Morris Philipson, former director of the University of Chicago Press (from 1967 to 2000), passed away on November 3, 2011, at the age of 85. We asked some of Philipson's friends and colleagues how they would remember Morris, and their thoughts follow below:

I worked at Chicago for ten years, from 1973 to 1983, half that time directly for Morris. He was brilliant, exacting, mercurial, funny, and loyal to the authors and people at the Press who held up his high standards. Like many others who went on to run other publishing companies, he taught me through example (mostly good) how to be a publisher. More than that, he shaped the Press's publishing program in ways that few directors attempt or manage. Those were glory years: The Lisle Letters, which more timid publishers would have abandoned; Derrida, whom he apparently understood; Mythologies; the Verdi Edition, which he supported even if his taste didn't run to high opera. The Chicago Manual of Style, Kate Turabian, the list goes on. He was willing to support his editors even when he was skeptical, a philosophy that led to the grand and enduring success of A River Runs Through It. The letter that Norman Maclean wrote to Knopf, who had turned it down (and that was reprinted in Harper's in 1993) says it all. Morris's death has brought back warm memories of my first publishing years and close colleagues who have stayed and moved on. We were fortunate to experience that remarkable era first hand.

—Wendy Strothman, The Strothman Agency

Morris Philipson's death is a deep sadness for me.

Our relationship dates back to the early 1970's when I joined Gallimard, and it went through different phases. For a long time, it was purely professional: Morris came regularly to the Frankfurt Book Fair, we saw each other in Paris, and he took a special interest in the authors I was publishing, such as Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Michel de Certeau.

He was very surprised to discover in me the historian of Les Lieux de mémoires (seven volumes), of which he was so fond that he planned to translate four volumes. Morris embarked on this adventure with ardor, with the help of his editor David Jordan. It created a real intellectual friendship between us.

My partner, who was American, played a large part in making our friendship stronger, because she also liked Morris the writer, whom I thus discovered.

His presence enriched my editor's career. I owe him a lot and I will long miss his thoughtful friendship.

—Pierre Nora, editorial director at Editions Gallimard

How I will miss talking with Morris. His sharp wit, his extraordinary, affectionate knowledge of books—their insides, their outsides (he knew well how often people did indeed judge books by their covers), the minds of the authors, the minds of the readers. The hilarious anecdotes from the old days chez Knopf, and the canny insights into the works and private lives of famous contemporary authors. He spoke about the projects he was working on with such joy and erudition, and when I sounded him on my own books in progress he invariably gave me tactful but telling advice and a treasure trove of places to look for what I was seeking. I can vividly conjure up the long, happy summer evenings sitting with Morris and Susie in the delicate garden behind their elegant townhouse on Dorchester Road, or, later, sitting with Morris alone, in restaurants and theaters, with Susie a palpable invisible presence, so strongly missed. Yet always, even in the last weeks of his life, it was easy to make him burst out in a laugh. He was a true connoisseur of the literary life, indeed of life tout court.

—Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago

What Morris Philipson achieved for the Press over a thirty-three year career was simply monumental; I doubt anyone could repeat a success story of that kind these days. I feel privileged to have worked as an editor at the University of Chicago Press with so many smart and talented people in every department, and Morris was a key inspiration in setting the tone (with intelligence, a delightfully urbane wit, and a practical business savvy unusual in the field of scholarly publishing), as well as a very high bar of achievement.

—Gabriel Dotto, director, Michigan State University Press

In the forty or so years that I knew, worked with, and came to enjoy the friendship of Morris Philipson, I had much to thank him for. As chairman of the German Department at the University of Chicago for twelve years, I especially appreciated his interest in German works—both scholarly and imaginative—and their translation into English, but most of all his enthusiasm for the work of Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard is without doubt one of the key figures in European literature of the latter part of the twentieth century and Morris's keen sense of this significance allowed us to play an important part in introducing his work to an American audience.

Beyond these more professional concerns, however, I deeply appreciated the convivial and stimulating evenings spent at his and Susan's dinner table, and especially the chilled martini that always so thoughtfully awaited my arrival in their refrigerator! The loss of such a friend is sad indeed.

—Kenneth J. Northcott, translator

Morris was both my publisher and my good, good friend. I will always remember the commitment to excellence he inspired—no, demanded—at the University of Chicago Press, a commitment that endures. Morris and I met through our novels, and my relationship, through him, with the Press has been the most artistically and professionally rewarding of my book-writing life. As important to me, our personal friendship was long, only occasionally bristly, and always deeply satisfying.

—Jack Fuller, former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and former president of the Tribune Publishing Company

Continue reading "Remembering Morris" »

Archived in Commentary | UCP News
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Fernando Coronil, distinguished professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, passed away last week after a hard-fought battle with lung cancer. Numerous colleagues have remembered the committed internationalist and critic of globocentrism, noting his capacious intellect, incisive scholarship, and passion for teaching, while still others have mourned the passing of a beloved mentor and friend. We remember Coronil as the author of The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela, which examined key twentieth-century transformations in the nation's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. Below follows a more personal tribute from our own executive editor David Brent, who worked intimately with Coronil on The Magical State, and who offers a few good words on Coronil's remarkable life:

A Tribute to the late Fernando Coronil (1944-2011)

As anyone knows who has read Fernando Coronil's The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela, or even just the endorsements of it on the back cover of the paperback edition, it is an exceptionally significant work not only for Latin American studies or anthropology in general but for all the other social sciences. It has also been a highly successful book for the Press in terms of its critical reception and its sales. After nearly 15 years in print, it is still being adopted for many courses both in the United States and abroad.

Fernando was a wonderful but sometimes slightly frustrating author to work with. I first met him sometime in the early '80s when he was already a rather senior graduate student at the University of Chicago. I found him to be a most impressive, charismatic, and warm person; just shaking his hand made me feel special and alive. At the urging of several faculty members, we discussed the possibility of publishing a revised version of his 1987 doctoral thesis The Black El Dorado: Money Fetishism, Democracy, and Capitalism in Venezuela. After reviewing at least two redactions of the thesis, the Press offered him an advance contract for The Magical State in February 1991. The contractual delivery date for the final manuscript was originally March 1992 but when it became clear that that was unrealistic it was revised to what turned out to be the equally unrealistic date of September 1992.

Fernando and family were of course already ensconced at the University of Michigan and he had many new and exciting projects to work on (including building the History and Anthropology Program there), students to supervise, and numerous other publications. Each time we met in person—which was at least once a year at a conference or a party—Fernando would beg my patience and even forgiveness for his tardiness; I remained supportive and enthusiastic, not out of politeness, but because I sincerely wanted him to finish his book and to publish it! In retrospect, I must say that his excuses for repeatedly missing deadlines were never tiresome and even after over four years of waiting I never lost confidence in him or the book.

When one day in early 1996 Fernando showed up at my office in Chicago and handed me the final manuscript it was a bright day indeed. There were a few complications regarding permissions and illustrations, but as I recall we managed to solve them without great difficulty and the book was finally published in September 1997.

Fernando and I remained friends all these years and we warmly embraced every time we met for drinks or a meal. We also discussed many possible future book projects but it was discussing ideas with him and simply being in his presence that thrilled me the most. I will sorely miss this remarkable man and scholar.

David Brent, Chicago, 25 August 2011

Archived in Anthropology | Commentary
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A review of Julia Lupton's Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life from a recent issue of the Time Higher Ed opened with a clip from Samuel Johnson on the Bard:

"There is," wrote Johnson in the magnificent preface to his edition of the plays," always an appeal open from criticism to nature." Shakespeare is true to life when he shows joy bumping up against sorrow and the sublime against the ridiculous.

The review went on to call into account Lupton's premise: that to "think with Shakespeare" was to learn about both politics and life, as well as to call into question how—with nods to Agamben and Arendt—Shakes might help us unravel a contemporary crisis or two.

The next afternoon, reading a piece by Rosemary Counter in the Globe and Mail on Carrie Pitzulo's Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy, we were reminded of Johnson's reference to the open appeal. Here, too, in a review that delved into the viability of Pitzluto's premise, was a question that posited the sublime with the ridiculous: can we "think with Playboy?"

In search of answers, Pitzulo begins with what we're all thinking: the centerefolds. While objectification comes straight to mind, Hefner believes playmates are "glorified" as a "friend and equal." And, to his credit, they're far from wanton libertines or nameless nudes: through interviews, the Playmates are often presented as educated, assertive, hard-working and individualist (also presented, however, are their measurements).

In the instance—and interest—of both works, however, the real question fielded by their authors seems to be the validity of a revisionist account, and how such a return in recent criticism might help us to explore the social constructs that these two monster narratives have imbued in our cultural consciousness.

Never the twain shall meet? How about a particularly dramatic revisiting of Harry Nilsson's ubiquitous ode to "The Desk" from Playboy After Dark? Not quite the quandary of Caliban's age or minority status, and isolated from the the question of whether Hef's notion of gender as a social construct and sexuality as a wide spectrum was ahead of its time, but still a moment when we might again use a mix of high and low culture to enter that shapeshifting space between politics and life:

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Sociology
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Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We'll be ending a month of Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer, with one final conversation about ocean-borne viruses with Penny Chisholm.

Sallie W. "Penny" Chisholm is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and professor of biology at MIT. Her research lab seeks to advance our understanding of the ecology and evolution of microbes in the oceans, and how they influence global biochemical cycles. In January 2010, she was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal, for "pioneering studies of the dominant photosynthetic organisms in the sea and for integrating her results into a new understanding of the global ocean."

Dear Carl,

Thank you for giving viruses the recognition they deserve. As you point out, the discovery of viruses in the oceans is relatively recent. It seems that about once every decade there are similar major discoveries in oceanography that change the way we think about ocean ecosystems. One of these—a discovery by the late John Martin—was that iron availability limits the growth of phytoplankton (your 'geoengineers') over large regions of the oceans. This changed the major 'drivers' of carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans, and climate models had to be changed accordingly.

Evidence that iron—carried from land to ocean via atmospheric dust—limits the ocean's capacity to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere has fueled the idea that large scale ocean iron fertilization could be used for engineering Earth's climate. What does this have to do with viruses (you are wondering)? Well, it turns out that iron has been used to flocculate viruses for wastewater treatment, and to concentrate them from ocean water for scientific study. What if iron dust deposition does the same in the oceans? What if it not only stimulates phytoplankton growth, but also reduces phytoplankton death rates by 'precipitating viruses' and settling them out of the system? Might this phenomenon help explain the observed relationships between iron dust deposition and atmospheric carbon dioxide in ice cores? This has been proposed by MIT's Hyman Hartman, who has also suggested that we might enhance phytoplankton's capacity to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by (somehow) killing off viruses in the oceans. I doubt he is truly serious. But I also doubted the seriousness, twenty years ago, of people proposing ocean iron fertilization (OIF) as a means of carbon sequestration. Today, research on OIF for geoengineering is endorsed by leading scientists.

Whether or not one takes seriously the idea of global geoengineering with anti-virals, a thought experiment along these lines quickly exposes the complexity of marine microbial systems (give it a try!). In fact, recent field experiments have revealed one of the many possible unexpected consequences; it turns out that when you reduce all the viruses in a sample of seawater you actually decrease the carbon fixation of cyanobacteria, because reduced lysis of heteotrophic bacteria deprives cyanobacteria of essential nutrients they need to grow optimally. In a nutshell, even these simple microbial systems are so complex that it is impossible to predict the consequences of removal of one component.

Just some food for thought.

Penny

Dear Penny:

It is funny how what at first seems absurd when it comes to virus can eventually become conventional wisdom. The very idea that the ocean harbored many viruses was absurd as late as the 1980s. Seawater just seemed like a terrible place for viruses to survive. But when scientists began to give a close look at the ocean, they discovered otherwise. A single spoonful of seawater might harbor a billion viruses. Most of those viruses proved to be bacteriophages—in other words, they infect bacteria. That's not surprising, because the most abundant hosts in the oceans are microbes. But what is surprising is the effect that those marine phages have on life in the sea. Viruses kill half of all the bacteria in the oceans every day. As you note, the rupturing of all those cells (known as lysis) dumps vast supplies of nutrients into the ocean, possibly fertilizing other microbes to grow faster. Since the microbes of the ocean pull down huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (and also return a lot of it back there), the overall effect that viruses have on the climate could potentially be huge. I can't help but find the idea of viruses influencing the climate a bit absurd—but the more I learn about viruses in the ocean, the more accustomed I get to it.

Your speculations about viral geoengineering bring a fitting close to the discussions we've been having on this blog over the past month. Once scientists discovered viruses, they began to acquire the power to control them. They were able to develop vaccines and public health measures that could sometimes slow their spread. In many cases, we've only had moderate success in controlling viruses, but in a few case—such as those of smallpox and rinderpest—we are now at the point where we could soon eradicate entire species of virus from the face of the Earth.

But the discovery of viruses has also revealed to us that they are not merely things that make us sick and must be eradicated. Phages can kill life-threatening bacteria, for example. For now, however, phage therapy is not standard medical procedure, in part because governments are a bit queasy about approving viruses as living drugs. As your MIT colleague Tim Lu explained last week, he's taking his research in a different direction, using phages to destroy the biofilms that grow in heating and cooling systems in buildings. In effect, he's trying to heal architecture.

It's a natural progression from bodies to buildings to the entire planet. At least it's natural to speculate about using anti-virals to change the global climate. Still, I can't help but think—what kind of drug store could fill that prescription?

Carl

For more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267. Additional materials, including those directed at a K-12 audience, can be found on the World of Viruses website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
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Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We're delighted to continue this month's Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer. This week Zimmer welcomes MIT scientist Timothy Lu to talk about the quest to use viruses to cure infectious diseases.

Timothy Lu is assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, where he heads the Synthetic Biology Group. Carl wrote a profile of Lu last year in Technology Review.

Dear Carl:

Bacteriophages are the most abundant biological particles on earth, but due to their size, and perhaps ubiquity, most of us don't think of them very often. Phages are essentially just bacterial viruses. When it comes to viruses, the popular notion is that they are bad entities that are responsible for disease and suffering. The truth is, however, that phages are very different from human viruses. Phages do not infect human cells and are not responsible for the viral diseases that plague mankind, such as AIDS, herpes, cervical cancer, and the common cold. Furthermore, phages have had a tremendous impact on modern biology and biotechnology.

Much of our early scientific efforts to understand genetic regulation were carried out in the humble phage. Phage proteins called recombinases are an integral component for the construction of "knockout animals," which cannot express particular genes—an indispensable tool in modern biological research. Phage display, a technique for sticking a library of peptides on phage surfaces and panning for targets to which these peptides will bind, has been used to make nanowires for batteries, identify new antibodies to treat human diseases, and understand the basic science which underlie protein-protein interactions.

Despite their importance as major research tools in the biomedical community, however, research into the use of phages as human therapeutics has garnered a mixed reputation in the Western world. Soon after their discovery in the early twentieth century, phages were tried as novel antimicrobial agents. Indeed, one can imagine the excitement that the early phage researchers must have experienced when observing the lysis—or clearing of bacterial cultures—by the addition of a newly discovered biological agent!

However, early reports claiming impressive successes at treating bacterial infections with phages were later tempered by failures in other settings and repeated trials.

Looking back, it is likely that a lack of detailed understanding of phage biology was responsible for much of these failures. Unlike antibiotics, which act like broad-spectrum bombs that blast all bacteria, good or bad, in their paths, phages are targeted warriors, the biological equivalent of a sniper or laser-guided missile. This targeted behavior is beneficial because it avoids killing bacteria which are good for us, as opposed to antibiotics which cause collateral damage. However, this targeted behavior also has its flaws because to effectively treat a specific bacterial contamination with phages, one must understand the bacterial compositions in detail and know what mixture of phages to use against them. Such capabilities were not available or known during the early days of phage therapy.

Thus, the subsequent discovery of antibiotics, along with their simplicity and miracle successes, largely displaced phages from antimicrobial research in Western medicine in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result, the notion of phage therapy often elicits justifiable skepticism when discussed as an alternative to antibiotics today, even though the antibiotics pipeline has dried up and we are in desperate need of new strategies to combat the rising tide of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Fortunately, in the past few decades, there has been a renaissance brewing in the phage world. Commercial, government, and academic labs have begun to tackle the fundamental issues that have held back phage therapy using rigorous molecular tools. To use phages to effectively treat bacterial contaminations, these labs have been developing technologies for classifying bacterial populations, identifying the right combination of phages to use, and optimizing phage properties using evolutionary or engineering approaches.

Instead of tackling the high hurdles that need to be crossed for direct human use, many labs and companies have chosen to apply phages to other applications in industrial, environmental, and diagnostic settings. For example, Intralytix makes phages to treat listeria contaminations of food, Omnilytix makes phages that control bacterial infections on tomatoes and peppers, and Microphage makes phages that can detect and report on the presence of harmful antibiotic-resistant superbugs, such as MRSA. A company called Novophage is advancing the use of phages for industrial applications, where they have the potential to enhance energy inefficiency and decrease biofouling (for full disclosure, I am a founder of this startup). Major advantages of phages compared with chemical biocides and pesticides include greater biocompatibility and decreased environmental toxicity. Using natural biological particles to combat biological problems is consistent with our society's continuous drive to reduce the use of harmful chemicals and is, I believe, a great application for phages in the modern era of biotechnology.

