Oh, Thomas Bernhard! Bringing the thunder, bringing the classism—an excerpt from “Playing Watten” (translated by Kenneth J. Northcott), from Three Novellas:

We often maintain, to ourselves above all, and in so doing justify ourselves to ourselves, that we know something through and through, that we have completed something, only so as not to have to bother ourselves with this thing (this person), because we are afraid that we shall be embarrassed by this preoccupation and that this preoccupation will make us totally unreliable with regard to ourselves, dear sir, because we fear the nuisance, something that we have to regard as fatal, caused by occupying ourselves with this matter (this person!), because we despise ourselves. Nothing is indubitable, dear sir. Were I to go and play watten again, I say to the truck driver, the whole thing would be nothing but an elementary disorder and nothing but sorrow, which is basically nothing but wretchedness, which is more or less nothing but madness. We are at the peak of concentration when we are playing. Playing watten. In the theater, dear sir, even the impossible is entertainment, and even the monstrous, as the [...]]]>

Oh, Thomas Bernhard! Bringing the thunder, bringing the classism—an excerpt from “Playing Watten” (translated by Kenneth J. Northcott), from Three Novellas:

We often maintain, to ourselves above all, and in so doing justify ourselves to ourselves, that we know something through and through, that we have completed something, only so as not to have to bother ourselves with this thing (this person), because we are afraid that we shall be embarrassed by this preoccupation and that this preoccupation will make us totally unreliable with regard to ourselves, dear sir, because we fear the nuisance, something that we have to regard as fatal, caused by occupying ourselves with this matter (this person!), because we despise ourselves. Nothing is indubitable, dear sir. Were I to go and play watten again, I say to the truck driver, the whole thing would be nothing but an elementary disorder and nothing but sorrow, which is basically nothing but wretchedness, which is more or less nothing but madness. We are at the peak of concentration when we are playing. Playing watten. In the theater, dear sir, even the impossible is entertainment, and even the monstrous, as the improbable, is an object of study, everything in the form of hints. People believe that the philosopher can handle his subject, that is, philosophy, whereas he knows absolutely nothing about this subject. But basically none of us knows anything about subjects. When nature anticipates you, I say to the truck driver, although I know that the truck driver does not understand what I am talking about, yet it is precisely to the truck driver that I say: if nature anticipates you, if it takes Siller (or any other person) out of the submissive world, as it did on that Wednesday, with its mysterious weather, because it comes naturally to it and, as we believe, closes an individual nature, has to close it, if it makes, form one moment to the next, a dead man out of a live one, which is not saying a lot, I say, should we not ask: why not by means of its own artificiality? I say, I have often thought ah, that’s a theologian! who explains everything to you and gives you reassurance for your whole life and ah, that’s a mathematician! and ah! that’s an artist! and ah, that’s an irreproachable scientific nature! more and more ah, a simple human being! and ah, the simplest of all human beings! who explains everything to you and will give you reassurance for the rest of your life, but, when all is said and done, not a single person has been able to explain anything to me, and not a single person has given me reassurance, has been able to give me reassurance even about the most ridiculous thing, on the contrary, I say, with the passing of time, I have become progressively more and more disturbed. Now, in the nature of things, I ask no more and no one, not another single person, for in reality there is no one you can ask, unless you are a fool.

A recent review from the New Yorker—and more about the book here.

“The wings of the pterosaur take us to the Wright Brothers, the pinhole eyes of the nautilus to the invention of the daguerreotype. In fact, the linkage is pointed: it’s not nature’s story or ours but both together. Divorcing human achievements from their relations in natural life means that Homo sapiens, too, is only ‘barely imagined.’”

From Josh Cook’s review of Recalculating by Charles Bernstein, in the May issue of Bookslut:

With translations, imitations, and homages, and with poems of poetry’s motion, and manifestos of politics and poetics, Bernstein has gone beyond a personal anthology of poetics to write a book I struggle to categorize. If you could remove all the term’s negative connotations, all the personal and cultural associations with boredom and restriction, if you could extract the term from the worst of academics and education, you could call Recalculating a textbook. It is the syllabus, the required reading, the example, the supplemental critical exploration, and the challenge. It is a shiv tearing at the fabric of poetry for a glimpse of the poetic future. It is the wall, the empty cans of spray paint, and the graffiti. It is the schematics for every part of the bomb but the fuse; the reader is the fuse. But as explosive as Recalculating is, the image of a bomb isn’t right, for, ultimately Bernstein is not a destroyer but a motivator. At the end of Recalculating, Bernstein wants you to believe poetry has not met its potential.

