Illinois Press Book Blog

Editors of the forthcoming book Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC have started arranging events to coincide with the October 2010 publication date. The first date on the current schedule is October 5 at Busboys & Poets’ 14th & P location in Washington D.C.

Judy Richardson, Jean Smith Young, Betty Garman Robinson, and other editors and contributors will celebrate publication of Hands on the Freedom Plow with a discussion and signing.

The current Hands on the Freedom Plow event schedule can be found here. It is expected that 10-15 dates will be added in the coming months. Check back for frequent updates.

Yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed update contained links to several posts that mentioned the Librarian of Congress’s release of 3-year exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on Monday.  As a result of the exemption request process, professors and film and media students (and the librarians who assist them) will now have a legal right to circumvent technological protections on movies in order to make clips available for lecture and class projects without penalty or fee.

Anyone interested in copyright issues in the classroom and in scholarly publishing would be wise to tune in to WILL-AM for Bob McChesney’s “Media Matters” show this coming Sunday, August 1, at 1 p.m. CST, when Lawrence Lessig will be his guest.  Lessig always has interesting things to say about copyright laws and how they can impede creativity and scholarship.

You can also subscribe to the show’s podcast via the WILL site, catch it streaming live online, and follow the show via Facebook for more information.

Bob McChesney is a co-editor of the Press’s History of Communication series and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

Today many of us are saying goodbye to our Marketing Department Intern, Brittany Pyle. Over the past year she’s made herself a valuable member of our team, and cheerfully completed any task assigned, which were frequently both essential and mind-numbing. Personally, we’ve shared stories about growing up in neighboring small towns that apparently haven’t changed that much over the past century, let alone the last twenty years.  And I’ve gotten to live vicariously, as a settled Gen-Xer, through her stories of learning how to make music videos by working on one for Elsinore, and got an in-depth lesson in fine art copyright after her class work turned into national news when the same band was taken to court over an album cover.

Brittany’s last day with us is tomorrow. Next week she will join Parkland College as the Art Gallery Exhibit Coordinator, with a second (unpaid) internship Fridays at 40 North, 88 West, our local arts council.  They’re both very privileged to get her! She’ll also find time to continue working on her own art.

Gail Collins’ tribute to twenty-somethings in yesterday’s New York Times captured my feelings better than I can. All the best to you, Brittany.

A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945 by Nancy C. Carnevale was selected as a winner of an American Book Award for 2010. 

The book examines Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century and is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group’s experience with language in America. Choice wrote: “Outstanding from start to finish. . . . The author displays exceptional range and depth in exploring not only the interior world of Italian American life, but also the intersections of this group’s story with that of other immigrant communities and with society as a whole. . . . Highly recommended.”

Congratulations, Nancy!

In a nutshell, the challenge of translating Sollers consists of finding a balance between rendering his idiosyncratic prose style without flattening it, on the one hand, and writing intelligible English, on the other. To me, it was absolutely necessary to let the English-speaking reader in on the secret of the Sollers charisma, which is not, as some of his critics may think, because his smiling face and glib personality appear often before the public on French television. Anyone who has really read Sollers in the original has learned to appreciate him because he is a masterful stylist, a unique poetician. His writing is his very identity; I had to convey it.

But I’m writing this book in English, not some mélange of Frenglish and franglais. The last thing I want to do is betray my own native language and lay myself open to the charge of making my English sound odd—the English that sounds like it’s trying to be French, the scandalous ineptitude of the “word-for-word.” These contradictory requirements pulled me in opposite directions. How to make Sollers speak English?

I suppose any translator faces this dilemma, and the success of a translation may well depend on the translator’s skill in making the contradiction simply disappear. I have a hunch that the good translations are the ones where the reader has no clue how hard it was to find that balance.
 
