Yesterday, we asked scholar Sandra M. Gustafson, author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, to comment on President Obama's recent State of the Union address. This afternoon, she's joined by James T. Kloppenberg, author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, who engages with the history of other deliberative democrats and evaluates where Obama's words fell for a spectrum of interested parties, while remarking on the conflict and compromise that informs both authors' books. Thanks again to Professors Gustafson and Kloppenberg for sharing their thoughts with us!

"Obama's 2012 SOTU: Keeping Open the Invitation to Deliberate" by James T. Kloppenberg

Champions of conciliation face an uphill battle in 2012. As Sandra Gustafson notes, ours is a contentious culture. Of course that's nothing new. As Barack Obama emphasized in The Audacity of Hope and as he has observed many times since, conflict is as American as apple pie. The first settlers in New England began squabbling before they got off the ships that carried them across the Atlantic. William Penn's utopian vision of a peaceful Pennsylvania vanished in a firestorm of criticism. Most of those shipped to the southern colonies arrived as slaves, servants, or convicts, inferior beings to whom the ruling white males would not have to listen. Yet beneath the noisy arguments that erupted everywhere in colonial America, a new sensibility quietly established itself around the idea of self-government. In New England towns, in the villages established by the quarreling religious and ethnic groups that settled the middle colonies, and in the colonial legislatures where southern planters fought a war on two fronts against the demands of English officials and the rabble they wanted to keep subservient, people were learning from experience that, in the absence of a ruling monarch or an aristocracy with privileges secured by law, the members of every deliberative body had to learn to accept the judgment of the majority. Accompanying conflict, in other words, was the imperative of persuasion, the need to convince those who disagreed to see the light and come around.

Ever since the ancient world, a tension has persisted in democratic cultures between the prophet's principled refusal to compromise with evil and the deliberative democrat's equally principled commitment to the institutions and the process of achieving gradual change through conciliation. As Sandra Gustafson shows in her splendid book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, and as I try to establish in my forthcoming book Tragic Irony: Democracy in European and American Thought, conflict and its provisional resolution through compromise together constitute the democratic tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Obama understands the power and the necessity of unyielding calls to justice, he also understands that democracy can work only when the chasm between competing and incompatible principles can be bridged through efforts to understand other perspectives and identify and bring to the surface buried commitments to shared ideals. Americans have always fought bitterly over issues ranging from theology to economics, from slavery to abortion, and those who reject compromise always dismiss as unprincipled those conciliators who work to discover or create overlapping consensus where others see only irreconcilable differences. Like deliberative democrats from James Madison to John Dewey, Obama understands that although not every dispute can be resolved through deliberation, the alternative—civil war—is always tragic and usually ineffective as a means to heal the deep wounds it creates. Our culture's romantic celebration of warriors blinds us to war's long-term consequences; democracy depends on persuasion and must resort to force only as a last resort.

Obama's State of the Union address surprised only those who continue to project onto him either their own aspirations for radical change or their own paranoid fantasies about his secret plot to turn the United States into Denmark. The speech instead falls neatly in the continuous line of analysis Obama has offered ever since 1988, when he wrote the little essay "Why Organize?" before he left the Chicago world of community organizing for the Harvard Law School. Some commentators on the left complain that the SOTU left them feeling undernourished: Obama failed to excoriate his opponents or lay out a bold plan—to be accomplished by executive order, evidently, given the Republican majority in the House of Representatives—to bring justice to our land of inequality and oppression. By contrast, members of the self-styled moderate conservative commentariat have been left sputtering about the speech: the food is terrible, they complain about the mildly progressive measures Obama sketched out as his priorities, and there's so little of it. Their frustration is easy to understand. Although Obama did make clear his preferences for a simplified and more steeply graduated income tax, steps to return manufacturing to the United States, and more robust regulation of the environment and the financial sector, there was nothing in the speech to antagonize the independent voters whom his Republican opponent will have to woo in November. Instead he continued to plead for "responsibility," "cooperation," "opportunity," and "fairness," favorite code words invoked by progressives for over a century to justify the reforms we seek. For decades conservatives successfully blocked such initiatives by raising various specters, first communism, now terrorism, and again and again the various demons conjured up by the notion of a culture war. Obama refused to play into the mythology that he is an anti-business or anti-American radical. Instead he embraced the explicitly solidaristic ethos of the military and reminded us that he is willing to deploy helicopters, moles, or drones when he deems it necessary. Americans who actually listened to his words, rather than filtering the speech through the increasingly rickety categories concocted by his critics, heard the voice of a moderate who still believes, against all odds, in deliberative democracy. Although surrounded by people who would rather shout down their opponents than reason with them, Obama showed yet again his commitment to the proposition that the electorate can be persuaded to choose a path of moderate development toward a newer, and more inclusive, understanding of the present-day meanings of the nation's traditional democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all.

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University and the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Second Edition, 2012).

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Following President Barack Obama's recent State of the Union address, we thought it a fitting occasion to invite a dialogue from two leading scholars of civic rhetoric and the democratic tradition. Today, Sandra M. Gustafson, author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, examines the metaphor of war in Congressional politics and evaluates President Obama's use of military imagery, in light of his initial post-partisan appeal. Tomorrow, she'll be joined by James Kloppenberg, author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, who accounts for our own projections onto the President and explores Obama's use of moderate policies and progressive language. We're delighted to host both of them on the blog, and hope you're as intrigued by their analyses as we are.

President Barack Obama opened his fourth State of the Union address with a paean to the American armed forces. In a tribute designed to showcase important achievements of his first term, he celebrated the end of the Iraq War, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared over on December 15, 2011; the assassination of Osama bin Laden earlier that year; and the diminished power of the Taliban and draw down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Overlooking some notable military failures—the Abu Ghraib scandal, the "kill team" in Afghanistan, the hazing related death of Pvt. Danny Chen, statistics indicating widespread sexual assault—the president instead celebrated the "courage, selflessness and teamwork" that have made the U.S. armed forces successful: "They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together." Building on an image of an American military characterized by fairness and discipline, he contrasted them with less successful institutions that have "let us down." He did not need to say that for many people the central example of a failed institution was Congress itself, which in the days leading up to his speech had an approval rating of 13 percent.

That the most recent sitting U.S. president to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize should look to the military as a model for Congress bears reflection. The legislative branch is in its design and function very different from the hierarchical military system. It is an independent branch of government, not subordinate to the commander in chief. By calling on Congress to be more like the military, Obama was not suggesting a breach of separation of powers. He was speaking to one of the central issues that has bedeviled his presidency: the increasingly rigid refusal of Congressional Republicans to work with him and the Democrats to solve pressing national problems.

Candidate Obama campaigned on a platform of post-partisanship. His early years as a mixed-race child raised by white grandparents and his work as a community organizer prepared him for his mediating role as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, which launched his political career. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama characterized the United States as a "deliberative democracy" that works through free and open discussion. He promised to move past rigid polarities and take good ideas where he found them, a stance based in pragmatist philosophy as James Kloppenberg has shown in Reading Obama. This promise was tacitly premised on the willingness of Republicans to work with him. Instead, fueled by Tea Party money and energy, they embraced an oppositional role. War, not dialogue, has been the guiding metaphor in Congressional politics for much of the last three years.

This turn of events cannot have been wholly unanticipated. The readiness with which the president's most truculent opponents label his policies "socialism" draws on a long tradition of associating African Americans with leftist ideologies—a tradition based in the reality that in the four decades between the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist revelations, many African American intellectuals turned to those ideologies for an antidote to the pervasive racism of a segregated United States that prided itself on its democracy while inscribing inequality in law. Ralph Waldo Ellison was one such intellectual. In his great novel Invisible Man, which celebrates its sixtieth anniversary this March, he portrayed a young black man's attraction to and ultimate disillusionment with powerful ideologies. During his campaign Obama repeatedly observed that he was a human Rorschach test, meaning that people saw in him what they wanted to see—a not-so-subtle allusion to Ellison's unnamed hero.

Today war has become a standard way of modeling difference. In her 1998 book The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words, Georgetown linguist Deborah Tannen analyzed "a pervasive warlike atmosphere" infecting public dialogue. Noting that a conflict-based approach to difference has a long history, she nevertheless documented its rise to new heights in recent decades. Conflict pervades the media, the law, technology (think computer games), and education. I work at the home of the "Fighting Irish," where a leader of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies was featured in a promotional video series "What Would You Fight For?" The installment was called "Fighting for Peace."

Writing about the fate of the president's post-partisan agenda in the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza cited research on the extremely limited impact that presidential rhetoric has historically had. Obama has called for compromise and consensus-building on many occasions over the last three years, including during the health care reform discussions and during his negotiations with John Boehner over the debt ceiling. Those appeals have contributed to a number of concrete legislative results, but they have probably also contributed to the heightened oppositionalism of the Tea Party Republicans. While it was this atmosphere that Obama promised to change, the extent of the problem requires long-term, systemic efforts, not quick fixes.

A number of initiatives—some originating with the administration, some not—offer a vision of a longer-term transformation. Last June NEH chairman and former Republican congressman Jim Leach completed a nineteen-month "Civility Tour" of all fifty states to promote better public dialogue. This month the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, on commission from the Department of Education, released "A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future." The report calls on institutions of higher education to promote "capacities to engage diverse perspectives and people" and build more robust institutions of democratic civic engagement. Meanwhile the group No Labels has encouraged people to eschew party labels and promoted a set of Congressional reforms designed to fix the processes that have contributed to polarization and paralysis.

At the conclusion of his State of the Union address, President Obama returned to his opening military imagery, this time in connection with the flag given him by the SEAL Team that killed Bin Laden. The names of the team are written on the flag, and the president noted that "some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn't matter." What matters, he went on to say, is that they were able to work together, to have each other's backs, and he called on Congress and the nation to do the same. It is a reflection of our moment—sad, perhaps, but real—that American culture has become so saturated with conflict that our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president turns to the military institutions designed to engage in conflict as our best examples of teamwork and cooperation.

Sandra M. Gustafson teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a member of the English department and a faculty fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Her book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's response from James Kloppenberg, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, and the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton University Press, Second Edition, 2012).

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As New Hampshire voters take to the polls in today's Republican primary, more and more media analysis continues to emerge on the role played by the Iowa caucuses, and whether or not such a "primary" position is warranted by the state's demographics.

In Why Iowa?: How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process, David P. Redlawsk (five-time former Iowa precinct caucus chair), Caroline J. Tolbert, and Todd Donovan argue that not only is Iowa's impact warranted, but it reveals a great deal about other informational aspects of the campaign. Iowa's exceptionally well-designed caucus system brings candidates' arguments, strengths, and weaknesses into the open and—most importantly—under the media's lens.

A recent piece by John Sides for the NYT's FiveThirtyEight blog focused on Iowa's dramatic finish, where a late surge by Rick Santorum left Mitt Romney with a narrow, eight-vote victory. Sides's appealed to media data and commentary from the Why Iowa? authors, in addition to polling data from Nate Silver. The result? In Sides's words:

Why does this matter? Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues demonstrate that not only do candidates who do relatively well in Iowa do better in New Hampshire—see also Nate's analysis—but this shift in media attention may play the causal role. The media's attention matters too, and their attention depends on how candidates perform versus expectations. Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues then show that the results in New Hampshire shape the candidates' overall share of votes in the primaries as a whole. So Iowa affects New Hampshire, and New Hampshire affects everything else. . . .

In the run-up to the caucus, Redlawsk spoke with Ezra Klein at the Washington Post about how Iowa rose to its current first-in-the-nation status and why so many candidates care about such a small number of delegates. As Redlawsk commented:

Probably what Iowa does best is winnow the field: eliminate the also-rans, the ones who just can't build a campaign. That's really what Iowa does. It teaches them to build a grassroots campaign. Those who do well get to move forward, and those who don't drop out. That said, in the last few cycles, Iowa has played a very significant role. There's no question that it launched Obama. But in the end, it's not so much winning Iowa as it is generating attention because you beat expectations.

Tolbert chimed in for a piece by Gail Collins for the NYT, which presented a dissenting perspective on Iowa, where as Tolbert noted, "Caucuses tend to foster more grass-roots participation."

Redlawsk also sat down for Public Radio International's The Takeaway, and offered some wisdom about the caucuses unpredictable results and what the truth is about their effect on candidate selection:

It's the media that's the primary king-maker here. What the media does is interprets the results of Iowa, the results of New Hampshire, as we go forward in a sequential process.

For more information about Why Iowa?, check out the authors' interactive website, which includes excerpts, interviews and talks (including recent mentions on the BBC and Southern California Public Radio's Madeleine Brand Show, and other information about the book and its scholarship.

In the meantime, here's some coverage of the 1988 Republican and Democratic Iowa caucuses from PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour (including some vintage Roger Mudd) that grapples with some of same questions Why Iowa? continues to debate:

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Sad news from Berlin: the passing of critic, novelist, and essayist Christa Wolf. Long credited for helping to establish a distinctive East German literary voice, Wolf was the author of numerous works, including Divided Heaven, The Quest for Christa T., Patterns of Childhood, Cassandra, Medea, On the Way to Taboo, and Accident: A Day's News. Though much of Wolf's work engaged with issues of feminism, self-reflexivity, societal pressures, and German fascism, it was her quest for "subjective authenticity" that helped to position her literary output in vital proximity to the social and political issues of her time. In 2002, Wolf was awarded the inaugural German Book Prize for her lifetime achievement.

In her 1994 lecture "Parting from Phantoms: On Germany," extracted here, Wolf reflects on Germany's reckoning with its history five years after reunification. Along the way, she describes confronting "a compromising phase in my past" and the uproar that ensued when she revealed that she had worked as an informal collaborator for the East German secret police between 1959 and 1962. "Parting from Phantoms: On Germany" appears in full in Christa Wolf's Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990-1994, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Everything about Germany has been said. I make this claim after wearily pushing aside the stacks of recently published books, the piles of fresh newspaper articles that I have read, skimmed, or left unread. What a giant gruel Germans have been cooking up, talking and writing and analyzing and arguing and polemicizing and pontificating and lamenting, even satirizing themselves and Germany, in the past four years. We have stirred this gruel ourselves, put the pot on the fire, watched it simmer, bubble, sizzle, boil over; we have tasted it, eaten it up like good little children. But the gruel cannot be consumed, nor can it be held in check any longer. It is spilling over the stove and kitchen, out from the messy house onto the road, onto all the streets of our German cities, apparently bringing no nourishment to the homeless Germans who huddle there. And if we well-housed Germans want to be honest—and what do Germans today want more urgently than to be honest!—we must admit that we no longer like the taste of this German millet gruel. We are sick of it. We are fed up with it.

"No!" cries the German Suppenkaspar, the Boy Who Won't Eat His Soup, who along with his friend Struwwelpeter is just this year celebrating his 150th birthday in blooming health (that is, their story is still being printed in great numbers): "O take the beastly soup away / I won't eat any soup today!"' The question arises how a child raised to be antiauthoritarian can be forced to eat up the soup he has cooked himself, to swallow something he doesn't like….

Where am I headed? I am searching for a name for a feeling. In Santa Monica, I confronted a compromising phase in my past. I learned how difficult it can be to face the past honestly and adequately when, in Germany, "overcoming the past" on the public level usually takes the form of a chronicle of scandals or a mere skimming of documents—documents that reduce people's personal histories to simple patterns of yes or no, black or white, guilty or innocent, and provide no information beyond that. I thought then and still think that this credulous faith in files is possible only in Germany. I shall not forget, nor do I want to forget, the physical sensation of being replaced, piece by piece and limb by limb, by another person who was built to suit the media and seeing an empty place arise at the spot where I "really" was. It was an eerie sensation. I then found words for my eerie feeling: the disappearance of reality.

"Unreality" is a word Thomas Mann applied to Germany in 1934, when he was already abroad but not yet in exile. He spoke of the return to unreality. The phrase struck me and preoccupied me deeply. I would often travel up to Mann's house in Pacific Palisades and go down Amalfi Drive, where he used to walk almost daily when he was writing Doctor Faustus, that awe-inspiring self-confrontation of the German intelligentsia in their failure against fascism. Cautioning myself inwardly not to make pat comparisons, I wondered, Have we Germans now come together in a polity that at last is proof against the temptation to think "tragically, mythically, heroically" the kind of thinking Mann attributed in 1934 to the dear compatriots of his who had succumbed to German myth? Aren't we now thinking "economically," "politically"—that is, realistically—at last, in what Mann said was not the German way? Yes, if thinking economically means thinking that the maximization of profit is the highest of all values and if thinking politically means putting the interests of one's own party above everything else.