The hurdle that has yet to be overcome is the use of phages for human therapeutics, the original application area for phage therapy. Nonetheless, given the great need for new antimicrobial therapies and the inroads that these laboratories have been making into optimizing phages for practical applications, the prospect of effective phage therapy being applied to human infectious diseases in Western medicine seems to be growing!

Tim

Dear Tim:

In all my work as a science writer, I can't think of a story as strange as the history of phage therapy. It's been nearly a century since the Canadian physician Felix d'Herelle discovered viruses that infect bacteria. And yet, despite great promise, phage therapy has yet to become a mainstay of medicine.

What makes the story even stranger is that Herelle could see the promise of phage therapy as soon as he discovered the viruses. He was soon using them to treat dysentery and cholera. When four passengers on a French ship in the Suez Canal came down with bubonic plague, Herelle gave them phages. All four victims recovered. He went on to conduct large-scale public health campaigns for the British government in colonial India. Phage therapy became so well-known that Herelle inspired the central character in Sinclair Lewis's 1925 best-selling novel Arrowsmith. Phage therapy became big business: Herelle developed commercial drugs that were sold by the company that's now known as L'Oreal, which were used to treat skin wounds and to cure intestinal infections.

But by the time he died in 1949, Herelle had sunk into obscurity. Doctors had abandoned phage therapy for antibiotics. His dream did not vanish entirely, however. On his travels, Herelle met Soviet scientists who wanted to set up an entire institute for research on phage therapy. In 1923 Herelle helped establish the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology, and Virology in Tbilisi, which is now the capital of the Republic of Georgia. At its peak, the institute employed 1200 people to produce tons of phages. In World War II, the Soviet Union shipped phage powders and pills to the front lines, where they were dispensed to infected soldiers.

Soviet scientists continued to investigate phage therapy after World War II. They conducted the best trial of the viruses in 1963. They enrolled 30,769 children in Tbilisi. Once a week, about half the children swallowed a pill that contained phages against dysentery. The other half of the children got a pill made of sugar. To minimize the influence of the environment as much as possible, the Eliava scientists gave the phage pill only to children who lived on one side of each street, and the sugar pill to the children who lived on the other side. The Eliava scientists followed the children for 109 days. Among the children who took the sugar pill, 6.7 out of every 1,000 got dysentery. Among the children who took the phage pill, that figure dropped to 1.8 per 1,000. In other words, taking phages caused a 3.8-fold decrease in a child's chance of getting dysentery.

Phage therapy only began to attract interest in the West after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Soviet scientists could communicate more freely with the rest of the world. And yet, as you point out, the U.S. government has been leery of approving viruses for medical treatments. Gone are the days when a physician like Herelle could pretty much do as he pleased. As a result, many companies and investors are reluctant to embrace his phages.

If phage therapy can leap over these hurdles, I think that there are a vast number of potential applications. Treating a skin infection is just the start. Phages, after all, are part and parcel of every person's inner ecology. Our bodies are home to 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes. Recent surveys estimate that these microbes play host to about four trillion phages, which come in about 1,500 different species. In some cases, our phages kill their hosts, and thus maintain an ecological balance in our mouths, noses, guts, and other nooks and crannies. In other cases, phages insert genes into their microbial hosts, giving them new powers.

The human microbiome is not merely an infestation we tolerate. It plays many different roles in our bodies. Microbes synthesize vitamins for us, regulate how much energy we get from our food, fight off invading pathogens, nurture our immune system, and potentially even influence our behavior. It may be possible to manipulate the microbiome through the phages that have coevolved with it for millions of years.

Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring a conversation between Zimmer and Sallie Chisholm on the nature of ocean viruses. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267. Additional materials, including those directed at a K-12 audience, can be found on the World of Viruses website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome to TRAFFIC, a series exclusive to the Chicago Blog presenting an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We're delighted to begin a month's worth of Friday TRAFFIC posts helmed by popular science writer Carl Zimmer in collaboration with some of our most acclaimed virologists, immunologists, and scientifically minded journalists.

Please join us for the next four weeks in welcoming discussions on virology and immunology with W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity; small pox with Richard Preston, New Yorker writer and bestselling author; phage therapy with Timothy Lu, inventor and Novophage founder; and ocean viruses with Sallie Chisholm, biological oceanographer and marine science expert.

With that in mind, join us for our first TRAFFIC exchange with Zimmer and Lipkin below:

The New York Times calls Carl Zimmer “as fine a science essayist as we have.” In his widely admired books, essays, and blogs, Zimmer charts the frontiers of biology. Booklist acclaimed his most recent title A Planet of Viruses as “absolutely top-drawer popular science writing.” Zimmer is a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches writing about science and the environment. He is also the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. W. Ian Lipkin, MD, is the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology, and professor of neurology and pathology in the Mailman School of Public Health and the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. His specialty is detecting new viruses and testing links between viruses and diseases. In A Planet of Viruses, Zimmer describes Lipkin's discovery of West Nile Virus in the United States, as well as his work uncovering hidden strains of the common cold. Zimmer also profiled Lipkin in November 2010 for the New York Times.

Dear Carl,

I just finished A Planet of Viruses. It's a compelling read that explores new frontiers in microbe hunting and the complex path from disease association to disease causation, a path we have not fully traveled. As with any book there are holes to be filled; nonetheless, this is an excellent roadmap!

We typically think of viruses as pathogens, but there is abundant and increasing evidence that they had an important and positive role in our evolution as mammals and the planet we live in. Retroviruses, a special kind of RNA virus of which HIV is the most famous, intercalate their genetic code into their host's. When host cells replicate their DNA, the virus replicates with it. If the virus makes its way to a sperm or egg cell, the virus wins the (rare) opportunity to get passed on from parent to child, over and over again. These genetic infiltrators, known as endogenous retroviruses, have integrated themselves into mammalian genomes over millions of years. They activate genes during pregnancy to produce proteins that prevent rejection of a fetus as a foreign body, likely facilitating the evolution of the placenta and live birth. Marine viruses, known as bacteriophages, which are the most abundant viruses on earth, shape our ecosystem by infecting and lysing bacteria in deep-sea sediment, thus affecting how nutrients are recycled.

Initiatives like the Human Microbiome Project, which surveys the human body's resident microorganisms and how they interact with our genes to influence health and disease, have mostly focused on bacteria. However, scientists cannot continue to ignore viruses, fungi, and other bugs! Traditionally, we have focused on bacteria because they are easy to clone, allowing us to replicate parts of their genome that may shed light on our own evolution. With the advent of newer and “sexier” technologies like virus detection microchips and high throughput sequencing, we can turn our attention to studying our interactions with viruses in more detail. As we learn more about the viruses in our gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts, I will be very much surprised if there are no helpful inhabitants among them.

Stay tuned!

Carl, you also discuss zoonotic diseases like AIDS, influenza, SARS, and Ebola, but let's not forget that how investigators decide where and when to sample for potential pathogens is also important. Hotspot modeling allows us to target surveillance efforts to ‘hot spots’ for human disease—the areas where human pathogens are most likely to emerge. The EcoHealth Alliance is a pioneer in this field and an advocate for the idea of One Health, which promotes collaboration among environmental scientists, vets, and clinicians.

And what about those curious about how microbe hunters do what we do? What are the platforms we use to find known and novel agents? How do we prove relationship to disease (or equally important, disprove a causative relationship)? Carl, let's give them directions! The work we do the Center for Infection and Immunity helps to answer some of those queries. We provide links to papers and interviews that address these challenges as well as video demonstrations of some relevant technologies

Last (but not least), as this is not a peer reviewed publication, and I have been encouraged to let my imagination run free, I wonder whether you might consider a chapter in a potential sequel focused on how microbes may alter host behavior to enhance their growth and dissemination. For example, rabies is associated with the inability to swallow, leading to the accumulation of saliva that contains rabies virus, and with aggressive (rabid) behavior that facilitates its spread. It is possible, though I have no experimental proof, that when herpes simplex virus infects the sacral ganglia, it may (in)advertently stimulate nerve endings in the pelvic area , promoting sexual activity and increasing the likelihood it will move into another host.

Carl, thanks again for sending me a preview copy of your book. I look forward to many spirited discussions!

Best,

W. Ian Lipkin

Dear Ian:

Thanks for your reflections. There's a lot to ponder in them, but I'm most intrigued by your most speculative ideas—namely, whether viruses manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. As we discover more and more viruses, I suspect that scientists will indeed find good evidence that at least some viruses act like puppet masters.

I first became familiar with this sort of strategy while writing my previous book, Parasite Rex. Some of the most spectacular examples of parasite manipulation come from animal parasites. The lancet fluke—a parasitic flatworm—has a life cycle that takes it from snails to ants to grazing mammals like cows or sheep. Getting from one species to another is no simple feat. The lancet fluke has ways of manipulating one host after another to make its way through life. Mammals release the fluke eggs in their droppings, which are then eaten by snails. The snails defend themselves by coating the eggs in slime and then “coughing” them up. Ants passing by find the slime delicious, and devour it, along with the eggs inside.

Once inside the ant, the fluke eggs hatch, and the parasites develop. When they're ready for their next host, they begin to alter the ant's behavior. At twilight, the ant crawls up a blade of grass and clamps onto the tip. That's when grazing mammals are likely to pass by and devour the grass, and the ant, and the parasites inside. If the ant does not get eaten by dawn, the parasite causes it to release its grip and crawl down to the ground, where it can enjoy the shade until the end of the next day—when it feels the urge to climb again.

There are many such examples, and for some reason most of them come from parasitic animals—tapeworms, parasitoid wasps, thorny-headed worms, and the like. I don't think that this bias reflects the superior sophistication of parasitic animals over non-animal parasites like viruses. I think it's just another case of the drunk looking for his keys under a lamp post—not because the keys are there, but because that's where it's easier to look.

Consider, for example, the fungus Cordyceps. This little mushroom has no animal nervous system. It's just a mass of fungal cells. Yet Cordyceps manages to manipulate ants as well as lancet flukes. Ants pick up its spores on the ground, whereupon the fungus penetrates its host exoskeleton and starts to grow inside. It doesn't kill its host, however. Instead, it feeds on the ant's internal fluids until it's ready for its next stage of life. The ant then starts to climb—not to the tip of a blade of grass, but to the underside of a leaf a few feet off the ground. The ant clamps onto a vein in the leaf, whereupon the fungus sprouts a flower-like stalk out of its head, which showers spores on the ants below.

While Cordyceps may not have the complexity of the animal nervous system, however, it's not simple. Fungi have big genomes. Yeast, for example, has about 6,500 genes. There's a lot of storage capacity in such a genome to encode lots of sophisticated strategies. A parasitic fungus might be able to use some of its many genes to make proteins that interacted with its host's nervous system to direct it to just the right spot on a leaf. Viruses, on the other hand, typically only have a handful of genes.

Are ten genes enough for a virus to manipulate a host? I suspect they may well be. After all, scientists have already shown how viruses can manipulate us in other ways, such as the way that human papillomaviruses can speed up the growth and division of their host cells. There's nothing particularly special about behavior that would make it beyond the reach of viruses. They'd just need to make proteins that could shut down certain genes in neurons or switch other ones on to produce big changes. And as I mention in A Planet of Viruses, scientists are now finding giant viruses that contain over a thousand genes. Perhaps they have unappreciated powers of manipulation, too.

Parasitologists have one big piece of advice for anyone who wants to investigate whether viruses manipulate their hosts: don't be fooled by mirages. It is very tempting to see any change in a host as the product of a fine-tuned adaptation in its parasite. But it's also possible that a strange host behavior is merely a byproduct of being infected. It's not easy to distinguish between these alternatives. One way is to measure just how big of a difference these “manipulations” make to parasites. Robert Poulin of the University of Otago has studied a parasitic fluke that infects cockles on the beaches of New Zealand. It then needs to get into the shore birds that eat the cockles to move to the next stage of its life cycle. And it just so happens that the infected cockles lose the ability to burrow. So if you walk around on the beach in New Zealand, a lot of the cockles you see may be infected and unable to dig back down into the sand.

Seems like a great way for the parasite to boost its odds of getting into a bird, right? Well, Poulin worked through a detailed model of the parasite life cycle and discovered that it actually makes little difference. For one thing, the cockles also get eaten by other predators in which the parasite can't survive. So Poulin concludes that this case of “manipulation” could not have evolved because it benefited the parasites. Instead, it's just a side-effect. If someone wants to see if the aggression caused by rabies is a manipulation, they could try to carry out a similar test. It wouldn't be easy, but it would be interesting.

Still, it would be a mistake to look only for the most fine-tuned adaptations in viruses. Just consider a single-celled protozoan called Toxoplasma, which normally has a life cycle that takes it from cats to rats and other mammal prey and back to cats again. Toxoplasma does not make rats sick. Instead, it forms harmless cysts in rat brains. And there it seems to manipulate rats in a very precise way: it causes them to lose their fear of cat odor. This change may make them easier prey for cats, boosting the reproductive success of the parasite.

Toxoplasma is a serious health problem for humans. Pregnant women need to avoid contact with cat litter or garden soil, because they may pick up the parasite and accidentally ingest it. While healthy adults can keep Toxoplasma in check, fetuses with immature immune systems cannot. Toxoplasmosis can thus cause serious brain damage, as the parasite grows unchecked. Toxoplasmosis is also a serious concern for adults with compromised immune systems—due to AIDS or immune-suppressing drugs taken after organ transplants.

In human adults, the parasite may be benign, but it does appear to cause some shifts in personality. Some studies suggest that people with Toxoplasma are more likely to get into car accidents, for example. It would be a mistake to see these personality shifts as the parasite's strategy for getting us eaten by cats. For one thing, Toxoplasma was probably not a common disease in humans until the domestication of house cats—when we came into close contact with their parasite-laden droppings. For another, I doubt my pet cats would ever consider me a potential breakfast.

Still, the fact that these personality shifts are not fine-tuned adaptations does not make them unimportant. Could some psychological disorders, like depression, be the result of viruses that alter the behavior of their regular animal hosts? And as virologists like you discover new viruses moving into our species from other animal hosts, I wonder if they'll bring their puppetmaster tricks with them.

Best,
Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring Zimmer in conversation with Richard Preston. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"I did the job with a guy," Parker said. "I guess I'll get in touch with him again."

Donald E. Westlake was a twentieth-century master of crime fiction. Under the name Richard Stark, one of his many pseudonyms, he penned the legendary Parker novels, including three just brought back into print by the University of Chicago Press this week: Butcher's Moon (1974), Comeback (1997), and Backflash (1998), each with a new foreword by Westlake's friend and writing partner Lawrence Block. To celebrate their release, Press publicity manager and Parker masterfan Levi Stahl sat down with Brian Garfield, novelist (author of the cult classics Death Wish and Hopscotch), screenwriter, and an old friend of Westlake's. What's in store? Behind-the-scenes snapshots of a legendary poker game, insight into the film adaptations spawned by the Parker series, a look into Westlake's writing process, and more:

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LTS: First off, why don't you just tell us a bit about your friendship with Donald Westlake. When and where did you meet? Were you friends for a long time?

BG: We met at a poker game in New York, 1965. It was a regular weekly quarter-limit writers' game. Lawrence Block and agent Henry Morrison were regulars. The game was a wonderful source of one-liners—now if only I remembered them. . . .

We all were young and had egos; we hoped the other guys at the table would like our work, so we shared it quite a bit, but we weren't really looking for critiques. That came later. Bob Ludlum came once in a while, as did various other writers; Justin Scott became a regular. The game stopped for a while but was revived and goes on to this day, I think; I left New York in 1979, so have been away from it for a long time. These photos are from a night in early 1972 when the game was held in my apartment, where, when we weren't playing poker, I was busy writing Death Wish.

Don and Larry and Justin and Henry and I became close friends from the mid-1960s through the '70s; we built each other's bookcases, and those of Otto Penzler's Mysterious Bookshop, and we helped one another move. Sometime in the early 1970s my then-wife and I bought a beach house in Fair Harbor (Fire Island) near Don and his wife Abby's place. We all would summer out there with our respective wives and friends. There were games, picnics, political discussions, expeditions, consumption of beer and spirits, occasional lit'ry discussions. We talked quite a bit about books we'd read, but mostly it wasn't derogatory chatter; we reserved that sort of thing for the personalities rather than the works—though we'd read the handwritten manuscript of Bob Ludlum's first novel and loftily we all pronounced it unpublishable, as did several publishers. Henry Morrison said we were missing something important. He became Bob's agent. I expect the experience taught the rest of us a thing or two.

