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What We’re Reading

Diverse and eclectic book choices from Northwestern University Press staff. 

JD Wilson, Director of Sales and Marketing

What book(s) are you reading this week?

Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

I’m a voracious reader of periodicals, and I saw this book mentioned as an aside in one. I don’t remember which. “Times Literary Supplement” maybe? I found the book at the Northwestern University library. I had no idea the book was so new. Cudos to the NU libraries for acquiring a copy so fast. Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less.

I’m grateful that the NYT’s Pamela Paul came out as a “slow reader.” I’m one too, and it makes me appreciate slim novels like this one. This is an Icelandic novel by a writer named Sjón, a frequent collaborator of Björk’s. It’s an imagined year in the life of an Icelandic teenager in the late nineteen teens around the 1918 flu epidemic. It’s not a plot-driven novel, but Sjón’s crisp, detailed images will transport you back to Reykjavik.

Greta Bennion, Marketing Manager

What book(s) are you reading this week?

I’m currently reading Horse Heaven, by Jane Smiley.

How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

I picked it up at the Printers Row Lit Fest this past June. Jane Smiley is one of my favorite authors, and the book looked interesting to me because it centers on the horse racing world, something I know very little about.

Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less.

I love how the book revolves around so many different characters, and Smiley does such an amazing job at bringing them to life. I feel like I’m right there next to them, experiencing what they’re going through.

Anne Gendler, Managing Editor

What book(s) are you reading this week?

I’m reading Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy and Syria Burning: A Short History of a Catastrophe by Charles Glass.

How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

I’m reading Hadji Murat for my book group and Syria Burning Glass because I realized I was confused about what was really going on in Syria, which is in such a humanitarian crisis. Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less.

Hadji Murat is a short book with an extremely contemporary story of Russians fighting Chechen rebels in 1851. Based on firsthand accounts that were known to Tolstoy, it’s almost like a journalistic piece of creative nonfiction. He wrote it late in his life, and it came very easily to him.

Syria Burning is a brief recap of changing motives and alliances in the region is a helpful guide to sorting it out.

Liz Hamilton, Intellectual Property Specialist

What book(s) are you reading this week?

I’m reading The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

I’ve read Mary Karr’s books all out of order; I started with her second volume of memoir, Cherry, and loved it so much that I immediately read Lit, the most recent installment of her story. Now I’m circling back to find out how it all started, instead of trying to piece together allusions from the later volumes. Note to potential readers: maybe begin at the beginning. Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less. The writing is gorgeous, the characters are already familiar, and I can’t wait to read what happens next.

Marianne Jankowski, Creative Director

What book(s) are you reading this week?

Perfectly Imperfect: The Art and Soul of Yoga Practice

How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

I was a yoga junkie in my 20s—then came kids, home and job responsibilities, and my yoga ritual faded away. Ever since, my attempts to return to the same degree of mind-body practice have failed, most recently due to my own body restraints.

Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less.

I luckily ran across this book and find that I have merely reached a plateau, my true north has always been with me—it was my attention and energy that have drifted away and I only need to bring myself back, begin again, and ‘be’ again.

Maggie Grossman, Acquisitions Coordinator

What book(s) are you reading this week?

This week I am reading the Saga series. I just finished Book One, which collects issues #1-18.

How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

I have been exploring the world of comics and graphic novels over the last couple of years and I pretty much couldn’t go any longer without reading Saga

Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less.

Saga is a Hugo Award-winning series penned by Brian K. Vaughan and inked by Fiona Staples.– it’s a modern classic of the genre. I love the depth and originality of the story, the art is breathtaking, and the concept of two eternally warring peoples whose conflict has taken over an entire universe – without anybody questioning the premise of the fight – is just mind-blowingingly brilliant. Looking forward to picking up the next installment!

Gianna F. Mosser, Editor in Chief

What book(s) are you reading this week?

I am reading Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra.

How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

It was a big award nominee when it came out in 2006, and I have had it on my list of postcolonial novels to get to when I had a good chunk of time. This tome is almost 900 pages and the type is pretty small!

Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less.

What I like about the book is that it is framed as a detective thriller but it really works as novel invested in social critique. The caste system, local politics, the legacy of Partition, and organized crime all mix to keep readers guessing about who is at fault, only to postulate that perhaps everyone is culpable.

Netflix announced this year that they will sponsor a series based on the novel, which didn’t influence my decision to read it, but it’s notable nonetheless!  

Emily Dalton, Digital Content and Systems Coordinator

What book(s) are you reading this week? The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin

How did you come to read this/these book(s)? I read The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya last winter and wanted to find another contemporary Russian book. This probably could not have been more different.

Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less. The Blizzard might be the weirdest book I've ever read. It’s a genre bending Russian allegory that I don't think I fully understand, complete with tiny horses and a hallucinatory drug that comes out of a pyramid. What's not to like?

Parneshia Jones, Poetry Editor

What book(s) are you reading this week?