The [...]]]>

From Josh Cook’s review of Recalculating by Charles Bernstein, in the May issue of Bookslut:

With translations, imitations, and homages, and with poems of poetry’s motion, and manifestos of politics and poetics, Bernstein has gone beyond a personal anthology of poetics to write a book I struggle to categorize. If you could remove all the term’s negative connotations, all the personal and cultural associations with boredom and restriction, if you could extract the term from the worst of academics and education, you could call Recalculating a textbook. It is the syllabus, the required reading, the example, the supplemental critical exploration, and the challenge. It is a shiv tearing at the fabric of poetry for a glimpse of the poetic future. It is the wall, the empty cans of spray paint, and the graffiti. It is the schematics for every part of the bomb but the fuse; the reader is the fuse. But as explosive as Recalculating is, the image of a bomb isn’t right, for, ultimately Bernstein is not a destroyer but a motivator. At the end of Recalculating, Bernstein wants you to believe poetry has not met its potential.

The “recalculating” moment happens when we go off course, miss a turn, take a wrong turn, or misinterpret a direction. “Recalculating” is the GPS both following your lead and keeping you on track. It’s a strange kind of modern freedom; no matter how many “wrong” turns you take, no matter how much you wander from the ideal course, the GPS will always lead you to your destination. It’s an odd titular image for a poet defined by defiance, who celebrates what the mainstream rejects, who challenges when others acquiesce, who values difficulty, obscurity, and actual break-a-sweat intellectual poetic engagement when most are content to see poems as postcards. You’d expect Bernstein to throw the GPS out the window. But all the defiance and revolution, all the polemics and pontifications, all the shouting and laughter, come from the same core source; Bernstein’s profound love of poetry. All the wrong turns, all the deviations, all the explorations, all the escapes, they all return to one fundamental idea; poetry is beautiful and poetry is important. And so is Recalculating.

***

Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of poems in seven years. Read more here.

From the Introduction 

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer

by Lisa Downing:

“Serial killers are so glamorized . . . as to tempt other to . . . revere them as the prophets of risk and individual action, in a society overwhelmed and bogged down by the dull courtiers and ass-kissers of celebrity culture.”—(Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus, 2001)

“[Murderers] share certain characteristics of the artist; they know they are unlike other men, they experience drives and tensions that alienate them from the rest of society, they possess the courage to satisfy these drives in defiance of society. But while the artist releases his tensions in an act of imaginative creation, the Outsider–criminal releases his in an act of violence.”—(Colin Wilson, Order of Assassins, 1976)

“Jack the Ripper, along with many of his followers, has achieved legendary status. Such men have become world famous, awesomely regarded cultural figures. They are more than remembered; they are immortalized. Typically, though, their victims, the uncounted women who have been terrorized, mutilated, and murdered are rendered profoundly nameless.”—(Jane Caputi, The Age of [...]]]>

From the Introduction 

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer

by Lisa Downing:

“Serial killers are so glamorized . . . as to tempt other to . . . revere them as the prophets of risk and individual action, in a society overwhelmed and bogged down by the dull courtiers and ass-kissers of celebrity culture.”—(Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus, 2001)

“[Murderers] share certain characteristics of the artist; they know they are unlike other men, they experience drives and tensions that alienate them from the rest of society, they possess the courage to satisfy these drives in defiance of society. But while the artist releases his tensions in an act of imaginative creation, the Outsider–criminal releases his in an act of violence.”—(Colin Wilson, Order of Assassins, 1976)

“Jack the Ripper, along with many of his followers, has achieved legendary status. Such men have become world famous, awesomely regarded cultural figures. They are more than remembered; they are immortalized. Typically, though, their victims, the uncounted women who have been terrorized, mutilated, and murdered are rendered profoundly nameless.”—(Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime, 1987)