Our "lit'ry" discussions might have seemed odd to people who weren't writers. For example I remember Don's fascination with the way Ira Levin had cleverly concealed the identity of the killer in A Kiss Before Dying, and we all admired the way Mickey Spillane solved the mystery in Vengeance is Mine in the final word of the novel. I don't know that it's ever been done that way before. Spillane was a comic book-style writer, but we all thought he was much underrated as a storyteller. We didn't talk about his writing style; we talked about his inventiveness. It helps, I suppose, to realize that we all had worked our way up through the pulps—probably the last generation to do that, as the pulps mostly died by the early 1960s. Don and Larry wrote crime stories and softcore porn; I wrote crime stories and Westerns. (They came from the Northeast; I came from the Southwest.) We all had been published since the end of the 1950s. By the mid-60s we'd found a way to do the apprenticeship and make a sort of living out of it, although it wasn't a great living; most of my early books earned somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand dollars. All that meant was we had to write them fast. We thought of the work as fun, challenging but easy to do.

By 1970 Don had published several comic novels. The Busy Body, God Save the Mark, and a few others had come out, and that year he published his first Dortmunder novel, The Hot Rock. He was also finishing Comfort Station (by "The Vibrant J. Morgan Cunningham"); Henry Morrison, by then his agent, had it typed on rolls of toilet paper to submit it to New American Library.

Don Westlake had a blinding-fast mind. He always seemed to have on the tip of his tongue the sort of wonderful witty rejoinders that occur to most of us a day or two too late. In 1970 we got the idea that it would be amusing to try combining our strengths in a Western comedy novel. We wrote Gangway!, and it turned out to be quite funny, I think. Henry sold it and it did fairly well. But our ambitions to sell it as a basis for a movie didn't work out. And we'd done it in a silly way—each of us would write a draft, then turn it over to the other, who'd rewrite the whole thing and give it back. It was about four times as much work as either of us would have put in individually on a book. So we didn't try that again. But it was fun, and we got to know each other's working styles.

The writing life, for a novelist, is solitary, and if you're working full time the pressures can create a kind of loneliness. Most of us prefer to work alone much of the time, I think, but there's a limit. Don and I enjoyed working together at intervals, simply to alleviate the solitariness and to correct a few of one another's bad writing habits. We worked intermittently on several projects, from my script for Butcher's Moon and the foreword I wrote to a 1981 edition of The Outfit to what became the movie The Stepfather, which was, I like to think, a very good movie inspired by coincidence.

It took off from the true case of John Emil List, who'd murdered his entire family in New Jersey, then disappeared. My thought was "What about this guy's next wife and family?" The viewpoint character ought to be the teen-age stepdaughter, I thought. I have no children and would not have written that relationship very well at all. Don had married the charming Abigail Adams, who had several kids in their teens, including a daughter. It struck me he would be the best of all writers for it, or at least the best of all writers I knew. We discussed it several times—I remember tossing notions back and forth on drives from New York out to Fire Island. His ideas struck me as superb. At that time I was a would-be Big Shot—had put together a film company (Shan Productions) with backing by several investors. Our first actual production was Hopscotch (the Walter Matthau film, from my novel) but while it was still waiting for production Don was working on his screenplay for The Stepfather. I don't remember exactly when he delivered it, but between the long time it took us to get Hopscotch in the can and my idiocy as a producer, it took several years before we found an organization willing to take on The Stepfather. We even tried one or two variant versions of the screenplay in our desperation to sell it, but they weren't as good as Don's, so we kept going back to that. Don made a few revisions here and there, but essentially it sprang from him whole, like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter.

ITC finally took it on, and Don worked with director Joseph Ruben. I wasn't there, so I don't know what they did together, but the film is pretty much as it was in Don's original screenplay. ITC made the movie in Canada on a budget of three rubber bands and a paper clip, but it looks fine. Don was more critical of that movie than I was, however. Certainly it's a genre piece, but a damn good genre piece, because he wrote it splendidly, and it was performed and directed splendidly. The star was Terry O'Quinn, an unknown at the time, who gave a superb performance. The movie won festival awards and became a cult favorite, and I still think it's one of the best character-study movies of its time, thanks mostly to Don, with the assistance of Terry O'Quinn and Joseph Ruben, who added elements when they brought the material from the page to the screen. That's usually the secret of a good movie—several people having exceptionally good days at the same time.

LTS: You've talked about how you and Don would discuss what you both were working on. Given the leanness of his prose and the clockwork precision of his plots, I would imagine he would have been a good first reader and critic—was that the case?

BG: I don't remember any specific direct criticisms he gave me of my work, and I never felt confident enough of my opinions to parse his. Our group wasn't in competition; even in the absence of another member, we almost never talked about the absent member's work. Sometimes Don liked my stuff (Hopscotch especially, and Death Wish—the novel, not the movie) and sometimes he thought it was overblown or pretentious (he was particularly huffy about The Romanov Succession, calling it a poor imitation of a Ludlum story, which it probably was, but what the hell, Ludlum was a friend of ours and Henry Morrison had made him a star and I thought I'd give it a try. It didn't work, so I didn't do it again).

I was blown away by the Parker novels and by the magic of Don's comic stories. We didn't have long talks about it. Writers develop passions for peculiar projects—his was the nonfiction book Under an English Heaven (which he'd wanted to call The Natives Are Revolting), mine was the biography The Meinertzhagen Mystery (nee Raptor), but I don't recall discussing either book with Don. His was amusing but didn't sell very well, and I suppose mine falls into the same category, although it sold about as well as we expected.

We did have ferocious discussions of the movies made out of our various works, however. There was a baseline difference: a book is mainly a writer's own work; a movie has many makers. You may have written the novel, but unless you produced, directed, starred in, photographed, scored, edited and got lucky with a movie, it isn't entirely yours. When a movie survives all that, it must have had a damn good screenplay to begin with and it also must have been very lucky to attract the crowd of people who served that screenplay. Don had that on The Grifters, certainly. I had it on Hopscotch.

LTS: Speaking of movies, you wrote a screenplay for Butcher's Moon that was never produced. How did that come about, both the writing and the mothballing? And how did you handle the sheer overstuffedness of the book—which is one of its chief pleasures? It's got two rival gangs, a dozen or more heisters, and action galore, and at the same time it brings together characters, threads, and themes from nearly all the preceding fifteen novels. But those qualities could be deadly impediments to the necessarily tighter, more self-contained form of a screenplay. How did you handle those problems?

BG: Butcher's Moon, the book, was bought by 20th Century Fox. Charles Bronson had an estate across the Hudson River from Albany, and he'd agreed to do Butcher's Moon if it could be filmed in and around Albany so he could commute to work. Michael Winner had said he'd direct Butcher's Moon as his next project. These elements were all in place when Don recommended that Fox hire me to write the script; I'd just written the introduction for the book of Butcher's Moon, and my Death Wish was just then being filmed in New York with Bronson, directed by Michael Winner.

I was not a first-class screenwriter then. I don't remember feeling challenged by the "overstuffedness" of it. Don's sense of story structure was superb, and I'm sure my script must have followed the book—perhaps too closely, but I don't remember being confused or put off by the number of characters. I'd read most, perhaps all, of the previous Parker novels, and I do remember combining several characters and simplifying some of the off-screen back-story, but that didn't seem too challenging.

I probably turned in a serviceable second draft, but by then I think the subject had become moot. The producers had cooled, Bronson had cooled, and Winner had finished filming Death Wish—a movie that both Don and I, having seen it in screenings, disliked. It became a huge hit in the summer of '74, at a time when I was in Africa researching something else. I sort of understand the appeal of the movie—it had an excellent screenplay by Wendell Mayes—but I thought it was a hasty and indifferent job of filmmaking. I suppose Don and I both failed to hide our disappointment with the movie, so it's not too surprising that both Bronson and Winner walked away. Without them, I gather Fox had very little interest in pursuing the project.

LTS: What did Westlake think of your screenplay? Did he give you any tips?

BG: The only thing I remember his saying was that there were too many telephone calls in it, but he assumed we'd clear that up in a third draft. Other than that, I don't recall his liking or disliking it. We went to screenings of each other's movies, but I don't recall post-morteming them; a movie is nearly always somebody else's, and anyhow it's already in the can. The only time we ever told each other what, or how, to write anything was on Gangway! and mostly that was because I supplied most of the jokes and he made them better. Gawd, I still miss him.

LTS: As you mentioned earlier, Westlake wrote screenplays—including an Oscar-winning adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters. But he never (as far as I know?) wrote any screenplays based on his own material—even as he was never fully satisfied with any of the films that were made from Parker novels. Was there a reason for that?

BG: Several reasons. One, obviously, is that if you've written the novel then you've already told the story. Writing it in another form can be boring. It's much more interesting to adapt someone else's story for the screen—you haven't written it before. Another, probably less obvious, is that if a studio or producer buys your book, then it's their (or his) movie to ruin. If you write the screenplay, you're likely to get blamed if it's a bad movie based on your own novel. As Don said, "If I write a novel, I'm a god. If I write a screenplay, I'm a minor deity."

It may be true that Don was not fully satisfied with any of the Parker films, but he did like Point Blank a lot—we talked several times about director John Boorman's imaginative use of imagery and time, such as the scene in which Lee Marvin is shown waiting in a room, and then is shown waiting in the same room but this time it's unfurnished—like the character's mind. I don't think Don was crazy about the Alcatraz frame for the film's story—it struck him as pretentious—but he liked Marvin and he liked most of what Boorman did with it. Also to some extent he liked The Outfit, partly because of its casting—director John Flynn cast Robert Duvall in the lead, and filled the 1973 movie with film noir actors from an earlier time, such as Robert Ryan, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Sheree North, Richard Jaekel, Tim Carey, and Elisha Cook Jr.

The rest of the Parker movies were routine except for Made in USA, and adaptation of The Jugger by Jean-Luc Godard that was incredibly bad—so bad that Don sued Godard in French court, won the lawsuit, and prevented the film from being mass-exhibited in the United States for many years. (You can get a copy now on DVD, but unless you're a masochist it ain't worth it.)

He never sold the Parker character, so the leading man in each of the movies has a different name. This was largely a commercial decision—if you give up the character, you may have given up all the books. (Joe Gores and I ran into that silliness when we tried to sell a Sam Spade screenplay.) But Don remarked more than once that the Parker character "obviously lacks definition," because in various movies the character was played by Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson—and Anna Karina.

LTS: Did you have any specific actor in mind who would have been a great Grofield? I think we've all got ideas about Parker, but Grofield seems tougher to cast—any thoughts?

BG: The only time we ever mentioned it was shortly after we'd been to a play and a party afterward, where Kevin Kline and Ben Gazzara and several others were present, and I said I thought Kevin Kline would play Grofield very well. Don agreed, but that was as far as it went. Don didn't write Grofield as a cinematic character. It's a mistake to write a book with one eye on the movies—you end up with a bad book that won't get filmed.

LTS: You've been a successful writer in a variety of genres. Were there any specific lessons you took from Westlake's work that were helpful along the way?

BG: Just one I can remember. If you begin a sentence—or, particularly, if you begin a book—with the word "When," then something just about has to happen right away. People who knew him miss not just the writing but Donald E. Westlake the person. He was unique—a treasure.

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Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Artist, critic, poet, performer . . . model? While David Antin's iconic image has adorned the covers of many of his most famous publications—from the stark black and white photograph of the author in a safari jacket on talking at the boundaries (New Directions, 1976) to the Colonel Kurtz-on-the-roof shot of Antin accompanied by an assistant in stonewashed denim jacket on A Conversation with David Antin (Granary Books, 2002) —few might realize the careful consideration behind this striking framing (though Caroline Bergvall has a great piece at Jacket on A Conversation that leads with an exploration of the cover image). Many of these images were shot by the American photographer and longtime Antin collaborator Phel Steinmetz and Antin's most recent collection Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, proves no exception—in fact, the decision to run a black and white cover was even an homage to the use of Steinmetz's earlier images on Antin's previous volumes.

We asked Antin to share his thoughts on the discussion that went on behind the scenes before he decided on the image that now graces the cover of Radical Coherency. Antin responded in his characteristic conversationalist tone, imbuing his thoughts on this process with larger reflection on what this particular kind of image might embody:

When it came to thinking about a cover for Radical Coherency, I called on my usual team—Elly and Phel. Elly [Eleanor Antin] had designed my first book definitions and consulted on all the others, and Phel Steinmetz had shot the photo images for four of my earlier books. So we got together over coffee in our dining room and started to work it out. Radical Coherency was not like any of my other books. It was a Selected of past works from 1966 to 2005. So I wanted a cover that carried the sense of me looking at my past. That meant it was going to be a photograph with me in it. Elly thought it should be shot in the southern California landscape around our house. "You're a Southern California poet and that's where you live." I thought it could be a shot of me coming up our rugged driveway and Phel agreed but thought a shot taken behind the house might be just as good. We decided to try both places. But then Phel said he had an idea he was toying with but didn't know if it would work out. He would take two shots of me—one a full length, facing the camera, and the other a close-up over my shoulder—that he could combine to give the sense that I'm looking at myself. We all liked the idea but I wondered whether the over the shoulder shot would read clearly as me. "You just wear that old Safari jacket," Elly said. "The one you've been wearing since Phel shot the cover for talking at the boundaries back in '76. Who else looks like a bald poet in an old safari jacket?" Phel took the shots and came back with different scale versions of the two of them, laid them out on our dining room table, and we picked the two we liked best. But in the frontal shot I was carrying the safari jacket, not wearing it, and the over-the-shoulder shot was too close up for certain recognition. Studying the combined image, I realized I wasn't sure which shot represented the present and which the past, and even whether the Buddha-like image of the over-the-shoulder shot was really me. So after all that planning, it was ambiguous—like nearly all the artworks I'm interested in. And we liked that and decided to go for it.

david antin

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Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By all accounts, philosopher Richard McKeon (1900-85) was a legend in the classroom. The list of students for whom McKeon shepherded an academic pursuit or two reads like a roster of the twentieth-century's most noted cultural figures: Robert Coover, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Richard Rorty, Paul Rabinow, and Wayne Booth, among them. But McKeon never quite knocked out the one bankable work that makes an intellectual's name. Instead, his contributions—to everything from human rights, medieval philosophy, and the history of science to dialectics, literary criticism, and rhetoric—remain as diverse as the pluralist approach he helped espouse.

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Our own executive editor Doug Mitchell shares the following thoughts about McKeon's contributions to twentieth-century thought:

The University of Chicago Press has been home to many publications by and about Richard McKeon, going back to editions of Cicero and Aristotle and up to an ongoing series of Selected Papers in three volumes, of which two are already published, with a third due in 2013. McKeon's range as a philosopher was enormous (from metaphysics and philosophy of science to ethics and international politics to aesthetics, education, and the philosophic arts, with special emphasis on the arts of logic and rhetoric). His participation in curriculum-building at various universities (from Baroda to Puerto Rico to Swarthmore to Chicago), and in establishing UNESCO and the drafting the Universal Bill of Rights at the United Nations has marked him as a significant player in the junction of philosophy with the world of practical affairs.

What may be most striking about his notably original philosophy is its reformulation of the history of ideas as a branch of philosophy and philosophy as an examination of plural traditions of philosophic discourse. This positions his philosophy of systematic pluralism as an entrée to invention and judgment in the extension of techniques of discourse and of avenues to inquiry, eschewing relativisms and deconstructivisms, on the one hand, but also deflecting the absolutism of naturalisms and positivisms on the other. McKeon's philosophy is undergoing a revival of interest in areas as diverse as sociology, literary history, neuroscience, rhetorical studies, and comparative studies in civilization and world community.

For this reason, the Press is delighted to offer a link to a website devoted to McKeon, established in 2011, which features his autobiographical writings, a bibliography of his works, and samples of his audio lectures as well as his lecture notes.

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McKeon's many publications include several published by the University of Chicago Press that are still in print today: Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon; On Knowing: The Natural Sciences; Introduction to Aristotle; Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Volume Two; and The Edicts of Asoka (coedited with N. A. Nikam). For those seeking additional information about McKeon and his philosophy, George Kimball Plochmann's Richard McKeon: A Study, the first book-length treatment of McKeon's scholarship, is worth noting, as is Walter Watson's The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism.

The newly launched Richard McKeon website includes varied responses to McKeon's philosophies and promises to be a very helpful place to begin for those unfamiliar with this pioneering American intellectual.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Philosophy
Posted by KAM at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome back to TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril, an exchange of thoughts on the nation's future in light of the recent Pacific coast earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. This afternoon, we asked John Whittier Treat, professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale University and acclaimed scholar of Japanese studies, and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, noted cultural critic, age activist, and award-winning journalist, to comment on Japan's current crisis and its links to the nation's past atomic experiences—and the uncertain future of its aging population.

TRAFFIC taps the expertise of leading figures from across the disciplines—whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us—on themes of contemporary global interest.

