frenzy as they buy and sell futures—is going to become a thing of the past. Zaloom's book tells the story of this sea change and its implications for everyone involved.

Read the press release. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since their emergence as a political force in the 1980's, conservative Christians have been stereotyped in the popular media: Bible-thumping militants and anti-intellectual zealots determined to impose their convictions on such matters as evolution, school prayer, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality on the rest of us. However, a recent article by Eyal Press in the November 20 edition of the Nation notes how Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout's new book The Truth about Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe makes a convincing argument that conservative Christians are not as fanatical or intractable as many people think, nor are they necessarily the monolithic voting block or political base for Republican candidates. Eyal Press writes in the Nation:

How, Greeley and Hout ask, do pundits routinely equate biblical Christianity with right-wing politics when African-Americans, "who are in nearly every respect as religiously conservative as whites," nevertheless "vote overwhelmingly for Democrats?" By, it appears, mistakenly assuming all Bible-believing Christians are reactionary white Southerners who write monthly checks to the likes of Jerry Falwell.… Greeley and Hout provide strong evidence that among white conservative Protestants—a category that includes denominations such as Southern Baptists, Pentecostals and Mormons—class indeed matters a lot more than most pundits think. Between 1992 and 2000, 80 percent of the affluent members of these denominations voted for Republicans, but fewer than half of those who are poor did so.

Challenging commonly held assumptions about the American electorate and revealing the complexity, variety, and sensibilities of conservative Christians, The Truth about Conservative Christians dispels the myths that have long shrouded them in prejudice and political bias.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Religion
Posted by TXM at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Passed in 2002, the McCain-Feingold Act regulates federal elections by prohibiting national political parties from accepting soft money contributions from corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individuals. The law was a bipartisan effort, one widely hailed by the media, and seemingly noble in purpose. But it has been surrounded by controversy since its inception.

This impassioned book, by the director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute in Washington DC, argues that measures like McCain-Feingold are a violation of the First Amendment and detrimental to our democracy. According to John Samples, campaign finance reform is based on specious ideas with little basis in fact. There is no proof, for instance, that campaign contributions really influence members of Congress. And our most common concerns about big money in politics are misplaced because the ideas implicit in our notion of corruption are incoherent and indefensible.

Defying long-held assumptions and conventional political wisdom, The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform is a provocative work that will be essential for anyone concerned about the future of American government—especially in this heated election year.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 06:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cyberculture icon R.U. Sirius conducted a lengthy interview with Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

R.U. Sirius was the co-founder and founding editor of the cyberculture magazine eventually known as Mondo 2000, which carved out the geeky-but-glossy publishing space later exploited more successfully (in financial terms at least) by Wired. The activities of R.U. Sirius are not limited, however, to writing and editing: he has also recorded with an art-rock band and run for the presidency of the United States.

The Sirius interview with Turner is titled "How Stewart Brand Took Us From Counterculture to Cyberculture" and ranges over Brand, cybernetics, the Whole Earth Catalog, the Global Business Network, R. Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, and the links between the new communalist, back-to-the-land movement of the '60s and '70s and the technoculture of the '90s and beyond.

Also, we have two excerpts from Turner's book. You can read the introduction and an excerpt from chapter four about the Whole Earth Catalog and the emergence of digital culture.

Update November 21: R.U. Sirius has a posting about Fred Turner's book and an edited transcript of his interview with Turner over on 10 Zen Monkeys.

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by DB at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No critic alive has reviewed more movies than Roger Ebert, and yet his essential writings have never been collected in a single volume—until now. With Awake in the Dark, both fans and film buffs can finally bask in the best of Ebert's work. The reviews, interviews, and essays collected here present a picture of this indispensable critic's numerous contributions to the cinema and cinephilia. From The Godfather to GoodFellas, from Cries and Whispers to Crash, the reviews in Awake in the Dark span some of the most exceptional periods in film history, from the dramatic rise of rebel Hollywood and the heyday of the auteur, to the triumph of blockbuster films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, to the indie revolution that is still with us today.

Noted film scholar David Bordwell observes in his foreword to this volume that if Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were godmother and godfather to the movie generation, then Roger Ebert is its voice from within—a writer whose exceptional intelligence and daily bursts of insight and enthusiasm have shaped the way we think about the movies. Awake in the Dark, therefore, will be a treasure trove not just for fans of this seminal critic, but for anyone desiring a fascinating and compulsively readable chronicle of film since the late 1960s.

Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire: Volume Two: Space, edited by Pierre Nora, is Chicago's second volume in a monumental project to capture the essence of French history and culture. As noted in a recent review in Choice magazine, in this volume Nora has collected essays by France's leading academics that concentrate on the space, or spaces of France in terms of "the interplay between places, events, and people's memories of them." The analyses focus on three aspects of natural boundaries: the forest, the north and the south, and the coastline. Each region of France, they show, is a space of memory that is the fruit of all the knowledge that gives it shape: statistical, cartographical, geological, and historical.

This volume, the Choice reviewer writes, "is yet another brain-stretching and assumption-challenging set of ideas from the Nora project, presented in a lavishly produced, beautifully illustrated, well referenced volume."

Rethinking France will be appreciated by any critical thinker with an interest in French history, politics, culture, or philosophy.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry's "complex of complaint and praise," Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son's baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11. The call for a five-minute silence throughout Europe in memory of those slain by Spanish guerillas triggers a meditation on the difficulties of responding to historical tragedy. And in a daring longer poem set in Berkeley, Weiner explores the relationship between political and aesthetic commitments and acts of self-invention.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Stuart Mill, a man popularly thought to be responsible for the reformation of Victorian philosophy, is a household name among philosophers. Unfortunately one of his greatest contemporaries is not. William Whewell, a man equally engaged in transforming the philosophical conventions of his era, is often overshadowed by Mill's fame. However, as noted by a recent review in the Times Literary Supplement, Laura J. Snyder's Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society eloquently demonstrates that it was not Mill alone, but rather the dialectic generated by the rivalry of these two great thinkers that was ultimately responsible for the radical transformations in the field of philosophy that took place during the Victorian era. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, Laura Snyder revises the standard views of Victorian philosophy, showing that the concerns of both men remain relevant today.

A rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain, TLS calls Snyder's work "science history at its best." Reforming Philosophy will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy.

Archived in Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Manual of Style Online features a Q&A page, where the manuscript editors from the University of Chicago Press interpret the Manual's recommendations and uncoil its intricacies. Our editors receive hundreds of submissions each month and a handful of the most helpful (not to mention entertaining) are selected for publication on the Chicago Style Q&A page. And often there's one too good not to reprint here:

Q. Oh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.

A. In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.

Anyone can post a question and access to the Q&A is free, so go ahead and ask all those hairsplitting questions about English grammar you've been dying to solve!

While you're at it, be sure to check out the loads of other free content like the tools for editors—a collection of sample forms, letters, and style sheets—as well as the Chicago Style Citation Quick Guide for help citing sources.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by TXM at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Executive Director of the Fallen World is fearless and forthright, just the sort of blunt reality check that is missing from so much of contemporary, over-stylized poetry. Rector's stoicism and slightly murderous sense of humor pervade these poems as he doffs his hat to humility and audacity, taking on America, money, movement, marriages, and general cultural mayhem. The characters and voices in Rector's poems are, by tragic turns, unflinching, clearly and cleanly bitter, sarcastically East Coast, and lyrical.

As the former executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and a spirited First Amendment advocate who has sparred on screen with Bill O'Reilly, Liam Rector knows whereof he speaks in The Executive Director of the Fallen World.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Normally we try not to draw attention to negative commentary about our authors. But sometimes the commentary is too artful to be ignored. John G. Geer is the author of the recent book In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, which makes the controversial argument that negative campaign advertising benefits voters and the democratic process. Geer is, then, in no position to object when he becomes the subject of an attack ad:

The video was created by Jeremy D. Mayer, Associate Professor and Director of the Masters of Public Policy Program, School of Public Policy, George Mason University. Mayer was a commenter at a presentation Geer did about his book at the Cato Institute in September. On YouTube Mayer noted:

I made this negative ad as part of my commentary at the Cato Institute on John Geer's new book In Defense of Negativity. His book argues that negative ads are good for democracy. Almost none of the claims in this ad are "true" (for example, he's actually an award winning, popular lecturer—these are the only negative comments up on Ratemyprofessor), although each is based on a shred of truth. John thought it was hilarious. Hope you do too.