Am I being unjust? Partisan? Four and a half years of German unity, and myths and legends abound—some circulated intentionally, some necessarily arising from the way German unity is being pursued. The large-scale attempt to reduce the GDR to the status of an "unconstitutional state," to assign it to the realm of evil and thus to block historical thinking about it, has proved useful in the equally large-scale title challenges and mass expropriation of the property of GDR citizens. But above all it has helped hide the fact—from our West German fellow citizens, among others—that history is once again sailing in the direction favored by those who have enough clout to determine which way the wind blows. . . .

Where am I headed? I think that in East and West Germany it is time to part from the phantom that each was to the other for so long and thus to part from the phantom of our own land, too. Get down to business, Germany! And why not? We know what happens to denied, repressed reality: it disappears into the blind spot in our consciousness, where it engulfs activity and creativity and generates myths, aggressiveness, delusion. The spreading sense of emptiness and disappointment also produces social maladies and anomalies in which groups of young people "suddenly" drop out of civilization, cancel what seemed abiding social con-tracts, and turn into young zombies without com-passion, even for themselves. At a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: "Mein ist die Rache" (Vengeance is mine). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after another. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigre German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, "America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it."

The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It's a "pan-German" question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn't it lead to three other questions that are worrying us: What was? What remains? What will be?

An English clergyman told us recently that the Germans must make up their minds about themselves, must learn to affirm themselves and the positive sides of their history; otherwise the young people would drift farther and farther away. My family thought about what we Germans could be proud of, what we have that is particularly good, and my fourteen-year-old grandson, who had just spent two weeks in the United States, said, "The bread we bake in Germany." We laughed, and the more I thought about it, the more I was satisfied with that answer. Bread as an ancient symbol and as everyday concreteness, as the food par excellence, a sensual pleasure you never tire of, simple and at the same time delicious. It fills you, it has aroma, it has flavor, and with its color and manifold shapes it is also a feast for the eyes. Along with wine, it stimulates conversation, friendship, hospitality. What I would like to see—and it's already happening—are Germans from different points of the compass working together, developing projects, and then sitting down around the table to talk, even to argue, and to eat, to eat in common, the soup they have cooked for themselves. To set on the table the bread they have brought from their various regions, offering it to each other and sharing it gladly and generously.

Translated by Jan van Heurck

Lecture given at the Dresden Staatsoper as part of the "Dresden Lectures" series, February 27, 1994. This translation (first published in PMLA, May 1996) ©1996 by the University of Chicago; all rights reserved.

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Marshall Sahlins—globally renowned ethnographer, Polynesian historian, and the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus) at the University of Chicago—has had quite a series of weeks.

First came notice from the French Ministry of Culture, helmed by Frédéric Mitterand: Sahlins has been named a Chevalier des Arts et des Letters (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters), an honorary position that commends artists, scholars, and others who have contributed "to the enrichment of French culture."

In addition, Sahlins is set to receive not one—but, two—honorary doctorates, from the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.

In addition, the Sorbonne will host a daylong conference on Monday, November 14, 2011, in celebration of Sahlins and his work, featuring contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers from around the world.

The author of numerous books (an assortment of which have been translated into French,
including The Western Illusion of Human Nature), Sahlins is also the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press. Among those books of Sahlins published by the University of Chicago Press are Culture and Practical Reason, winner of the Gordon J. Laing Prize; How Natives "Think": About Captain Cook, For Example; Islands of History; Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa; and the two-volume Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (coauthored with Patrick V. Kirch).

Sahlins personal ties to France are notable—in the late 1960s, he experienced the May 1968 student protests firsthand, while studying with anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss at his Laboratoire at the College de France. Later, Sahlins returned as the sole American participant in the ceremonies celebrating Lévi-Strauss's 100th birthday in 2009.

Quipped Sahlins in acknowledgement of the honors:

"I think I am the Jerry Lewis of French anthropology. The French love me, and the Americans can't understand why."

Photo by Alan Thomas

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This week brought The Black Power Mixtape to Chicago, though the film was previously released in early September to audiences in Los Angeles and New York. A documentary pieced together by filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson from hundreds of reels of 16-mm interview footage produced by Swedish television journalists from 1967 to 1975, The Black Power Mixtape interlaces contemporary audio commentary revisting the Movement with many clips either unseen since they first aired in Europe, or lost to network archives. Organized chronologically by year, the film documents the rise of Black Power, from Stokely Carmichael's earliest post-SNCC speeches and the founding of the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Program to TV Guide's (a publication owned by Richard Nixon's then Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Annenberg) critique of Scandinavian television's "negative" portrayal of American society, eventually trailing off into more-or-less vernacular pieces on Harlem bookstores and drug-treatment culture.

To watch the movement's rhetorical development and the increasing exile, imprisonment, and death of its leaders alongside the community's—and nation's—growing disillusionment with the Vietnam War, Nixon administration politics, and urban poverty, is a fascinating exercise in the nuances of discrimination and endemic societal problems. To watch all of this alongside a sometimes sympathetic, often curious, and largely culturally distanced assortment of Swedish journalists (drawn from over twenty televised broadcasts) leaves you pondering an almost inexplicable gap—between that time and the present, between these two societies (often united by their anti-Vietnam political stance), and between the roles of participant and observer. What sort of historical reading properly prepares you for a bus of blonde-haired Swedish investigative journalists being chastised about exploring Harlem, as their tour guide uncomfortably stumbles out a comment about how their fear is shared by better ("better?" "Can I say that?") African American citizens?

In 2001, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, edited the collection Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism—thirty-five years after Adam Clayton Powell Jr. delivered, as part of his baccalaureate address at Howard University, an early version of the phrase: "To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power." Is It Nation Time? collects new and classic writings on the Black Power Movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers—including Glaude, Cornel West, and Robin D. G. Kelley—in order to tackle contemporary issues such as the commodification of blackness, class tensions, and the larger discourse surrounding black nationalism.

A precursor to Is It Nation Time?, William L. Van Deburg's New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, follows the literal arc of much of The Black Power Mixtape's historical trajectory, offering a comprehensive account of the Black Power Movement's rise and fall, from its preconditions to ideologies that straddled everything from labor and campus life to sports, soul music, theology, and nationalism. The book garnered the Gustavus Myers Center's Outstanding Book Award (1993), and was praised by Bob Blauner in the New York Times as a "densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."

Angela Davis, who recently retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program, where she long served as a professor (she's currently Distinguished Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University), has several key moments in The Black Power Mixtape (including one that demonstrated the journalists' unusual access to Davis during her 1971-72 stay in a Marin County prison cell). The most pressing of these occurs during the conclusion of one interview, where Davis states (in response to a question about violence in the movement): "When someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible," she says. "A person asking that can have no idea about what black people have gone through in this country."

To understand the raw emotion and power of Davis's articulation, Is It Nation Time? and New Day in Babylon are fine places to start—but to place her words in the context of our own continued struggles for social justice and equality today, where institutional racism, economic disparity, the struggle for GLBTQ rights, and other issues play out in daily headlines, is to hear an echo of her furious intensity as part of a soundtrack whose audience continues to grow.

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Marjorie Perloff is the kind of critic who doesn't require an introduction. From her pathbreaking work on the experimental inheritances of modernist poetics to her championing of outsider approaches, both on and off the page, she has earned her moniker as grand dame of the avant garde. This past month alone saw Perloff reach two additional milestones, which came commingled under festive circumstances: a celebration of her eightieth birthday at the thusly inaugurated First Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics in Wuhan, China.

Perloff abroad seems to have much in combine with the stateside prowess we've come to admire. Joined by pomo poetry's jester-magician Charles Bernstein, Perloff lectured on how she became a critic, and engaged with topics ranging from Duchamp's Readymades to Ginsberg's Howl. On her return to American shores, Perloff was greeted with an incisive piece from the Los Angeles Review of Books on "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism," where Joseph Campana engaged with issues of legacy and cultural visibility for four of our most celebrated (and occasionally, maligned!) literary critics, locating Perloff in the company of Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and Marjorie Garber. As Campana put it:

It's hard not to get caught up in Perloff's zeal; I read her writing with real eagerness precisely because she seems certain that literature is alive, well, and constantly changing.

The piece considers Perloff's most recent offering Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, which takes a twenty-first century stance on the practices of appropriation, assemblage, and information channeling that dominate contemporary "unoriginal" works. What's most compelling about Perloff's take is how personal she finds these works to be, tracing their lineage of choice back to T. S. Eliot's vocal citations in The Wasteland and even Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, while extolling the ingenuity and pleasure to be found in this kind of remix.

Need another opinion? Modern Language Review just weighed in, summarizing Unoriginal Genius and its offerings:

Is this continuity or rupture, or perhaps an arriere-garde 'with a difference'? Perloff does not engage at length with these questions in the conclusion, thus leaving, like the poets she analyses, space for the reader to complete the text by teasing out the implications of the kind of poetry she has introduced and inviting us to think about the next direction for poetry in the new century, whether it be forward, back, or around with a twist.

We couldn't agree more, and though we've come to depend on Perloff's generous, astute readings of some of our favorite poets over the years, there's something special about the space on offer in UG. That kind of breathing room is its own sort of legacy, one absolutely overdue, and like the writing Perloff so aptly analyzes, surprisingly personal in its invitation.

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Recently, in light of the tenth anniversary of the events that unfolded on September 11, 2001, discourse in the American public sphere has centered on a remembrance of what was lost that day. Yet, at the same time, many darker elements of the national psyche have also been confronted: reckoning the health plight of rescue workers, for instance, and questioning exploitation of the events for any war or terror produced in their wake with a clarity produced in hindsight.

At Chicago, we bear in mind the lessons gleaned from David Simpson's 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, which examines the paradoxical nature of American reactions following the event, from angles of aestheticization, exploitation, and appropriation. Simpson's book, which expands on several essays published in the London Review of Books, analyzes our responses to the events of that September morning with the persuasive sweep of humanities scholarship, ultimately using the tools of this cultural knowledge to help us digest the tragedy and its deep and wide-sweeping consequences.

At the University of Chicago, the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) , a social science research group dedicated to advancing knowledge of international security and terrorism, has put together an admirable selection of perspectives on 9/11 by some of America's most prominent policy makers and professors. Among them? Robert A. Pape, the director of CPOST, and coauthor of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It. Cutting the Fuse, written by two global experts, has quickly become the definitive book on suicide terrorism, and its advancement of foreign military occupation as the root cause of these types of attacks has heralded impressive policy debates.

On the CPOST site, in a piece entitled "The End of Fear," Pape writes:

America has been waging a long war against terrorism, but without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill us. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack, this was perfectly understandable. If toppling the Taliban was necessary to take out Al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, so be it. But, in an instant, there was also a great need to know, or perhaps better to say, to "understand" the events of that terrible day. A simple narrative was readily available and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Since the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill us. Within weeks after the attack, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, "Why do they hate us?" and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of who we are, not what we do.

The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked. It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution, one whose ambition only made it seem all the more worthy in light of the trauma of that terrible day. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies, with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.

The only problem: Islamic fundamentalism is not the main driver of suicide terrorism. What drives this phenomenon more than any other single factor is foreign military presence, which inspires wave after wave of individuals to join terrorist groups in order to carry out suicide attacks in the hope that these would end the foreign presence in their lands.

The reproduction of simple narratives that Pape writes about is just the sort of verbal image that W. J. T. Mitchell uncovers at the core of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Though Mitchell eventually argues that the shared anxiety present in the concept of cloning and the replication of terror-based imagery and narratives fuels an uncanny structural resemblance, his startling analysis reaches the same conclusion as Pape's: the War on Terror has not only recruited more fighters to the jihadist cause, but undermined the tenets of our own foreign and domestic policies.

All of this, though, pales in the face of those events, even a decade later. But just as unrelentingly, it asks us to consider the decade since with senses more attuned to facilitating change, rather than reconciling our losses, however tragic they may be.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Before porn was legal, there was Beate Uhse (1921-2001). Before there were iconic other javelin champions-turned-stunt pilots-turned-sex-shop-proprietors, there was Beate Uhse. And before there was Beate Uhse, there was an erotic underworld in Germany, rife with untrained abortionists, uneducated practitioners, and a whole lot of folks looking for guides to "marital hygiene." Basically, before there was Beate Uhse, there was Beate Uhse undone: a perfectly fertile breeding ground, if you will, for an assertively proto-feminist stock offering.

Elizabeth Heineman's Before Porn was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse, recently profiled by New Books in History (which resulted in the most downloaded interview in the site's existence), takes on the story of the former Luftwaffe pilot, war widow, and black marketer, ultimately placing the erotica entrepreneur at the forefront of Germany's socio-sexual revolution. Through Uhse's story, Heineman explores how one mail-order business (spearheaded by Uhse's self-penned guide to the rhythm method) battled restrictive legislation and conservative mores in order to bring consumers the new products demanded by a burgeoning liberal marketplace that was anxious for sexual self-help. If that doesn't quite tempt you enough into uncovering more of what's—well, under the covers—of the book, then Heineman's innovative reads of oral histories from a nation on the verge of a social, secular, and democratic revolution certainly should. It's an Horatio Alger tale with a twist of liberal morality; a rags-to-riches coming-of-age foray with a hint of sexy mail-order mystique; and an exhaustive scholarly debut helmed by a badass German ace once banned from the Flensburger tennis club due to "general concerns."

Doctor says you better have a look:

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Sociology
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Parker—violent anti-hero, dangerous predator, single-named fictional protagonist who chases after ex-partners, ex-wives, and well-executed financial transfers—is about to become a cinema star again. Previous film adaptations of Donald Westlake qua Richard Stark's popular crime fiction novels have been helmed by iconic male stars such as Lee Marvin, Peter Coyote, and yes, Mel Gibson (by iconic, we mean some combination of hardboiled, hallucinogenic, and headcase-y). In the Taylor Hackford-directed Parker (set to release in October 2012—if we're not too distracted by the pending return of Quetzalcoatl), Jason Statham will take his turn at the marvelous villain, via a screenplay based on the recently rereleased Flashfire. The only thing that could make this all that much more interesting is . . . Jennifer Lopez. Done and done.

With all this in mind, and apologies to Jason Statham, we've reconsidered the casting and thought about five other actors fit to finesse our ruthless protagonist:

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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In a recent issue of the New Yorker, UCP author Stephen Greenblatt reminds us of the "strikingly modern" outlook of De rerum natura, Roman philosopher Lucretius's epic, 7400-line poem On the Nature of Things, and its Epicurean atomic mindblow. Amid the celestial provenance of fortuna—fate, not divine intervention—Lucretius mixed up explanations of the material world (lightning, earthquakes, and heat) with a primer on disease and a pestilent description of a plagued Athens.

As Greenblatt notes:

Every page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet's sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius, it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain. As it turned out, there was a line from this work to modernity, though not a direct one.

Should we follow that path? In The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition, Gerard Passannante takes us along these lines, tracing the rise of materialism in early modern Europe through the dissemination of Lucretius in scholarly practice and humanist thought. Blending Virgil, Bacon, Spenser, Montaigne, Newton, Henry More, and others, Passannante arrives at a particularly circuitous pensivity: What does it mean for a text to be reborn?

Greenblatt surrenders, er swerves, to this Lucretian lineage in an earlier piece for Harvard magazine, as well as the New Yorker article, and his most recent book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. For Lucretius, the world was in perpetual motion, a flurry of atom-like particles that collided and conjoined in a literal swerve of stellar movement. Science may have changed, but we can still get down.

Archived in Books for the News | Classics | Literature
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The Constitutional Convention took place from May 14th to September 17th, 1787. The delegates spent much of the early month of August adjourned as the Committee of Detail met to refine previously reached agreements, including the contentious role of slavery, before submitting what became an early draft of the U.S. Constitution. Though ten states had already outlawed the slave trade, three key Southern holdouts (Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) threatened to leave the convention and stall progress if the trade were banned outright. Ultimately, delegates instead ratified the Three-Fifths compromise (Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution), which created this federal ratio in order to assess slaves ("all other persons") as three-fifths of their actual number for purposes of representation in the House and Senate.

In A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, George W. Van Cleve judiciously demonstrates that this Constitution was pro-slavery in its politics, its economics, and its law. Framing the development of a strong federal republic around the allegiance of the Southern states, A Slaveholders' Union establishes this long-term protection of slavery as the consequence of Southern participation in the fledgling Union.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Annette Gordon-Reed, in assessing the book's attempt to bring slavery back to the fore of early American political life, commended Van Cleve's "dazzling addition to scholarship" and noted that no other historian "has made this point so clearly and with so much evidence and strong analysis to back it up." No faint praise, but just this past month, Library Journal furthered the accolades and named A Slaveholders' Union one of its top twenty bestsellers this past year in Politics and Law.

For anyone with an interest in the dark past at the foundation of our early American republic or with a passion for the intertwined interests at the core of our constitutional development, A Slaveholders' Union is one historical analysis not to be missed.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Law
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In a recent post for the Yale University Press blog, Eva Ledóchowicz (our shared sales representative for Eastern Europe) penned an article on the potential of the ebook as a "book without border," linking the changing landscape of publishing (for better or worse) with developments in the European Union surrounding ID-free travel made possible by laws governing the Schengen area.

The Schengen area came to be on March 26, 1995, when five original signatories (Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) implemented the Schengen Agreement (1985, named for Schengen, Luxembourg, where the document was first signed) into law, allowing for what approaches a single state for international travel, with no internal border controls (harkening back to pre-World War I days, when one could travel from Paris to St. Petersburg without a passport). Two years later, and twenty-five countries were onboard. In recent years, concerns over the pressure to provide shared security for the entire Schengen region, along with the preferences of individual nations over migration, has led to a new vulnerability for Schengen, its member nations, and those travelers who come and go within its amorphous borders.

In Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the Evolution of European Frontiers, political scientist Ruben Zaiotti traces the changing assumptions and cultural practices that led European policymakers to challenge long-established conceptions of sovereignty and security. While Zaiotti broadly surveys the implications of this new European integration, he also contrasts Schengen with post-9/11 developments in North America, where more restrictive control of borders has become a dominant theme.

Scholarship like Zaiotti's helps us to understand the circumstances and principles that shape territoriality in our globalized society, and Eva's post is an incisive first-hand account of what it might mean to be borderless (as commerce, ideas, or persons) in our twenty-first century world—we recommend you have a look at both.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
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The auteur is dead, says Jean-Luc Godard. The future is cut-and-paste movie mashups.*

#DearNetflix:

Satyajit Ray.**

The Odyssey is a sequel to the Iliad, and the second, better part of Don Quixote is a sequel to the first.

You can argue that Andy Warhol revamped this idea.

Throughout the 1940s, Welles and Wyler wrote articles and gave more interviews, often insisting that their films invited greater participation on the part of spectators.

Andrew Sarris's You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet and the collection OK, You Mugs.

For the sake of simplicity, we've called the principles norms.

Exhibit A is Tamar Lane's book The New Technique of Screen Writing (McGraw-Hill, 1936).

Jurassic Park and The Host likewise trace out several plot strands among a variety of characters.

I once asked Kiarostami how he got the remarkable performances in shot/reverse-shot that we see in films like Through the Olive Trees (1994) and The Taste of Cherry (1997). He said that he simply filmed one actor saying all of his lines and giving all his reactions, then filmed the other.

In order to pursue this question, the critic needn't declare Rebecca a great film or a failure.

If you declare that There Will Be Blood is a good film, you're evaluating it.

Progressive opinion in the silent era tended to deny that film was a performing art, since that would make it a form of theater. No, film had unique capabilities. Cinema was essentially moving pictures.

Thinking historically need not numb us to surprises.

*from a 12 June Guardian headline

**all text assembled from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media
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The tale told in Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film Chungking Express isn't particularly straightforward. In between the stop-motion jumps and alternative shots, the flick tells two stories: a cop with a jones for a lost love buys tins of pineapple that are due to expire the same day as his affection, while another cop. . . . Well, there's some mirroring with postdated boarding passes and a girl named Faye and California, the restaurant and the place and that kind of Dreamin' from the Mamas and the Papas song, and . . . uh, flight attendants and cousins . . . and. . . . Suffice to say it's perfectly complicated. The title of the film in Chinese literally translates to "Chungking Jungle," which refers to both its dense urban landscape and the Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong, where much of the movie's first sequence is set. Like the film, the Chungking Mansions offer an idiosyncratic slice of life in our transnational capitalist society.

Curry shops, African record stands, clothing stalls, sari tailors, Nigerian exporters, Sub-Saharan internet cafes, Lahore Fast Food, barbershops, Bollywood video kiosks, guestrooms inhabited by 120 distinct nationalities (on any given day), porno stands, and even Indian whiskey distributors fight for turf among a 17-story tower block. But as a recent Wall Street Journal review of anthropologist Gordon Mathew's Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong points out, the notoriously shabby tenement is engaged in a culture as much about low-end globalism as it is about cheap sleep and squalid stories.

Visitors go to Chungking Mansions to buy consumer and trade goods that have been manufactured in mainland China, bringing them back to their home countries for resale at a higher price. The goods are bought from middlemen who work from one of the more than 100 tiny storefronts and stalls on the lower floors of the building. Some traders transport their goods home by pooling money and renting shipping containers, but many simply fill their luggage with wares.

In the production notes for Chungking Express, Kar-Wai speaks to his desire to use the Mansions as part of his set:

It is a legendary place where the relations between people are very complicated. It has always fascinated and intrigued me. It is also a permanent hotspot for the cops in Hong Kong because of the illegal traffic that takes place there. That mass-populated and hyperactive place is a great metaphor for the town herself.

The WSJ goes on to commend Ghetto at the Center of the World as "a first rate business book," and closes its review with a quote that further articulates the Mansions as a microcosm of capitalism's soft underbelly:

Mathews adds: "As a Pakistani said to me vis-à-vis Indians, 'I do not like them; they are not my friends. But I am here to make money, as they are here to make money. We cannot afford to fight.'"

Whither the West? You'll have to watch the movie to find out whether or not the cop(s) get(s) the girl(s).

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Natalie Angier is a science journalist—and an outspoken athiest—with a thirst for. . . . fairness? At least that's the case in her recent piece for the New York Times, in which she explores the wealth gap that's helped spur our worst economic crisis since the Great Depression in light of research on human nature and the evolution of human social organization. Interesting to point out that another NYT study bills the average top executive's salary at ten million dollars and rising twelve percent per year.

And just who's fair?

Angier spells it out for us:

Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match.

In The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice, Peter Corning draws on evidence similar to what Angier cites in her article: the evolutionary record, along with the latest findings from the behavioral and biological sciences. The result? A provocative argument for the innate fairness of human beings, and the advancement of a new Biosocial Contract that takes lessons akin to those gleaned from the Kung bushmen of the Kalahari and the Ache hunter-gatherers in eastern Paraguay and applies them to the Madoffs and Enrons in our midst.

Is capitalism at a crisis point? Angier uncovers a study "in which Americans were given the chance to construct their version of the optimal wealth gradient for America." Both Republicans and Democrats ended up with a chart with a degree of income inequality that looked much more like Sweden's than that of the United States.

Chimpanzees might not carry a log together, but I've seen a conspicuous consumer or two lend a hand in understanding Ikea's cart-schlepping escalator. Corning reminds us there are real reasons why we might band together and build that Expedit shelving system arm-in-arm:

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Economics
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In the twenty-first century, Ivo Andrić's profile has remained surprisingly low for a Nobel Prize winner (his 1961 citation for the Prize in Literature commends "the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country"). That is, until now.

The Guardian recently reported on a collaboration between filmmaker (and two-time Cannes Palme d'or winner) Emir Kusturica and the Republika Srpska's government to build a new town inspired by Andrić's writings: Andrićgrad. Work on the 17,000 square meter town is "due to start this week and to be completed by 2014."

In his own day, Andrić (1892-1975) was a poet, novelist, civic servant, diplomat, deputy foreign minister, and parliamentarian. Born and raised in Bosnia (his writing is claimed by Serbs and Croats alike), Andrić was perhaps best known for his "Bosnian trilogy," three works that drew upon the history, culture, and folk wisdom of his native country. The first of these works, The Bridge on the Drina, spans nearly four centuries of Muslim and Orthodox Christian life in Bosnia and Herzegovina, through the prism of a town and its bridge across the river.

"Here, where the Drina flows with the whole force of its green and foaming waters from the apparently closed mass of the dark steep mountains, stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches," Andrić wrote in The Bridge on the Drina. "From this bridge spreads fanlike the whole rolling valley with the little oriental town of Visegrad and all its surroundings, with hamlets nestling in the folds of the hills, covered with meadows, pastures and plum-orchards, and criss-crossed with walls and fences and dotted with shaws and occasional clumps of evergreens. Looked at from a distance through the broad arches of the white bridge it seems as if one can see not only the green Drina, but all that fertile and cultivated countryside and the southern sky above."

For Kusturica, Andrićgrad will not only serve as the setting for his forthcoming film adaptation of The Bridge on the Drina, but will also further his interest in envisioning and constructing villages, which began with Kustendorf, a settlement he built in western Serbia, and for which he feels an affinity of place not dissimilar to Andrić:

"This is my Utopia. I lost my city (Sarajevo) during the war, now this is my home. I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, ten in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports. Cities are humiliating places to live, particularly in this part of the world. Everything I earn now goes into this."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature
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Dispatch just in from our Department of All Things Reference and Regional about annual Chicago favorite, the Printers Row List Fest:

[begin transmission]

Come out and join us this weekend at the 2011 Printers Row Lit Fest, one of the most anticipated events of the year for authors, publishers, booksellers, and book lovers in Chicago. Among the bookstalls and reading stages occupying five city blocks in the South Loop, you'll find the University of Chicago Press booth on Dearborn just south of Harrison. We'll be selling some of our most popular regional and general interest titles at great prices, including The Thinking Student's Guide to College by Andrew Roberts for $10 and a table full of books such as the The Rules of Golf in Plain English and The University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary for just $5. While you're there, catch our distinguished authors speaking at the following events:

10:00 AM on Saturday at University Center/River Room

Hillary Chute, author of Graphic Women and Melissa Ann Pinney, author of Girl Ascending, in conversation with Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune

10:30 AM on Saturday at University Center/Loop Room

Adoption Nation with Jane Katch, author of Far Away from the Tigers: A Year in the Classroom with Internationally Adopted Children and novelist Gina Frangello, moderated by young-adult librarian Amy Alessio

11:00 AM on Saturday at the Central Stage

Bob Riesman, author of I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy, and Michael Charry, author of "George Szell: A Life of Music," in conversation with Howard Reich of the Chicago Tribune

11:00 AM on Saturday at University Center/Lake Room

Carrie Pitzulo, author of Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy in conversation with Kimberly Yuracko, author of Perfectionism and Contemporary Feminist Values

2:15 PM on Saturday at University Center/Loop Room

John Vinci and Ward Miller, coauthors of The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan, in conversation with writer and Northwestern professor Bill Savage

11:00 AM on Sunday at the University Center/River Room

Eric A. Posner, author of Law and Happiness and The Perils of Global Legalism, speaks to BookTV

2:30 PM on Sunday at Hotel Blake

Larry Bennett, author of The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism, and Kristina Ford, author of The Trouble with City Planning, in conversation with Donna Robertson, dean of the IIT College of Architecture

For more information and a full schedule of events visit the Fest's official website. We'll look forward to seeing you there!

[end transmission]

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Publicity | UCP News
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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 Richard Preston, New Yorker contributor and bestselling author, for a conversation on smallpox and the possible eradication of other viruses.

Richard Preston is the author of seven books, including The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, and The Demon in the Freezer. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and his awards include the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. Preston also the only person who isn't a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control's Champion of Prevention Award for public health.

Dear Carl:

There's a debate in the scientific community about what to do with the remaining stocks of smallpox virus on the planet. Should the virus be preserved so that it can be studied? Or should the virus be destroyed, so that—in theory at least—it would become extinct and would not threaten the human species again?

Smallpox virus, or Variola major, is the cause of probably the worst infectious disease in human history. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, experts believe that smallpox killed half a billion people, accounting for far more deaths than all the wars of the time. Smallpox is a grisly and supremely painful disease. The disease has around a 33 percent case-fatality rate in unvaccinated patients. That is, a third of the disease's victims who haven't been vaccinated die. The victims suffer from an incredibly painful rash—blisters known as pustules stud the body. The survivors are typically left with scars for life. About ten percent of fatal smallpox cases consist of hemorrhagic smallpox, a manifestation of the disease in which the victim dies with hemorrhagic symptoms, including bleeding from the orifices. Smallpox virus spreads in the air from person to person, traveling in tiny droplets spewed when an infected person speaks or coughs. The vast majority of the world's population today has little or no immunity to smallpox, because vaccination ceased during the 1970s.

Smallpox was declared eradicated globally in 1980 by the World Health Organization (WHO), after a remarkable and heroic WHO-led effort to eradicate the virus worldwide. Today, the only remaining samples of live smallpox virus are stored in just two locations: a high-security lab at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and in the Vector State Research Center in Siberia, Russia. For a number of years, now, various member nations of the WHO have been pressing the WHO to order those stocks destroyed.

The smallpox virus stock at the CDC occupies a volume about the size of a basketball; the virus samples are frozen in small plastic tubes the size of pencil stubs. The Russian stock is probably similar. It would be very easy to destroy the virus: just heat it up.

But should it be destroyed? A series of defectors from the old Soviet Union have revealed that the Soviet Union weaponized smallpox; that the virus was a mainstay of the clandestine Soviet biowarfare program. Illicit stocks of smallpox may have been taken out of Russia; nobody knows where the virus might exist on earth today in the form of undisclosed, secret stocks of the virus.

Researchers using live smallpox virus at the CDC have been studying the virus in an effort to develop antiviral drugs that would be effective against a smallpox infection. The drugs might also be effective against genetically engineered smallpox.

The genome sequence of smallpox virus is publicly available and can be downloaded from the Internet. Some day it will probably be technically feasible to recreate live smallpox from its genome sequence. Even if all the living smallpox were destroyed, it might be brought back to life in a lab somewhere, some day.

D. A. Henderson, who led the WHO eradication of smallpox, argues that the virus should be destroyed, regardless of whether it can be recreated. He argues that if the WHO makes smallpox extinct, then anyone who later had the live virus would be committing a crime against humanity and could be prosecuted in international courts.

On the other hand, researchers who are developing defenses against smallpox argue that the disease is simply too dangerous to destroy; they argue that we must continue to study it under the principle of Sun Tzu, "Know thy enemy."

What do you think?

Richard

Dear Richard:

Your question is a timely one. On May 16, the World Health Organization will be having their annual meeting, and one of the items on their agenda is a global consensus about what to do with the world's remaining smallpox stocks.

If WHO does decide on eradication, it will be an historical moment. We humans have only eliminated two viruses from the wild. Smallpox was the first. The second, as of last October, is rinderpest, a devastating scourge of cattle. For now, both smallpox and rinderpest remain in laboratory stocks. But if WHO decides to get rid of the smallpox lab stocks, too, the virus may be eliminated from the planet.

The prospect of such a milestone raises the question of why we haven't been able to wipe out any of the other viruses that plague us. In some cases, it's because viruses have escape routes. In 2004, for example, SARS burst on the scene, killing 774 people in total before quarantines and other public health measures beat it back. There have been no reported cases of SARS since then in humans, but SARS is probably thriving. It spread from animal hosts—bats and civets—to humans, and it doubtless retreated back to them.

Some viruses are hard to eradicate because they're lurkers. HIV takes years to produce symptoms, making it hard to recognize and treat infected people. By the time it makes itself known, people may have spread it to many other victims. And doctors still lack vaccines for HIV and many other viruses.

In all these respects, smallpox is a peculiar virus. Unlike SARS, smallpox only infects humans. Unlike HIV, smallpox makes itself known in a matter of days. It's also unusual in that there's a cheap, effective smallpox vaccine. Combined, these three factors made it possible to effectively break the transmission cycle of smallpox and thereby drive it towards extinction.

Whenever a species goes extinct, we lose the opportunity to get to know it better. I'm sure no one would shed a tear at the extinction of smallpox, but, as you note, there's a lot we still don't understand about the virus. I don't think getting the opportunity to try people for crimes against humanity is worth giving up the chance to learn more about smallpox.

Even if smallpox never rears its ugly head again, that knowledge could still be valuable. Studies on smallpox DNA suggest that it evolved just a few thousand years ago from a pox that infected African rodents. Many closely related pox strains infect animals today, and they have plenty of chances to evolve into a new human pox. In 2003, for example, people in the Midwest came down with monkeypox, an African virus that is closely related to smallpox. It was baffling at first that an African pox could infect American victims. Eventually public health workers determined that the victims got the virus from prairie dogs they all bought at the same Missouri pet store.

If smallpox can help us prepare for the next pox, we should resist the urge to annihilate it.

Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring a conversation between Zimmer and Timothy Lu on phage therapy. 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 | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

’Tis the season for award announcements and prize citations, and we're delighted to announced several recent winners and acknowledge their achievements.

We begin with an award close to home: the Gordon J. Laing Prize, which is awarded annually by the University of Chicago Press (since 1963) to the faculty author, editor, or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction. This year, we honor Robert J. Richards for The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.

Continue reading "Awards, fellowships, and recent accolades" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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Our oceans are home to an astounding array of creatures, some of whom engage in peculiar underwater activities that help them stay alive, fight predators, reproduce, and eat. While this might sound simple, the actual patterns and behaviors that determine the rhythms of biodiversity are much more complicated—and witnessed by a very select few of us who dwell above ground. We asked marine scientist Ellen Prager, author of Chasing Science at Sea: Racing Hurricanes, Stalking Sharks, and Living Undersea with Ocean Experts and Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter, on how scientists might engage the public in highly topical matters—like the complications of marine life—that often require them to translate their expertise and specialized knowledge into relevant, accurate, and accessible writing.

The elegant beauty of a pacific sea nettle. Photo copyright David Wrobel / SeaPics.com.

Continue reading "Ellen Prager on Sex, Drugs, Sea Slime, and writing science" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday afternoon, the Poetry Foundation announced their 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner: David Ferry, our own Phoenix Poet and author of three collections published by the University of Chicago Press. The Lilly Poetry Prize is presented annually to a living American poet whose lifetime accomplishments "warrant extraordinary recognition." No small award, this: at $100,000, it is one of the nation's largest and most coveted literary prizes. With all of that in mind, we extend our warmest congratulations to Professor Ferry on this remarkable achievement.

From Poetry editor Christian Wiman's Lilly Prize citation:

"David Ferry is probably best known as a translator—and his achievements in that regard are extraordinary—but I think in the end it will be his poems that last," said Wiman. "In a time when most poetry relies on intense surface energy, Ferry's effects are muted and subterranean—but then, in their cumulative effect, seismic. For 50 years he has practiced poetry as if it truly matters to our lives and to our souls—and now his poems have that rare power to wake us up to both."

We celebrate David Ferry as the author of Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations, Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, and Strangers: A Book of Poems, each of which have been published under the Phoenix Poets imprint. The emeritus Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College, Ferry is a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University, as well as a distinguished visiting scholar at Suffolk University. He has previously been awarded numerous awards and fellowships, throughout his notable career, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and an Academy Award for Literature form the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Phoenix Poets series was inaugurated in 1982 by University of Chicago poetry and poetics professor Robert von Hallberg, and by 1983, had begun to publish an often eclectic and always erudite selection of American and UK-based poets. Books in the series have garnered almost every major poetry prize, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, and others. Now helmed by acquiring editor Randolph Petilos and an anonymous board of editors, Phoenix Poets continues onward into a new century of formal ingenuity, depth of thought, quality of language, and poetic possibility.

Over at Scribd, we've curated a collection of Phoenix Poets titles, all available in ebook format (and discounted in celebration of National Poetry Month). Have a look and consider downloading a title or two, with a bit of praise from Philip Levine in mind:

"For the past several years, the University of Chicago has been publishing some of the finest books by the younger American poets. No other press, in New York or anywhere, is doing any better. In fact, I can't think of one that's done as well."

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | Poetry
Posted by KAM at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Strange indeed are the places that give birth to the ideas that later, for better or worse, find physical form as books. I first encountered my subject lying on my back in a dentist's chair. In an effort to distract the minds of those undergoing treatment, the dentist in question had attached a large photographic poster to the ceiling depicting the earth at night, seen from space. It is to the distant yet familiar world that his patients cast their eyes, sometimes blurred by tears, sometimes pre-naturally sharpened by the effort of ignoring their discomfort. What they learn is that much of the planet we inhabit no longer experiences 'night' as it was once understood."

So James Attlee begins Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, his meditation on the sublunar landscape and all things lux illuminata. Praised by Dominique Browning in the New York Times Book Review as "an inspiration," Nocturne left our critic commenting, "It makes you want to pull a chair out into the garden and bathe in the moonlight. No questions asked."

Jonathan Messinger, of Time Out Chicago, championed Attlee's occasionally gruff yet wildly wondering prose as that of "our kind of codger," while the Sunday Telegraph was struck by how much pleasure Attlee takes "from simply looking."

In addition to reviews of the book, Attlee has been gracing international pages with commentaries and essays on lunar-lit concerns, from a piece on the moon in literature for the Independent and on the supermoon in the Telegraph to a consideration of darkness in the Observer. All of this, not at all unexpected, from someone whose touchstones shift with such ease from Goethe, Auden, and Basho, to black and white photography, copper mines, and True Detective Magazine.

Piqued your interest?

Listen to Attlee reading excerpts from the book (in streaming format) here, taped during a recent Press trip to Oxford, UK. And, as ever, for additional information about Nocturne, pay a visit to the book's University of Chicago Press webpage.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by KAM at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elizabeth Taylor was the twentieth century's White Diamond—in an age that saw the decline of the Hollywood icon, her violet-eyed takes on high society Angela Vickers, hard-drinking Martha, and unhinged Maggie the Cat channeled pure lady power. It's not surprising that so many felt touched both publicly and privately by the the much-married screen siren, humanitarian, perfume impresario, and perpetual tabloid cover model. Perhaps one of the more interesting elements to explore in the wake of Taylor's death is the outpouring of public grief, from shrines set up at iconic gay bars to violet-hued flowers left on the actress's Hollywood star. We asked Notre Dame professor of American studies Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America to share her thoughts on what might be behind contemporary culture's memorial obsessions:

Elizabeth Taylor died this past Wednesday (March 23rd), and within hours the public grief industry kicked into full production. Fans gathered around her star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame, leaving bouquets of flowers dyed to match her violet-colored eyes. Reporters mobbed them with questions about what Taylor "meant" to them; responses ranged from her "eternal movie star beauty" to her "multiple marriages" (eight in total, twice to Richard Burton) and activism on behalf of AIDS research. Other mourners flocked to the Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood where Taylor regularly downed watermelon martinis. A temporary shrine featuring floral wreaths, votive candles, film stills, and other tokens of remembrance was set up in the bar's VIP room; on a nearby table, staffers set aside a Blue Velvet Martini (vodka and blueberry schnapps) in tribute to Taylor's 1944 movie National Velvet. In terms of specific places to grieve, there really wasn't anywhere else for fans to congregate: no Graceland or traumatic death site. The seventy-nine-year-old actress died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and in accordance with personal wishes and Jewish tradition, was buried twenty-four hours later in Forest Lawn Cemetery in a private ceremony attended by her closest friends and family.

Many fans turned to online grief support groups. Internet memorial outfits like "The Eternal Portal," "Respectance," "Valley of Life," "Gone Too Soon," and "Memorial Matters," which offer services ranging from building memorial websites ("simple to create, remember anywhere," fourteen-day no obligation) to selling commemorative products (armbands, candles, balloons, and awareness ribbons personalized with the name of the deceased), saw a flurry of quickly made Elizabeth Taylor tributes. Other stars and celebs paid tribute on Twitter: Elton John, "We have just lost a Hollywood giant. More importantly, we have lost an incredible human being"; Russell Crowe, "R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor, Goddess"; Kirstie Alley, "Elizabeth . . . thank u for the lessons u taught me about life . . . suffering and Joy . . . you are the BRIGHTEST STAR in the universe. . . Eternal love"; Joan Rivers, "Sad to hear of Elizabeth Taylor's death. She was the 1st major celebrity to join me in the fight against AIDS when it wasn't a popular cause." By Wednesday night, hundreds of thousands of Tweets, Facebook messages, and blog diaries featured the shared sentiment: "R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor."

Temporary memorials, online shrines, and social networking practices all point to changed understandings—and expectations—of public mourning in America today. The more tragic and traumatic the death, or the more sudden and surprising, the more effusive the public display of grief. When Taylor's good friend Michael Jackson died in July 2009, for example, thousands descended upon the teeny white house in Gary, Indiana where Jackson and his siblings were raised. Dozens of TV crews and reporters set up camp while a steady stream of mourners added teddy bears, condolence cards, and hand-painted pictures of the King of Pop to a sprawling shrine that took up most of the front yard. Fans held candlelight vigils in the street and practiced Moonwalking; neighborhood kids hawked tshirts, CDs, and bottles of water.

For her part, Dame Elizabeth Taylor shrugged off such carnivalesque performances of grief. "I can't be part of the public whoopla," she told one reporter after Jackson died. "I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us, not a public event." She might have been amused by the very public dimensions of her own passing.

For more of Doss's thoughts on the culture of commemoration and our obsession with issues of memory and history, have a look at Memorial Mania's UCP page here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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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)

The eastern mountain lion—called occasionally cougar, catamount, panther, painter, puma, or mountain screamer—was once one of the most widely distributed terrestrial mammals in the Western Hemisphere. But times have turned for these secretive and crepuscular big cats (the cougar is the largest of the small cats, actually, although it characteristically resembles those from the larger Pantherinae subfamily). In the twentieth century, following two centuries of European colonization, the mountain lion population on the Eastern seaboard was declared all but extinct. Dwellers in this coastal region questioned the existence of this majestic subspecies, giving rise to all sorts of legends—all of this despite the fact that it had been officially listed on the United States Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species list since 1973.

On March 2, 2011, the USFWS finally declared the eastern mountain lion (Felis concolor couguar) officially extinct.

"We recognize that many people have seen cougars in the wild within the historical range of the eastern cougar," said the Service's Northeast Region Chief of Endangered Species Martin Miller. "However, we believe those cougars are not the eastern cougar subspecies. We found no information to support the continued existence of the eastern cougar."

The Service's decision to formalize the extinction of the eastern cougar does not affect the status of yet another wild cat subspecies listed as endangered: the Florida panther. Once one of the most common predators of the Southeast, the Florida panther now exists in a breeding population of less than 200, which combs a habitat less than five percent of its original size and scale.

Maurice Hornocker, director of the non-profit Selway Institute, began his first long-term study of cougars in 1964. Since then, his groundbreaking research has led to more than 100 published papers on everything from the lynx and bobcat, to the ocelot, wolverine, and yes—even the Florida panther. Cougar: Ecology and Conservation is the capstone to Hornocker's pioneering career as a big cat researcher, and a powerful resource for scientists and conservationists alike. Edited in tandem with Sharon Negri, Cougar brings together twenty-two distinguished scientists, who together offer our fullest account yet of the cougar's behavior, genetics, ecology, and conservation needs, accompanied by stunning photographs of the creature in the wild and in captivity. From firsthand field research to ecosystem analyses, Cougar puts recent extinctions like that of the eastern mountain lion in perspective, and cautions new generations as to what delicate balances keep these enigmatic creatures from facing oblivion.

To learn more about cougar conservation, visit the Cougar Network or check out the Cougar Fact Center at the World Wildlife Fund. For additional information about Cougar: Ecology and Conservation, including reviews and awards, please visit the book's University of Chicago Press website, here.

Bruce Wright, New Brunswick wildlife biologist and author, with what is believed to be the last eastern puma. The puma was trapped by Rosarie Morin of St. Zacharie, Quebec in Somerset County, Maine in 1938. Mounted specimen resides in the New Brunswick Museum in St. John, New Brunswick (image and photo credit courtesy the USFWS).

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by KAM at 03:54 PM | 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)

Welcome to TRAFFIC, an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities, social science, and natural sciences, whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us.

Join us for the two-day exchange TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril on the future of that nation and the larger global consequences, in light of the recent tsunami and earthquake that devastated the Tōhoku region on the Pacific coast, leaving left thousands dead, tens of thousands more imperiled, and a series of nuclear reactors on the brink of partial meltdown. Today, we asked sociologist Lee Clarke, a specialist in technological and organizational failures, with expertise in community response to disaster, and Ronald T. Merrill, a geophysicist and paleomagnetic pioneer, to share their thoughts with us on how they see Japan's future unfolding:

From Ronald T. Merrill, author of Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism:

My wife and I lived in Japan most of 1965 while I was studying geophysics. During that time we made many friends, which have subsequently increased in number. We wish them all the best during this tragic time.

Although somewhat painful, earth scientists can use this tragedy as an opportunity to educate others on earthquakes and tsunamis. Unfortunately, there likely could be more bad news to come. My 'rule of thumb' is to expect that another earthquake, about a magnitude smaller than the main shock, could be among the many aftershocks to follow in the coming year or so. Although such an aftershock (around magnitude 8) would have about 30 times less energy than the 9.0 earthquake that struck on March 11 (not the ten times less energy often erroneously given in the popular media), it would still release hundreds of times more energy than did the Hiroshima atomic bomb dropped near the end of World War II. It could also trigger another devastating tsunami.

Although we all hope that this possibility is not realized, we can reflect on what we would do in a similar situation, particularly in Washington State where I live. About 13 subduction earthquakes with magnitude near 9 are estimated to have occurred off our coast during the past 7500 years. The last one occurred in 1700 and was large enough to produce a tsunami that struck Japan with waves several feet tall. Such an earthquake is almost inevitable in our State's future, even though seismologists do not have the capability of predicting just when this will occur.

In the meantime, everyone living where earthquakes occur should consider how prepared they are: Do you know what to do in the event of an earthquake? Have your bookcases been secured to a wall? Where do you plan to obtain drinking water when your taps fail and none is available to purchase? These questions and others are well worth considering now.

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From Lee Clarke, author of Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Modern Imagination:

Some working hypotheses

The horrors in Japan reveal the folly of concentration. In Worst Cases, I flagged population concentration as one of the social conditions that gives rise to "globally relevant disasters." People concentrate themselves in dangerous places and this makes them a target that's easier to strike when hazards come along. Japan is in the Ring of Fire. So is Indonesia, where 250,000 died in the 2004 tsunami. So are two nuclear plants in California, Diablo Canyon and San Onofre (2 live reactors, 1 dead one, also "spent" nuclear fuel).

Thinking in terms of worst cases isn't always a bad idea. I've taken a little heat, so to speak, over the past five years for advocating "possibilistic thinking." This heat is mainly from people who didn't read the book. But if there'd been more of it in Japan maybe they wouldn't have put the backup generators in the basement. Maybe someone would have said "Well, it's unlikely but if a tsunami rolls in we want to have the cooling system well above sea level; the consequences could be really bad."

We flaunt our vulnerabilities to powerful forces like the atom, the sea, tectonic plates, and organizational failures, to great peril. Hubris is at the root of many of our vulnerabilities. As I wrote in Worst Cases, "Hubris enables people to push the envelope, to build things never before built, and to think of things never before thought." Hubris can help the audacious imagination. But it can just as easily hurt the impudent one. Here are some examples: thinking the Mississippi River can be controlled indefinitely, presuming New York City is safe from hurricanes, and neglecting the New Madrid fault.

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Join us tomorrow for Part II of TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril, with additional commentary from an ageism expert and Japanese historian on what happens next—and how we might prepare for this future.

For additional information on Lee Clarke's Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination, and Ronald T. Merrill's Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism, please visit the University of Chicago Press's website here.

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

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Archived in Books for the News | Cartography and Geography | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events
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John Martin (1789-1854), English Romantic painter, was born the same week that the Bastille was stormed—an event whose sturm und drang might be said to eerily echo the grandiose theatrical visions of Martin's work in oils. Martin's large-scale paintings bore the influence of contemporary diorama culture—indeed, Martin even claimed that D. W. Griffith was aware of his work and many see his panoramic, imaginative works as precursors to epic cinema. During the last four years of his life, in particular, Martin furthered his scenes of apocalyptic destruction and disaster by engaging with a triptych of biblical subjects: The Great Day of His Wrath, The Last Judgment, and The Plains of Heaven.