From John Whittier Treat, author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb:

On Fukushima and Japanese Rearmament

Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, with six reactors one of the largest in the world, is also one of the oldest. The Tokyo Electric Power Company began the process of building this plant in 1960, bringing it on line ten years later despite citizen concerns over placing reactors in known earthquake-prone zones (it is timely to note that our own Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built to withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake; Japan's last Friday was 8.9). In fact, trouble began not long after Fukushima joined the grid: fire broke out in 1976, though news of it only reached the public thanks to a whistle-blower. Other accidents occurred in 1978, 1990 and 1998. Now, this past weekend, we know that some people in the plant have already died, others have received potentially lethal doses of radiation, increased numbers of residents are being evacuated, and doses of iodine are being readied for many others. Even if a meltdown of a nuclear core—or two—is averted, Fukushima has already joined the ranks of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl to comprise an unholy trinity of the world's worst nuclear power catastrophes to date.

Fukushima Prefecture, however, is not an analog to Pennsylvania or the Ukraine in all respects. Fukushima is Japan, where the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing act of World War Two exposed tens of thousands of Japanese to radioactivity that sometimes killed them in later years, sometimes left them pitifully enfeebled, and sometimes, they feared, altered the genes they passed on to their children and grandchildren. This makes what we elsewhere in the world are now witnessing as "news" a vivid memory for the Japanese as well as their present-tense event. Genpatsu 'nuclear power' immediately recalls the older word genbaku 'atomic bomb' with a surplus of history and horror that our English translations do not.

Last December, and in response to a perceived growing threat from its nuclear-armed near neighbors, the Japanese Diet voted across all party lines to move closer than it ever has towards abandoning its long-standing "nuclear allergy" when it doubled its defense budget. At the time, few voices at home were raised in protest. More than half a century had passed since August 6 and 9 that long hot summer of the Japanese Empire's defeat; the world had changed, Japan faced new enemies, and they do seem suddenly emboldened. Article 9 of Japan's postwar "peace constitution" notwithstanding, Japan's new arms-building program seemed destined to include, covertly if not openly, immeasurably improved descendants of the Little Boy and the Thin Man weapons used against them long ago.

But partisans for nuclear disarmament in Japan can hope that now, as their nation surely recovers from the devastation of the earthquake, the tidal waves, and the nuclear debacle of its power industry, the country's as-yet unique sensitivity to the power of the atom to do harm as well as good will revive, come center-stage again, make the Japanese government rethink the new path on which it has set out in an admittedly evermore militarized Northeast Asia. Fukushima already has its victims, and the number will likely grow if reports are true. But the live coverage on television and the internet of explosions in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant may also usefully inspire the Japanese to reclaim their moral leadership in a world increasingly crowded with nuclear nations and declare: Here is a line we will not cross.

It is too early to tell what all the repercussions of this latest nuclear power accident will be. Japan, weakened economically after its infamous "Lost Decade," and ill served by a series of short-lived, anemic governments, now faces immense new hurdles. But among the challenges is an opportunity—to regain the higher ground in the ongoing international debate on the future of nuclear technology.

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From Margaret Morganroth Gullette, author of Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America:

Japan in Peril

Everyone should have special compassion for elderly people in a catastrophe like this one in Japan. Emergency crews in Japan must recognize that older people need special protections.

One lesson that Americans did not learn from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, sadly, is that older people are the most vulnerable.

Of those who died right away, 64 percent were over sixty-five, in a city where beforehand a mere 12 percent were over that age. A full 78 percent were fifty and up. Katrina was one of the worst medical catastrophes for the aged in recent U.S. history. In the longer run, the hard fact is that thousands of people over fifty were given painfully less choice—about being evacuated or drowning; easing back to normal or fighting for every scrap of recovery; getting home fast or spending years in the alien diaspora.

As I say in Agewise, we could not learn that lesson because the press was mainly unconcerned about age or ageism.

Katrina was not an isolated incident. In Paris in the heat wave of 2003, it was also older people who died. In Paris "disparate impact of age" meant not old people's intrinsic frailty, but family abandonment and lack of communal resources like air-conditioning. After 9/11, our foremost gerontologist, the late Dr. Robert Butler, pointed out that in Manhattan pets were evacuated within twenty-four hours, while older shut-ins and the disabled waited for up to a week without electricity or food.

Adult children also behaved heroically in New Orleans. First responders in a boat offered to take a bedridden woman's family if they left her behind. The family refused. When a second boat approached, they prudently placed her in it first.

What I worry about is "triage" whenever there is scarcity. Younger people too suffer from hypothermia or dehydration but older people die sooner without appropriate treatment. Rescuers everywhere make unconscious decisions about who gets sought if missing, who receives warm blankets, radiation tests, or housing. Perhaps enough respect for elders survives to make that possible. Such emergencies are a gigantic implicit test of social values.

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This concludes our series TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril—thank you for joining us. For additional information on John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, or Margaret Morganroth Gullette's Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, please visit the University of Chicago Press's website here.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by KAM at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sad news from New York about the passing of Leo Steinberg, one of the twentieth century's most acclaimed art historians, whose critical insights, eloquent writings, and articulate ideas about art from Renaissance to modern, sharpened the minds of several generations of scholars, critics, and artists.

Born in Moscow, educated in Berlin and London, Steinberg earned his doctorate from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in 1960. Steinberg later taught at the City University of New York, Hunter College, and Harvard University, and was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held for sixteen years (1975-91).

Steinberg pioneered a now much more common approach to art and letters: as his own body of work moved from criticism into art history, he continued to write articles for the most influential journals and magazines of his day, from Partisan Review and Harper's to ArtNews and Art, many of which are collected in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art.

A maverick scholar of Rauschenberg (Encounters with Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture) and the Renaissance noted for his thoughtful integration of works, both internally and externally, Steinberg formed an infamously imagined triad with Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, celebrated by Thomas Wolfe in The Painted Word (1975) as the "kings of Cultureburg." Coiner of the "flatbed picture plan," Steinberg levied criticisms against formalism, the dominant mid-century critical methodology, and encouraged scholars to look beyond the content of a painting and aspire to find meaning in more visual choices, like color and shape. This merging of representation and subject matter paved the way for radical critical understanding—and openness—toward the works of the Abstract Expressionists. As Steinberg said of painter Jasper Johns: "The formalist (a)esthetic, designed to champion the new abstract trend, was largely based on a misunderstanding and an underestimation of the art it set out to defend."

Later work saw Steinberg address the as-yet-unsuspected eroticism of the iconographies devoted to Christ and Mary, the subject of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, and the cause of much controversy throughout Steinberg's career. An extensive museum lecturer, Steinberg also was the first art critic to receive the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, in 1983.

We remember Steinberg for those three works published by the University of Chicago Press, for his prodigious talents as a writer and iconoclastic thinker, and for his reverent approach to painting and what it might offer us, as students of our own humanity.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary | UCP News
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Literary critic, esteemed professor, rhetorician, and scholar, Wayne C. Booth was born to Mormon parents in American Fork, Utah, on February 22, 1921. A young Booth served on a mission for the church before completing undergraduate work at Brigham Young University (1944) and graduate studies at the University of Chicago (1950).

Also ninety years ago this week, the word "robot" was ushered into the global idiom with the premiere of Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a play that debuted on the stages of Prague (1921) before launching a four-month run at Broadway's Garrick Theater in the winter of 1922-23.

After an early teaching stint at the University of Chicago, Booth taught at Haverford and Earlham Colleges before returning to the University as the George M. Pullman Professor of English in 1962, a position he would hold for nearly three decades (though continuing to teach on occasion even in his 80s). Just prior to his appointment, Booth published The Rhetoric of Fiction, a work which considers the literary text in light of both author and audience, applying Aristotelian theory and concepts to advanced discussions of how we make sense of the fictional form. For generations of scholars, the terms Booth advanced in order to analyze complex orders of showing and telling—the "implied author," for example, or the "postulated reader"—became commonplace components of the critical lexicon.

Čapek didn't credit himself with coining the word that became "robot"—instead, in an article printed in Lidové noviny (first articulated in response to the Oxford English Dictionary's etymology), he attributed the word's origins to his brother Josef. Karel had initially wanted to use the Latin word for "labor," rather than Josef's suggestion of robota, which literally translates from the Czech as "serfdom" or "drudgery," and connects to a traditional literature filled with Golem-like creatures.

Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction produced two editions, was translated into seven languages, and won awards from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the National Council of Teachers of English, among other accolades. Booth continued to publish works of enormous influence on narrative theory and literary studies, including A Rhetoric of Irony, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, The Vocation of a Teacher, The Knowledge Most Worth Having, and several editions of The Craft of Research. Booth also championed teaching and collegiality, serving as Dean of the College from 1964 to 1969, helping to moderate unrest during the Vietnam War period. He coedited Critical Inquiry for many years; delivered one of the University's Ryerson lectures; was awarded Guggenheim, NEH, and Ford Faculty Fellowships; served for one year as the president of the Modern Language Association; and was recognized by the American Association for Higher Education as one of six professors who made "a difference in higher education." To this day, the University hands out the Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in his honor.

Čapek countered the adaptation of Robota in his play's title, and in a gesture toward those titular entities (which were not mechanical, as in our modern sense of the word, but instead biological beings early mistaken for humans), included the name Rossum, which alludes to the Czech word rozum, meaning—naturally—"wisdom" or "intellect."

Booth's legacy as a top-tier scholar, both in terms of technical skill and ethical perspective, and teacher is nearly without peer. We remember him today, in light of other benign anniversaries, on what would have been his ninetieth birthday, as one who helped us wrestle with what it meant to be the opposite of Čapek's robot—a bit more fully human.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Reference and Writing
Posted by KAM at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past Friday, the University of Chicago community mourned the loss of one of its brightest stars, when Miriam Bratu Hansen lost her decade-long battle with cancer. The Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities; professor in the Departments of Cinema & Media Studies and English, and at the College; founder of the Film Studies Center; and a faculty board member of the University of Chicago Press (1991-96), Hansen shifted the confines of cinema studies to account for modernism's more vernacular forms in line with the writings of Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and others from the Frankfurt school, as Hansen's colleague Tom Gunning describes in his moving tribute:

Coming to the United States, she worked at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and taught at Rutgers University before coming to Chicago in 1990. Her research moved to the history of early American cinema and to the work of the Frankfurt school and its satellites on cinema. Both of these areas were evident in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Cinema published in 1991, a work which gave shape to the research that had been emerging in the eighties on early American cinema, seeing it through the lens of Negt and Kluge's concept of the public sphere, and providing a magisterial analysis of D. W. Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance through the criticism of Walter Benjamin, and new work on gender.

Hansen was able to work out an intersection between film history, film analysis and film theory few have ever matched. Her boundless curiosity marked her teaching and writing in the next decade, as she evolved the concept of the "vernacular modernism" through probing the influence of Hollywood on early Asian (especially Chinese) cinema, working with her student Zhen Zhang, and especially extending her research into the Frankfurt school and cinema, producing a series of crucial essays and finishing shortly before her death a large manuscript on cinema and the Frankfurt school.

Tributes to Hansen online can be found at Film Studies for Free (including a compendium of her work available on the web), Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, Cintetrix, and 3 Quarks Daily. Many will remember her for her vitality, patience, and uncompromising intellect. I'm one of them.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Miriam Hansen Fellowship Fund at the University of Chicago, 5801 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

Archived in Commentary | UCP News
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Sometimes information clicks. Like the success of pink dresses on the red carpet outside of the Golden Globes (allow us—chagrin, we know—that cultural comparison), you can't anticipate how new scholarship, when produced, might take off and traffic through the usual spheres of commerce and the circuitry of Web 3.0. With that in mind, we couldn't be more fascinated by the explosive debut today (surprising findings in tow) of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

The Chronicle of Higher Education places the book in profile in a four-part (I II III IV) series ranging from commentary and news analysis to a more targeted study, including an excerpt from the book itself.

As the Chronicle summarizes:

In the new book, Mr. Arum and his coauthor—Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia—report on a study that has tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 four-year colleges in the fall of 2005.

Three times in their college careers—in the fall of 2005, the spring of 2007, and the spring of 2009—the students were asked to take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a widely-used essay test that measures reasoning and writing skills. Thirty-six percent of the students saw no statistically significant gains in their CLA scores between their freshman and senior years.

And that is just the beginning of the book's bad news.

At the NYT's blog "The Choice," Jacques Steinberg's post, which synthesizes Arum and Roksa's research in light of findings from the National Survey of Student Engagement, has already received over 70 comments in just a few hours. In addition, USA Today opened their Education section with commentary on the book, offering the following lede:

Nearly half of the nation's undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don't make academics a priority, a new report shows. Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

In a much trafficked post, Inside Higher Ed hones in on one of the book's key points: "The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor." The Huffington Post continues in this vein:

The study, an unusually large-scale effort to track student learning over time, comes as the federal government, reformers and others argue that the US must produce more college graduates to remain competitive globally. But if students aren't learning much, that calls into question whether boosting graduation rates will provide that edge.

"It's not the case that giving out more credentials is going to make the US more economically competitive," Arum said in an interview. "It requires academic rigor. . . . You can't just get it through osmosis at these institutions."

But how do you know when a scholarly book has really gone viral? Two recent reviews from Vanity Fair and Gawker (respectively) place Academically Adrift's findings in a bit more vernacular light:

In a crushing exposé of the heretofore secret society known as "college," a recent book by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reveals precisely what parents, grandparents, and anti-intellectual naysayers have long feared: university students spend nearly five times as much of their day in bed, playing Frisbee golf, and updating their Facebook statuses as they do attending class and studying.

**

To succeed in America, you must get a college degree. To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money? Not learning. College kids don't learn stuff.

No matter your thoughts on the particularities of what Arum and Roksa's findings truly reveal—who to blame, how to adjust, and what next to to further our core understanding—even the book's index presents a faceted take on the dynamics of undergraduate education ("e-mail correspondence, time spent on" and "student culture; and disengagement compact between faculty and students"). For more information on the book, check out its UCP page here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Education | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Certainly one of the most involved discussions at the recent annual meeting of the Modern Language Association was the continued emergence and changing role of the digital humanities. From blockbuster panels and papers on an array of topics to summaries in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Twitter feed responses, we've just barely scratched the surface of some of the conversations that might introduce a digital humanities newbie to the wealth of exchanges that happened this past weekend, alongside a couple of new announcements made in the conference's wake.

What follows is an assortment of clips that have come through our wires, marking our own foray into readings that extend beyond ThatCamp basics and Chicago's own list in this burgeoning interest area. By no means exhaustive, this is a collection of moments that caught our attention, as the internet flickered in the days following our return from M(LA).

If you don't know what the digital humanities is, you haven't looked very hard.—Matthew Kirschenbaum, author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, which won the MLA's First Book Award in 2009

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I know from experience that there are plenty of people in the profession who know little about this established field and even regard it with disdain as something disturbingly outré and dangerous to the mission of the humanities.—William Pannapacker, "Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant?"

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Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2011 MLA:

12. Labor in the Digital Humanities
19. Digging into Data: Computational Methods of Literary Research
29. The Brave New World of Scholarly Books: Publishing in Tempestuous Times
45. Getting Funded in the Humanities: A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Workshop
48. Hacking the Profession: Academic Self-Help in an Age of Crisis
52. E-Books as Bibliographical Objects
91. Meeting in the Library: Academic Labor at the Interface
125. Literary Research and Digital Humanities
140. What Is College Level Writing in the Twenty-First Century?
141. New Thresholds of Interpretation? Paratexts in the Digital Age
150. New Tools, Hard Times: Social Networking and the Academic Crisis
185. Planet Wiki? Postcolonial Theory, Social Media, and Web 2.0
193. New (and Renewed) Work in Digital Literary Studies: An Electronic Roundtable
218. Analog and Digital: Texts, Contexts, and Networks
233. Transmedia Activism
248. The Dictionary in Print and in the Cloud
282. Paper as Platform or Interface
296. Technology-Enhanced Delivery Models in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching
305. Silent Night: The Archives of the Deaf and Blind
309. The History and Future of the Digital Humanities
331. The Open Professoriat: Public Intellectuals on the Social Web
349. From N-Town to YouTube: Medieval Drama on Film, Video, and the Web
385. Endangered Languages, Language Documentation, and Digital Humanities
397. The Lives That Digital Archives Write
431. Textual Scholarship and New Media
436. The Institution(alization) of Digital Humanities
462. Foreign Language Cultural Literacy and Web 2.0
474. Social Networking: Web 2.0 Applications for the Teaching of Languages and Literatures
493. The Archive and the Aesthetic: Methodologies of American Literary Studies
505. Lives and Archives in Graphic and Digital Modes
521. Close Reading the Digital
532. Electronic Lives
541. Electronic Literature: Off the Screen
577. Print Culture and Undergraduate Literary Study
596. Will Publications Perish? The Paradigm Shift in Scholarly Communication
606. Methods of Research in New Media
617. Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) and the Scholarly Edition
619. Ecocriticism beyond Literature
639. Where's the Pedagogy in Digital Pedagogy?
743. What the Digital Does to Reading
752. Literature and/as New Media
753. Sustainable Publishing
792. Sound Reproduction and the Literary

Archive taken from Mark Sample's updated Sample Reality repost on hastac.org

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If in flux in the age of digital technologies are the roles of instructor and intellectual, and the methods and formats of scholarship, so too are the very objects of study.—excerpt from "Digital Humanities at the 2011 MLA Convention," published by the University of California, Berkeley's Townsend Humanities Center

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4Humanities began because the digital humanities community—which specializes in making creative use of digital technology to advance humanities research and teaching as well as to think about the basic nature of the new media and technologies—woke up to its special potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy.—from the mission statement of 4Humanities: Advocating for the Humanities, cited in a paper by Alan Liu ("Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?")