As reflected in the epigraphs above—the first written by an incarcerated serial killer; the second by a respected writer, thinker, and murder “expert”—a pervasive idea obtains in modern culture that there is something intrinsically different, unique, and exceptional about those subjects who kill. Like artists and geniuses, murderers are considered special individuals, an ascription that serves both to render them apart from the moral majority on the one hand and, on the other, to reify, lionize, and fetishize them as “individual agents.” And, as the third epigraph by a feminist cultural critic announces, this idealization of the murdering subject needs to be understood in gendered terms. Such discourses, by highlighting the exceptionality of the “individual,” effectively silence gender-aware, class-based analyses about murder. Analyses of this kind might notice which category of person (male) may “legitimately” occupy the role of killer, and which category of person (female) is more generally relegated the role of victim in our culture. Female murderers, by extension, become doubly aberrant exceptions in this culture, unable to access the role of transcendental agency since, as Simone de Beauvoir made clear in 1949, only men are allowed to be transcendent, while women are immanent. From a feminist critical viewpoint, then, the figure of the killer described by Brady and Wilson is not out of the ordinary at all—he is merely an exaggeration, or the extreme logical endpoint, of masculine patriarchal domination, and his othering as “different” serves to exculpate less extravagant exhibitions of misogyny. The ways in which—and purposes for which—murderers are seen as an exceptional type of subject by our culture is the central problem this book seeks to address.

In Natural Born Celebrities (2005), resonating with Brady’s observation regarding a celebrity-obsessed society to which the figure of the murderer appeals, David Schmid has compellingly described the cult of sensationalist fame enjoyed by the “idols of destruction” that are serial killers in contemporary North America. Where Schmid’s aim is to explore and account for a “specific, individuated form of celebrity” that accrues to the serial killer within that national context, my aim here will be to unpick , both historically and in contemporary culture, the terms “specificity” and “individuation,” rather than the related concept of “celebrity,” that work on and through, and that are exemplified particularly well by, the figure of the murderer. The contemporary, ambivalent idea of the murderer as a special and aberrant subject, and as an object of fascination that can lead to him (and to a lesser extent her) becoming a celebrity, has a history that predates twentieth-century North America, where it is perhaps most prevalently seen today, and that originates in paradigmatically European intellectual ideas.

The ubiquity of the idea of the murderer as a figure of fascination can be testified to by an example from the work of historian of systems of thought Michel Foucault, whose analyses of discourses of criminality and subjectivity will be central to the critical work undertaken in this book, In discussing the case of a rural parricide, Pierre Rivière, who, in 1835, murdered his mother, sister, and brother and produced a long, complex confessional account of his crimes, Foucault reports feeling, “a sort of reverence and perhaps, too, terror for a text which was to carry off four corpses along with it.” Foucault’s team of sociological researchers was drawn to the Rivière dossier as an object of study initially because it was the thickest of all the files they found, but Foucault admits that it held his attention ultimately because of “the beauty of Rivière’s memoir.” He describes the fascination he and his team experienced reading the confessions in the following way: “We fell under the spell of the parricide with the reddish-brown eyes.” This admission of having been mesmerized by the murderer’s confession—and, by extension, seduced by the figure of the  murderer himself—is a surprising one for Foucault, an arch demystifier of discourses of individuality, to make. It is a perfect illustration of the widespread and pervasive nature of the problematic that this book seeks to expose and understand.

***

Read more about The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer here.

(Images, top to bottom: Lisa Downing speaking at The Subject of Murder’s London launch at St. Bart’s Pathology Museum; simulcra-style book cakes at the event courtesy of Lucy Bolton; and Lisa Downing + cake eyes. All photographs by Keifer Taylor.)

We greet the spring with an annual rite, neither more nor less essential than the other invocations that usher in the season (woodpecker outside my window foxing with overzealous, semester’s-end induced sleep; big-leaved magnolia blossoms littering the street like well-boutonnièred toilet-paper folk art and norteño/Baby Bash productions looping over and under some dude’s fancy for the J. Geils Band). With this rite—the announcement of the recipient of any particular year’s Laing Prize—we drum up the legacy of Gordon J. Laing, former general editor of the University of Chicago Press. In February 1925, the same month that saw the New Yorker publish its first issue, Laing penned a satirical piece about university publishing for the in-house newsletter Press Impressions. Stravinsky strings on, and we reproduce it in its entirety below:

***

The Trials of an Editor

Some Experiences of the Man Intrusted [sic] with the Preparation of Manuscript for Our Publication

By Gordon J. Laing, General Editor

From Press Impressions, Volume 2, Number 5, February 1925

The editor of Press Impressions gave me the title of this article and I have let it stand. The fact, however, is [...]]]>

We greet the spring with an annual rite, neither more nor less essential than the other invocations that usher in the season (woodpecker outside my window foxing with overzealous, semester’s-end induced sleep; big-leaved magnolia blossoms littering the street like well-boutonnièred toilet-paper folk art and norteño/Baby Bash productions looping over and under some dude’s fancy for the J. Geils Band). With this rite—the announcement of the recipient of any particular year’s Laing Prize—we drum up the legacy of Gordon J. Laing, former general editor of the University of Chicago Press. In February 1925, the same month that saw the New Yorker publish its first issue, Laing penned a satirical piece about university publishing for the in-house newsletter Press Impressions. Stravinsky strings on, and we reproduce it in its entirety below:

***

The Trials of an Editor

Some Experiences of the Man Intrusted [sic] with the Preparation of Manuscript for Our Publication

By Gordon J. Laing, General Editor

The editor of Press Impressions gave me the title of this article and I have let it stand. The fact, however, is that although I have been an editor for fifteen years, I have never had any trials. I know that this statement will surprise any editors of books or journals who may happen to read this article, and already I can see amazement and incredulity registered on their keen and intel­lectual faces. “An editor for fifteen years and no trials! Impossible!” They cannot believe it, and yet it is the truth. Moreover, the expla­nation is a very simple one and, to those acquainted with the particular conditions of my editorship, manifest and obvious.

It lies in the fact that I am the editor of a university press and most of the authors with whom I deal are professors. Now, as everyone knows, professors are always prompt, practical, and busi­nesslike. Often have I listened to tales of woe told by the editors of less favored organizations. They say that it frequently happens that they make a contract with an author for the delivery of a manu­script on a certain date. The day comes but no manuscript appears. After waiting a few months, they venture to write the author and ask when they may expect it. No answer. They write again with the same lack of result. And it is only when they send a telegram that they hear from him that, “Owing to the pressure of other engage­ments he has not yet been able to start work on his book but hopes to do so early in the following year.” Nothing of this kind ever hap­pens at the University Press. When a professor gives a date for the delivery of his copy, he delivers it on that day. There is never delay of excuse. The academic conscience is of a high sensitiveness and exquisite delicacy and brooks no procrastination. The knowledge of this has had an enormous influence in building up the morale of our Press. Not only the editorial staff, but all the other officers of the organization, realize that with our authors dates are dates and that the schedule they have made for copy-reading, composition, and the sending out and return of proofs will be adhered to with absolute exactitude.

It is this that has made the staff and employees of our Press the most contented, carefree, light-hearted, and happy group of workers in the world. The promptness of our authors makes them prompt also and inspires them with a love of service and an ever increasing desire for more and more work. I sometimes hear of dissensions in other publishing houses, of jealousies between indi­viduals or departments, but we never have anything of that kind at the University Press. A sort of divine harmony reigns throughout the organization. There is no bickering among individuals, no fault finding, no criticism of other departments, for every member of the house thinks of others before he thinks of himself and is as anxious for the success of other departments as he is for that of his own.

Another trouble that I have heard the editors of other publishing houses mention is the confirmed habit on the part of their authors of making alterations in the proofs of their books. It was only the other day that I met the editor of a famous house and congratulated him upon the excellent quality of a book his firm had recently issued. “It is a very fine work,” I said. But I got no enthusiasm from him. A dark scowl gathered on his face and there was a low growl, partly inarticulate and partly consisting of words that to my untutored ears sounded sacrilegious, and which, if he had not been an editor, I should certainly thought profane.

“I am glad to hear that you think it is good,” he finally said, “for I had an awful time with that author. He practically rewrote his book in the proof. We allow our authors a ten percent margin for alterations, but his corrections amounted to something like forty percent. When I wrote to him and told him that we should be obliged to charge the excess alterations against his royalty, he sent me a letter in which, with a vehemence of rhetoric and a luxury of phrase that I have never seen equaled, he expressed the opinion that while osten­sibly we were publishers, we really were pirates and buccaneers. With what he doubtless considered a very pretty wit he suggested that from this time on we should substitute a black flag for the trade mark which our house has used for nearly a century.”