This week, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle opened a major new exhibition of Martin's work, which will run through the end of April before traveling to the Tate Museum later this year. This is the largest public exhibition of Martin's work since his death and the first exhibition devoted to the painter in more than thirty years, and it will include both previously unseen and newly restored paintings. Paying particular attention to how Martin's populism fits within the larger narrative of British art, the exhibition also connects to larger questions of showmanship, science, epic morality, and today's charged social and political culture.

In The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856, Ralph O'Connor demonstrates how Martin's art helped to give birth to the modern geological imagination. The story of the nineteenth-century geological writers—James Parkinson, John Playfair, William Buckland, James Rennie, and others—is a saga on par with the theatricality of Martin's paintings. Backed by other men of science, clergymen, and hacks who borrowed freely from the Bible, poetry, and the panorama industry, these pioneering scientists piqued the public imagination by recasting the story of creation with uncouth mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and serpentine sea dragons in lieu of Adam and Eve. Just as Martin's paintings circulated through a public sphere half charged by fear of a coming moral apocalypse and half enthralled by new theatrical opportunities, so too did Victorian geological writing enter into the discourse of the wider Bible-reading public.

The Earth on Show garnered several prizes, including the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the Best Book Award from the British Society for Literature and Science—with Martin's retrospective as impetus, it's as good a time as any to revisit its enthusiasm for the days when paleontological wonders first went public.

The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-53), John Martin. Courtesy of the Tate, London, 2010.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Our democracy is out of control in Wisconsin," Mr. Barca said. "And you all know it—you can feel it."

A quote from this morning's New York Times, by State Representative and Wisconsin Democrat Peter Barca reveals the escalation of already tense emotions in Madison as the State Assembly prepares to vote on a bill curtailing bargaining rights for many government workers.* Wisconsin has been a site for national and international coverage in past weeks, as tens of thousands of protesters have take to the Wisconsin State Capitol in demonstrations against Republican Scott Walker's proposed legislation—which would weaken collective bargaining for state employees, requiring those employees to contribute 5.8 percent of their salaries to cover pension costs, and 12.6 percent towards health care premiums.

Recent studies, including one published by the Wall Street Journal, emphasize that growth in state and local government jobs nearly doubles the rate of population growth, and public unions depend on tax revenues to generate pay and benefits. For Wisconsin, a state whose 2003 and 2011 tax cuts may help to generate up to an 800 million dollar reduction in tax revenues by 2013, the situation is dire; this, coupled with Governor Walker's legislation, which is part of a "budget repair bill," could affect thousands of workers seeking to organize in their own interests. All of this, despite a particularly rich union history: Wisconsin was the first state in the United States to provide collective bargaining rights to public employees, back in 1959.

Richard B. Freeman and Casey Ichniowski's When Public Sector Workers Unionize was first published in 1988, when public sector unionism had become one of the most dynamic components of the American labor movement. Contributors to the book focus on the role of labor-management relations in the public sphere, and pay special attention to what the private sector can learn from what was—at the time—the fairly unmitigated success of collective bargaining in the public. The larger arguments of the book acknowledge how public sector unionism affects the economy—stimulating employment, reducing layoff rates, and developing innovative ways to settle labor disputes. Commissioned by the nonprofit, nonpartisan, private National Bureau of Economic Research during the 1980s, the study behind the book offers a new lens through which we might view what's happening today in Madison: and question what consequences might be foreseen by the bill's passing.

*The bill passed 53-42 in the state Assembly later this afternoon and will now be put into the hands of Governor Walker, who has promised to sign it.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
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David Antin, champion of avant-garde sensibility, performance poet, critic, and peerless conversationalist was once David Antin, small press magazine editor. As an excerpt—from Antin's Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005—recently published by Design Observer recalls, Antin's days editing some/thing with his friend Jerome Rothenberg were not without their difficulties.

Without giving everything away, we'll quickly make mention that the excerpt is taken from the book's Introduction, in which Antin charts his course from linguistics doctoral student to critic of art and literature. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters that reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century cultural life: Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, John Ashbery, LeRoi Jones, John Baldessari, Frank O'Hara, Stan Brakhage, Allen Ginsberg, and paintings by Klee, Kandinsky, and Kirchner, among others. Zoning in on one particular episode that featured Andy Warhol designing the cover of some/thing's Vietnam issue, Antin remembered:

When I went to see Andy I showed him our previous issues and told him about the Vietnam issue we were planning, he said, "Great!" What he'd really like to do was a Vietcong flag. But I said, "What we'd like you to do is take a prowar slogan like 'BOMB HANOI!' put it on the cover as a button, and fuck it up any way you like." So Andy said, "Great!" and I thought it was settled. But over the next two weeks I ran into Gerard Malanga twice in the Eighth Street Bookshop, and he told me Andy would really like to do a Vietcong flag. Finally I said, "Look Gerard, I don't know too much about the Vietcong, and neither do you or Andy. But what we do know about are the American warmongers. So what I want is for Andy to take one of their idiot slogans and fuck it up any way he likes for our cover. That way any member of the American Legion could pick up a copy on a news stand and maybe read it." Andy finally did it with the image of the BOMB HANOI button repeated over and over gain on a cover that functioned as a page of grungy looking stamps you could tear apart along the perforations and if you felt like it glue on a wall. When I gave Allen Ginsberg his copy, Allen's jaw dropped and he said "What's this?" Then he turned it over, saw his name on the back and said, "It's all right, I'm in it."

some/thing Vol. 2, No.1, Winter 1966
(image and caption courtesy of David Antin)

"The cover Warhol finally approved for the Bomb Hanoi issue. The cover was a sheet of real glue-backed stamps, made convenient for tearing out and pasting on telephone poles or subway walls by real perforations. It carried the deteriorated pro-war image Warhol was trying to show in all its pro-war shabbiness. It rhymed with the collage of war-promoting propaganda of the American and South Vietnamese Generals and the 'Best and the Brightest'—the Rusks, the McNamaras, the Rostows and the still servile American press that surrounded a hapless LBJ in which we embedded the poetry and prose of the American avant garde."

For additional images from some/thing's Vietnam issue, including the cover's first take and the issue's table of contents, visit the Observatory archive at Design Observer; for more information on Radical Coherency, visit the book's UCP page here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by KAM at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday marked the twenty-eighth anniversary of the death of Arthur Koestler (1905-83), one of the twentieth century's more complicated—and controversial—figures: a former Communist Party member and anti-totalitarian scribe; a university dropout, born in Budapest to a mother who was once a patient of Freud, who later renounced his citizenship; a pioneer of science studies with an intrepid interest in the paranormal; and a man frequently preoccupied with death and uncertainty who committed suicide.

Among his numerous biographies, novels, and essays is the work Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, which chronicles the fall of Málaga in 1937, when Koestler was a German exile writing for a British newspaper. Arrested by Nationalist forces, Koestler spent the next three months in a prison cell in Seville, watching fellow prisoners meet their execution without notice and living in constant fear that his life could end at any moment.

The result is a mix of Doestoevskian insight and journalistic observation. Part journal and part reconstruction, Dialogue with Death is Koestler's conversation with himself, filled with moments of eerily "Olympian calm" and "colorless disappointment." Koestler reads Nerval, Bunin, Stevenson, Tolstoy, Plato, St. Simeon, and others, speaks broken Spanish, and considers the anniversary of the Republic, all while ripping strips off of his shirt to stuff into his ears so as not to hear the cries of those shot during the night.

But the candor and extreme self-analysis that carry through this type of experience can often alter perspective. What kind of narrative journalist is Koestler? And what type of biographical writing does the book become? In his Introduction to the new University of Chicago Press edition, Louis Menand makes mention of one salient fact:

There is no reason to doubt anything in the account Koestler gives in Dialogue with Death of his arrest and his ninety-four days in captivity, but there is one major elision. As he made clear in the preface he wrote for the 1967 reprinting of the book, contrary to what William Randolph Heart, the fifty-six MPs, and the League of Nations may have believed, Koestler was not really a journalist when he went to Spain. He was exactly what Franco suspected him of being: a Communist agent. And so he genuinely was, for those three months, at every moment on the verge of being shot. Oddly, this elision (or evasion) is what gives this nonfiction book a kind of literary permanence.

It's just this sort of detail that makes Koestler the memoir writer as complicated as Koestler the man. As Menand continues:

It is not likely that Koestler was embarrassed about his Communist past. He would write openly about it just a few years later, in The God that Failed; and, in any case, he seems a man who was embarrassed by nothing. He must have seen that the reasons for finding himself in the situation he describes in Dialogue with Death are not important. Between 1933 and 1945, millions of Europeans, the grand and the ordinary, the infamous and the insignificant, found themselves confronted with the knock on the door, with an imminent threat of annihilation. Dialogue with Death is the story of a man who escaped, and only by a hair, his own knock on the door.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature
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Oxford is a city that with a rich history and receptive memory: a crossroads where the Thames changes its name to Isis; land of the ford, Tolkien, Murdoch, and Bayley; home of Pressed Steel to the east and a certain medieval University on its left-facing bank. The quintessential—yet entirely unique—university town. Or is it?

You'll want to consider this before departing on your own pilgrimage, with art publisher and writer James Attlee, in our free e-book for the month of March, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey.

Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates a particular area in order to present it in detail, and that's just what the book does for Oxford's Cowley Road. Drawing from sources ranging from Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy and Cage's 4'33" to readings of Lucretius and contemporary art, our guide engages with every aspect of Cowley Road's eclectic culture: pornography emporiums, sensory deprivation tanks, halal shops, and car factories included. Accompanied by a notebook and a tape recorder, Attlee records the immediate details of his surroundings and revels in the allegorical depths of the everyday. The result? This eloquent hymn in praise of the invigorating, complex nature of the twenty-first century city and the ultimate East Oxford book.

"An iridescent picture of a new Oxford that no guide book has yet captured."—New York Times

"Attlee's reading is deep and wide and engagingly circuitous, and this book frequently provides the delights of discovery that make any adventure worth undertaking."—Bookforum

Curious? Read an excerpt. Or download your free copy of Isolarion today (and through the end of the month)—and if you like what you read, consider accompanying Attlee on another voyage: this one by moonlight.

(More about Chicago Digital Edition our free e-book of the month program, including a chance to subscribe and discounts on related books, can be found here.)

Archived in Books for the News | Cartography and Geography | Literature
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In the spirit of Presidents' Day (in other birthday news: the cribbing of W. H. Auden lines —"One rational voice is dumb/Over his grave the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved"), we're celebrating the caricatured, the cartoonish, the garishly sketch, the "Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead!" reverie of Fathers, Founding and Our American Presidents. With that in mind, here's a list of commands our backlist has in reserve for our Commander(s)-in-Chief:

Top Five of Ten: We command you, Commander!

Richard Nixon, with this volume Philip Guston's Poor Richard by Debra Bricker Balken, we command you:

"Openly betray your sense of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery representative of the American 1970s: fill it with personal and political meaning that helps to bring about the renewal of the figure in painting and a witty, sardonic take on a political regime gone awry. Be good."

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Gerald Ford, with this volume Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future by Newton N. Minow and Craig L. Lamay, we command you:

"Consider a neck and shoulder massage. Relax. Watch and rewatch Fletch. During the October 1976 presidential debate, consider building a time machine and traveling to 1989, when the statement 'Poland is no longer under communist domination' will actually ring true."

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John Adams, with this volume Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility by G. J. Barker-Benfield, we command you:

"Heed Abigail's advice: 'I love to amuse myself with my pen, and pour out some of the tender sentiments of a Heart over flowing with affection, not for the Eye of a cruel Enemy who no doubt would ridicule every Humane and Social Sentiment long ago grown Callous to the finer sensibilities—but for the sympathetick Heart that Beats in unison with.' Careful also, sir, with those Boston Patriot letters to the editor."

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Abraham Lincoln, with this volume Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America by Barry Schwartz, we command you:

"Transcend controversies for secular sainthood. Withstand indifference, questioning, and cynicism: embrace your flaws, do justice, protect Mary Todd from those bad séance vibes."

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George Herbert Walker Bush, with this volume Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History by Jan R. Van Meter, we command you:

"Consider what is old and passing; throw the I Ching. Watch the low Neap tide under a Kennebunkport moon. Usher in your acceptance of the GOP presidential nomination with the promise of a lesson learned: No new tricycles, tragedies, tautologies; No new Tao. . . . No new teleology, temp agency, television mini-series. . . . No new Terms of Endearment, tipping point, toxoplasmosis. . . . No new. . . . Nothing new. . . . Nothing new under the sun, George. Read your Beckett."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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Full confession: it's Yoko Ono's birthday. In a Fluxus-inspired riff, we cribbed knowledge of the odd science that follows below first from the Atlantic and then from Drew Grant's piece at Salon. Part of a much bigger trend (we use trend skeptically since this sort of thing—video games, the a-r-t remix—has been around at least since the early days of artist-hackers like Cory Arcangel and SF Moma's 2001 exhibition "ArtCade: Exploring the Relationship Between Video Games and Art"), repurposing new technology (digital coding) in order to transform older technologies (Atari- and Nintendo-inspired video game cartridges) into faux cultural artifacts seems to be all the rage.

What got us excited? Old school video game adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Waiting for Godot, naturally. As one writer opined, it's a particular type of nerd that feels elated at choosing between the Vladimir and Estragon avatars (was "avatar" part of the terminology from the Frogger years?). But there's a certain euphoria (or better: eunoia) experienced in navigating a pint-sized Nick Carraway through Level 1: Gatsby's Party, even if the adaptation only skims the surface scenery of the book. Why, we wonder, is this?

Edward Castronova pioneered the study of virtual gaming in Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Gaming (interview here), offering perspective on the social culture and synthetic world economics involved. But these games aren't world-creating in the same way; they speak to fans of the literature (as do the game adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, and others) or those fascinated by the interstices of high-tech/low-tech digital arts. Seemingly driven in part by nostalgia for simplicity and in part by cultural capital, games like The Great Gatsby fall into one of the digital humanities' new great new divides: art meet science meet a time machine.

Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover's new collection Switching Codes: Thinking through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts excavates this complex terrain. Contributors—including Bruno Latour, Charles Bernstein, Alain Liu, and Richard Powers—employ a variety of forms (among them: game design) to consider the precipitous growth of digital information over the past half century has transformed how we think and act in our increasingly mediated age. Switching Codes address the cognitive gap between IT specialists and scholars, both of them utilizing and making sense of technology, while using language and skill sets not necessarily complimentary to each other. In the face of all of this, new criteria emerges.

Just this past Wednesday, the Globe and Mail previewed the Smithsonian Museum of American Art's forthcoming exhibition "The Art of Video Games," noting:

[T]he museum wants to centre the exhibit "on visual effects and the creative use of new technologies." We're not being asked to elect our favourite games, but rather those that were most visually compelling and technologically innovative for their time (the selections have been divvied up into five eras). That means conscientiously selecting between a couple of games like Disney Epic Mickey, which delivered mediocre play but offered up some amazingly authentic interactive versions of 70 year-old cartoons, and Super Mario Galaxy 2, which had great play scenarios but didn't advance the graphical bar much beyond its predecessor, isn't as cut and dry as you might think.

Are video games inherently art? Is a forward-moving technology part of the criteria with which we should evaluate their appeal—and success? And what to make of an odd duck like The Great Gatsby game, with its out-of-date technology and literary underpinning? The Medium was Tedium, certainly. But in this case: maybe the Mediated was Appreciated?

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Literature
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We're just settling in after our long winter's nap (in which we dream a dream very much like the College Art Association's annual meeting and centennial year launch in New York), chiding ourselves for forgetting to offer some important early February accolades.

Last week, at a ceremony in Washington, DC, the 2010 PROSE Awards were announced, honoring the best scholarly and professional publications in over forty categories, nominated by peer publishers, librarians, and science professionals.

Among them? The PROSE Award for U.S. History, handed out to Claude Fischer's Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, in which Fischer draws upon decades worth of research to track our American "We" over the past three centuries. And we were just as delighted to see Courtney Bender's The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, a work that locates contemporary American spiritual beliefs in various nineteenth-century movements, take home the PROSE Award for Theology and Religious Studies.