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If you don't begin with the assumption that literature itself is a repository of human values that human beings need, then we lose everything.—Professor Donald Pease, Dartmouth College, quoted in a Los Angeles Times article about MLA and the "low-plateau" of the job market for humanities scholars

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'Everyone is rushing now to announce,' Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, said via email. He has been involved in the planning conversations behind some of the new ventures. 'The good news, I think, is that the e-transition for the institutional market is clearly—and finally—at escape velocity.' —from Jennifer Howard's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the recent announcement of Books at JSTOR and other ebook publishing platforms

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An analysis of the 7,649 tweets with the hash tag "#mla11":

80% (6119) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were made by 13% (115) of the twitterers.

The top 10 (1%) twitterers account for 38% (2915) of the tweets.

50% (428) of the twitterers only tweeted once.

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Community and collaboration are undoubtedly signs of the spirit, but to say that disciplinary definition doesn't really matter is to eschew the hard reality of life in the modern academy. Digital Humanities is not some airy Lyceum. It is a series of concrete instantiations involving money, students, funding agencies, big schools, little schools, programs, curricula, old guards, new guards, gatekeepers, and prestige. It might be more than these things, but it cannot not be these things.—Stephen Ramsey, excerpt from "Who's In and Who's Out," a paper presented at the History and Future of the Digital Humanities panel

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Early odds on the digital humanities 'arriving' at #mla12 are 1/100—tweet archived by lwaltzer on January 10th

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Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Manmoth can't really be dead, can he?

But Manmoth died in the autumn:

DEATH OF OSCAR WILDE; He Expires at an Obscure Hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Is Said to Have Died from Meningitis, but There Is a Rumor that He Committed Suicide.

What love best about Manmoth? (A Top Five or Ten list of minutiae that will eventually come round to the critic and his work, in publication)

Fingal O'Flahertie Wills as middle names (older brother Willie Wilde—a real, as if imagined, alliterative sibling—and two half-sisters burned to death in an accident triggered by one dancing too close to a coal fire)

deep appreciation for peacock feathers as decorative accoutrement; also: blue china and lilies (and lectures during his 1882 American tour on the history of interior design)

Names of periodicals at which he played an editorial role: the Pall Mall Gazette; the Lady's World, later the Woman's World; and the Chameleon (limited run)

choice of architecturally tectonic (as if GPS) coordinates for the publication name associated with The Ballad of Reading Gaol—C33 (cell block C, landing 3, cell 3)

the fascinating etymology of the word "dude," (c. 1883) in which (depending on the source) Wilde plays a role as progenitor, coiner, inspiration, or exemplar

From the Brooklyn Eagle (25 February 1883):

A new word has been coined. It is d-u-d-e or d-o-o-d. The spelling does not seem to be distinctly settled yet. Just where the word came from nobody knows, but it has sprung into popularity in the last two weeks, so that now everybody is using it. A dude cannot be old; he must be young, and to be properly termed a dude he should be of a certain class who affect Metropolitan theaters. The dude is from 19 to 28 years of age, wears trousers of extreme tightness, is hollow chested, effeminate in his ways, apes the English and distinguishes himself among his fellowmen as a lover of actresses. The badge of his office is the paper cigarette, and his bell crown English opera hat is his chiefest (sic) joy.

But minor delights aside: Manmoth lingers in witty epigrams, sharp-toothed dramas dressed up in social etiquette, and as a major figure in both aesthetics and the history of criticism. Just this past weekend, the New York Times devoted a significant portion of their Book Review to lit crit's current manifestations ("Why Criticism Matters"), with thoughtful pieces by rising stars like Elif Batuman and Sam Anderson. Wilde appeared in the usual dapper photograph in a section on Masters of the Form, which hailed Manmoth alongside Eliot and Matthew Arnold (many Wolverines on Dover Beach these days?), among others. Here, the Times sampled "The Critic as Artist," one of the pieces published by Chicago in The Artist as Critic: Critical Wrings of Oscar Wilde.

"Wilde . . . emerges now as not only brilliant but also revolutionary, one of the great thinkers of dangerous thoughts."—Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review

This essay, like many by Wilde in this collection, has been taken to heart (and put to memory) by many, despite the recent celebration of its 120th birthday. "To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes." What remains special about this book, though, even more so than the writings of Wilde is Richard Ellman's editorial hand. Winner of a posthumous National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his Oscar Wilde (1989, and still the standard life), Ellman was also embraced by writer Edna O'Brien as the only person who conquered Finnegans Wake and "digested the whole of it."

Much of the Times piece on criticism's future seemed to be trying to articulate the uncertain remains of liberal humanism. Richard Ellman was one of its twentieth-century faces and his work on Wilde one of the triumphs of his career. It made for compelling reading to juxtapose vintage soundbites from the masters alongside those important new critical geographies, but if you're curious about those "whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the [critical] gem," Ellman's collection is worth revisiting.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Polycrates of Samus, Pisistratus (the tyrant of Athens), the real-life cast of the television program Hoarders, King George the Fifth (philatelist), Jay Leno, the curators of the British Lawnmower Museum—certain people have been known to collect a thing or two. We recently schooled ourselves on the Freudian psychopathology behind collecting, and though we'll spare you our findings, suffice to our cultural obsessions with objecthood doesn't seem in danger of disappearing any time soon. Or does it?

"A centre of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean counters."

That's from a recent article in the NYRB about the Warburg Institute and its breathtakingly recondite offerings from the once-private collection of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), cultural and art historian, patient of Ludwig Bingswanger, and observer of the Hopi snake dance. As the Independent reports, the Warburg Institute might be foisted from its home at the University of London due to an increase in rent, which puts much of its collection either in peril or at the liberty of the University's Dewey Decimal system. Warburg organized everything according to "good neighborliness"—we could not love this more if we made it up in our own short fiction. Hopi snake dance and astrology, sigh. Aby Warburg and Patti Smith: a running list of Chicago Blog fascinations, if you're keeping track.

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man." —Alexander Pope

The object stares back. Marshall Poe opens a recent interview with Ann Fabian, author of a book about another sorting of objects, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead, with Pope's quotation from An Essay on Man (1733). The Skull Collectors considers the burgeoning nineteenth-century "science" of crainiology (Melville, we're looking at you and remembering Ishmael tracing fingers on bone) alongside the battle dead of the Civil War, campaigns against indigenous peoples, global history from conquered places, and the tale of Philadelphia naturalist and skull collector Samuel George Morton.

Fabian was recently the featured author on the literary site Rorotoko, where she began her own short essay about the book with simple enough questions:

"I was curious about the skulls. Whose? Why?"

Moving beyond the poor science involved in Morton's theories of racial hierarchy, Fabian uncovers deeper stories of the dead whose skulls he collected—this is the opposite of Warburg's "good neighborliness," but just as pressing in terms of context. Dead bodies matter. As Fabian says, much more adroitly:

The dead had roles to play in anchoring communities in tie and place. . . . Skull collectors liked to boast that they were not tied down by the superstitions that hobbled ordinary men. Collecting helped them imagine themselves as men dedicated to science.

And imagination takes us back to Warburg again—the relationship between science and objects and collecting, that hybrid art shaped by the materiality of our own bodies and days.

For more information on Ann Fabian's The Skull Collectors, visit the book's UCP site here.

And for a photograph of Eugene Boban, official archaeologist in the Mexican court of Maximilian, dealer of antiquities, and auctioneer of more than one fake Aztec crystal skull:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | History
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What follows below is the conclusion of our inaugural installment of TRAFFIC, a series in critical dialogue with leading scholars from across the disciplines and the ideas that shape our world. Here, W. J. T. Mitchell (Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present) and Tzvetan Todorov (The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations) discuss Nick Ut's iconic image of the Vietnam War, the duty of humanities scholars, and the changing face of liberal democracies. Thanks very much for joining us—we hope you'll return for future conversations.

TRAFFIC, by the way, is taken from the Arabic taraffaqa, "to walk along slowly together."

Dear Tzvetan:

I have located the picture from the October 23rd New York Times, and it is, as you suggested, quite appalling. The little girl, having seen her parents killed in front of her by U.S. soldiers, is wailing in grief, while the figure of a soldier stands in the shadows outside the illuminated area where we see the blood-spattered child. I sometimes wonder how an embedded photographer can bear to take such a picture, which was clearly done at very close range in the immediate aftermath of this event. The picture also raises the question of the ethics of beholding. As James Agee put it so memorably in his commentary on Walker Evans's photographs of destitute sharecroppers:

"Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance and for what purpose, and by what right to you qualify to, and what will you do about it?"

The picture defies commentary of any interpretive sort; it is more like the direct transcription of a trauma in its naked, inconsolable appeal for pity and comfort. What it is doing in conjunction with a news story that tends to minimize U. S. responsibility while engaging in observations about the comparatively greater cruelty of the Iraqis toward their own people is—to me—completely inexplicable and quite shocking. For me, the picture is rather like that image that has become iconic of the Vietnam war—the 1972 photo by Nick Ut of a naked Vietnamese girl, her skin burned by napalm, fleeing from her burning village. I don't think this image will become iconic in the same way for a variety of reasons, but any American who sees it should, in my view, think long and hard about what has become of the United States. We are supposed to be a beacon of peace and liberty, but instead we have become the greatest purveyor of military violence in the world, with uncounted hundreds of bases scattered around the world, and two major wars in progress with no end in sight. This is not some accident of history, but reflects a fundamental pathology and pattern that can only lead to disaster for our nation. This picture, which is a product of a war fought in the name of every American citizen, should lead all of us to take a long look in the mirror.

Best wishes,
Tom

**

Dear Tom:

I gladly agree with your just remarks on the picture I mentioned earlier. It does remind me more of the Nick Ut photo of the running Vietnamese girl than the tortured prisoners of Abu Ghraib, and the presence of the photographer at that very moment is indeed somewhat problematic: in a way, he has become a part of this terrible event.

I would generalize another remark of yours: I think not only American citizens but also those of the European states should "think long and hard about what have become" our liberal democracies. On the international scene we have adopted a kind of democratic messianism, i.e. the strategy of using military force in order to impose on distant countries the regime we consider most appropriate for them. On the internal front the very notion of common interest, implied by the democratic idea, seems to be fading away. This doesn't mean that the picture is entirely black, nor that in some distant place flourishes an idyllic utopia. In Europe as in the United States we live in pluralistic societies, by far preferable to China or Saudi Arabia; but in these societies antidemocratic forces have become stronger. I think that we, professionals of the humanities, should accept fully our role as educators, and use our capacities in interpreting—images, words, fictions, ideas—thus contributing to the defense of the values we cherish.

Yours,
Tzvetan

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
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If you're just joining us, welcome to TRAFFIC: a new series hosted by the Chicago Blog that pairs leading critics and scholars from across the disciplines, often in conversation for the very first time. Welcome to Part II of our inaugural exchange, between Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (one of the Guardian's 2010 Books of the Year) and W. J. T. Mitchell, whose Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, just published. Join Todorov and Mitchell as they discuss international media coverage of WikiLeaks and more below:

Dear Tzvetan:

Your linking of my image repertoire to Goya is very shrewd. The Hooded Man on the box curiously reminds some people of Goya's executioners and inquisitors—a strange reversal of the roles of torturer and victim. But I wonder what you think of the Christological echoes in this figure? To me, they seem unavoidable, but certain people have expressed resistance and skepticism, based on ethical concerns that this turns us away from the reality depicted in the picture. My answer is that there is a reality produced by the pictures in their reception that also needs study.

But the question I am most eager to ask you has to do with the concept of the the "historical uncanny," which to me is the spark that leaped between our two books. First, a purely personal thrill at the coincidence that we would publish books in the same year on the same list and on the same subject—the contemporary state of the war on terror. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all, given the importance of the subject, and the need to reframe it with the perspective of culture, civilization, and (in my case) images and metaphors. But I wonder how it strikes you to take your seminal discussion of the uncanny (in The Fantastic)—the literary genre that emerges between fantasy and the detective story—and test out its applicability to the very history we are studying. We say without hesitation that history discloses irony, tragedy, even farce (if Marx is right). Do you think there can be a properly historical uncanny? That is, moments when events produce suspension and transition between opposing interpretations, uncanny repetitions, coincidences, doubles, and the like? I see your figures of the civilized and the barbarian as avatars of these archaic double images, mirroring and opposing one another.

I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions.

Warmest regards,
Tom

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Dear Tom:

I was struck myself by the proximity and simultaneity of our two books. Even more so, maybe, if one can confront this closeness with what we were both doing a few decades ago. I believe both of us were much more "textually" oriented and we weren't exploring current political events (at least I wasn't). This simultaneous change cannot be purely personal—probably it is related to the transformation of our societies as well. This deserves reflection. . . .

To comment rapidly on your two questions: I can see quite well the resemblance of the Hooded Man with the crucified Jesus. I have a feeling that the religious imagery of Christianity is so deeply absorbed by those who belong to our cultural tradition that we cannot avoid superimposing its schemes and models on our present perceptions. Goya is again a case in point: when he paints a man that will be executed in the following minutes (in The Third of May), we immediately relate the gesture of his open arms to Jesus Christ on the cross. The same is true concerning the figure in the first engraving of the Disasters of War ("Sad Premonitions. . . ."): the man praying on his knees (an allegorical image of the author) is immediately related by most viewers to the image of Christ in Gethsemani garden ("take away this from me").

This connection doesn't turn us away from the reality depicted because we always grasp reality with references to earlier perceptions, which in turn help shape present ones. On the other hand, I hadn't thought before you wrote that there may be a historical relation to the "uncanny." Excuse me for coming back again to the subject that interests me most these days— this was very topical for Goya, whose career was contemporary to the rise of this genre in England and France. I am thinking of these "undecidable" pictures of the last years of the XVIII century—of witches and witchcraft—when we don't know whether the characters are dreaming or really encountering demons.

My attention has been distracted during the days separating our first and second exchange of letters by a media event: the publication of new information on the Iraq war by WikiLeaks. The first thing that struck me was that the journalists from major newspapers that had access to the sources didn't present the same picture of them (another example of the construction of different facts out of the same raw material). The NYT and IHT published two papers on the subject: one was on the Iranian interventions in the war and the other on the fact that the worst violations of all rules were committed by the Iraqi police forces. Nothing was devoted to any violation of these rules by American forces.

The coverage in Le Monde was very different: it concentrated on the American transgressions of law and on the "banality of evil." Thus, if you read the NYT, you won't learn anything about the 303 complaints filed by Iraqi survivors because they had been tortured by American forces (more Hooded Men). On the other hand, Le Monde published photos of routine war, whereas the NYT has one very powerful picture which could become an emblematic image like those you discuss—an absolutely distressed young girl whose parents were shot in front of her eyes. A very strong image indeed; I wonder how you would comment it.

What strikes me also is that the official reaction in the United States is rather one-sided: "Pentagon condemns leaks." "We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents, etc." But they don't deplore the crimes committed by the soldiers or the private companies working for the army, or the orders they receive which cause them break the law. They don't condemn the torture: only the fact that it is exposed. To say nothing of the huge disproportion of victims in general: 4500 on the American side and several hundred-thousand for Iraq, although Iraq never attacked the United States.

This brings me back to another chapter of your book, in which you comment on Karl Rove's proud statement that he and his friends are creating reality. Indeed, but what an ugly reality it is! Isn't this the strongest threat for our fragile democracies?

Warm regards,
Tzvetan

Please be sure to join us tomorrow at the Chicago Blog for the conclusion of the Mitchell/Todorov TRAFFIC exchange—

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
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We're thrilled to introduce a new feature to the Chicago Blog today: TRAFFIC, an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities, social science, and the hard sciences, whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us.

We're kicking things off with a series of letters between Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations and W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present on the visual imagery of the war on terror, our current global political climate, and the role of the historical uncanny in everything from Abu Ghraib to Goya's Disasters of War. Filled with insights into our contemporary culture of occupation, Todorov and Mitchell's communication pairs two of our leading critical voices for the very first time and we hope that you'll join us here at the Chicago Blog for the next three days as we watch their exchange unfold.

