UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Introducing Summer Shorts

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:28:29 -0500

“Still longer than a tweet and still shorter than A River Runs Through It—” SUMMER CHICAGO...

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:37:38 -0500

A recent review from the New Yorker—and more about the book here. “The wings of the pterosaur take...

On the Subject of Book Cake

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:41:00 -0500

From the Introduction The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer by...

One of the taglines—the pithy paragraph-end to an initial piece...

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:15:26 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Chicago Shorts

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:04:42 -0600

“Longer than a tweet and shorter than A River Runs Through It—” INTRODUCING CHICAGO SHORTS The...

Quadriptych, with hands: Dave Hickey, Harold Bloom, Richard...

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:35:01 -0600

Quadriptych, with hands: Dave Hickey, Harold Bloom, Richard Cheney, Mel Brooks

Winold Reiss: Painter of the Harlem Renaissance

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:15:29 -0600

And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen by Charles Molesworth considers the extensive body...

Jane Addams: Citizen

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:15:38 -0600

On Election Day, it’s never a bad idea to revisit the larger consequences and historical stakes...

Carlo Rotella, "The Greatest"

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:47:43 -0500

Carlo Rotella grew up on Chicago’s South Side. His native-son meets hometown-boy-makes-good...

“Hank Hill listens to Dubstep,” from King of the...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:20:00 -0500

“Hank Hill listens to Dubstep,” from King of the Hill (Season 13)

Scholarly accession:

Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation by Thomas Turino

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:04:45 -0500

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)

More in Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis

“These works have led some critics, journalists, and...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:50:30 -0500

“These works have led some critics, journalists, and art-lovers to speak of Turrell as a ‘sculptor of the sky.’ He bends it and shapes it, bringing forth novel appearances, but without laying a hand on it. His work is in invitation to the sky to condescend to show itself to us. This invitation is made by offering it a frame, a limit or edge that can contain its immensity and thereby let the uncontainable sky appear. Turrell’s work works around the sky and is always about the sky. Being always about the sky that one is seeing, Turrell’s own work is not what one looks at when one is there. You do not look at what he has made, for what he has made is just the edge circling around what is not made: the sky that his work is alwaysabout.

This sky that is not made is what we are made, patiently, to see.”

—from Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy by Jeffrey L. Kosky

File under: rejected names for the University of Chicago...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:08:40 -0500

File under: rejected names for the University of Chicago Spanish-English Dictionary app

the University of Chicago Re-Amped Vulgar Latin Palatalization Meme Generator and Rococo Cat Collection

the University of Chicago Verb-framed Voiceless Stopper, i.e. Fosse

the University of Chicago’s vast phonetic inventory of the Andalusian term for “bobby pin,” mitigated by the subversion of gender and the signifying economy

Capitalismo y Libertad

Zeitgeist: On Ditching the Monograph and Digital Print Culture

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:45:00 -0500

On October 14, Jennifer Howard wrote a post for the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s College,...

This post by scholar Marcel LaFollette, the first in her series...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:15:00 -0500

This post by scholar Marcel LaFollette, the first in her series on television and the Smithsonian archives, perked our interest. LaFollette writes about the show-and-tell parlance of early morning talk shows, pulling up archival images from an April 1953 sit-down by Smithsonian Secretary Leonard Carmichael, his predecessor Charles Greeley Abbot, and aeronautics curator Paul Garber celebrating the fiftieth anniversary powered flight. The crew brought along related ephemera from the Smithsonian’s collection, including Charles Lindbergh’s flying suit and a map of the flight plan (along with an elaborate passenger plane-model prop).

WTOP announcer Bill Jenkins can be seen clutching the latest issue of Saturday Evening Post, which featured Part 3 of an article by Lindbergh himself. We did some digging in the internet archives and found a copy of the May 2, 1953 issue, which ran Part 4. The cover art, an illustration by Thornton Utz, is equally remarkable—Utz designed 50+ covers for the Post in his lifetime, along with some corporate ad design for Coca-Cola, General Electric, and Ford Motor Co. You can check out a post on the Mad Men meets B-movie dynamics of his work here and an overwhelming archive of his illustrations for The American Magazine here.

On the Animated GIF and the V-P Debate

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:13:00 -0500

In On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extensions of Life, Sypros...

Laura Letinsky: Venus Inferred

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:44:09 -0500

Sigmar Polke, Supermarkets (Wir Kleinbürger), 1976. “Among...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:21:19 -0500

Sigmar Polke, Supermarkets (Wir Kleinbürger), 1976.

“Among West German artists of the second postwar generation—those who came of age in the 1960s—Polke most definitively expressed in his paintings that the first true lapse in the tenets of modernism had occurred. Emerging during the heyday of pop art, Polke toyed with the forms of high and low, simultaneously drawing comic attention to the gap between them and attempting to break down the perceived opposition. With this shift came a marked embrace of the trivial and an accompanying perception that seriousness need no longer be the primary goal for postwar German artists. Polke’s parodic sense of humor and comedic dismantling of numerous modernist visual tropes made him a key figure in the West German variant of pop. Polke’s work stands for the early phase of postmodernism, when an acceptance of the inevitability of stylistic repetition led to a critically effective version of humor.”

—from Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art by Gregory H. Williams

“To develop a theory of an ecology of happiness, we must...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:07:00 -0500

“To develop a theory of an ecology of happiness, we must go beyond these statistical correlations and understand what, in their contact with a preserved natural environment, makes people happy. Looking back at the origins of human beings’ relationship with nature is an obvious first step. American biologist Edward O. Wilson, professor at Harvard University and a great pioneer in biodiversity studies, in 1984 proposed the concept of biophilia, from the ancient Greek bios—“life”—and philos—”beloved” or “friend.” According to Wilson, people have an innate tendency to establish a relationship with the living world and natural processes. In other words, the human species has an innate emotional affinity with other living beings as well as with the plant kingdom and natural surroundings. This concept of biophilia thus refers to the psychological well-being that people experience during a close interaction with the natural environment. An attraction to nature is the expression of a biological need that has been an integral part of the development of the human species since its origin and which is essential to both the physical and the psychic parts of human nature. The hypothesis of a human dependency on nature implies much more than a need to satisfy one’s physical wants; it also includes a search in nature for aesthetic, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual satisfactions, and more widely, a quest for the meaning of life.”

—from An Ecology of Happiness by Eric Lambin

“We come back in the end to Dr. Faustus, who was one of...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:36:06 -0500

“We come back in the end to Dr. Faustus, who was one of the most important folk heroes of the world of printed books and a rough contemporary of Don Quixote. Faust was a product of early modern learning, of all those books that were increasingly available to readers. Faust was Quixote’s serious side. Unlike the Don, however, who steadily devoured works of fiction, Faust tried to know too much about the world. He tried to surpass what could be known in a book, whether it was the Bible or the alchemical handbook. Faust, the fist, in other words, is our modern day demon, not Mephistopheles, his devilish double. Faust reminds us of the way books are totems against ceaseless activity, tools for securing the somatic calm that is the beginning of all careful but also visionary thought. If we believe in the value of rest, and the kind of conversional thinking that is makes possible, then we will want to preserve books and their spaces of readerly rest.

But Faust also reminds us not to hold on too tightly. He shows us the risks of grasping.”

—from Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper