UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

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. See you in the new year—

Not only full of facts (though that’s certainly an apt description), but about to return to the airwaves, complete with new logo:

“The show will return to WTTW, Chicago Public Television, where Gene Siskel and I first taped Sneak Previews in 1975. The station still has our original seats, but we are constructing an all new set. Our critics of course will be back in the iconic balcony, and will be using the famous ‘thumbs up / thumbs down’ rating system.”

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/television/-as-of-now-this.html

laphamsquarterly:

So says @ebertchicago. Full of facts that one. 

“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:

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:

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?

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…

…

The Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago has a growing collection of soon-to-be published transcripts and streaming audio from Leo Strauss’s groundbreaking undergraduate philosophy lectures at the U of C in the late 1960s. Want to know how Strauss broke down Plato’s Apology the year the Doors recorded their debut album? Listen to all 16 sessions here. THE CRYSTAL SHIP! Where art thou in all of this, Oliver Stone?