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Dear Tzvetan (if I may):

First let me say how much I have enjoyed your new book, The Fear of Barbarians. I find your account of the rise of Islamophobia very compelling, and I am especially struck by your remark that "the fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarians." My favorite English poet, William Blake, put it this way: we "become what we behold," by projecting a feared image of the Other as cruel and uncivilized, and then mirroring back exactly the behavior we deplore. This mirroring process is both convincing and troubling, and I think it forms the common argument of our two books. It suggests that, as the cartoonist Walt Kelly put it so succinctly, "we have met the enemy and he is us." This, in a nutshell, is the basic argument of my critique of the so-called "war on terror" in Cloning Terror, which, I am proud to say, will appear on the same list with your new book.

This is not to suggest, however, that there are no real enemies of liberal, secular, democratic states. As you point out, the dangers posed by Al-Qaeda and radical Islamism are not imaginary. But it is the Manichean reaction of the Western powers, especially the United States, in conjuring up fantastic categories such as "Islamo-fascism" based on outdated cold war models, that turns Western democracies into dangers to themselves. I argue something very similar in my chapter on the war on terror as an "autoimmune disorder," extrapolating on Jacques Derrida's vivid metaphor of the body politic attacking its own constitution. For an American, that is the deepest wound administered by 9/11 and the threat of terrorism. It is a self-inflicted and threatens many of the liberties associated with American democracy.

Your critique of the metaphor of a "war on terror" is incisive and compelling. You demonstrate convincingly how counterproductive it is to apply the inappropriate model of a war between nation-states to a struggle against a relatively small number of extremists, who are in no way representative of the vast majority of their countrymen. This "war," in fact, as you point out, has had exactly the reverse of its intended effect. Instead of reducing the numbers of the enemy, it has served as a recruiting tool for jihadists, and actually helped to proliferate the number of enemies prepared to sacrifice themselves in acts of revenge. This is the pattern I call "cloning terror," the paradoxical result of the attempt to stamp out terror by means of wars of invasion and occupation.

I suppose the main difference in our approaches is one of framing.

You choose to situate your discussion within the age-old debate on barbarism versus civilization, with "culture" playing the role of a kind of currency between these two polarities. My framework is more narrowly focused on what I call the "iconological" dimension of the conflict, with an emphasis on the verbal and visual images, metaphors, and pictures that define the symbolic and imaginary elements of the conflict. That is why, for me, the figure of cloning is so crucial. It not only helps to clarify the curious and paradoxical reversal in which a war has the effect of making the enemy stronger; it also captures, in my view, a whole range of specific features of the imagery that defines the war on terror.

I'm thinking of the uncanny parallel between the "clone wars" in American domestic politics, and the war on terror; the proliferation of figures of mirroring, doubling, and repetition; the literalizing of what was previously thought to be "merely metaphoric" in the actualization of the fantasy of a war on terror, and the techno-scientific realization of the ancient fantasy of creating artificial life. In this regard, I have found myself recently —when asked to reflect on the overall argument of Cloning Terror—going back to your classic early book, The Fantastic and your brilliant location of the concept of the uncanny as a transitional aesthetic between fantastic narratives and the detective story, a liminal realm between imagination and reality. In retrospect, I think I could have labeled the argument of Cloning Terror as an instance of "the historical uncanny," describing a period in which the imaginary and metaphoric (the war on terror) became all too real and literal.

The clone, clearly, is also uncanny in the most precise sense, as a figure of doubling and repetition, as well as the realization of an ancient fantasy. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has refused to pursue the logic of this uncanny transition all the way into the realm of the detective story, to retrace the steps by which a phantasmatic, endless, and unwinnable war became all too real, along with the realization of the ultimate nightmare—the transformation of a nation officially committed to human rights into a place where one could actually have a public debate over the merits and necessity of torture. The telos of the detective story, the pursuit of truth and justice, however partial, has been renounced by Obama in favor of "looking forward, not backward." But the logic of the uncanny tells us that the past inevitably returns, and the ghosts of Abu Ghraib are waiting for us in the future.

I wonder if, looking back over the arguments you make in The Fear of Barbarians, you have had any second thoughts of this kind? If you had to reframe the argument of your book now, how would you do it? Your afterword was an attempt to bring your book up to date in 2010, well into Obama's administration, and my book portrayed itself as a history that continues "to the present"—clearly an impossible task. I very much look forward to hearing from you.

With best wishes,
Tom Mitchell

**

Dear Tom:

Thank you very much for your receptive comments and your generous appreciation of my book. I, too, was struck by the closeness of our two projects, which becomes clear on the very first page of both, due to the name of our common addressee, Edward Said. As you mention early in your book, one can insist on either "what happened" or "how it was represented." We both know that this seemingly obvious distinction raises some tricky problems, since how our perception selects and combines the features of the observed event is already a form of interpretation: things do happen in the outside world but it is the representation we give them, whether in words or images, that transforms them into intelligible events. Still, this distinction permits me to describe our two books and their complimentary nature—my focus being mainly on the events that shaped our recent history, and yours on their representation. At the same time, you have an incomparably better grasp of the internal American scene, which allows you to deal with many images unknown to me, and, more importantly, to connect the coverage of the "war on terror" with the debate on cloning.

One of my main purposes in my book was to insist on a point that you formulate at the very start of your letter: "The war on terror was having the effect of recruiting more jihadists, and increasing the number of terrorist attacks." Neither one of us recommends embracing terrorism and thus ceasing to fight it, but we believe that the current means used to achieve our aim are counterproductive. Just as self-damaging are other measures of fighting Islam in European countries nowadays, where the rise of a xenophobic extreme right is a concrete reality. This is why I devoted a chapter in The Fear of Barbarians to the discussion of certain "current affairs," such as the Dutch film Submission, the Danish caricatures, and the Pope's speech. Not that these situations are simple to deal with, but I am sure that the politics of intolerance and xenophobia only make things worse.

Your use of the cloning image allows you to insist on a point with which I agree completely: the danger of becoming a mirror image of the enemy one is fighting. The torture issue, a common topic of both our books, provides a fine illustration of this. Let me add that, if even the practices and theories of torture were produced under the responsibility of the United States government, European governments cannot be considered as entirely innocent: their agents were taking part in the interrogations and none of these governments ever spoke openly against the acts of torture.

Obama's election did indeed change the general climate of fear and the triumphant rhetoric of war, but other changes are slow to come. Guantanamo is not closed, the absurd war in Afghanistan is still going on, and the Bagram prison camp still cannot be visited by independent observers.

To come closer to the process of representation: in reading your book, I am struck by the proximity of the images you are discussing with the images of a painter I have been working on since the completion of The Fear of Barbarians: Goya. His Disasters of War and its drawings are sometimes surprisingly close to contemporary photos or paintings. Maybe I should put it the other way around: the most striking of our contemporary images remind me in their symbolic power of certain Goya engravings and drawings. I am sending you here two of them: one shows the pleasure taken by the executioner, smiling next to the victim, another illustrates an act of torture. Don't they remind us of attitudes captured by the Abu Ghraib pictures? Others are close to the Vietnam War images you mention.

I am struck by another coincidence. The War for Independence in Spain (1808–13) that Goya's artwork recorded, was fought against Napoleon's army but also against the enlightened Spaniards who saw in the occupation the occasion to accelerate the evolution of society, was also the first asymmetrical war between a modern army and a clandestine guerrilla (the word itself was invented on this occasion). The Afghan Taliban plays today the role of the reactionary Spanish clergy of the time, which defended national independence and traditional values; our occupation forces "bringing" democracy and human rights to Afghanistan play the part of the French regiments claiming that they bestow liberty and equality to the oppressed.

With my best wishes,
Tzvetan

Stay tuned tomorrow at the Chicago Blog and join us for the next installment of Mitchell and Todorov's TRAFFIC exchange—

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
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"And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—
So much is true."

We're back from our Thanksgiving sojourns and ready to set the cornucopias ablaze; first, though, we're busy using our Turing machine and Twitter algorithms to raise Anthony Powell from the dead. Have you downloaded your free copy of A Question of Upbringing yet?

[gratis ebook generator, c. 2010]

Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance was equally on fire this week, with a review appearing in the Washington Post, a Holiday Reading shoutout at Design Observer, an exchange between Linfield and Ian Crouch at the New Yorker, and a sweeping and thought-provoking profile of the book by Frances Richard at the Nation.

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Andrew Piper, author of Dreaming in Books: The Making of Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age, appeared as part of a roundtable on the future of—yes, you're good—the book on the CBC. Listen to the podcast here. And don't forget to check out the book's amazing Appendix of not-quite-ready-for-primetime materials, Dreaming in Books: A Booklog.

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John H. Evans's Contested Reproduction: Genetic Technologies, Religion, and Public Debate, which charts the claims made about reproductive genetic technologies (RGTs) by religious persons from across the political spectrum, has seen quite a bit of attention in a series of posts devoted to a range of issues Evans touches upon at the Read the Spirit blog.

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The Financial Times compliments Harvey G. Cohen's masterful Duke Ellington's America, spurred by new releases of vintage Ellington by Mosaic Records.

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Rorotoko, a terrific sleeper site for prescient author interviews and commentary, has a new one posted with Larry Bennett, author of The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism.

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Gina A. Ulysse (have a look at Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica here) offers a timely post on the Haitian presidential elections at the Ms. Magazine blog.

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Do you like heartwarming things? You should read John Eklund's tribute to retiring University of Chicago Press sales rep, jazz aficionado, thoughtful raiser of eyebrows, and all around remarkable gentleman David Stimpson here.

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And finally, we misdelivered a review copy to James Grehan, associate of the Journal of Middle East Studies, somewhere in Cambridge, MA. James, are you out there? We've almost lifted Powell!

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If I were Cassandra and someone had asked me as an adolescent what noble passions would come to define the end of my twenties, I would have answered with certainty: the reading of encyclopedic novels, twentieth-century nostalgia, and the television series thirtysomething. And like C, I would have been doomed to disbelieve myself. I could have gone on and on about a world gone digital (now 3.0); electronic books; the decline and fall of James Frey and orange Crocs; FREE ELECTRONIC BOOKS; and the University of Chicago Press ebook release of all twelve volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series, beginning with our free December ebook (Volume 1!), A Question of Upbringing.

Here, Cassandra hits the trifecta. There are encyclopedic novels and then there is A Dance to the Music of Time, a series so macrocosmic in scope that it makes the legendary 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica seem a minor tome. There are the intersecting and changing lives and stories informed by minutiae and banal realities that inflect thirtysomething and then there is Dance. And there's this minor epoch—the twentieth century. Pales in comparison to Dance.

We're talking Modern Library's Top 100 Novels, Time's Best 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century, James Wolcott-endorsed, Terry Teachout-fanned, Ed Park-supported, monumentally hypnotic reading.

This is tremendously exciting stuff—the University of Chicago Press is releasing each book in the series electronically and the first volume is free not just on our own website, but on the Kindle, Nook, Borders, and Sony sites. In addition, we're discounting the full Dance collection, with all books (both electronic and print versions) available at a 30% discount on our website (use the promo code DANCE30). Can you think of a more engrossing winter teaser? A more enviable New Year's achievement? Your Dance-card is full.

Our own publicity manager Levi Stahl, reader and re-reader of Dance, has written many an eloquent ode to the series, including this hilariously prosaic post at Maud Newton's site in imitation of Powell's own idiom. He's already pointedly hooked us with literary raconteur Jonathan Ames's take:

Jeeves and I were reading together, as a sort of two-person book club, Anthony Powell's epic, twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. It's absolutely a stupendous work—almost nothing of moment occurs for hundreds of page, thousands, even, and yet one reads on completely mesmerized. It's like an imprint of life: nothing happens and yet everything happens.

Jonathan, are you out there someplace listening? Let's do this together—you and I and Jeeves, some of us for the first time and some again and again:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've always has a soft spot for newsworthy (pun intended) online publications—so it's no surprise that we read today's headlines about Salon with a bit of chagrin. The San Francisco-based "Internet roundtable" has long been in the red—with losses of $15 million dollars in the past three years alone—but now the Wall Street Journal reports (a paid content item quickly picked up by the New York Observer) that the company is searching for a larger media company to partner with or to subsume its enterprises. While possible pairings that emerge during heroic acts of desperation (remember John Candy and Eugene Levy in Armed and Dangerous?) can be surprisingly generative (this past April, Salon formed a content-based micro-partnership with the popular literary independent McSweeney's), it's the changing circumstances, audiences, and even our clinical understanding around how we receive and are informed by the news that are applying pressure to traditional journalistic practices.

Salon has transformed itself quite a bit during its twelve-year run, from an innovative online news site helmed by information-driven posts and public forum op-eds to a more lifestyle-inclusive, audience-driven . . . well, salon. Experiments with subscription-based content have faltered and pushed them further into the red, but recent media headlines alone—from the Tribune Co.'s buyout and various lawsuits with its creditors to a potential merger between Newsweek and the Daily Beast—suggest big changes for online journalism. Speaking of which, shout out to longtime Baffler editor and Press author Thomas Frank's powerful piece, "Bright Frenetic Mills," in this month's Harper's on a world where bloggers break stories and bubbles, navigating a landscape shaped by content mills and the perilous position of old-fashioned journalism (an excerpt from Frank's The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism is available here).

Jack Fuller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent nearly forty years working in newspapers, including many as editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of the Tribune Publishing Company, might not have a perfect prediction as to what the future holds, but he certainly has some sharp ideas. What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism anticipates Frank's polemic by exploring the crucial question of how journalism lost its way.

Fuller locates the surprising sources of change where few have thought to look before: in the collision between a revolutionary new information age and a human brain that is still wired for threats faced by our prehistoric ancestors. Sound impossibly suggestive? Check out an online excerpt from the book about the neuroscientific explanations behind twenty-first century info gathering here. And for more about how information overload, a growing distrust of experts and authority, and increasingly interactive media are changing the face of journalism as we know it, while still trying to provide the information necessary to a functioning democracy, don't miss What Is Happening to News.

Wait, are we still live?

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We couldn't help but notice a late-arriving review from last week's NYT's Paper Cuts blog celebrating the coming of the newly leaked video game Call of Duty: Black Ops, which features a truly bipartisan dream team (largely resurrected from the dead)—John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Fidel Castro, and yes, Richard Nixon—fending off the zombie apocalypse.

Jennifer Schuessler (bless her!) took this fairly brilliant opportunity to pay homage to one of our very favorite Chicago titles, Mark Feeney's Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief. As Schuessler notes, Nixon was voted to the White House the same year as the debut of George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead. Coincidence? Oh, who really knows about these things. But one thing we do know is that Nixon probably didn't watch the film—at least, not cuddled up at home with Pat, arm protectively slung over a visiting Julie. How do we know, you ask? Thanks in part to the knockout Appendix (available on the book's UCP site here) that accompanies Feeney's masterful tome, culled from the pages of the Secret Service's Daily Diary, which records the cinephile former president's almost daily film consumption, from his 1969 inauguration through his resignation in 1974.

In addition to charting the personal relationship of Mr. Checkers and the cinema (again, coincidence!: they both arrived in Southern California in 1913), Nixon at the Movies takes a revelatory approach to looking at Nixon's career—and Hollywood's. Arguing that Nixon can help us see the movies in a new light, the book draws on biography, politics, cultural history, and film criticism to show just how deeply in the twentieth-century American grain lies the pair of seemingly incongruous nouns in its title. Okay, okay: we're practically bursting: TOP FIVE OR TEN! TOP FIVE OR TEN!

Without further hesitation, we present the latest Top Five or Ten: What was Richard Nixon watching when he probably should have been preoccupied with other concerns?

June 28, 1969: the Stonewall riots in New York City help to launch the modern movement for lesbian and gay rights

Richard Nixon is watching John Wayne's Academy Award-winning star turn as U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (!)

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August 15-18, 1969: the Woodstock Music and Art Fair ("An Aquarian Exposition") is held in upstate New York

Richard Nixon anticipates the event with a peaceful double feature spread over the course of two nights: The Dirty Dozen and Their Finest Hour

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June 17, 1972: Watergate break-in! Five White House operatives are arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters!

NIXON IS WATCHING THE NOTORIOUS LANDLADY! (Blake Edwards screenwriting credit, by the way)

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May 17, 1973: televised hearings of the Watergate scandal begin in the United States

Nixon is, of course, watching The Searchers (he has a thing for John Wayne, naturally)

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October 20, 1973: the Saturday Night Massacre, in which Nixon tries to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox via Attorney General Elliot Richardson; several resign and calls for Nixon's impeachment grow more vocal

Nixon watches William Dieterle's The Searching Wind (penned by Lillian Hellman), the story of a diplomat faced with difficult choices during Mussolini's rise and the story he must tell decades later. . . .

**

Queue exit music, in which Richard Nixon plays his own composition, set to concerto form with "15 Democratic violinists" (and a dig at Harry Truman!):

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Film and Media
Posted by KAM at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."