The Light of the World: A Memoir by Elizabeth Alexander

How did you come to read this/these book(s)?

What does it mean to speak the ones we’ve lost? How do we carry their light forward? In a quest to reckon with my own personal reveries about a singular, paramount soul suddenly becoming an ancestor, I turned to Ms. Alexander’s memoir about the sudden death of her artist husband to find solace and symmetry with my own feelings and writing.

Describe what you like about the book in 25 words or less.

Elizabeth Alexander is a conjure poet who let her poet-self expand in opulent lines of prose. She buoyed my search of how we can evoke and celebrate our lights whom now live amongst the stars.  

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AAUP Blog Tour: People in Our Neighborhood

A cozy Midwestern town with touches of New England sailboats and lighthouse charm, the eight square miles of Dutch elms and sycamores are home to seventy-five thousand Evanstonians.

One of the most accomplished citizens of Evanston was Charles Gates Dawes, recipient of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize and Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge from 1925–‘29. A banker, politician, and military general, Dawes was something of a Progressive Era Renaissance man known for his mercurial wit and for the salty language he used in Congressional hearings. He and his family occupied a lake-facing home just south of the university. Built in the chateau style—though in its rural form—the home was donated by Dawes to the university with the understanding that it become the home of the Evanston History Center (EHC).

This year, Northwestern University Press has enjoyed a growing partnership with the Evanston Historical Society, centered around the publication of Charles Gates Dawes: A Life, the definitive biography of America’s thirtieth vice president. Annette Dunlap, the author of a biography of first lady Frances Folsom Cleveland, penned the book.

Throughout 2016, the EHC has organized a series of events aimed to restore wider recognition of Dawes’s contributions to the history of the city, nation, and world. As part of this “Year of Dawes,” the EHC held a twilight gala titled Melody in August at the Dawes home where North Shore history buffs feted the release of the book.

The cooperation between EHC and the press that facilitated the creation of the book fostered multiple new points of contact between the two organizations as well as fresh momentum to find new ways to collaborate. In 2017, EHC is planning a series of events titled “Meet the Press.” Bringing together the press, the EHC, and the public, the events will create new opportunities for Evanston’s avid reading community to engage with literature, reading, and ideas.

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Get a Free Copy of YOU MAY SEE A STRANGER

Head on over to Goodreads, the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations, and enter to win a copy of Paula Whyman’s debut short story collection that Publishers Weekly called “honest and sharply observed.” 

In You May See A Stranger Miranda Weber hoards duct tape to ward off terrorists, stumbles into a drug run with a crackhead, and—frequently—endures the bad behavior of men. Miranda can be lascivious, sardonic, and maddeningly self-destructive, but, no matter what befalls her, she never loses her sharp wit or powers of observation, which illuminate both her own life and her strange, unsettling times.

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

You May See a Stranger

by Paula Whyman

Giveaway ends May 31, 2016.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

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Find the Perfect Gift for the Thinking Woman’s Mother’s Day

Looking for a book to gift to mom on mother’s day? Here at Northwestern University Press we’ve got a number of titles that will make the perfect gift for the thinking woman in your life. Here’s a list of staff favorites and bestsellers that celebrate and explore the complexities of motherhood, parenting, and family. 

Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Barbara Alpern Engel

The first psychosocial study of the female intelligentsia in Russia, Mothers and Daughters explains how and why women radicals of the nineteenth century diverged from their male counterparts, describes the forces that led women to rebel, and discusses their legacy to future generations. Throughout, Engel brings nineteenth-century women to life, humanizing history as she presents a case study of how the personal became political in a time and place different from our own.

The Distance Between Us

Valerie Sayers

Franny Starkey is a married mother of three that  no longer turns heads the way she used to. Sayers creates an engaging novel that follows Franny’s path from her early, poverty-ridden days to her hedonistic college life to her longings for an artistic career while changing diapers in a Brooklyn apartment. The constant in her life is Steward Morehouse, a well-to-do nerd from Due East, South Carolina who loves Franny. When Stewart and Michael, Michael, her drug-dependent playwright husband, collaborate on a play, the lives of these three become more complicated than Franny could have imagined.

Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse

Ana Castillo

Watercolor Women / Opaque Men is a wild and raucous narrative of a single, working mother, the daughter of Chicano migrant workers, and her struggles for upward mobility. Watercolor Women / Opaque Men contains episodes that range from the Mexican Revolution to modern-day Chicago and reflects a deep pride in Chicano culture and the hardships immigrants had to endure. With a remarkable combination of tenderness, wicked humor, and biting satire, the main character, Ella-or "She"-moves toward establishing her sexual identity (she has affairs with both men and women) and finding her rightful place in the world while simultaneously raising her son to be independent and self-sufficient.

Hemisphere

Ellen Hagan

The poems in Hemisphere explore what it means to be a daughter and what it means to bear new life. Ellen Hagan investigates the world historical hemispheres of a family legacy from around the globe and moves down to the most intimate hemisphere of im¬pending motherhood. Her poems reclaim the female body from the violence, both literal and literary, done to it over the years.

Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture

Jenny Kaminer

In Women with a Thirst for Destruction Jenny Kaminer examines how the typically noble and self-sacrificing image of Russian motherhood  is destabilized during periods of dramatic rupture in Russian society. Kaminer investigates the aftermath of three key moments in the country’s history: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. She explores works both familiar and relatively unexamined: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlev Family, Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s The Time: Night, as well as a late Soviet film (Vyacheslav Krishtofovich’s Adam’s Rib, 1990) and media coverage of the Chechen conflict. Kaminer’s book speaks broadly to the mutability of seemingly established cultural norms in the face of political and social upheaval.

The Gift

Florence Noiville

In this novel, Florence Noiville draws the portrait of a grand and unforgettable lady, loving and unable to love at once. As the narrator heads home after a meeting regarding her inheritance her mother looms large in her psyche. Labeled “eccentric” or “Italian,” her mother in fact suffered from what was later found to be manic depression. Without understanding the disease, the fam­ily treated the unpredictable ups and downs of her condition as they struck. During periods of paralyzing depression she was hospitalized, and the family felt abandoned. During periods of manic productivity and overdrive, she was a dedicated pharmacist, an exemplary home­maker, and an unusually knowledgeable gardener.

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Remembering Imre Kertesz

We are saddened to announce the passing of Imre Kertesz who died on Thursday at his home in Budapest. Kertesz was imprisoned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and later worked as a journalist and a playwright before publishing his first novel, Fateless in 1975. Northwestern University Press is proud to have introduced his work to the English-speaking world with its translations of two of Kertesz’s novels, Fateless in 1992 and Kaddish for a Child Not Born in 1997.

Fateless is the story of 14-year-old George Koves’s experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war. In the camps, George maintains a precarious semblance of normalcy by imputing human motives to his inhuman captors in a response to his situation that is curiously ambivalent.  Lacking emotional or spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage and rejected by his country, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that neither his neither his Hungarian nor his Jewish identity was at the heart of his fate: there are only “given situations, and within these, further givens.” The Washington Times called Fateless “an ornate and honest testimony to the human spirit.”

Kertesz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. He was 86.

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Benjamin’s Displaced Jewish Tradition

In his forthcoming book Postsecular Benjamin, Brian Britt analyzes Benjamin's engagements with religious traditions as resources for contemporary debates on secularism, conflict, and identity. Below is an excerpt from "Benjamin's Displaced Jewish Tradition" ​that originally appeared as part of The Future of Benjamin, 7+2 Articles, edited by Nitzan Lebovic with Commentary  by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. 

Scholars who disagree sharply over the importance of Jewish tradition in Walter Benjamin’s work tend not to explore what Jewish tradition means for him. The publication of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life presents an opportunity to revisit and reframe this question.1 One thing Jewish tradition could mean is observant Jewish practice, which even casual readers of Benjamin realize does not apply. Consider how the story of his abortive attempt to attend Rosh Hashanah services in Berlin Childhood Around 1900 reveals a “suspicion [Argwohn] of religious ceremonies” and also somehow contributes to his sexual awakening (SW 3:386). For Benjamin, Jewish tradition, and tradition in general, survives in modernity through what I describe as mechanisms of displacement, the numerous ways in which traditions change and survive, even in the face of modern denials of tradition.

Secularist scholars typically consider religion, even Judaism, as a belief or faith, meaning, I suppose, a doctrine or set of doctrines.2 As a scholar of religion, I have always found this idea confusing, because I do not know how to observe or understand religion as belief: it could mean a public statement of belief, like a creed, but is that by itself a meaningful indicator of a person’s identity? Or it could mean some kind of lasting mental state. But even there I get lost: how do you hold a belief about invisible, supernatural realities in your head for any length of time? It reminds me of a magician who says, “Think of a card.” I think of a card, I hold the idea, the image, and the name of that card in my consciousness. But then my mind wanders—I think of a joke, an old friend, or my next meal. Will my attention deficit spoil the trick, or my religious identity?

Jacob Taubes argues for the idea of religion as belief when he argues that when Benjamin said Messiah he meant Messiah: “[T]here is a Messiah. No shmontses like ‘the messianic,’ ‘the political,’ no neutralization, but the Messiah.”3  Of course, defining religion simply as faith misses the point of Judaism and other religions, even Christianity. If religion means anything at all, it has to involve belief and action. But even belief and action together do not encompass Jewish tradition for Benjamin, whose thinking on tradition includes the kinds of subtle, displaced phenomena included in the category of displacement. Tradition survives through displacement in spite of modern intentions, as Gershom Scholem’s well-known letter to Franz Rosenzweig on modern Hebrew shows.4

Far from passively inheriting Jewish tradition, Benjamin theorizes the inheritance of tradition. This inheritance can be framed in terms of displacement, the shifting and transformation of religious beliefs and practices he identifies in his early and late writings.5 Drawn from Freud and Benjamin, the idea of displacement means that traditions change rather than go away, but the inheritance of tradition does not conform to simple grand narratives of decline, progress, or eternal recurrence. Writing from his German Jewish vantage point, Benjamin consistently engaged the problem of tradition, pushing against these grand narratives and affirming tradition even as he immersed himself in modernist of art and culture. Benjamin’s studies of language, thought, and culture restlessly disclose modern displacements of tradition.