And let's add kudos for our honorable mentions to this rousing chorus: Matthew Jesse Jackson's The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (Art History and Criticism), Alan D. Schrift's The History of Continental Philosophy (Multivolume Reference, Humanities and Social Science), Harvey G. Cohen's Duke Ellington's America (Music and the Performing Arts), and Christian Smith's What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Philosophy).

If you've needed an excuse to delve deeper into our newly revamped website in order to explore an option or two, this is the perfect excuse! With that invitation, we offer our most sincere congrats to all the winners and nominees:

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | History | Religion
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It's nearly impossible to turn away from the tumultuous events in Cairo, and to make sense of rights and freedoms on the line from an international vantage. We've been following the feeds at the Guardian and most recently reading PEN International's statement, released this morning, and thinking about the March of Millions planned for Tuesday. In trying to stay present with the coverage and assessing where to begin to solidify our understanding of a nation's culture and a movement for its people, we came across the music of Umm Kulthum, whose fallahah (peasant) perspective imbued her life and work, offering insight into the cultural and political studies that Egypt faced only a generation or two before.

Kulthum, the "voice of Egypt" (also "the Star of the East" and the "Nightingale of the Nile"), was one of the most celebrated performers of the twentieth-century Arab world. The idiom she created from local culture and traditions helped her to develop a populist musical practice that was heralded as a crowning example of a new, yet authentically Arab-Egyptian culture, during tumultuous changes mid-century.

Perhaps most pressingly, Kulthum's music and public persona helped to contribute to the artistic, societal, and political forces that surrounded her, the daughter of an Imam, lauded by Maria Callas and Charles de Gaulle, exiled and reinstated from the Egyptian musician's guild following the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Virginia Danielson's The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century is the first English-language biography of this remarkable figure (see a website devoted to her life and work here), and a chronicle of societal shifts in this modern nation whose repercussions are still relevant and a part of events today.

With Egypt in mind—listen to Umm Kulthum singing "Enta Omri" below:

Archived in Books for the News | Music | Politics and Current Events
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It's that time again: we accidentally left a printout near the copier on the 3rd of May 2010 (Goya reference not lost upon us!), only to find it still there this afternoon. With that melding of the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation in mind ("Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born I was/Thursday's child"), let's again revisit the week that was:

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The Times Higher Ed profiled Kenneth J. McNamara's The Star-Crossed Stone: The Secret Life, Myths, and History of a Fascinating Fossil. Their verdict? "A scholarly but highly accessible book, peppered with stories of the archaeologists responsible for excavating sites containing fossils" which "skillfully mingles anecdote with hard evidence."

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Just days before the book was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence was the subject of Jed Perl's thoughtful and challenging piece in the New Republic, where Perl commended Linfield's "natural appetite for photographic images" and her refusal "to be boxed in by any particular discipline or literary genre." What's all the fuss about? Excerpt here.

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In the Guardian, Ann Fabian's The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead was featured in the Birdbooker Report as "an interesting story" that "takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history."

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The just-released February/March 2011 issue of Bookforum includes reviews on two recent University of Chicago Press books: Rebecca Messbarger's The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini and James Attlee's Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight. Since both reviews are part of the print edition, you'll have to take our word for the praises below:

"Decaying corpses, flayed limbs, home laboratories—Rebecca Messbarger's new book has all the makings of a horror story. . . . Messbarger draws on her deep knowledge of the period as well as on a rich trove of archival materials to make a strong case for her subject's exceptional status as both artist and anatomist."

"For Attlee, the power of moonlight is not so much what it allows us to see as what it allows us to look away
from. . . . When we undermine the dominance of sight, we remember how to feel our way through the world and encounter a lost intuition."

**

Michael P. Jeffries, whose book Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop just made its debut, has a thoughtful piece up at the Atlantic entitled, "Is Barack Obama Really the Hip-Hop President?" With a nod to Young Jeezy, multiple subjectivity, and Dreams from My Father, Jeffries interrogates the "sloppy racial reasoning that fuels pop-cultural romanticism."

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Annelise Riles, author of the forthcoming Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Finance Markets, made the front page of today's Huffington Post with a column offering an anthropologist's perspective on market reform. Like what you read? Check out her Collateral Knowledge blog here

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Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred has a wonderfully nerdy piece up at Boing Boing on (echo? echo?) on the paranormal and popular culture. Arthur Koestler, Buddhist temples, the Johnson space station, superheroes, psychedelic tea, and a touch of sophistication, oh my!

**

Thomas DaCosta Kauffmann's Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting was reviewed in Toronto's National Post. The reviewer's verdict on Arcimboldo? "He was easily the oddest damn artist of the whole Renaissance." On the book? "Kaufmann, as a good historian, wants us to understand the Arcimboldo his contemporaries knew him."

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And finally—Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses continues to ride the warp and weft of the World Wide Web. We've touched upon some of its successes here and can only add: if it was once the Summer of Hayek, can this mean that we've finally reached the Winter of Our Discontent?

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Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Reviews | UCP News
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On the heels of last night's State of the Union speech, which saw President Obama addressing a newly divided Congress, and amid the varied responses, rebuttals, and interpretations that have emerged, we asked Sandra M. Gustafson, author of the forthcoming Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic to weigh in on how deliberation was shaping the current political climate. Gustafson digs deep into Obama's rhetoric, connecting it to several speeches written during his presidential tenure, as well as early Congressional debates that shaped our civic discourse, nineteenth-century American literature, and the recent events in Tucson. Read Gustafson's compelling take below:

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In a recent op-ed published by the New York Times, Joanne B. Freeman provides a chilling background for reports that, in the wake of the Tucson shootings earlier this month, several lawmakers planned to begin carrying guns. Freeman's article relates the little-known story of the violence that disrupted Congressional debates in the years leading up to the Civil War. In those years legislators threatened and sometimes attacked one another with guns, knives, and canes. But there is another and more hopeful side to this history.

James Madison championed deliberation as a central feature of the government created by the United States Constitution, and in the years after the nation's founding many writers and public figures worked to make the ideal of deliberation into a reality. No public figure contributed more to this effort than Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who in his speeches to Congress repeatedly returned to the ideals of republican self-governance that Americans of his day associated with Cicero. These efforts became more urgent following the election of Andrew Jackson, who for the first time brought frontier culture into the White House. Best known for embodying a particular version of American democracy (one identified with giving white men the vote regardless of property qualifications), Jackson also contributed to a political climate of conflict and violence that was most apparent in the removal of Native Americans from their homeland and the escalating tensions over slavery.

Webster's effort to make American civic discourse increasingly deliberative is nowhere more apparent than in an 1830 speech known as the Second Reply to Hayne—an address that continued to be widely taught in American schools well into the twentieth century and that has long been celebrated for its ringing proclamation, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" The Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate involved competing regional alliances, economic programs, and interpretations of the federal system. Both sides of the debate claimed to be perpetuating the values of the nation's founders. As a proponent of Henry Clay's American System, Webster argued that public lands should be administered for the good of the nation. He criticized Hayne and by implication, Hayne's fellow South Carolinian, Vice President John Calhoun, the major exponent of nullification, for putting local interests over national ones. Like Calhoun, Hayne argued for a loose and soluble federal system which gave priority to discrete local needs, such as the protection and expansion of slavery, and did not attempt to manufacture a vision of the good of the whole.

Webster put particular emphasis in his address on the deteriorating conditions of debate generated by the nullification movement. He charged that over the previous two days, Hayne had touched on a wide array of topics with the single exception of the public lands—to which he had "not paid even the cold respect of a passing glance." Not only had Hayne been disrespectful to the Senate by ignoring the subject of the resolution, he had been rude to Webster personally, refusing his northern colleague's request to delay the debate because Hayne had "something rankling" in his heart and because "he had a shot . . . to return, and he wished to discharge it." Webster mocked Hayne's rhetorical violence, observing that "if nobody is found, after all, either killed or wounded, it is not the first time, in the history of human affairs, that the vigor and success of the war have not quite come up to the lofty and sounding phrase of the manifesto." He then contrasted Hayne's anger toward him with his own even temper and respectful treatment of his colleague. The Senate, Webster continued with a rising emphasis, is "a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators." The floor of the Senate was not the arena for rhetorical contests but "a hall for mutual consultation and discussion." Throughout his lengthy address Webster repeatedly criticized Hayne for fostering "party abuse and frothy violence" and for claiming that the Democratic Party to which he belonged was "the true Pure, the only honest, patriotic party."

Webster further contested Hayne's interpretation of the Constitution, which held that state legislatures could declare federal laws unconstitutional. In this view, the federal government was based upon a compact and thus was not a national state in the full sense of the term. Webster insisted that the sovereign people, and not the states, authorize the federal government. In a famous passage that Abraham Lincoln later echoed in the Gettysburg Address, Webster insisted that "It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Nullification theory destroyed the Constitution, undermining the government until it became merely "a collection of topics for everlasting controversy; heads of debate for a disputatious people." Webster explained the nullifiers' capacity to reduce the federal government to powerlessness as a function of the way the human mind is constituted. In a controversy, Webster suggested, both sides of the argument appear "very clear, and very palpable, to those who respectively espouse them; and both sides usually grow clearer as the controversy advances." Webster warned that extreme polarization of the sort fostered by Hayne's militarist rhetoric would lead to the real violence that Freeman describes.

Webster was not the only voice calling for more mutually respectful public debates. Such appeals occurred in unexpected places, such as the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans, which appeared just four years before Webster's speech, contains plenty of violence, but it also includes a great many scenes of respectful consultation and thoughtful decision making, notably between Natty Bumppo and his Delaware companions. Cooper bluntly observes of one such scene that "the most decorous christian [sic] assembly," even a collection of "reverend ministers," "might have learned a wholesome lesson of moderation from the forbearance and courtesy of the disputants." Another frontier voice, that of David Crockett, used humor rather than violence as a means to challenge opponents, showing how it could be used to create strong social bonds that foster the common good. When Crockett served as Representative from Tennessee, he publicly broke with Jackson over his land and Indian policies and allied himself with Daniel Webster and his associates. The words of Webster, Cooper, and Crockett offer a striking reflection on the road not taken in the political struggle over national expansion and slavery.

The State of the Union speech last night moved the United States further down the road toward the civil and deliberate politics that Webster and others envisioned. Recoiling from the violence in Tucson, rather than brandishing guns at one another, many legislators chose to sit with members of the other party in an effort to foster greater comity in what has been an unusually polarized Congress. Observers noted the change that this seating arrangement made in the tone of the event, which was less boisterous and partisan, more thoughtful and deliberate than in years past. President Obama contributed to that tone by stressing the themes of civility and consensus-building which have characterized his political message since he rose to national attention with his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, where he memorably said "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America." The proposals in his speech last night drew from both liberal and conservative agendas in a pragmatist effort to elicit the best ideas from both sides to most effectively address national concerns.

It was in this spirit that he opened his speech with an echo of the 2004 address that launched his national career, as well as with an acknowledgment of his moving tribute to Christina Taylor Green, the nine-year-old victim of the Tucson shootings, whose family sat in the gallery next to Michelle Obama:

"We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled."

This description of a national family, and the subtle reference to a young girl's untimely death, allude to another classic work from the antebellum United States: Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), in which Little Eva dies because of her deep attunement to the sufferings of the slaves, which, she says, sink into her heart.

This is not the first time that the president's rhetoric has evoked Stowe's novel. In the conclusion to "A More Perfect Union," his speech on race in America delivered in March 2008, Obama told the story of a young campaign worker named Ashley whose commitment attracted an elderly black man. The story of this unlikely pair resonates with the powerful connection between Little Eva and Uncle Tom. As Obama noted then, "that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children." The civil and deliberate tone that Congress and the President set at the State of the Union address will not by itself solve the national problems that he outlined. But the moment of recognition of a shared set of goals can help foster the spirit of cooperation and compromise with which it is necessary to begin.

Sandra M. Gustafson is a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic will appear this spring from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
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In 1919, the (literally) round table at New York's Algonquin Hotel first became fodder for the goings-about-town sections of literary journals and New York City dailies, as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and others (shoutout to Edna Ferber!) barbed wits while whittling their way through Prohibition, personal failures and successes ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and other trappings of the times. In April 1974, in tribute to those well-quoted luminaries, three contemporary critics (John Leonard, Nona Balakian, and Ivan Sandrof) decided to extend their conversation about contemporary literature to the national level and thus, the National Book Critics Circle was formed.

Now, our foray, thirty-seven years after the fact:

Hearty congrats to Susie Linfield, author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism! In a banner year (Two university presses with nominees in the Criticism category! Independent publishers spread throughout the list!) for the NBCC, we couldn't be more delighted to celebrate what Artforum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Nation, and many others have already acknowledged: Linfield's book is a tour-de-force polemic on the often intimate and always complex relationship between photography and political violence. Stay tuned, as this year's award winners will be announced on March 10th. Until then we, arm-in-arm with all of those critical commentators that comprise the NBCC, encourage you to celebrate Linfield and the other nominees the best way we know how—by urging you to read their praiseworthy tomes.

If you haven't yet found the time to check out this impassioned critical take on the history of violence and its bearings on modern photojournalism, excerpts from The Cruel Radiance are available online at Tablet and Guernica, in addition to on the book's University of Chicago Press site here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We must admit that a recent blog post by Press author Andrew Piper (whose Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age garnered this year's MLA First Book Prize and generated a rich Booklog of related ephemera) on automated friendships has us thinking.

Piper, who specializes in the intersection of bibliographic and literary communication, from the eighteenth century forward, posted an anticipatory take on Web 3.0 (which, you might argue, may or may not have already arrived) and whether or not the quality of "friendship" will ultimately qualify the information we take in from the socially hotwired interweb.

In light of Chuck Klosterman's recent NYT's piece "My Zombie, Myself: How Modern Life Feels Rather Undead" ("The internet reminds us of this everyday"), Piper frames our contemporary dilemma:

But when you have 500 friends, or follow on average 400 twitter streams per day, is friendship still the best category to think about reading and the exchange of information? The push to make the selectivity of information more automated—algorithms of aggregation, much like Amazon does now with book titles—is likely to show up soon in the world of social networking. It raises the interesting question: what kind of sociability is quantified sociability? "Calculation" of course was precisely the value that was not supposed to belong to "friendship."

Interesting stuff. Though we're not entirely certain if digital finesse is the appropriate conduit to rehumanize our relationships (are we already post-apocalypse?), the thought that there's a paradox at work between emotional and technological intimacy (and their varied returns) is enough to make us a bit more alert when The Waking Dead finally shows up in our automated Netflix on Demand preferences—

"Suspenseful Dark TV Shows that Engender Debate about whether or not Modern Life is a Limit Experience."

To keep up with all things Andrew Piper, check out The Book Report here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by KAM at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Occasionally we find ourself a humanist on the moon here at the Chicago Blog, though not without sensitivity towards our more rarefied friends who yield to Aristotle and the laws of nature. Scientists: those chroniclers of phenomena and behavior with interesting Kepler tattoos and jokes about Karl Popper and inductivism. We kid? But we do wish to point out the interesting—and complicated—space that emerges when works in the history and philosophy of science meet the much-charted forms of the contemporary book review and author interview. Perhaps exemplified no better than in the call-in public radio talk-show (cited below!), this realm of scientia curiosa abets a natural TOP FIVE OR TEN list of highlights and lowlights in reviews and 'views, recently registered. Onward!

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"It sounded a bit like Maria was on the line from Mars."

From a live, call-in interview on Newstalk Ireland with Maria D. Lane, author of Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet (full podcast available here)

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"Are you of the opinion that one of earth's magnetic poles might have been tidally locked to THE MOON many, many years ago?"

From Ronald T. Merrill's recent appearance on Science Friday's (with Ira Flatow!) "The Poles, They Are A Changin'" discussing Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism

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"One of the defining books (though this is the revised edition to the first version) in the history and sociology of science. Probably can read this in relation to some follow-up articles in 'Essential Tension.'"

From the blog Unquiet Mind of an Academic Libertine, in which a PhD student preps (annotations!) for her field list in science studies with Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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"Such provocative findings, and Winsberg's exceptionally readable account of the reasoning that led him to them, will interest many general readers as well as scientists and philosophers of science."

From Richard C. J. Somerville's Science review of Eric B. Winsberg's Science in the Age of Computer Simulation (a great von Neumann microhistory, to boot!)