In with a comet, out with a comet: Halley's, that is. For elementary students, the life of Mark Twain is first introduced as celestial; later, with adolescent reads of that "great American novel" The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, our humorist falls back to earth, where his larger-than-life sensibilities, rich use of narrative, and social critique sharply attuned to human vanity, frailty, and hypocrisy, introduce a particular breed of American pathos. Beyond the work—which spans everything from colloquial verse and travelogues to historical fiction running the gamut from realist-inspired to proto-science—is, of course, the life. Mark Twain died on April 21, 1910, and in keeping with his wishes, just this fall the University of California Press released the first volume of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, in celebration of that centenary. But as the New York Times reports this weekend, demand has far exceeded expectation for the surprise best-seller: and as we approach the holiday gift-giving season, booksellers are struggling to keep it on the shelves.

"Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else."

Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's laboratory, 1894

If you count yourself among Twain aficionados (full disclosure: I am one of you!) and find yourself fretting in search of a copy, don't despair. Part of the beauty of Twain's autobiography, as any amateur Twainian or anyone familiar with the University of California, Berkeley's astounding Mark Twain Project Online might let you know, is that the book is non-chronological and ever so slightly absurdist. But to reap the riches Twain touches upon in his final years—his involvement with the Society for Psychical Research; his battles with serious depression; and his friendships (and feuds) with paupers, monarchs, and Standard Oil executives alike (his loathing of George Eliot! his fascination with Joan of Arc!) —why not read the biography that the New Republic calls "one of the most reliable and readable books in the whole huge library of Twain biographical studies"? Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool embraces Twain's difficult last years with candor and verve, charting the personal tragedies and questionable business decisions that marked the author's final decade.

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

Want to dig deeper into how this manifested in Twain's work? Susan Gillman's Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America plucks the confidence men, disguised characters, and assumed identities from Twain's pages and plunks them down alongside the laws regulating race classification, paternity, and cases of rape that underwrote much of Twain's writings in the 1890s and onward. Here spiritualism's "pseudoscience" and the birth of modern psychology provide the complex cultural vocabularies essential to the last two decades of Twain's work.

Humble suggestions from the Chicago Blog about our humble chronicler of good humor and that new American anxiety—and no matter your thoughts, we're geeked to share this brilliant clip, in inspiration. Shot by Thomas Edison at Twain's Connecticut estate Stormfield in 1909, it features Twain playing cards with his daughters and combing the hallowed grounds—like Mark Twain: God's Fool and Dark Twins, it's not to be missed:

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And with this whimsical title, we introduce a new Chicago Blog feature: the Top Five or Ten, a collection of materials occasionally preceding eleven and following nine—the Fermat prime, if you will, or the, um, bell that tolls multiple times for thee—geared for a day when you need a bit of neurotic listmaking in your life. Sometimes we double your pleasure ("Ten") and other times we streamline your attention span ("Five"). That said, let's inaugurate, shall we?

On the heels of Patricia Cohen's well-charted NYT piece on the digital humanities and Press author Dan Edelstein's forward-thinking response, we'd like to point you towards five wholly relevant recent books that chart these brave new methodologies and help us to make sense of developments in the liberal arts and their bright digital future:

Drumroll, please (and in no particular order):

Lydia H. Liu's The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (forthcoming, January 2011) Liu's book offers a rigorous study of the politics of digital writing and their fateful entanglement with Mr. Freud, from avant-garde literary experiments to the postphonetic and ideographic system of digital media. #literary theory #cybernetics #Joyce #neurotic machines

N. Katherine Hayles's My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
We've been fortunate to publish four books by Hayles, and this, her most recent, doesn't disappoint that brilliant lineage: it considers the generative relationships between programming code and language, and the complex bearings we use to locate ourselves in age of what she coins intermediation (online excerpt available here!). #cultural practices #William Blake archive #Standard Generalized Markup Language

Alan Liu's Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
Local Transcendence puts postmodern cultural criticism and digital information technology to task in this collection of essays inflected with the new methodologies of media history. #postindustrial theory #synthetics #Remembering the Spruce Goose

Richard A. Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (excerpt and author interview online here and here, respectively) A pathbreaking look at the transition from an economy of things to an economy of attention, Lanham's book anoints a new set of moguls: masters whose grounding comes from the data-rich humanities and liberal arts, rather than MBA programs. #audits #computer science #rhetorical commodities

And last but not least: Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover's Switching Codes: Thinking through New Technology in the Humanities and the Arts (forthcoming March 2011) An all-star cast of contributors (Bruno Latour and Richard Powers, among them) employing a staggering array of forms (fiction, dialogue, criticism, and even game design) examines how the precipitous growth of digital information and its technologies are transforming the ways we think and act (check out a recent conference at Bard College devoted to the subject here). #IT specialists and scholars #technocultural life #excited about this one

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Literature | UCP News
Posted by KAM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Things have really been abuzz around these parts in the wake of Patricia Cohen's piece in the New York Times on the digital humanities. We couldn't be more geeked that this glimmer of the Humanities 2.0 is the first in a series of articles devoted to the changing face of the liberal arts in light of the data revolution. Lots to like in Cohen's assessment of the field—including the startling array of digital projects harvesting all sorts of newly available primary documents, Civil War-era topographies, animated travelogues, and supercomputing databases. Lots to come, as well—our eyes are certainly peeled as to how these digital endeavors will present themselves and extend the possibilities of the book, and equally curious as to how new methodological discoveries will change not only how—but what—we choose to interpret.

Our own Dan Edelstein, author of The Enlightenment: A Geneology and associate professor of French and Italian at Stanford University, figures prominently in the article. His National Endowment of the Humanities-funded project Mapping the Republic of Letters (the Times has a great multimedia slideshow feature and accompanying video-savvy blog post devoted to it) traces, quite literally, the flow of ideas during the Enlightenment by using a geographic information system to trace the exchange of epistles between prominent thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, and Newton, to startling results. More on all of that in the article, of course! We asked Professor Edelstein if he might be willing to comment on the project and his own view of the digital humanities' bright future, including anything the Times neglected to touch upon in their own piece. His gracious response follows below (and don't forget to have a look at a bit of its lively material results—check out Edelstein's UCP books here and here, and the video trailer for Mapping the Republic of Letters following his response):

Even skeptics will admit that new digital technologies—from search engines and databases to network graphs and GIS visualizations—are changing the research habits and results of most humanists. The emerging field of digital humanities, recently featured in a New York Times article by Patricia Cohen, takes these technologies a step further to harness the power of computation with the art of interpretation. Some critics counter that digital humanists are merely positivists who have drunk the Kool-Aid of quantification, but they're largely misdirected. In the case of our project Mapping the Republic of Letters, for instance, we've found that visualizations tend to provide starting points for further inquiry, much of which is often done the old-fashioned way: by reading books.

One of the most revolutionary features of the digital humanities, however, often goes unnoticed. While some practitioners in the field are genuine 21st-century Renaissance men and women, many of us—myself included—do not combine a specialization in the humanities with a background in computer science. Since I became involved in digitally humanistic pursuits, I've learned a great deal about different programs, platforms, and methods, but nowhere near enough to do any actual programming work. Indeed, our project, like many others, is fundamentally collaborative: my co-P.I., Paula Findlen, and I work with a team of faculty members and graduate students, in conjunction with various programmers (mostly students in computer science), who are in turn overseen by another co-P.I., Nicole Coleman, an academic technology specialist. The visualization that was featured in the New York Times article and accompanying blog post was produced by three C.S. students, working with Nicole, according to guidelines proposed by faculty and graduate students. None of us could have accomplished this work alone.

In fact, the collaborative web stretches even farther. We acquired our initial data set from the Electronic Enlightenment Project at Oxford, and have subsequently received data or established partnerships with a dozen other digitization projects; our group receives technical and logistical support from the Stanford Humanities Center and the Spatial History Project, also at Stanford; some of our research teams work with professional designers; and we are partnering with an Italian design team at the Politecnico di Milano to tackle problems with visualizing uncertainty.

For humanists, this collaborative structure is quite radical, given the primarily solitary nature of our work. While there are collaborative aspects to some of our activities—it is preferable not to be alone in a classroom or at a conference panel—we are still used to being independent, and not part of a team. Digital humanities projects, by contrast, are often impossible without a group structure.

Tellingly, for all of those involved in our project at least, this team approach has proved exhilarating. The novelty of our work, but also the novelty of this collaborative experience, have led all participants to put in far more time and effort than they initially expected. Because no one person is driving the research agenda, we often find ourselves going down unexpected paths. Moving beyond cross-fertilization, our research teams actively collaborate to build tools together. This is all the more surprising that the payoff in career terms is fairly limited.

And therein lies the rub for digital humanities projects. While their novelty makes them more likely candidates for exposure in the press, one does not get much institutional credit from them. This is less of a problem for tenured faculty than it is for graduate students and assistant professors. Of the main challenges, publication may surprisingly be the simplest: most search committees and deans are perfectly capable of evaluating joint-authored publications. Harder to resolve is the time issue: these projects often demand a huge amount of up-front effort; like icebergs, their workload is 90 percent submerged, most of which goes unnoticed (and hence, unappreciated). Graduate students, on a tight five-year schedule, rarely have the luxury of time. Finally, the primary outcome of these projects is not always a book or article: many projects produce digital tools that are then made available to the scholarly community. Evaluating these tools, as well as each participant's individual contribution, is a daunting task.

It may seem prosaic to turn a conversation about exciting new technological innovations in the humanities into a familiar litany about scholarly promotion and recognition. But it is such human trifles—rather than major technical hurdles—that may most impede the growth of the field. Thankfully, the sheer excitement of asking questions about familiar corpora that no one had been able to ask before seems to outweigh most practical concerns. Among the most enthusiastic members of our group are indeed our graduate students, who are the ones in the most precarious professional situation. But they are also the future of our field, which suggests that one way or another, the digital humanities will become a core part of the humanities at large.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | History
Posted by KAM at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." Oh, bless ye, former President Truman, and your reaction to Abstract Expressionism. We've been nursing this line for a few days, as for reasons unknown, we've seen a 1995 article by the Independent making the rounds of various Facebook pages and internet listservs. The gist of the reportage? That, amongst other wild revelations, modern art was a "weapon" knowingly used in our cold cultural war with the Soviet Union; that the CIA backed Stephen Spender's influential journal Encounter; and that a strange beast going by the name the Propaganda Assets Inventory subsidized everything from the 1958 touring exhibition "New American Painting" (featuring de Kooning, Motherwell, and Pollock, in an all-star cast) to the board of directors at MOMA. The rationale of the CIA was, of course, communist-combatant. Up in arms about the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists, the government agency sought to portray Socialist Realism as an outdated art movement, and as the article mentions, they moved boldly forward with that plan:

[A]t its peak [the CIA] could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

But the pressing question remains: if we couldn't convince a president of the integrity and value of modern avant-garde movements, did we really convince the rest of the world? And how did the rest of America come to embrace Sunday afternoon trips to a certain midtown Museum or Ed Harris's later star turn in a related biopic?

Television, duh.

Media art historian Lynn Spiegel penned TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television in order to address the surprising links between the urbane world of modern art and the commercials and network programming that helped define 1950s and '60s America. From trendy products advertised in between episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to the works of Richard Avedon, Ben Shahn, and Ero Saarinen that graced corporate headquarters, company cufflinks, and staged living rooms, Spiegel demonstrates how art, television, and commerce merged in dynamic—and surprising—ways. To read a fascinating excerpt from the book—which tells the story of fine-arts photographer Paul Strand's experience designing a sponsorship ad for CBS, pay a visit to the book's UCP website here. Are you listening, Conan? Time to reconsider your sofa.

And what about that Socialist Realism? Did Soviet art movements willingly collapse, eyes a-goggle at Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)? Yes and no, well, not really—art historian, critic, and Our Literal Speed participant Matthew Jesse Jackson tells the most comprehensive story of unofficial postwar Soviet art yet to appear in any language in The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes. Kabakov's art—installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts—rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate and through the work of Kabakov and his Moscow Conceptual Circle peers, Jackson suggests that what emerged in the wake of Stalin is now inextricably part of a transnational art world for which the Soviet Union is largely a memory, fading fast.

Art is what you make it—and both of these books reveal vital contributions to neglected chapters in the history of twentieth-century art. With that in mind, we offer yet another perspective: check out Andy Rooney's assessment of contemporary public art below. The buck really should stop here:

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday's the perfect day for a wrap-up—good ol' Thunor's Day, Donderdag, or as Truman Capote had Holly Golightly put it best in Breakfast at Tiffany's:

"'Thursday.' She stood up. 'My God,' she said, and sat down again with a moan. 'It's too gruesome.'"

Gruesome or not, *it is* almost Friday. And with that in mind, we'd like to proliferate a few news items and multimedia ephemera in what we hope will become a Chicago ritual: the wrap-up on the day that is not the day that wraps things up. Onward!

With Veterans Day still weighing on hearts and minds, David Royko has reposted his father Mike Royko's classic Veterans Day column from 1993. Many know the legend of Mike Royko, Newspaperman, but few are familiar with the tender naiveté Royko exhibited in his Air Force days, via the exchange of letters with his sweetheart (and later wife) Carol Duckman that became Royko in Love: Mike's Letters to Carol.

In unavoidably idiosyncratic news outside of scholarly publishing that we just can't help touching upon: the Guardian and now People and the Los Angeles Times report the heroic, years-old tale of porpoises rescuing a sleeping, surfboard-helming Dick Van Dyke somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. If only scholarship circulated like chimney sweeps, folks!

The Scholarly Kitchen continues to run with a great series of posts about the paradigms binding contemporary publishing—this week alone, they've touched upon paywalls, the concept of trust throughout the various stages of publishing, and the peer review process and its levels of transparency.

The shadow of Milton Friedman continues to loom large at the New York Times, with Capitalism and Freedom shortly away from year fifty.

Have we mentioned that we love Columbia University Press's thoughtful weekly curation of scholarly press blogs? Thanks, guys!

Fare thee well, print edition of U.S. News and World Report?

Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman's Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It and Tzvetan Todorov's The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations both made the Huffington Post's list of Best Social and Political Awareness Books of 2010. Congrats to all!

And finally, Press author Daiva Markelis sits down with Chicago's own Milt Rosenberg for an Extension 720 Podcast Exclusive about her recent book White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life. Listen in and be sure to read an excerpt of the book here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Commentary | Politics and Current Events | UCP News
Posted by KAM at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Veterans Day has been around in one form or another for almost a century, since that great Tea Party-scourge Woodrow Wilson first proclaimed Armistice Day on November 11, 1919 and Dwight David Eisenhower pushed through a bill (originated by a shoe store owner from Emporia, Kansas) expanding the federal holiday to honor all of those who have served, regardless of conflict. Veterans Day, and the commemorations, protests, and remembrances associated with the call for continued and greater freedoms, has long been a time of serious-tempered reflection. With that in mind, we'd like to call your attention to a book we've blogged about here and there over the past few years, whose project is framed by the perils and virtues of today's holiday and whose author has engaged in a particular kind of service that allows our own intimate access to those lives put on the line for our varied causes.

Ashley Gilbertson is a contemporary photographer, born in Australia, who lives in New York but spends much of his time on assignment in the roadside fields, army hospitals, federal corridors, recovery homes, and civil unrest zones of Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Washington, D.C. In 2007, the Press published Gilbertson's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, which gathers the best of his extraordinary photographs of life in occupied Iraq, as he followed marines in to the cauldron of urban combat. Beyond the vivid images that chart the day-to-day experiences of U.S. troops on the ground, Gilbertson's own story—his guilt over the death of a marine escort, his struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his tenuous turn from hard-drinking photo ace to scarred survivor—plays an evocative role.

Since the book's publication, Gilbertson has become a regular at the New York Times's Lens Blog, with images of everything from the bedside recovery of a Times colleague and landmine victim in Afghanistan to a recent New York Times Magazine photo portfolio that examined a day in the life of Barack Obama. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot saw a fairly significant amount of acclaim when it was published, including George Packer's review for the New Yorker:

"Remarkable. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot collects Gilbertson's four years of work in Iraq, with an introduction by his Times colleague Dexter Filkins, and a colloquial, self-revealing text beautifully written by the photographer himself. The pictures chart the descent of Iraq from the initial post-invasion euphoria into the extreme violence of the battles for Karbala, Samarra, and Falluja. They also show a young photojournalist, who wasn't interested in covering combat, learning his craft, proving his mettle, forcing himself into situations that nearly destroy him morally as well as physically, and finally discovering, amid the inferno of Falluja in November, 2004, the strange tenderness that characterizes the very greatest war photography."