German Men and Women (Deutsche Menschen, 1936)

The case of German Men and Women poses a paradox: here is a collection of letters from the 18th and 19th centuries celebrating German writers and thinkers, all of them non-Jewish, but when he inscribed copies for his sister, Scholem, and Kracauer, Benjamin described the book as a Jewish ark written when the fascist flood began to rise. And he published the book under the pseudonym Detlef Holz to conceal his Jewish identity. I’ve explored this puzzle elsewhere6, but I would only say here that the case of Deutsche Menschen makes it very difficult to disentangle German from Jewish identity, something Paul Mendes-Flohr, Georg Mosse, and many others have shown; in fact, Benjamin’s book inscribes their combination, even in 1936, as a kind of quixotic hope. But this mixing of German and Jewish identity only continues the centuries-long entanglements of Judaism and Christianity theorized by Daniel Boyarin and others. This hybridity need not be schizophrenic or divided in any way; as Benjamin and the Berlin Jewish Museum show, this is a positive historical identity no more or less authentic or complete than any other. To quote a popular saying about cultural trends: “It’s a thing.”

The idea of displacement fits Benjamin’s orientation to tradition, which opposes the modern secularist narrative of progress, traditionalist visions of decline, as well as Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. For Benjamin as for more recent “postsecular” thinkers like Talal Asad,7 tradition never just goes away; even the most iconoclastic modernisms bear the afterlife and traces of the past. The inversions, paradoxes, and formal experiments of Benjamin’s thought identify the displacements of tradition in ways that open space for critical thought, and, I would argue, agency.8

Against the grand historical narratives of progress, decline, and eternal recurrence, the displacement of traditions preoccupies Benjamin from his early studies of literature to his late work on modern culture. If his work insists on critical awareness of the complexity, multiplicity, and contexts of cultural forms, it reflects the complexity of his life, which no biographical formula (tragedy, heroic tale, mourning play) or simplistic label (Marxist, aesthete, theologian, melancholic, Jew, German) can capture. It is ironic that scholarship on Benjamin so often resorts to such formulas and labels when he devoted a substantial part of his work to their critical examination. It takes a Critical Life like the biography of Eiland and Jennings, one that resists generalizations, embraces complexity, and reads the life with the work, to recognize more fully the significance of Benjamin’s thought.9

Endnotes

1 Walter Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

2 See Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000), 23.

3 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 70.

4 Scholem, “Thoughts About our Language (1926),” in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 27-29.  Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a similar point in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 115-137.

5 I derive the idea of tradition as displacement from Freud and Benjamin in Biblical Curses and the Displacement of Tradition (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 191-212.

6 Britt, “Identity and Survival in Deutsche Menschen,” Benjamin-Studien 3 (2014): 83-104.

7 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

8 This is the argument of my forthcoming book, Postsecular Benjamin: Agency and Tradition (Northwestern University Press).

9 Eiland and Jennings lament how selective previous studies of Benjamin have been:  “The result has all to often been a partial or, worse, mythologized and distorted portrait” (Eiland and Jennings, 7).

Postsecular Benjamin: Agency and Tradition is available for preorder here.

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Women Warriors of ‘Ghostbusters’ and Revolutionary Europe

Ghostbusters fans have lit up social media with reactions to the new Ghostbusters movie. The film, which features an all-female lineup of phantom fighting comedians, opens this summer and the controversy over the cast’s gender has grown bigger than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. According to Julie Koser’s new book Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe a film featuring female ghost fighters opening during the most disruptive and divisive presidential campaigns in recent memory is more than a coincidence. Whether you love or hate the idea of female Ghostbusters, this isn’t the first time that depictions of female warriors have coincided with periods of political uncertainty. The destabilizing political environment produced by the French Revolution led to “reestablishment of clearly defined gender roles as a form of social control” in nineteenth-century Germany. In her new book, Julie Koser examines tropes of the woman warrior constructed by print culture and how women’s bodies became a semiotic battleground for competing social, cultural, and political agendas in one of the most critical periods of modern history.

In the wake of the French Revolution … depictions of women and violence embodied the climate of apprehension, uncertainty, and instability that held western Europe, and German-speaking territories in particular, captive at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A full contingent of women warriors of page and stage triggered persistent anxieties as well as powerful fantasies about women’s use of violence—and forms of “perceived” female transgression more generally that destabilized the status quo of entrenched structures of power. Evoking simultaneous feelings of aversion and attraction, women warriors, as the embodiment of female transgression writ large, appear at once as ghastly prospect and feminine ideal, deceitful criminal and valorous patriot, deviant villain and sacrificing heroine, bloodthirsty hyena and defender of the domestic good, paragon of love and repository of unregulated passions, aberration of nature and emancipatory fantasy.