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"Readers of this pluralistic narrative are left with a revitalized appreciation for scientific virtues: why they mattered in late modern technoscience and why they continue to matter in the world to come."

From a review of Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation on the aptly named blog The Bubble Chamber ("Where history and philosophy of science meet society and public policy")

Additional interviews with Shapin about the book are available here and here

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And one more, perhaps unrelatedly? A grain of salt (unscientifically) tossed over the shoulder:

"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own."—Bertrand Russell

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

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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)

Oh, Thursday. It's ungodly early and we're transcribing mid-flight en route to the Modern Language Association's annual meeting. We already can't shake the strange combination of Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" and a haunting recollection of the theme songs from late 1980s television programming—it must be the promise of Los Angeles. What does a Cat Paint photograph of the Rockies look like, you might wonder?

We're a little less pithy with the fog of latte brain, but there's a lot to report from late-arriving 2010 wrap-ups and more recent reviews, so with the usual nod to almost the end-of-the-week ennui, on we go:

Stephen Greenblatt's new collection of essays Shakespeare's Freedom saw its fair share of attention as we ushered in the new year. The Times Literary Supplement gets us started:

In Shakespeare's Freedom, however, Greenblatt engages in a more challenging and potentially rewarding exercise: to seek in Shakespeare's writings for reflections of the evolving thought processes of the dramatist's "formidable intelligence" in relation especially to the concept of freedom. It is good, at a time when there is a danger of seeing Shakespeare too exclusively as an entertainer, to find an acknowledgment of the intellectual powers that pervade his work, and Greenblatt brings his formidable critical expertise to bear on the writings.

The New Statesman nods to Greenblatt as "one of America's most elegant and inventive literary critics," and further acknowledges the "great pleasure" to be had in watching a contemporary master wax on a topic so broad as to encapsulate "beauty, hatred, authority, and autonomy."

Says the Financial Times, in a soundbite suitable to both author and subject:

The book's real lesson is Shakespeare's awareness of the human condition in all its complexity. He grappled with the absolutes of his age, yet his art appeals to timeless human concerns.

An excerpt from Shakespeare's Freedom is available at the book's University of Chicago Press page here.

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In another December review, the Guardian commends Kenneth J. McNamara's The Star-Crossed Stone: The Secret Life, Myths, and History of a Fascinating Fossil (excerpt here):

McNamara's vision is even broader than that: using our knowledge of early habits of fossil collecting, he explores the evolution of the human mind itself, drawing striking conclusions about humanity's earliest appreciation of beauty and the first stirrings of artistic expression. Along the way, the fossil becomes a nexus through which we meet brilliant eccentrics and visionary archaeologists and develop new insights into topics as seemingly disparate as hieroglyphics, Beowulf, and even church organs.

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The January-February issue of American Scientist devotes a lengthy feature profile to Andrew Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, profiling this original exploration of the lives and works of six key figures from the British cybernetics community, including Gregory Bateson and R. D. Laing, in a piece that challenges and engages the book's aims and ends.

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On to the Society for Psychical Research! Jeffrey Kripal's Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, his latest interdisciplinary foray into philosophy and religion, was recently reviewed in the December issue of the Times Higher Ed:

Kripal's goal is different; he wants to open readers' minds to the possibility that evidence for the supernatural may indicate that we need to rethink our basic beliefs about the nature of subjective and objective reality. What would our world look like if telepathy really existed? Or if the evidence for UFOs, or sightings of the Virgin Mary, was convincing enough to appear not as the delusions of the few but rather the reality for all of us?

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Two University of Chicago Press books snuck into a couple of late-arriving Best of the Year and holiday gift-giving guides. Jonathan Yardley recapped his admiration for Harvey G. Cohen's masterful biography Duke Ellington's America in the Washington Post, while the Chicago Tribune's Julia Keller called out Ronald T. Merrill's Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism as a "fascinating explanation of that mysterious force" perfect for "a self-described geek drawn to science books like an iron filling to a magnet."

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And finally: Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance, a mesmerizing take on the photography of violence, was reviewed this past week in the Wall Street Journal, alongside a Q & A with the author. In both the book and the interview, Linfield examines the history of photography and its critics, which is briefly captured in one of her responses to the WSJ below:

Your book suggests that many photography critics don't really like the medium.

I think they care about photography and the effect they think it's having on the public. But they are certainly not fans in the way that Pauline Kael was with movies or Greil Marcus was with music. Their stance is being disapproving of how normal people use photography. Susan Sontag was very good at pointing out the ways in which photos can manipulate and fail to tell us the complete histories of events they document. But the valuable aspect of photography and the ways it calls up emotional reaction in us—I think all of that Sontag was oblivious to.

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Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 02:12 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)

The holidays always have the potential to be a little overwhelming, and in the rush to welcome the latest trends and advances—quite notable this past year, from growing ebook audiences to newly digitized archives—occasionally we miss the opportunity to acknowledge the losses that have also defined our year.

We'd like to take a moment to reflect on the very recent passing of two members of the University of Chicago Press community.

Muzaffer Atac (1931-2010) was one of the founding scientists of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and longtime head of Fermi's detector development group, all while working simultaneously as a physics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Dallas. In a career that spanned 40 years of service with the Department of Energy, Professor Atac played an integral role in the history relayed by Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall's Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience. Fermilab uses the backdrop of the cold war and captures the real human dramas played out by Atac and his colleagues at the cutting edge of science in the twentieth century (you can have a peek at Atac's powerful legacy via a website devoted to the book here).

Across the ocean, we also mourn the loss of Press author and one of France's leading scholars of Greek civilization and language, Jacqueline de Romilly (1913-2010). De Romilly was not only the first woman named a professor at the Collège de France, but also a lifelong champion of the humanities and a specialist on the historian Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. In 1985, she authored A Short History of Greek Literature for the University of Chicago Press, which was translated by Lillian Doherty. De Romilly was the first woman elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and became only the second woman admitted to the Académie Française.

From the New York Times's obituary:

Her election to the Académie Française in 1988 came eight years after the election of the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman admitted as an "immortal." She seized on the occasion to argue for the value of literary culture, which she warned "may well be as endangered as the fauna of the oceans or the water of our rivers," and the importance of classical languages.

Farewell to Professor Atac and Professor de Romilly, whose insights and accomplishments we'll keep close at hand in the years to come. And farewell from the Chicago Blog to 2010. See you in the new year—

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | UCP News
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"The days of the digital watch are numbered."—Tom Stoppard

Maybe it's watching David Ulin's piece at the Los Angeles Times on the rise of the ebook traffic through the internet, or maybe it's nostalgia for the numbered days of all sorts of products: Tom Stoppard's digital watch; Nike's limited edition, Marty McFly-inspired, self-lacing shoes; or the CD boxed-set of Mariah Carey's Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, Collector's Edition. In any case, it is (afterall, or we jest in the style of our esteemed distributed journals, Afterall) the season of giving.

Is your Dance card full? Are you a cinephile in the vein of Jonathan Rosenbaum or do you side with Roger Ebert's take on Groundhog Day? Do you wring your hands with anxiety about the sensibilities of Mr. and Mrs. Adams? Holidays have you feeling down? Probably not as down—or as pathos-driven—as Last Words of the Executed. Did you know that all of these books, along with many more Chicago favorites, are available in (highly portable! low cost!) electronic editions?

And now, through December 31st, enter the promotional code EBK2010 in your shopping cart to receive a 30% discount on any ebook published by the University of Chicago Press.

Happy holidays from Chicago. The future is now, right? And it might just cause us to break out in song:

Archived in Books for the News | Publicity | UCP News
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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
Posted by KAM at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It slipped through our fingers like sand through the hourglass! We nearly fainted with the outpouring of yearly best-of lists and insightful mentions. We're too overwhelmed to keep everything under wraps until Thursday next—we offer the below, with humility for the tardy appearance of this post and fervor for the warp and weft of a wrap-up of that week that was:

"This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays."

The Boston Globe reviews The Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, our most recent offering from the "outrageously prolific and always fascinating" economist and writer, Deirdre N. McCloskey. "The latest chapter in what has to be one of the most interesting scholarly careers in America today." We agree!

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time finds worthy mention at the Atlantic's "The Best Book I Read This Year" series. "It's a particularly interesting book to read in one's twenties." Hey, we remember when we wrote at the Atlantic in our tw—wait, the Atlantic (Monthly)? Er, nevermind. That ship has sailed, Christopher Cross. That ship has sailed.

Jonathan Messinger commends Larry Bennett's The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism with a solid tagline in Time Out Chicago—"a fascinating portrait of the city."

Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna 1938, The Photographs of Edmund Engelman. We published it in 1976! It's one of the Art Newspaper's Best Books this Year! Better grab a copy fast before Doc Brown rewires the DeLorean to go BACK TO THE FUTURE!

Note to self: nuns still going wild. See here and here (a charming interview in the Boston Globe with Nuns Behaving Badly author Craig Monson).

The Chronicle of Higher Education is just as excited as we are about Nicole R. Fleetwood's Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Fleetwood, an American studies scholar at Rutgers University, analyzes a persistent presumption in American culture: that seeing blackness is problematic.

Do you follow the Millions and their "Year in Reading" feature? If you do, you've already seen Seth Mnookin drop Richard Stark's Parker novels as a worthy pursuit for your addictive tendencies and/or thief/antihero fixation. If they're good enough for James Franco, then truly: what more do you need?

Rebecca Messbarger, author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini, was recently featured in an extended profile devoted to her research and ideas at the Washington University site. As if her study of one of the Enlightenment's most renowned anatomical wax modelers and burgeoning feminist icons couldn't get more interesting, Messbarger has her own story to tell: "I should have been a doctor," she says. "I love reading anything about anatomy. I get so excited about it. I'm the person at the cocktail party who can't stop talking about their work." Three cheers, Rebecca!

Looking for gifts for Your Father, The Architect (film reference sleight of hand)? The San Francisco Chronicle recommends Blair Kamin's Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age (excerpt here), while the Wall Street Journal endorses Stanley Greenberg's Architecture under Construction (image gallery available here).

And finally, Ruth Franklin praises Robert K. Elder's "extraordinary" Last Words of the Executed for The Read's "Books I Missed" column at the New Republic.

Did I miss anything?

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Awards | Books for the News | Publicity
Posted by KAM at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did anyone else watch Patti Smith on the Colbert Report Monday night? We're Luddites without a TV, we admit, and this pales in comparison to her insanely gracious impromptu live appearance with the Tiny Cover Band at Columbia College in Chicago, but. . . . Sigh. Ms. Smith. May all of our cultural heroes continue to inspire with such ferocity. Speaking of: if you haven't read Just Kids yet, why are you waiting? In the book's opening, Robert Mapplethorpe is dying—going, going—and then (heart wrenches): gone. Smith wakes up, knowing and undone, to "Vissi d'arte" from Puccini's Tosca: "I have lived for love, I have lived for art."

I admit to having read Just Kids three times over within 72 hours of purchase. I admit to my own repeated listening to the music that informs the work, Smith's own life: Puccini; Tim Hardin; an awkward, failed reevaluation of the Doors; Radio Ethiopia again and again. But the Puccini—there must be something in the air.

One-hundred years ago, this past Friday, Puccini's la Faniculla del West (adapted from David Belasco's play, The Girl of the Golden West) premiered at the Metropolitan Opera. From the New York Times's recent centenary commemoration:

Toscanini was in the pit; Enrico Caruso, Emmy Destinn and Pasquale Amato sang the leads; and Puccini, alone in his box, surveyed the scene. That is, until the end of Act I, when the composer and cast appeared on stage for 14 curtain calls. Similar pandemonium broke out at the end of the other two acts.

Last seen at the Met in 1993, the opera returned for its centennial on Monday night, just as Patti Smith sat down with Stephen Colbert (the opera seria: a contemporary adaptation?). The Times noted the opera, revived from the 1991 production, as "still too little known and misunderstood." Ah, grace. Mapplethorpe.

Don't get us wrong. The review is really commenting on the opera's loyal following and this particularly powerful restaging. But to be misunderstood (young Smith and Mapplethorpe as tramps in Washington Square inadvertently posing for tourists' photographs as "artists") is its own special something. And we're here to offer some understanding.

Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis's Puccini and The Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West is the first book to explore the opera, which became the earliest work by a major European composer to receive an American premiere when it opened at the Met in 1910. The authors mine musical materials, newspaper accounts, and rare illustrations and behind-the-scenes photographs to tell the full story of the opera's production and reception. In terms of brushing up on your Puccini in time to appreciate the powerful reappearance of this heralded work, Puccini and the Girl shouldn't be overlooked.

But another Times article about the centenary revival says it best:

For the blessings and challenges it has brought us, let's have, in the immortal phrase from Fanciulla, a 'whiskey per tutti' in honor of Puccini's American opera and the progressive spirit it represents.

Cheers. For Patti and Robert, and The Girl, too:

Archived in Books for the News | Music | Publicity
Posted by KAM at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three-day weekend: fin! We're back with a vengeance today: and by vengeance, we mean filled with admiration and applause for Robert K. Elder's piece on the approaching 150th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US history, which appeared in this morning's New York Times. Elder, author of Last Words of the Executed (a sample of excerpts here), profiles the fate of the thirty-eight doomed Dakota Indians executed that day, including one story of mistaken identity, and updates us with the possible case for federal pardon. Spot-on narrative coverage of a historical issue with lingering repercussions for our own heated debate on capital punishment, we say. Congrats, again, Mr. Elder.

In other news, we've been poring over the 124-page transcript from Senator Bernie Sanders's filibuster this past Friday. Galleycat already ran with a well-researched piece on all of the references Sanders made to books in his eight-and-a-half-hour-long speech (plus excerpts!) filibustering the tax deal shaped by Congressional Republicans and President Obama. With that post as inspiration, we thought to Top Five or Ten this, in tribute to Senator Sanders's verbal endurance and in spirited promotion of books we think he might squeeze in as holiday reading before the next round:

Top Five or Ten: Books we'll be sending to Senator Sanders in the hopes he'll find time to read them before the next contentious bipartisan debate requires a prolific speech act

Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum's translations of Seneca in Anger, Mercy, Revenge

Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. In Anger, Mercy, Revenge, Kaster and Nussbaum deftly translate three key writings, two of which were penned as advice for the young emperor, Nero. The third? The Apocolocyntosis, an artful satire lampooning the end of the reign of Claudius. Who better to champion an eight-hour speech than a Stoic, we ask? Read an excerpt here.

**

George William Van Cleve's A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic

Van Cleve convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than another mere "political" compromise—they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would be capable of expanding into a continental empire and in order for America to become an empire on such a scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor. The cost of their allegiance? The deliberate long-term protection of slavery by America's leaders through the nation's early expansion. MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award-winner Annette Gordon-Reed calls the book "a dazzling addition to scholarship."

**

Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer's Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market

An in-depth study of the working poor in the midwestern United States, Both Hands Tied tackles the plight of working women in light of a gendered change in the labor market, welfare reform, and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state. Sanders might first read Carl Chancellor's insightful post about the book on Change.org's Poverty in America blog here.

**

Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media

Perloff's negotiation between poetic and media discourses has much to offer a would-be filibusterer. The natural speech of Phil Donahue versus the natural speech of modernism? Check. Written under "the sign" of John Cage, the artist behind one of our best-known acts of silence? Check. We really should make this a two-in-one and include Perloff's Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, which brilliantly posits how citation became a form of literary discourse.

**

Gregory Koger's Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate

We end with our most obvious candidate—the go-to history for how and why obstruction has been institutionalized by the US Senate over the past fifty years, and how its transformation continues to affect politics and policymaking. Hailed by everyone from the New York Review of Books to the Washington Post, Filibustering is great tactical reading for Sanders and its smart red cover makes it an apt object to wave on the Senate floor.

**

Right, Mr. Smith?

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events
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'Twas the night before editing class, when all through the house,
Not a Tumblr was stirring, not even about Leo Strauss.
Our Manual was hung by the Craigslist chair with care,
In hopes that substantive freelance projects soon would be there.

She sprang to the Blue Line, incanting abbreviations like a psalm.
But will she read http://uchicagopress.tumblr.com?
I heard myself query, dazed like Thomas de Quincey post-opium poppy,
"I thought I'd be writing for the LRB, not generating marketing copy?"