I listened to this narrative with the greatest surprise. No one at our Press has ever had an experience that resembled this. With us, the situation could not arise. Our authors never make any alterations. Other authors may change the title of their book three or four times, may rearrange the contents by exclusive omissions and in­sertions, may decide to have illustrations only when the book has reached the page-proof stage, but ours never do any of these things. The title they first give us always stands. They have thought of all other possible titles and eliminated them before they deliver their manuscript to us. And their copy is in final form in all other respects. Preface, table of contents, dedication, illustrations, foot­notes, half-titles, and appendices are all there in their proper places, and the copy for the index is invariably delivered not later than three days after the page proof has been sent out.

In view of this, surely no one can wonder at my statement that ours is a happy family and that the meticulous precision with which our authors and journal editors adhere to their schedules has result­ed in that esprit de corps in our plant to which I have just referred.  Indeed, esprit de corps is but a faint phrase for the enthusiasm for their work that all members of our staff display. Many of our clerks and operators arrive at the Press half an hour or more before the time at which they are supposed to come, and any one passing along Ellis Avenue early in the morning is sure to see a crowd of our people hammering impatiently at the doors which the laggard janitors have not yet opened. Once admitted and in their places they really begin to enjoy life. The pressmen sing happily as they overhaul their machines, the binders hum gleefully over their glue and thread, the casters praise their commodious quarters, the fore­men beam upon the keyboard operators, the master-printers smile upon their devils, and to the proofreader the voice of the copy-holder is sweeter than that of any operatic song bird. The file clerks only sigh when there are no more letters to file; even the noiseless typewriters sing a muffled song of joy as the blithe oper­ators ply the keys with flying fingers; and on the faces of the ad-writers shines the bright light of creative imagination as they describe the books the authors should have written. The managers have never been known to arrive at the office later than eight-thirty, and, although I hesitate to mention it (for one should avoid even the appearance of boastfulness), I have been informed that the members of the editorial department set their watches as I come in to keep my eleven o’clock hour.

In still another respect is our Press unusually fortunate. Our authors never object to our typographical style. It is a familiar fact that most authors have strong opinions on all such matters as punctuation, capitalization, the use of italics, and so forth. With some of them it is more than an opinion; it is an emotion that some­times attains the violence of a passion. It is well known that in more than one case a comma has permanently disrupted the life­long association of friends who have collaborated on a book. Authors of this type generally bring in their manuscript them­selves, and after pointing out that they have edited the copy with the utmost care and that they have made a hobby of punctuation from their youth up, they insist that the manuscript shall not be subjected to the ruthless hands of the copyreader but be sent straight to the compositor. I am told also that on such occasions they are likely to express themselves very freely about the manual of style used in the publishing house, describing it as illogical, misleading, and behind the times. I do not suppose that there is anything on which we at the Press congratulate ourselves more heartily than the fact that our authors have never shown the slight­est trace of such an attitude as this. They almost always send a note with the manuscript containing the simple instructions: “Follow Press style. Pay no attention to my punctuation; it is sure to be wrong.” It is this sort of thing that cheers the heart of an editor and endears his profession to him.

To be sure, our Manual of Style is a famous book and doubtless the soundness of its principles and the convincing way in which they are stated have contributed largely to this satisfactory state of affairs. The Manual is the product of many years of experience. Moreover, we are careful to keep it up to date. We revise it from time to time and we never hurry the revision. We are revising it now, and one can realize the meticulous care that we bestow upon the work when I state that this revision was started in the first year of the Harding administration but will not be finished until late in President Coolidge’s third term.

Nor do we ever hear complaints from authors about the advertis­ing circulars we issue. They are always delighted with them. It was only a few weeks ago that I was stopped on the campus by one of our authors who congratulated me on the high efficiency of our advertising department. The circular we had just sent out seemed to him singularly apt and clear. “I was especially pleased,” he added, “with the paragraph describing my third chapter. I had always been a little vague in my own mind about the drift of that chapter, and it was only when I read your description that its real meaning flashed upon me.”