So whether she is depicted as an Amazon queen wielding a sword or a funny lady with a  proton pack the woman warrior has long been a harbinger of political anxieties. Though it does not outwardly carry any political message the new Ghostbusters movie reflects the unease of our time in the same way: by making women’s bodies the site of the struggle for power.

Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe is available for preorder here.

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Chicago celebrates its 179th birthday this weekend! Want to commemorate the event with a good read? Use this handy chart to figure out which book to mark the occasion with.

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Umberto Eco In Dialogue with Our Digital Future

Lovers of the written word are mourning the death of Italian writer Umberto Eco. Northwestern University Press was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to publish Eco’s This Is Not the End of the Book, A conversation between Eco and and Jean-Cladue Carriere that the Washington Post called “quick-paced and absorbing intellectual entertainment.”

Book lovers today might sometimes feel like they are watching the written word become lost to time. In This Is Not the End of the Book Eco and Carriere share a dazzling dialogue about memory and the pitfalls, blanks, omissions, and irredeemable losses of which it is made. Both men collect rare and precious books, and they joyously hold up books as hardy survivors, engaging in a critical, impassioned, and rollicking journey through book history, from papyrus scrolls to the e-book. Along the way, they touch upon science and subjectivity, dialectics and anecdotes, and they wear their immense learning lightly. You can read more about This Is Not the End of the Book here.

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Rachel Hadas reads "Slow Green” from her book of poetry, Questions in the Vestibule

Hadas, along with her husband video artist Shalom Gorewitz, combine moving images and the spoken word to explore the expressive potential of interrogating and subverting form and time.

You can purchase Questions in the Vestibule here

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Five Questions With the Author: Corinne Granof and Laura Wertheim Joseph

A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s focuses on Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991) a rule-bending artist, musician, and advocate for the experimental art of her time. We talk to Corinne Granof, curator of academic programs at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and editor of A Feast of Astonishments as well as Laura Wertheim Joseph, Consulting Curatorial Associate, about the barrier-breaking musician and performance artist.

Charlotte Moorman was known for having “a proclivity for the feminine.” Her favorite holiday was Valentine’s Day, she loved donning the formal dress of classical performance, and she won the Little Rock Arkansas Miss City Beautiful pageant in 1952.  However, she retained many characteristics of stereotypical femininity in her performance practices at a time when Second Wave feminism was on the rise, and artists like Judy Chicago were coalescing around the feminist art movement. How did her embrace of the feminine effect the perception of her work in the late 60s and 70s and long-term? Has “Third Wave” feminism triggered a further reevaluation of Moorman’s work? 

LWJ: Self-described feminists of the 1960s and 70s held a wide range of attitudes about the value of conventionally feminine dress, behavior, and roles. Many felt that casting off attributes traditionally associated with femininity was necessary for the realization of gender equality. In embracing traditional signifiers of femininity, Charlotte Moorman was out-of-step with many of her feminist contemporaries. Her willingness to perform sexualized works, written by such composers as Nam June Paik, incited explicit criticism from second-wave feminist artists. Additionally, Moorman did not express outward interest in the feminist politics of her time or in aligning with the feminist movement. As the exhibition attests, Moorman eventually developed her own vocabulary to assert for the importance of her artistic contributions. But the fact that her work was largely criticized or ignored by her feminist contemporaries certainly played a role in Moorman’s subsequent underrepresentation within histories of the period. Third-wave feminism did advance ideas about the constructed-ness and performativity of gender that eventually made Moorman’s reevaluation possible, but it did not, at the time, trigger that reevaluation. Because the emergence of third-wave feminist thought coincided with a wider cultural backlash against feminism—inaugurated by the election of Ronald Reagan and his call for a “return to family values”— many third-wave feminist thinkers were suspicious of calls to celebrate traditional femininity. 

In addition to performing, Moorman was also known for putting on art festivals in New York City. How did Moorman’s facilitation of these festivals make her a conduit for avant-garde art to a wider audience, and avant-garde artists to one another? 

CG: Moorman’s festivals are one of her major contributions. The first three festivals were dedicated to avant-garde and experimental music. They took place at Judson Hall, a concert venue in midtown Manhattan, and ran over several evenings. With the fourth event in 1966, however, the festivals achieved a new level of visibility and influence and grew in proportion and ambition. Held in Central Park and taking place over eighteen hours, there was a profound new intersection between the public and the artists, musicians, and festival participants. By bringing the festival to a very public space, where a general audience encountered different kinds of art—installation, music, dance, poetry, film, performance—over the course of a day without purchasing a ticket or going to a designated performance space, Moorman created a platform for a public experience that dissolved boundaries between artists and audiences. Through the festivals, which grew to involve hundreds of artists, Moorman also formed a community. Many artists in “Charlotte’s web” participated in several festivals and would come back year after year. They anticipated the festivals and got to know one another by sharing spaces and seeing each other’s work. A common purpose of coming together for the annual events galvanized these artists, who shared many sensibilities and interests. 