Happy holidays from Chicago! Download your own Chicago Manual of Style mini-ornament here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Reference and Writing | UCP News
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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

**

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—

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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.

**

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—

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Posted by KAM at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"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
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We try to start off on the positive side of the street: with congrats to Press authors Matthew Jesse Jackson and Tom Vanderbilt for their Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers grants, which will spear a variety of projects, from art-curio blogging to short-form cultural criticism.

And then we cross—

A combination of sources broke the news yesterday about the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," which opened on October 30th at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The exhibit, the first at a major museum to focus on "sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture," drew some gnarling critique from the Catholic League and conservative politicians, aimed at the late artist David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly. Wojnarowicz, a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and activist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, is known for work that mixed death and longing, simplicity and pathos. The work in question includes video footage of ants crawling on a crucifix, an image representative of the AIDS crisis. Soon to be Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner issued a statement that reads, in part, "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds."

The Smithsonian took down the work.

Back to the middle: the explanation. Critic and theorist Wendy Steiner wrote The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism in 1995, less than a decade after a fatwa was issue for Salman Rushdie's death and twenty-five years after Robert Mapplethorpe began snapping his first polaroids. In it, she surveys a wealth of cultural controversies, demonstrating that the fear and outrage they inspire is really the result of an imperiled misunderstanding about the complicated relationship between art and life.

Steiner has always been compelled by these issues and her most recent book The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art is no different. Here she situates our contemporary culture, simultaneously fixated on artifice and the real thing, caught in a media-saturated, real-virtual divide that relies on the arts to etch out a new ethical potential: through the "figure" of the model-protagonist.

In part, it seems like that's what the Smithsonian curators wanted to do: to draw attention to the difference—imperceptible or obvious—that is all too real. In an excerpt from The Real Real Thing, available on the book's UCP site here, Steiner describes the changing mores of an almost contemporary society on the cusp of media saturation and anticipates recent events:

A realm of mirrors, of fantasy and feint, the arts have always presented a conundrum in terms of their real-world efficacy. 'Poetry makes nothing happen,' declares W. H. Auden in a poem that simultaneously derides that claim. True and not true, the assertion of artistic impotence has been a valid defense against the censor, the bowdlerizer, the book-burner. Do not worry, we assure them: aesthetics and ethics are separate spheres. What 'happens' in art is not happening in reality, and so it is quite safe to let anything 'happen' there. The changes that take place through art are changes of mind, and democracies recognize the value of entertaining any and all such virtual revolutions.

This position we abandon at our peril, Steiner finishes, before situating modeling—in all of its facets and well, faces—as our best exemplar between reality and representation.

Back to the other side—

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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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
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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?

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
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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
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"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
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We often find ourselves comparing the nunneries of late sixteen- and early seventeenth-century Italy to a fairly volatile combination of The Craft and Moulin Rouge—just not publicly. So when the Economist took note of Craig Monson's Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy, we immediately put on our thinking habit and got to work. In the book, Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of cloistered heroines, drawing attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose "misbehavior"—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for others' wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today.

The Economist delights in the "too modest" Monson's tome, which "wears its learning with a smile" despite its serious milieu:

Convents in 16th- and 17th-century Italy were largely dumping-grounds for spare women: widows, discarded mistresses, converted prostitutes and, above all, the unmarried daughters of the nobility. Aristocratic families were loath to stump up dowries for more than one daughter. The rest were walled away. In Milan in the 1600s, three-quarters of the female nobility were cloistered. At the same time the church was cracking down on lax discipline, in nunneries as much as anywhere.

The result was a headache for the (male) authorities. With few genuinely spiritual nuns, convents were full of women finding ways round the rules through scheming and backbiting, through art or music or lesbian love and once, even, through torching their convent and escaping en masse. All this meant extra paperwork: complaints to the Vatican, petitions, investigations, and interrogations.

In tribute to the book, and in light of the fact that a title like Nuns Behaving Badly practically screams TOP FIVE or TEN (that might just be Kathy Najimy from Sister Act II, though), we've gone Gidget 2.0 and gleaned the archives for clips of our favorite righteous babes:

Sister Wendy Beckett: who hasn't screamed YES! at 3 AM when this ascetic's aesthetics air as a series of introductions to art history on late night public television?:

The Singing Nun, Jeanine Deckers (Soeur Sourire, or Sister Smile)—her tragic tale is definitely worth reading, if you're not familiar or haven't seen the 2009 or 1966 (starring Debbie Reynolds) biopics—everyone knows "Dominique" is the jam:

Nunsploitation was a popular film subgenre in 1970s Europe, especially in Italy, where Anita Ekberg behaves very badly in Giulio Berruti's infamous flick Killer Nun:

Agnes of God. VHS Trailer! Norman Jewison directs, Jane Fonda gives us a psychiatric star turn, and Anne Bancroft and Meg Tilly engage the sisterhood:

Finally, rounding out our list: remember when Pierre Batcheff bicycles down the street wearing a nun's habit in Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou? If only dream logic determined more of our fashion trends! Happy Friday:

Archived in Books for the News | Religion | Reviews
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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
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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)

This past Friday, one of New York City's most venerable cultural institutions, the 92nd Street Y (136 years strong and still kicking!) bestowed a unique honor upon one of the University of Chicago Press's most beloved authors. In all of the years that the 92Y has been creating and playing host to vibrant lectures, readings, conferences, community service opportunities, and city-wide programming, it had yet to endow and bestow an award named after a living figure—that is, until now. Please join us in celebrating the 92Y Vivian Gussin Paley Award for Early Childhood Education and its inaugural recipient, the "playful" visionary and early childhood education pioneer, Vivian Gussin Paley.

From the 92Y's commendation:

Vivian Gussin Paley examines children's stories and play, their logic and their thinking, searching for meaning in the social and moral landscapes of classroom life. A kindergarten teacher for 37 years, Mrs. Paley brings her storytelling/story acting and discussion techniques to children, teachers and parents throughout the world. In addition to her direct contributions to children and teachers, she is a MacArthur fellow and recipient of numerous awards, including: the Erikson Institute Award for Service to Children (1987); American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement (1998); the John Dewey Society's Outstanding Achievement Award (2000); and she was named Outstanding Educator in the Language Arts by the National Council of Teachers of English (2004).

The award itself celebrates Paley's inspirational contributions to the 92Y's Wonderplay initiative, which includes a conference attended by more than 900 educators each year, all of whom come together to consider Wonderplay and its core values, which seek to "awaken children's innate sense of wonder, promote self-discovery, build self-esteem, and inspire a love of learning."

We couldn't imagine a more deserving recipient than Paley. We're proud to publish five of her original books: Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four, Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner, Mollie Is Three: Growing Up in School, Boy on the Beach: Building Community through Play (check out an excerpt online at the book's UCP site), and A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (an excerpt aimed at first-grade education available here).

Feeling overwhelmed and not sure where to begin? Have a look at Patricia M. Cooper's The Classrooms All Young Children Need: Lessons in Teaching from Vivian Paley. Charting the change of attention paid to debates about the reduction of children's play time, the role of race in education, and the results of No Child Left Behind, this collection of essays embraces a holistic view of Paley's many books and articles. Here you'll find the evolution of Paley's thought, as well as the key characteristics of her teaching philosophy—everything from storytelling to superheroes.

In the meantime, here's a clip from our acclaimed advocate herself, delivering a talk at the 2008 Wonderplay conference:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Awards | Books for the News | Education
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"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
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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
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Uh-oh. TV Squad has the contemporary political equivalent of the long-stemming left brain-right brain debate: a chart of the most popular Republican and Democratic television shows (with the opposing party's strangely proportional tally in parentheses!). Based on a new study by Experian Simmons, the results situate the Grand Old Party on the couch in front of populist-charting favorites such as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, while the lefties decompress with Law and Order: SVU and Mad Men. Chart toppers? Op-ed news network programming faves Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann, rather unsurprisingly.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, public opinion studies pioneers Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first published News that Matters: Television and American Opinion. Just released in an updated edition, the book was the first to document a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that demonstrated how the order and emphasis of news stories varied in selected television broadcasts. Now hailed as a political science classic, News that Matters, Updated Edition (with a new preface and epilogue, and available as an ebook) shows how and why extended coverage in the national news and broadcast television causes matters to gain or lose credibility, as criteria for everything from evaluating the sitting president to prioritizing issues on the ballot. Taking all of this in light of the Experian Simmons survey, I think we can say News that Matters does matter: careful what you tune into!

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Psychology
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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
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This weekend marks the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair (though things technically got underway last night) at MOMA's PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. Sponsored by Printed Matter, the non-profit institution dedicated to the promotion of artists' books and material ephemera, the Fair features cutting-edge art organizations, journals, scholars (Boris Groys), and contemporary artists (Paul Chan and Kristin Lucas, among them), alongside over 200 exhibitors, including native Chicagoans Soberscove Press and Temporary Services. In celebration of the conference, we'd like to point you toward some events and exhibitions organized around the work of one of our own purveyors of that soon-to-be discussed art-book hybrid, Press author Josiah McElheny.

McElheny's The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia" has already enjoyed a profile in ARTnews, a centenary party cohosted by Cabinet, and mention in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A recent editor's choice review in BOMB engages the book in sum:

The slim volume The Light Club reveals McElheny's passion for modernity's early days, its promises, its failures, and its forgotten stories. The book offers the first English translation of Der Lichtklub von Batavia, a futuristic satire from 1912 by German novelist and theorist Paul Scheerbart, who argued for colored-glass architecture as it may 'overcome cultural stagnation.' The somewhat bizarre anecdote has its protagonists, who are 'hungry for light, for understanding, and a new certainty,' rally around the idea of creating an underground spa in an abandoned mine—not for bathing in water but for bathing in electrical light. McElheny surrounds this vision of 'ironic utopia' with metanarratives, which he commissioned from other artists and writers, or authored himself. In a play, a reminiscence, a male/female dialogue, and a critique, Scheerbart's century-old original gets re-narrated—its bold creative idealism is highlighted while its discriminating and, in hindsight, alarming aspirations are exposed. McElheny's delightful and eye-opening introduction ponders 'Utopia Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, or Never.'

What's new with our man of translucent infinities, you ask? McElheny, a MacArthur Fellowship-winning sculptor, performance artist, filmmaker, and writer, will debut his most recent film Island Universe this coming week (November 8th) at MOMA's Modern Monday series. Soon after, he'll take Chicago by storm with the opening of his solo exhibition at Donald Young Gallery on November 12th (which runs through December 15th), and a talk and booksigning of The Light Club on November 15th, hosted by the University of Chicago's Department of Visual Art's Open Practice Committee.

For more information on the modernist themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness that animate McElheny's project, be sure to pick up a copy of The Light Club. In the meantime, here's an Art21 exclusive on "History and Orginality" that reveals a bit more of what fuels McElheny's striking practice:

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events | Books for the News
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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This summer's unlikeliest hit book, F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, continues to attract notice. Glenn Beck, the Fox News host whose endorsement of the book in June catapulted it up the best-seller list, recently used the book’s success as evidence that his "audience is devouring books like never before." Over the weekend, the New York Times concurred with Beck and included Road in an article on the emerging "Tea Party canon." Taking stock of Hayek's pervasive influence on the current political landscape, the Times reported:

Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, alluded to The Road to Serfdom in introducing his economic "Roadmap for America's Future," which many other Republicans have embraced. Ron Johnson, who entered politics through a Tea Party meeting and is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented "the rule of law," Hayek's term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of "personal ends and desires."

Justin Amash, the 30-year-old Republican state legislator running for the House seat once held by Gerald Ford in Michigan, frequently posts links to essays by Hayek and Bastiat on his Facebook page, his chief vehicle for communicating with voters. "There is no single economist or philosopher I admire more than F. A. Hayek," he wrote in May. "I have his portrait on the wall of my legislative office and the Justin Amash for Congress office."

Read more on the Tea Party's reading list here. And check out an excerpt of the introduction to the book that, according to Glenn Beck, "will make your eyes bleed" on our site here.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by RH at 10:52 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
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The Wall Street Journal leaked a story this morning quickly picked up by the folks at Gawker about a warning McDonald's Corp. has issued to federal regulators: waive the U.S. health care overhaul's new premium requirement or else 30,000 hourly restaurant workers might find themselves without insurance.

The requirement in question? A "mini-med" plan clause that offers limited benefits to over 1.4 million American low-wage workers. More specifically, McDonald's is up in arms about the percentage of premiums that must be spent on worker benefits:

Last week, a senior McDonald's official informed the Department of Health and Human Services that the restaurant chain's insurer won't meet a 2011 requirement to spend at least 80% to 85% of its premium revenue on medical care.

McDonald's and trade groups say the percentage, called a medical loss ratio, is unrealistic for mini-med plans because of high administrative costs owing to frequent worker turnover, combined with relatively low spending on claims.

Democrats who drafted the health law wanted the requirement to prevent insurers from spending too much on executive salaries, marketing, and other costs that they said don't directly help patients.

The article goes on to mention dozens of other low wage-providing companies likely poised to cut or challenge limited benefit plans, including Home Depot, Inc., Disney Worldwide Services, CVS Caremark Corp., and Staples, Inc. For low-wage workers, those with "soft skills," as Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer term them in Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market, challenges like benefits cuts put their own lived experiences into dialogue with the structural and political forces that shape their lives.

Collins and Mayer dig deep and explore the struggle of working women to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying jobs with inflexible schedules—and what happens when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Several interviews in the book take place at locally franchised McDonald's—and the stark and poignant portrait of how reform and low-wage incomes afflict poor, single-parent families isn't lost in light of the threat of cuts like these. For more information, check out Both Hands Tied or read more—like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Chancellor's op-ed about the book, "Working Poor, Two Words that Should Never Be Linked" at the Poverty in America site on change.org.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Sociology
Posted by KAM at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab ran a piece discussing Pablo J. Boczkowski's new book News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance. Boczkowski, a pioneer in the field of exploring the effects of technology on the media, takes a look at how the Internet has changed the way the news is both consumed and produced. In particular he examines the phenomenon of how the limitless space and interconnectivity of the Internet has led to a surprising homogenization of news stories.

To a degree, the reasons this has happened are fairly simple. Right now it's likely that while reading this you're also keeping an eye on the current headlines, whether you've got CNN's website open in another tab, RSS feeds filling up your Google Reader, or Twitter feeding you a constant drip of headlines and links. And if consumers of the news are closely monitoring breaking news, you can bet editors and reporters are even more concerned with what the competition is up to.

Boczkowski studied the current state of online news by looking at two papers in Argentina, and there he discovered a new species of newsroom worker, "the cable guy." Megan Garber at Nieman describes this new specimen:

The papers Boczkowski studied have introduced a role in their staffs that they call the "cablera" (loose translation: "the cable guy"): someone who sits in the center of the newsroom, all day (lunch eaten at desk), and whose job it is to monitor the web, radio transcripts, cable feeds, and, of course, competitors' websites. Constantly. The cablera then sends relevant updates, via IM, to staffers—resulting, Boczkowski said, in a kind of "constant bombardment" on all sides. And staffers, in turn—with the help of the information provided by the cable guy—are expected to produce six to eight stories a day, in addition to updating the existing ones as needed.

Read more on the effects of "churnalism" over at the Nieman Lab.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media
Posted by RH at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Debates over fair use, free culture, illegal downloading, and copyright protection have been simmering since the dawn of the digital era. Intellectual property is a hot-button topic, as the Atlantic's technology blogger Nicholas Jackson points out, and every once and a while a story breaks that positions a major cultural figure at the center of the IP wars. Today's news stars New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who recently donated 1,000 euros toward the legal defense of James Climent, a French citizen accused of downloading 13,788 MP3s. Godard's pithy rationale? "There's no such thing as intellectual property."

Whether or not you share Godard's position, Adrian John's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, is a vital history worth consulting. Piracy explores intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first, ultimately arguing that piracy has always stood at the gateway between creativity and commerce. Be sure to take a timely glance at an excerpt from the book here before reading the full account of Godard's donation at internet technoculture site Boing Boing, the first to translate the news.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary
Posted by KAM at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The BBC reports today that the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization has released their annual report on global hunger. There is some good news in that the number of undernourished people fell between 2009 and 2010, but, at 925 million, that number is still "unacceptably high." In 2001 the UN designated a 50% reduction in the number of hungry people by 2015 as one of its Millennium Developme