(Tip of the hat to Technorati and the blog of television station WKRN in Nashville.)

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The October 30 issue of the New Republic features an article about several recent additions to the prodigious body of published works by the influential art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-96), including his Romanesque Architectural Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series, edited by Linda Seidel. Though renowned for his critical essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, Schapiro also played a decisive role in defining the style of architecture known as the Romanesque. Schapiro has remained a highly esteemed yet mysterious figure of academia, widely known, but little read. However, as Jed Perl's New Republic article notes, this new book promises to change that.

The book collects Shapiro's lectures on Romanesque Architecture given in 1967 for the Norton Lecture Series at Harvard; lectures which have been acclaimed throughout academia for their verve and freshness. Perl writes that much like the works of art they take as their subject, "the pleasure of Schapiro's lectures, though they were given in the late-modern 1960's, are what might be called early modern pleasures: the pleasures of close looking, and of the search for unexpected ways to express the most self-evidently human experiences.… Linda Siedel, in editing the Norton Lectures, has preserved the movement of Schapiro's speech, and it is a pleasure to listen in as he seizes an idea and expands on it."

With this masterpiece of art history now available to a modern audience, Romanesque Architectural Sculpture promises to revitalize interest in the work of this important scholar and is sure to delight students and scholars of art history, as well as anyone interested in seeing a new side of Schapiro's profoundly influential mind.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google’s announcement that it would digitize the holdings of several major research libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a sort of cultural gift to the world, a first step towards a long-dreamed-of universal library that would be accessible to all. But skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about its potential to misrepresent—and even damage— the world's cultural heritage.

In Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, reminds us of the commercial nature of Google’s enterprise and the problems and conflicts of interest inherent in such a profit-oriented approach to international cultural treasures. Moreover, he questions the very notion of a private corporation spearheading an effort that he believes should be in the hands of the public at large. Jeanneney closes by laying out the steps he thinks must be taken by cultural and governmental institutions worldwide to create a truly universal library—one representing all cultures and all languages.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We have previously noted the fond regard that geeks hold for the Whole Earth Catalog. Two more testimonials have burbled up through the ether. Tim O'Reilly, publisher of all those techie books with animals on their covers, says on his blog, O'Reilly Radar:

We shamelessly copied the name of the Whole Earth Catalog for our groundbreaking Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, but that's the least of our debts to Stewart [Brand] and crew. A huge amount of the O'Reilly sensibility, a mix of practicality and idealism, was learned from the Whole Earth Catalog.

Cory Doctorow also notes his affection and the influence of WEC, writing on BoingBoing:

Count me among those who were heavily influenced by the Catalogs. I have a complete set in a storage locker in Toronto. I used to pore through them for hours on rainy days, marvelling at the flowering of the mission of "access to tools and ideas."

The comments of O'Reilly and Doctorow are occasioned by the announcement of the Stanford University Libraries' upcoming symposium From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Taking its title from Fred Turner's recent book, the symposium will explore the the "extraordinary impact of the Whole Earth Catalog and the American counterculture on contemporary computing and everyday life." The symposium will be held on November 9, 2006, 7–9 pm, at Stanford's Cubberley Auditorium.

If you'd like to find out more about the ways that Stewart Brand has shaped modern digital culture, check out our excerpts from Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture. We have the introduction to the book as well as an excerpt from Chapter Four, "Taking the Whole Earth Digital.

Archived in Author Events | Film and Media | History
Posted by TXM at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential cultural anthropologists of the last four decades, died last Monday at the age of 80 of complications following heart surgery. As noted in his obituary in today's New York Times, Geertz differentiated himself from his intellectual forebears by rejecting the view of anthropology as "an experimental science in search of laws" in favor of "an interpretative one in search of meaning." Known for his extensive research in Indonesia and Morocco, Dr. Geertz' work helped to define and give character to an intellectual agenda of non-reductive, interpretive social science that continues to provoke much excitement and debate about the nature of human understanding.

The University of Chicago Press published a number of Dr. Geertz' works including The Religion of Java, Kinship in Bali, as well as a volume on Geertz, from the centennial session of the American Anthropological Association, Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues.

Archived in Anthropology
Posted by TXM at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)