And so it is at every stage in the production and history of a book. Mutual understanding between author and editor, appreciation of one another’s’ point of view, and sympathetic concern for each other’s success have created an atmosphere in the University Press in which trials and troubles cannot live.

Before We Loved the Buddha

by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

***

According to a famous Chinese legend, in 60 CE (or thereabout), the Emperor Ming of China had a dream. He dreamed that he saw a golden man flying through the sky, rays of light streaming from his head. The next day, he summoned his ministers to interpret the dream. They told him that the golden man was a sage from the west called the Buddha. The emperor immediately dispatched a delegation to find this sage. After a long journey, they returned with a scripture and a statue. And this is how Buddhism first came to China.

In 1603, the famous Catholic missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, published a book, in Chinese, in which he explained that the golden man the emperor saw in his dream was not the Buddha; he was Jesus. If the emperor’s envoys had gone farther west, they would have arrived in the Holy Land, and would have returned with the Gospels. Bringing Buddhism to China had all been a terrible mistake.

Among the “founders” of the world religions—Abraham, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad—perhaps the best loved (or at [...]]]>

Before We Loved the Buddha

by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

***

According to a famous Chinese legend, in 60 CE (or thereabout), the Emperor Ming of China had a dream. He dreamed that he saw a golden man flying through the sky, rays of light streaming from his head. The next day, he summoned his ministers to interpret the dream. They told him that the golden man was a sage from the west called the Buddha. The emperor immediately dispatched a delegation to find this sage. After a long journey, they returned with a scripture and a statue. And this is how Buddhism first came to China.

In 1603, the famous Catholic missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, published a book, in Chinese, in which he explained that the golden man the emperor saw in his dream was not the Buddha; he was Jesus. If the emperor’s envoys had gone farther west, they would have arrived in the Holy Land, and would have returned with the Gospels. Bringing Buddhism to China had all been a terrible mistake.

Among the “founders” of the world religions—Abraham, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad—perhaps the best loved (or at least the best liked) is the Buddha. He is wise, he is compassionate, he is largely unobjectionable—but it was not always thus. For most of the long history of Europe’s contact with Asia, the Buddha was widely disparaged and despised.

European travelers to Asia, whether missionaries or merchants, beginning in the thirteenth century and continuing for the next five-hundred years, thought the Buddha was an idol. From one perspective, it was hard to blame them. At that time, Europeans divided the peoples of the world into four nations: Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Idolaters. Because the Buddhists of Asia fell into the “none of the above” category, they were idolaters by default. And, indeed, Europeans in Asia observed Buddhists bowing down before large golden statues. To make matters worse, the Buddha was not one idol for the Europeans, he was many idols. As Buddhism had spread across Asia over the centuries—from India to modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, and Korea in the north; to Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the south—it took on its own character. Each culture developed its own artistic conventions for representing the Buddha in statues and paintings; each culture had its own local name for the Buddha: he was Fo in China, Hotoke in Japan, Sang-gye in Tibet, Gotama in Sri Lanka, and Phraphuttha in Thailand. Indeed, it would not be until the late seventeenth century that someone would figure out that all the Buddhists across Asia were worshiping the same god. Credit for this “discovery” often goes to Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. Kaempfer visited Japan shortly after visiting Thailand and was able to put two-and-two together. That did not cause Europeans to start liking the Buddha, however. Marco Polo knew the story of Emperor Ming and concluded from it that the Buddha had brought the practice of idolatry to Asia. Thus, the Buddha was not simply an idol, he was also a purveyor of idolatry.

As Europeans began to learn to speak the languages of Asia, they began to hear stories about the Buddha. Roman Catholic missionaries were among the first to do so, but even here, they often added their own sinister twist. According to traditional accounts, when the Buddha was born, he emerged miraculously from his mother’s right side, with neither mother nor child suffering the least pain. It was also said that the Buddha’s mother died (by some accounts, from joy) seven days after his birth. Certain Roman Catholic missionaries to Asia took these two elements and drew their own conclusion: the baby Buddha murdered his mother by gnawing his way out of her womb. That was just the first of his many sins.

Europeans would not really begin to love the Buddha until the early nineteenth century. But that, as they say, is another story.

 ***

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. is the author of From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha, published by the University of Chicago Press.

One of the taglines—the pithy paragraph-end to an initial piece of copy—for Dmitry Samarov’s Hack goes something like this: “And from behind the wheel of his taxi, Samarov has seen more of Chicago than most Chicagoans will hope to experience in a lifetime.” True words, Y/N?

I’d argue, “partially.” Part of what makes Hack such an appealing read is that its characters—the back-seat inhabitants of Samarov’s daily commutes through Chicago and its environs—are immediately recognizable as the kind of fully formed Greek chorus that shuffles and barks its way through contemporary urban life. But what makes them memorable isn’t just that easy familiarity. It’s the combination of Samarov’s prose and illustrations (many made from inside the cab) and how they perform a sleight of hand with our most basic Nelson Algren-ism: “Lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives.”

In Hack, these characters aren’t so much lost-on-the-verge-of-a-breakthrough as they are lost to the time and place of Chicago, inescapably caught up in strawberry-shake vomiting laps past McDonald’s drive-thrus and Marie’s Riptide Lounge; shapeshifting into an audience for tiny yapping lapdogs and overstuffed luggage stationed outside of [...]]]>

One of the taglines—the pithy paragraph-end to an initial piece of copy—for Dmitry Samarov’s Hack goes something like this: “And from behind the wheel of his taxi, Samarov has seen more of Chicago than most Chicagoans will hope to experience in a lifetime.” True words, Y/N?

I’d argue, “partially.” Part of what makes Hack such an appealing read is that its characters—the back-seat inhabitants of Samarov’s daily commutes through Chicago and its environs—are immediately recognizable as the kind of fully formed Greek chorus that shuffles and barks its way through contemporary urban life. But what makes them memorable isn’t just that easy familiarity. It’s the combination of Samarov’s prose and illustrations (many made from inside the cab) and how they perform a sleight of hand with our most basic Nelson Algren-ism: “Lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives.”

In Hack, these characters aren’t so much lost-on-the-verge-of-a-breakthrough as they are lost to the time and place of Chicago, inescapably caught up in strawberry-shake vomiting laps past McDonald’s drive-thrus and Marie’s Riptide Lounge; shapeshifting into an audience for tiny yapping lapdogs and overstuffed luggage stationed outside of mortgage-rarefied condo buildings in freshly gentrified alcoves; wearing the cowboy-style straw hats and Day-Glo bracelets of limited youth en route from Dyer, Indiana, to some place eternalized in the English language as the “Freakeasy.” Maybe they aren’t lost at all.

There are moments when you might wonder if Samarov is lost—a limited edition sort of portable participant-observer—until you get into the rhythm of the writing, and then you realize he’s right at home, and  you don’t want him to stop offering up his end of correspondence from this leggy human comedy, not now, not ever, whether or not it’s cab-side on a summer weekend, regardless of whether there’s a gas surcharge, and in spite of the fact that the radio rendition of It’s a Wonderful Life is really going to KEEP PLAYING all Christmas Eve long.

Anyhow: we recommend it. The trailer below expands a little more eloquently with Samarov’s own words. And it’s our free ebook for May, so click here to download your copy.

In How Animals Grieve, King considers a recent shift in anthropological attention to our companion species, which recognizes our long-chided tendency to anthropomorphize animal emotions might instead hold grains of truth. She tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. [...]]]> Barbara J. King is having quite a week—at least in terms of traversing brave new (pop-cultural) frontiers for the scholarly pursuits of animal intelligence and emotion. First came an excerpt from King’s latest book How Animals Grieve in a recent edition of the New York Post—noteworthy enough; so noteworthy, in fact, that it led to a mention of the book and King’s work on an episode of Howard Stern’s syndicated SIRIUS radio show (Stern, who along with his wife, is an animal rights advocate, experienced the traumatic loss of his English bulldog Bianca just a year ago; he even gave the book a plug via his Twitter feed). As if all this weren’t enough to render a tear in academic publishing’s space-time continuum, King herself made an appearance on Stern’s show, evidencing some of the ideas surrounding animal mourning that her book draws upon.

In How Animals Grieve, King considers a recent shift in anthropological attention to our companion species, which recognizes our long-chided tendency to anthropomorphize animal emotions might instead hold grains of truth. She tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she’s never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each of these instances, King—just as she did in her appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show—helps us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss.