Despite their obviously gritty and difficult circumstances, Gilbertson's photos, with their searing composition and verité style, can be easy on the eyes of consummate craftsmen. But not unlike Veterans Day, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has its dark side; it reminds us of what and who and how we make sacrifices for the battles we choose to fight. Perhaps all of this is better said by Gilbertson himself, who sat down with the book's editor Alan Thomas for a video interview, the first part of which follows below:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's issue of the New York Review of Books takes a stance on a hot-button issue that just happens to be the subject of a major new documentary. If you watch Oprah, read the Nation or Time magazine, or, you know, listen to conversations with President Obama on the nightly news, you know that Davis Guggenheim, director of the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (shoutout to Al Gore and polar bears!), helms a new movie about the fate of public education in America and the plight of five children competing for admission to in-demand charter schools. Waiting for "Superman" paints a provocative portrait of the rise of a new generation of charter schools, many funded by the government but privately run, and each presenting an alternative to troubled U.S. public schools.

But as Diane Ravitch notes in the NYRB article:

Waiting for "Superman" and the other films appeal to a broad apprehension that the nation is falling behind in global competition. If the economy is a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments of the population, if American kids are not as serious about their studies as their peers in other nations, the schools must be to blame. At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it's the public schools, their teachers, and their unions.

There's certainly room for debate here, but no matter what one's definitive stance is on how to improve public education, few can argue with its premise: to provide free education, regardless of race or class or social status, without a lottery for admission. At Chicago, our own education list runs widely and deeply through the rugged terrain of these contemporary debates. We publish everything from the American pragmatist and educational reformer John Dewey's The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum to Patricia M. Cooper's The Classrooms All Young Children Need: Lessons in Teaching from Vivian Paley. In terms of the pressing questions raised by Waiting for "Superman" and Diane Ravitch's informed response, I'd point readers towards two important recent Chicago titles:

William A. Fischel's Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts prefaces our current debates about charter schools by arguing that the historical development of school districts reflects Americans' desire to make their communities attractive to outsiders—which Fischel contends has created a standardized system of education not overly demanding for either students or teachers that forms the basis for localized social capital in American towns and cities. Check out a Rockefeller Center lecture by Fischel on the subject of the book:

In Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, a team of authors track the 1988 decentralization of the Chicago public school system in over 200 Chicago elementary schools. The result two decades later? An illuminating book that identifies a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors of improvement in certain schools, and failed social dynamics, including crime, that chronicle a different trajectory. Be sure to read an excerpt from the book at the Press's website here.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Education | Reference and Writing
Posted by KAM at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's the thing about viral videos: take a snooze for a few days, righteously celebrate a pagan holiday, or watch an older and more conservative electorate radically alter the shape of the American political landscape, and you're already a day late and a dollar short. This week, that video is Xtranormal's "So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities?" Picked up across the web by sites as diverse as Open Culture, a peer-to-peer educational forum, and 3 Quarks Daily, an intelligent commentary webzine, as well as by blogger Scott McLemme and nearly every graduate English student's Facebook feed, this satiric animated exchange between a tenured professor and an ambitious would-be Humanities PhD has pithily summarized long-brewing debates about the overcrowded academic job market, low-paying adjunct salaries, and grim prospects for those who, you know, continue to study the human in all of its endeavors.

We might not have a ready solution to all that ails, here at Chicago, but we do have plenty of resources for students similarly driven. Andrew Roberts's The Thinking Student's Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education is a great prequel to that one-on-one conversation with professors near and dear around letter of recommendation time. Roberts offers a personalized blueprint for everything from choosing between large research universities and smaller liberal arts institutions to interacting with faculty and applying to graduate school. When the time comes to take the plunge, have a look at John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine's The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure. The authors have more than 75 years of combined scholarly experience between them and the book is packed with inside information about finding a mentor, negotiating job listings, navigating departmental politics, and even financing graduate education.

When all is said and done? Well, you're either ready for William Germano's savvy From Dissertation to Book, which artfully reveals the process of careful and thoughtful revision behind turning a dissertation into a manuscript scholarly publishers will covet—

or you might want to crank up the stereo, put away the maudlin DVDs and Häagen-Dazs Five, and sit down with Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius's "So What Are you Going to Do with That?": Finding Careers Outside of Academia, a witty and accessible guide filled with stories from real people (!) who have negotiated this difficult transition and lived to tell about it (check out the website devoted to the book). Viral video coming soon.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Reference and Writing
Posted by KAM at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Susie Linfield is the director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she's an associate professor of journalism. Like many in her field, Linfield approaches the topic of her most recent University of Chicago Press book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence head-on, arguing that learning to see the people in politically violent photographs is an ethically necessary act in today's visually proliferated world. Surveying the work of photographers as varied as James Nachtwey, Gilles Peress, and Jack Birns, and ranging in scope from China's cultural revolution and the events surrounding 9/11 to the Nigerian-Biafran and Bosnian wars, The Cruel Radiance adroitly considers how photography has—and should—respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.

It should be unsurprising, to say the least, that the book has picked up steam in the weeks surrounding today's elections. You can check out several excerpts—this one at the UCP site on the history of photography, from Benjamin to Sontag; another at Guernica entitled "September 11th and the Democracy of Images"; and yet another at Tablet, which questions the right and wrong ways of looking at Holocaust-era photography.

Just yesterday, Artforum posted a 500 Words piece by Linfield, which included some important words on the book's immediate context:

[Robert] Capa's photos of the Spanish Civil War, or of China after the Japanese invasion, were very clear on political context. You knew what to do with your anger and your horror. Today, looking at images from Sierra Leone or the Congo, one can feel horror, disgust, and great sadness—but what to do in response is much less apparent. Which of the twelve militias now fighting in the Congo do you support? Visual atrocity is much clearer today, but we no longer have the political clarity to accompany it.

From there, it's a hop, skip, and jump over to the New York Times' story on Hilary Clinton's visit to Cambodia, where Clinton advocated for the nation to proceed with trials of the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, to understand the vital importance of the photojournalism Linfield discusses.

If you live in the NYC area, please consider attending Linfield's talk on Thursday, November 11th, at Book Culture. And, as ever, for more information about the book, be sure to check it out its University of Chicago Press page here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you watch movies and read blogs about watching movies, or blog with movie-like aplomb and thus spend your days (sort of like I do) plaintively "watching" the Internet, then Jonathan Rosenbaum is a man who needs no introduction. He certainly deserves a better one, no? Preeminent critic, global film connoisseur, former bandmate of Chevy Chase, opiner of Dead Man and op-ed penner upon the death of Ingmar Begman, Rosenbaum has been one of the most important figures in American film journalism for more than a quarter of a century. His most recent book Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition collects fifty pieces of his astute criticism from the past four decades, each of which showcases his passion for the way we view movies, as well as how we write about them.

The book and its author have been receiving quite a bit of attention lately from outlets as varied as the films Rosenbaum engages, like the Onion's A.V. Club:

Ceaselessly prolific, frighteningly well-informed on seemingly every detail of film history, and well ahead of the technological curve, Jonathan Rosenbaum has championed and contextualized many films in his 40 years as a critic. When print film criticism flourished, he could write 1,800 words on Cliffhanger and make them all matter.

Recently, the Nation cited Rosenbaum and his work in a panel discussion (presented here in streaming audio format) entitled "The Future of Film Criticism," featuring the Nation's film critic Stuart Klawans, David Sterrit from the National Society of Film Critics, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, and Cinema Journal's Heather Hendershot.

And lest not we forget, the Criterion Collection's "Book Notes" blog reviewed Rosenbaum's "invaluable" collection at length, while linking to a recent Rosenbaum feature on the affinities between Carl Theodor Dryer's Gertrude and William Faulkner's Light in August.

How about GreenCine Daily? They're off and running with commentary on Rosenbaum's "Rediscovering Charlie Chaplin," one of the essays included in Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, noting:

Rosenbaum finds the need for education urgent: in a world where it's easy to scorn the Tramp as sentimental and outmoded, he insists 'one can't even begin to grasp Chaplin's importance without processing sizable chunks of the twentieth century.' He then does his best to lay out some of that historical space briefly, and by the end even a hardened Chaplin skeptic may well be convinced they're the ones at fault.

But perhaps the Globe and Mail says it best: "Rosenbaum . . . is one of the bellwether critics in film reviewing, reminding others of the tradition of serious cinema and keeping abreast of new movements."

We couldn't agree more. To fine-tune your own critical approach, check out this excerpt from the book and be sure to follow-up with a visit to Jonathan's ever-updated blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | Commentary
Posted by KAM at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh, the British Invasion! It's nearly fifty years later and moony Keith Richards's mug, cigarette dangling, is still greeting visitors to the New York Times's homepage. What Stone is left unturned? But seriously: what else could possibly make aficionados of this particular Glimmer Twin all (ahem) a-Twitter? Plenty, says Janet Maslin, in her review of Richards's new autobio Life, one of many pieces on the book that dot the web today. In ironic contrast to the title of Richards's tome, however, the Guardian broke some sad news this morning: the death of Ari Up (Arianna Forster), lead singer of the celebrated British post-punk band, the Slits.

Ari Up embraced the potentials of her name: as a vocalist and songwriter, her chaotic and high-energy performances in the late '70s helped to redefine what was possible for women in music. She confronted norms with vocal guns ablaze: ferocious under her bow-tied and stiffed-up hair, Ari looked like a mad electrician's daughter, with ripped tights and a nod to the Rastafarians. The Slits only made a few albums ('79's Cut and '82's Return of the Giant Slits, some demos, and a later reunion EP), but their combination of reggae-infused rhythms and avant-garde experimentation helped Ari pen everything from mass media critiques to incendiary feminist anthems about what's wrong with "Typical Girls."

If this catches your ear, you should give the Slits a memorial listen. But if you want to know more about the intersections between twentieth-century music and the avant-garde, the British Invasion, and how the punk and new wave bands of the '70s and '80s owe their cultural capital to the cabaret performances of nineteenth-century Paris, you should check out Bernard Gendron's Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. We have an excerpt online here and it's just the place to begin to dig deeply into the relationships between high and low culture, materialism and aesthetics, and the gender/race/class transgressions that make bands like the Slits so memorable—and important.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary
Posted by KAM at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's that time of year again—the Great Chicago Book Sale is back! Now through February 28th, 2011 you can browse our print or online sale catalog for huge discounts on hundreds of general interest, scholarly, and award-winning books. Just use promo code AD9470 when you check out through our secure online shopping cart to receive up to 80% off some of your favorite UCP titles. (You can find more detailed instructions on our website.)

To get you started, here's a list of some of our staff picks from this year's catalog:

At its opening on July 16, 2004, Chicago's Millennium Park was hailed as one of the most important millennium projects in the world. "Politicians come and go; business leaders come and go," proclaimed mayor Richard M. Daley, "but artists really define a city." Part park, part outdoor art museum, part cultural center, and part performance space, Millennium Park is now an unprecedented combination of distinctive architecture, monumental sculpture, and innovative landscaping. Including structures and works by Frank Gehry, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, and Kathryn Gustafson, the park represents the collaborative efforts of hundreds to turn an unused railroad yard in the heart of the city into a world-class civic space—and, in the process, to create an entirely new kind of cultural philanthropy.

Timothy Gilfoyle here offers a biography of this phenomenal undertaking, beginning before 1850 when the site of the park, the "city's front yard," was part of Lake Michigan. Gilfoyle studied the history of downtown; spent years with the planners, artists, and public officials behind Millennium Park; documented it at every stage of its construction; and traced the skeins of financing through municipal government, global corporations, private foundations, and wealthy civic leaders. The result is a thoroughly readable and lavishly illustrated testament to the park, the city, and all those attempting to think and act on a monumental scale.

See a Millennium Park trivia quiz.

Kurdistan was erased from world maps after World War I, when the victorious powers carved up the Middle East, leaving the Kurds without a homeland. Today the Kurds, who live on land that straddles the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, are by far the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.

Renowned photographer Susan Meiselas entered northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War to record the effects of Saddam Hussein's campaigns against Iraq's Kurdish population. She joined Human Rights Watch in documenting the destruction of Kurdish villages (some of which Hussein had attacked with chemical weapons in 1988) and the uncovering of mass graves. Moved by her experiences there, Meiselas began work on a visual history of the Kurds. The result, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, gives form to the collective memory of the Kurds and creates from scattered fragments a vital national archive.

Nature's Great Events is the lavishly illustrated counterpart to the Discovery Channel's landmark wildlife documentary, Nature's Most Amazing Events. Using groundbreaking filming techniques and state-of-the-art scientific technologies, the book and the documentary on which it is based are epic in every sense, charting six seasonal events that transform entire ecosystems and the life experiences of the thousands of animals within them, from the largest mammals to the smallest microorganisms.

See videos from the BBC series, a gallery of photographs from the book, and sample pages (PDF format, 1.9Mb). The Discovery Channel has a website for the series.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by TXM at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We were saddened this morning to hear of the passing of Carla Cohen, longtime co-owner of Washington, DC bookstore Politics and Prose. An obituary in the Washington Post called Ms. Cohen, "an exuberant force behind the evolution of Politics and Prose from a simple storefront into an institution that defined Washington's literary scene," and those of us who work in publishing will miss her energy, commitment, and love of good books.

The Politics and Prose Web site has details about an upcoming memorial service, as well as a page for longtime customers and friends to leave condolences, tributes, and remembrances.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by LTS at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing a pithy sentence about winning the Nobel Prize in literature is an exhaustive experience—what more can be said about this accolade of accolades whose booty (ten million Swedish kroner, or roughly 1.4 million dollars) could alter the life of even the most penniless penner of tales? The background story is well told: nineteenth-century arms manufacturer Alfred Nobel, for whom the prize is named, had the opportunity to read his own obituary, the unfortunately titled "The Merchant of Death is Dead," eight years before his own death (the piece was meant for his deceased brother Ludvig). This transformative experience of embracing one's own remembrance spurred Nobel to bequeath his assets via a series of prizes to those organizations and persons "who confer the greatest benefit on mankind."

One hundred and ten years later, here we are. This morning, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in literature to Mario Vargas Llosa (odds embraced by L Magazine), Peruvian novelist, journalist, and statesman whose playful approach and political engagement helped him to become one of Latin America's most acclaimed modernist-realist writers. In recent decades, Vargas Llosa was perhaps most noted for his staunch neoliberal views, including a run for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. Plus, how many writers can claim they gave Gabriel García Márquez a black eye?

Taking a note from that page, Deirdre N. McCloskey, sage of the history of capitalism, opens The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce by exploring Vargas Llosa's thoughts on globalization:

Globalization extends radically to all citizens of this planet the possibility to construct their individual cultural identities through voluntary action, according to their preferences and intimate motivations. Now, citizens are not always obligated, as in the past and in many places in the present, to respect an identity that traps them in a concentration camp from which there is no escape—the identity that is imposed on them through the language, nation, church, and customs of the place where they were born.

McCloskey's sweeping, humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities takes on more than just Vargas Llosa, spanning from Kant to Bill Murray and back to American economics in a surprising page-turner. While waiting for the sequel Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World to appear from the University of Chicago Press this fall, be sure to check out an excerpt (including nods to Vargas Llosa, Alfred Tennyson, and Chicago-style pizza) from The Bourgeois Virtues online. And no matter your thoughts on the history of capitalism, for more information on Vargas Llosa and his Epic Adumbrations, have a look at a chapter of the same name in Alfred J. Mac Adam's Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature, which, alongside Vargas Llosa, explores the work of some of Latin America's most noted writers, including Borges, Neruda, and Arenas.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Economics
Posted by KAM at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The halls of feminist pop culture were a-chorus with their final "Ack!" this past Sunday, when long-running comic strip Cathy ran its final installment. Illustrated and created by Cathy Guisewite, the strip and its single everywoman heroine capped off a thirty-four-year run, departing a world noticeably different from that of its November 1976 debut (though the passage of time in semi-ageless Cathy's world had a tendency to be marked by promotions and new boyfriends, and of course, evolution of the four "guilt groups": food, love, Mom, and work).

In many ways Cathy aspired to be the archetypal late-twentieth-century career woman, less eye-candy than Transparent Eyeball for a generation that grew up with Jane Fonda, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and society's changing pressure on and opportunities for working women. In a fitting end, the strip finished with Cathy announcing her pregnancy to her parents and tech-geek partner Irving, who quipped about viewing the sonogram on his iPhone. Love or hate Cathy, closing shop with an iconic pregnancy helps us remember something important about the comic's origins.

For ordinary women like Cathy, who came of age in the '70s and '80s, access to information about issues related to their own health—contraception, pregnancies, abortion—helped to position the female body at the center of women's liberation. In Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women's Health in the Second Wave, historian Wendy Kline offers a compelling account and vital history of women's health and feminist activism, from the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) through the Depo-Provera FDA hearings (1983). Kline chronicles the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls that empowered women like Cathy and also divided them—according to race, class, sexuality, and level of professionalization. Bodies of Knowledge is fitting tribute to how far we've come—and an important look back over Cathy's shoulder at what we were fighting for. Check out a recent review of the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary
Posted by KAM at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)