It is the writing of Mysterious Mozart that makes Sollers’s book so fascinating and so different from the many others about Mozart. Difficult writing—I had to resist the inclination to make it easier to understand in English than in French. In other words, I had to preserve the difficulty, at the cost of making my English sound strange. And the sound of Sollers’s writing is precisely where its uniqueness lies. That’s what my English had to capture—a kind of poetic language. There is music in his prose. I hope my readers will hear it.

*****

Armine Kotin Mortimer is a professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and translator of Mysterious Mozart by Philippe Sollers.

On Wednesday, July 28, from 10:00pm until midnight, co-authors Gordon and Gary Shepherd will appear on Milt Rosenberg’s WGN radio program Extension 720 to discuss their new book Talking with the Children of God: Prophecy and Transformation in a Radical Religious Group.

A unique study of the radical religious movement now known as The Family International, the book draws on face-to-face interviews with the group’s leaders and administrative staff. One of the most controversial groups emerging from the Jesus People movement of the 1960s, the Family originally was known as The Children of God. Under leader David Berg, members proclaimed an apocalyptic “Endtime,” shunned secular occupations, lived communally, and adopted unusual sexual practices that led to abuse scandals in the 1970s and 1980s. Following Berg’s death in 1994, the organization began to dramatically alter its evangelization efforts and decision-making processes.

Gordon and Gary Shepherd will be Milt’s guests for the full two hours and will take listener phone calls in the second hour of the program.

Amalia Pallares, co-editor of the new book ¡Marcha! Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement, was interviewed July 22, 2010, on WGN-TV’s Midday News.

I have been working lately on arranging book events for our forthcoming anthology Christmas in Illinois. Editor Jim Ballowe will travel across the state during October, November, and December to promote the book. 

Forefront in my mind as the events are confirmed is how a book signing in one Chicago suburb might negatively impact store relations in the city or another suburb.  Anderson’s in Naperville (November 27) is 40 miles from The Book Stall in Winnetka (December 11) so there shouldn’t be a conflict.  The Book Stall is half that distance to Borders on Michigan Avenue (December 14), but the customer bases still seem pretty compartmentalized.

Of slightly more concern will be events I will start pursuing in southern Illinois. Are the Marion and Carbondale markets separate enough that stores in each town won’t object to a Christmas in Illinois event at the other location on the same day or successive days?

At least I don’t have to worry about Lollapalooza-sized conflicts. Literally.

Pop music critic Jim DeRogatis recently reported that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is looking into how playing at Lollapalooza impacts a performer’s ability to schedule other shows in the Chicago area.

… Madigan’s office is investigating anti-trust issues stemming from the so-called “radius” or “exclusivity clauses” that Lollapalooza promoters C3 Presents impose on all acts performing at the festival, prohibiting them from playing within 300 miles of Chicago for as much as six months before and three months after the August concert.

We’re pleased to announce that six forthcoming titles from our Fall 2010 catalog are available in e-galley form from NetGalley.  Reviewers, librarians, bookstores, and educators can get an early look at the full content of these titles:

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

Orwell: Life and Art

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century

Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition

Pay for Play : A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform

Honey, I’m Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World

Browse the University of Illinois Press NetGalley selection here.

For the past three years my oldest son and I have played hooky in July or August to attend a weekday Cubs game at Wrigley Field.  We typically park north of the ball park and walk south, passing an outfield entrance to the bleachers. We arrive early enough to see a long line of fans waiting to be admitted to the outfield stands.

In my many years as a Cubs fan I’ve wondered who buys the season tickets to sit in the Wrigley Field bleachers. Where do they work? Are they cityfolk or suburbanites? Do they sit in the same (general admission) seats every game?

Holly Swyers’s new book Wrigley Regulars: Finding Community in the Bleachers offers insights to the above questions while also examining the interactions between these hardcore Cubs fans.

The Cubs have performed better since the All Star break, but I have a feeling that play-by-play announcers Len and Bob and Pat and Ron could be looking for some between pitch talking points to break up the losing baseball talk. Gentlemen, your gratis copies will be in the mail shortly.