Caveat emptor: you might need to sonically surf a few minutes of dialogue about someone named Bigfoot and his search for kinship/lunch sandwiches/an exercise regimen to reach King’s appearance at the 2:27 mark, but perhaps this is not entirely unrelated the subject of animal emotions? We recommend a listen regardless.

Last week the New York Times Book Review ran a review of three books about Chicago. The review generated an “epic backlash,” and got everyone talking about, well, everything but the books reviewed. We want to change that.

For the first five days of May, we are making Neil Steinberg’s book You Were Never in Chicago available for download—free of charge—exclusively through the University of Chicago Press website at http://bit.ly/freebk.  It’s one of our bestsellers; it just won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Best Non-Fiction of 2012; and it has been critically acclaimed—even by the New York Times itself, who in September called it, “A strong case for Second City exceptionalism.”

Why free? Because we are so certain people will fall in love with Steinberg’s distinctive, wry, and unpretentious take on Chicago that we think they’ll read it and want to buy it as a gift for themselves or someone else who loves Chicago. Or who loves any city of the broad-shouldered kind.

Steinberg’s book takes its title from a Chicagoan’s outraged response to a New Yorker’s critique of Chicago—A. J. Liebling’s 1952 three-part essay in the New Yorker, in which he dubbed Chicago the “Second City.” [...]]]>

Last week the New York Times Book Review ran a review of three books about Chicago. The review generated an “epic backlash,” and got everyone talking about, well, everything but the books reviewed. We want to change that.

For the first five days of May, we are making Neil Steinberg’s book You Were Never in Chicago available for download—free of charge—exclusively through the University of Chicago Press website at http://bit.ly/freebk.  It’s one of our bestsellers; it just won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Best Non-Fiction of 2012; and it has been critically acclaimed—even by the New York Times itself, who in September called it, “A strong case for Second City exceptionalism.”

Why free? Because we are so certain people will fall in love with Steinberg’s distinctive, wry, and unpretentious take on Chicago that we think they’ll read it and want to buy it as a gift for themselves or someone else who loves Chicago. Or who loves any city of the broad-shouldered kind.

Steinberg’s book takes its title from a Chicagoan’s outraged response to a New Yorker’s critique of Chicago—A. J. Liebling’s 1952 three-part essay in the New Yorker, in which he dubbed Chicago the “Second City.” From garbage collection to the skyline, nothing escaped Liebling’s withering gaze. After reading the essay, an irate Chicagoan sent Liebling a postcard that read, simply, “You were never in Chicago.”

If you have ever learned to know and love a city, you will love You Were Never in Chicago, a book Roger Ebert called “a poetic mosaic of [Steinberg’s] life and the life of Chicago—past, present, real, imagined.”

Like Chicago itself, we’re confident and not afraid to show it. Download your copy of You Were Never in Chicago from May 1st through May 5th, and judge for yourself.

This year, the 2013 Laing Prize went to Andreas Glaeser, associate professor of soci0logy at the University, for Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Glaeser’s book considers socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989, building on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control, among other resources, to offer an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations.

Included below are some snapshots from the recent Laing Prize reception taken by [...]]]> The Gordon J. Laing Prize is awarded annually by the University of Chicago Press to the faculty author, editor, or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction. The varied expertise of past recipients has spanned the disciplines—from intellectual property wars and evolutionary theory to racial profiling and eighteenth-century Italian opera—and helped to generate an enviable listing of scholars that the University is lucky to call their own. On top of all that, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Prize, first awarded to Bernard Weinberg in 1963 for A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance.

This year, the 2013 Laing Prize went to Andreas Glaeser, associate professor of soci0logy at the University, for Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Glaeser’s book considers socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989, building on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control, among other resources, to offer an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations.

Included below are some snapshots from the recent Laing Prize reception taken by our editorial director for the Humanities & Social Sciences, Alan Thomas, which offer a glimpse of the Press and University community’s celebration of Andreas—and to that end, we extend our congrats!

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Andreas Glaeser (left) with his editor, Douglas Mitchell

University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer (left), University of Chicago Press director Garrett Kiely (center), and Andreas Glaeser

Previous Laing Prize recipients Bernard E. Harcourt (left; Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age; 2009) and Marshall Sahlins (How Natives “Think”: About Captain Cook, For Example; 1997)