One Moorman performance can often involve multiple artists. In describing some of the performance pieces in A Feast of Astonishments how did you pin down ownership?

LWJ: Authorship was a concept that came under scrutiny during this time, initially via French poststructuralist thought advanced by literary theorists such as Roland Barthes. As a result, many of the artistic and performative practices of the era reflected ambivalence towards single authorship. Fluxus artists with whom Moorman collaborated, for example, wrote instructional works that allowed for anyone to be the executor of the artwork or that required audience participation to be realized. This is not to say, however, that an investment in single authorship ceased to exist. The fact that Moorman’s instrumental role in many of Nam June Paik’s works has been largely overlooked or trivialized in histories of the period is a testament to the persistent valorization of single authorship in art historical discourses. Virtually every postwar survey text that includes Paik’s work will only rarely mention or identify Moorman. Our goal in preparing the materials for this exhibition was to convey the collaborative nature of the artistic activities to which Moorman contributed, while still representing the history in a legible way. We made clear, for example, that Cut Piece was an instructional piece created by Yoko Ono, but we also accounted for the ways in which the instructions allowed for Moorman to adapt it to her own ends. More broadly, we tried to open up ways of thinking about artistic production to include activities like Moorman’s annual avant-garde festivals, which facilitated the artistic production of others. 

How does this exhibit work toward changing the perception of Charlotte Moorman from participant and muse to artist and creator? 

CG: Until the publication of [Joan Rothfuss’s] 2014 biography and the exhibition, Moorman had generally been considered someone who performed on Nam June Paik’s artworks, primarily the TV Cello and TV Bra. The book and exhibition put the focus on her work and explore how she and Paik were collaborators. The TV Cello, for example, is designed by Paik, but Moorman is the only person to have played it. It is identified as much with her as it was with him. She also was very much part of the design of the instrument, as noteted in the Charlotte Moorman Archive show. The exhibition gives a much fuller and richer picture of Moorman and her tremendous achievements. Two main sections of the exhibition explore the major facets of her work. One explores several pieces that were part of her repertoire, works she toured with and became known for performing. The other section focuses on the avant-garde festivals. The fifteen avant-garde festivals she organized between 1963 and 1980 contributed immensely to how performance art is seen today. Moorman also showcased both established and lesser-known artists and provided a democratic platform for their work to be seen.  Many of the artists in her festivals, such as Bill Viola (who was a very young artist when he participated in the ninth festival in 1972), went on to became established and very well known. So, in addition to being an artist and creator, she was a curator.  

What are some of the challenges of making a museum catalog, especially one about performance art? 

CG: Both the exhibition and the catalog have extensive documentation of performance art. For the most part, the works of art themselves are time-based and ephemeral, so the project includes such documentation as photographs, film, relics (costumes, props, and signs), and ephemera (posters, brochures, correspondence, and programs). Where possible, we tried to borrow and include physical objects that were at the festivals. One highlight is a work by Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks—a clothesline with a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, socks, and underwear, painted to look like a bright blue sky with clouds. This hung between two trees at the 1966 festival in Central Park. To represent the 11th festival at Shea Stadium, there is a large cross that is part of a piece by Yoko Ono titled 46 Reflections from Dawn to Knight. The crosses, which have round mirrors at the center, were set up in the bleachers at the stadium. Each time sunlight hit a mirror, the viewer was supposed to make a wish. There is also a lot of documentary film and video in the exhibition that helps to bring the performances to life and allows us to visualize how they looked and were experienced at the time.

“A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s” runs through July 17, 2016 at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. You can purchase a copy of the exhibition catalog here.

[northwesternup]

5 Hip-Hop Tracks That Influenced Olympic Butter Gold

By Jonathan Moody

1) “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved (Rare Live TV Appearance 1971)” by James Brown: There’s no way around writing a poetry book about hip-hop without listening to James Brown. I could’ve easily selected “Funky Drummer,” but hip-hop heads are familiar with that track because of Clyde Stubblefield’s ridiculous drumming. I chose the condensed version of “Get Involved…” that I discovered on YouTube because when the horns come in at the 56 second mark it launches the beginning of a gorgeous break-beat that almost entices me to rock the body body into backspins and windmills.

 2) “My Melody” by Eric B. & Rakim: Nothing more I can say about this amazing song that probably hasn’t been said before. There are so many quotable lines in this track such as “My unusual style will confuse you awhile/ If I was water, I’d flow in the Nile” that evoke powerful imagery, wit, and science: qualities that I want my poems to manifest.

3) “Cell Therapy” by Goodie Mob: I’ve studied this disturbing song over the past twenty years, and I learn something new after each listen. What’s so frightening is that the social commentary on the track addresses the sneaky ways that the U.S. government engages in covert operations and domestic surveillance: “insane plain, soldiers coming in the dark by plane/to enforce the new system by reign, tag my skin with your computer chip.” The second section of Olympic Butter Gold entitled Freistil Battle is indebted to “Cell Therapy.” I reference how America treats its citizens like potential suspects and how, at times, we live in a militarized state.

4) “Ice Cream” by Raekwon (feat. Ghostface, Cappadonna, and Method Man): My erotic love poem “Lovelust á la mode” is where I try to channel Raekwon’s cool demeanor, Cappadonna’s disarming sincerity, and Ghostface’s vivid detail. The day I achieve success as a poet is the day when I describe my wife the way Ghostface describes women: painting a picture so colorful that readers who’ve never met my wife would instantly recognize her in public based on my imagery. I have a long way to go, but the idiosyncratic way in which I combine compassion with debauchery comes off successfully.      

5)  “The Genesis” by Nas: When I first heard “The Genesis” at 15, the movie excerpt that Nas sampled was lost on me.  I couldn’t understand what the two guys were arguing about: “… be a man! There ain’t nothin’ out here for you.” “Oh yes there is. This.” Where the hell was “here” and what was the “this” that the guy was referring to? For me, I experienced Illmatic in media res; it wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s when I realized where those voices came from: Wild Style (For some reason, I didn’t see that movie growing up). I realized that Nas had sampled one of the most memorable scenes from the film: the argument between the protagonist “Zorro” and his brother who’d returned home briefly from the Army.  The “here” was South Bronx and the “this” was hip-hop: graffiti to be exact.  Zorro’s brother didn’t just call Zorro’s dreams of being an artist into question: he explicitly stated that his younger brother’s dedication to art was childish: “Stop fucking around and be a man!”

I could relate; when I told my parents I wanted to apply to graduate creative writing programs to study poetry, they shook their heads in disbelief.  I’m not sure if Nas had any haters in his corner, but I’m damn sure that he knew his craft: not just with creating intricate rhyme schemes but with creating a sonic collage.  In “Genesis”, Nas’s inclusion of that argument from Wild Style as well as DJ Grand Wizard Theodore’s “Subway Theme” from the same film influenced the way I alluded to DJ Kool Herc and borrowed a line from Augustus Pablo’s “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown” in my poem “Son of a…”: to acknowledge hip-hop’s genesis. For Nas, he focused specifically on South Bronx: the birthplace of hip-hop.  For me, I touch upon South Bronx (Kool Herc) but also touch upon the country that influenced rap music production: Jamaica (the place where Kool Herc was born).  Like Nas, I also want to give readers a bird’s eye view of what it was like to experience hip-hop culture as a kid and an adult.  In essence, I’m hoping to put Frankfurt, Germany and especially Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, and Fresno, Texas, on the map in the way that Nas bolstered the significance of Queensbridge as being a force on the scene.

What Nas and other MCs and producers have taught me, though, is that it’s not enough to pay homage; you have to find some way to propel art forward.  He also taught me that there’s value behind speaking to a specific audience. Olympic Butter Gold is unapologetically Southern in the way that Nas’s Illmatic is unapologetically New York.  I’m comfortable with the fact that my specific reference to Texas slang “choppin’” might go over peoples’ heads the way Nas’s use of “telephone blown” went over my head until I read Miss Info’s explanation of what it meant in her NPR interview “Miss Info on Nas, Illmatic, and The Source”; however, art can grow with people as people grow over time.  It’s taken me years to appreciate all of the elements that have made Illmatic such a great album, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from a reader in order for him or her to appreciate OBG.  

*Out of the 10 tracks listed on Illmatic, “Genesis” is the only one that’s not a song; “Genesis” functions as a prologue or a marker of time: we hear the loud sound of a NY subway hurtling over the train tracks and a barely audible excerpt of Nas’s verse from “Live at the Barbeque” by Main Source playing at the same time as the movie snippet from Wild Style.

Jonathan Moody grew up during the Golden Ages of hip-hop and listened to rap that was as adventurous and diverse as his military upbringing. Moody was the winner of the 2014 Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in African American Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Common, Crab Orchard Review, good foot, Tidal Basin Review, Xavier Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the anthology Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, among other publications. He is also the author of The Doomy Poems (2012). Moody teaches at Pearland High School and lives in Fresno, Texas, with his wife and son.

You can purchase OLYMPIC BUTTER GOLD here

[northwesternup]

Gift Ideas for All of the Humanists on Your List

Need a gift for that special humanist in your life? Northwestern University Press has you covered! For even more gift ideas, check out our Holiday Gift Guide.

The Philosopher (Armchair or Otherwise)

Limited Inc by Jacques Derrida

The Politico

Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. 

The Music Lover

Let Freedom Swing: Collected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Gospel by Howard Reich

For Those Who Love to Have Drama In Their Life...

Hir by Taylor Mac

The Lyricist

Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis

The Art Lover 

The Cone Sisters of Baltimore: Collecting at Full Tilt by Ellen B. Hirshland and Nancy Hirschland Ramage 

[northwesternup]

Interview with Art Director Marianne Jankowski

What made you want to become a book designer?

MJ: Like a lot of us, I stumbled into publishing. My first exposure was with the University of Illinois Press, where I worked while still a student, mostly making line corrections for reprints. After two failed attempts at design positions after graduation, I reached for the Chicago Creative Directory and started cold calling—first on the list was Joseph Alderfer, the design manager at the University of Chicago Press. I wasn’t new to cold calling but was startled when Joe said, “Yes, we have an entry-level position; when can you come by for an interview?” My early years at Chicago, as well as a later stint in the ’90s, still hold a special place in my heart because it’s where I learned book design from some very talented people and fell in love with typography.

Tell us about your home press, Northwestern University Press? 

MJ: From its inception, Northwestern University Press has been at the forefront in publishing important works of scholarship as well as quality works of fiction, drama, nonfiction, and poetry. NUP currently publishes about 60 books a year.

How many covers do you design in a year? 

MJ: About 35% of our covers are in series, which means they’re templated and need only new imagery, so I’m designing roughly 40 covers a year.

What’s your design process?

MJ: I try to come to a simple understanding of the book, the essence of what is being discussed. I glean this information from a variety of sources: information from the acquisitions editor, readers’ reports, the manuscript, and previous blurbs if the book is a reprint. At times I am in contact with the author about the cover, but most times acquisitions gives me feedback from the author. I then start searching out potential visuals and/or check into the rights for suggested imagery. Occasionally “type only” covers prove best. I meet with sales & marketing, acquisitions, and the director every two weeks to review ongoing cover work. If there is a difference of opinion, we often poll our sales reps, who give valuable feedback on what they predict will do best in the marketplace. 

How is working on a trade cover different than working on a scholarly cover?

MJ: I feel there is more freedom in working on trade covers, because more can be left to interpretation. A novel or book of poetry can elicit a variety of visual images. I take note of any directives from sales & marketing and also from the authors, although I’m always careful not to promise that we’ll definitely use their “talented nephew’s drawing,” just in case. I try to garner most images from royalty-free stock houses to keep costs down, but sometimes a rights-managed image is the only way to go. While attending a cover design workshop, a trade publishing creative director asked “What does the story look like?” I’ve tried to keep this in mind when working on trade covers. 

A recent trade novel is about a gynecologist contending with Stalin’s prohibition of abortions in 1936. In the tradition of Russia’s great family novels, the story encompasses the history of two families. Their lives raise profound questions about family heritage and genetics, nurture and nature, and life and death. Not an easy subject to visualize, but we decided on this:  

A totally different kind of book, this next novel’s narrator “couldn’t stop turning and looking at the ‘bad boy’”: 

In working on scholarly covers, I’ve found that one option is to visualize literally what the book is about—the subject matter, the mood, the timing—all to help to reflect its content.

Another option with scholarly titles that don’t lend themselves easily to being communicated visually is to use nondescriptive art:

Crossover books present a different sort of issue–a cover design that looks less scholarly than the content actually is. Acquisitions has rejected covers because of this. Here is one that made it through:

What about interiors?

MJ:  With a lot of interior templates in place, I miss the opportunity to customize interiors. Occasionally a book like Harold or Chicago and Its Botanic Garden comes along, and I can expand the cover concept to the interior. 

What are some of your favorite covers that you’ve worked on at Northwestern University Press?

MJ: Millennium Park Chicago, by Cheryl Kent

My Sax Life, by Paquito D'Rivera

Red Army Red, by Jehanne Dubrow

This post is part of the 2015 university press week blog tour. To read more about university press design, check out Princeton University Press, MIT Press, University Press of Kansas, Georgetown University Press, Syracuse University Press, Stanford University Press, Harvard University Press, Athabasca University Press, and Yale University Press. 

[northwesternup]

This edition of "Incidental Noyes" comes from Ellen Hagan, whose collection of poetry HEMISPHERE just published. Library Journal was led to say that "we see that time doesn’t so much stretch out but circle us in, as reflected in a beautifully compressed language (“be the peacock & the treble, be/ the tremor & the starved”) that doesn’t so much capture as intensify." Enjoy this intensely energetic, explicit (if every way) playlist. Be prepared to dance!

[northwesternup]

This is our latest “Incidental Noyes” installment. Paul Breslin, author of BETWEEN MY EYE AND THE LIGHT: Poems shares his list. The highlighted titles aren’t available through Spotify, but are worth checking out. #poetry #music

[northwesternup]

We are posting Angela Jackson's installment of Incidental Noyes in honor of tonight's free and public reading at Northwestern. https://www.facebook.com/events/1548473808740635/ Listen, and join us! #poetry #events