Illinois Press Book Blog

Susie at her retirement party, February 21, 2009

After 30 years of service to the University of Illinois, Assistant Sales Manager Susie Dueringer is retiring from the Press. Susie has helped keep the Press functioning in many different ways, including:

Main switchboard receptionist
Review copy mailing label maker
Clerk-Typist III
Felt backdrop with Velcro in-house developer
Inventory manager
Books in Print detail tracker
Exhibits & Awards Manager

She also mentioned something about a time before there were personal computers.

As most of us look forward to this weekend, Susie looks forward to her permanent weekend. We’re jealous! And, we wish her all the best.

The debut of Examined Life gives Avital Ronell a celebrity that will amaze her, please her, and puzzle her, all at once. Choosing Avital as one of the principals in the film could hardly have been a better choice. She shares rare virtues with Butler, Zizek, Nussbaum, and West:  an enormous intellectual range, as deep as it is wide; the courage to confront all kinds of tyranny, especially the dogmatic kinds; a firm faith in the importance of teaching; and a restlessness that keeps her always moving forward, though with many a backward glance. But she is also unique, a clear reminder that intellectual brilliance differentiates. With humor, passion, and perpetual inventiveness, she incarnates the American voice of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. 

Our press has had the privilege of publishing her work for the past decade, including Stupidity, The Test Drive, reprints of Dictations:  On Haunted Writing and Crack Wars, and most recently The Überreader, a hearty sampling of her heterogeneity. A collection of essays on her work, Reading Ronell, edited by Diane Davis, is forthcoming later this year, and a translation of her interviews, published as American Philo in Paris, is due next year. 

If you love thinking, if you think Goethe and Dostoyevsky are worth thinking about, if you’ve ever doubted what doubt can do, you owe yourself a date with Ronell’s writing.

Barney & Terry Trilling-Josephson

David Brent Johnson posts an article that he wrote in 2000 about the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit” in advance of his radio interview this weekend on WFIU with Terry Trilling-Josephson, co-author of Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People.

The new Harper’s Magazine arrived yesterday with a cover story (subscription required) titled “The Last Book Party.”  Yes, it’s another article on the death of publishing. Or, I think it is. I can’t get all the way through it for the distracting physical descriptions of every person the writer meets at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Ira, in a bracingly Windsor-knotted pink tie and smart blue sports jacket , just stepped off the red-eye from New York but looks as though he just stepped out of an extravagant shower.

His jacket is black-and-white checked with a faint periwinkle stripe. His face has been harshly exfoliated, and his hair forms an obedient helmet of brushed-out grays. His pants are black and too shiny, and his tie, with purple and green diagonal stripes, makes me suspect it is one of only three he owns.

Jamie has a leonine aspect, with a high clear brow and soft curls eddying over his …

Enough! Get to the death of publishing already.

But, maybe I’m just put-off by the thought of his potential description of me at this year’s BEA.

Passing a university press booth I see a hulking figure wearing a suit that only escapes the closet once a year and was obviously purchased at one of those lowbrow chain stores found in a Midwestern mall …

James Parker pens an article for The Atlantic that I’ve been waiting to read for over a year. 

To a senescent music industry, this “downloadable content” has worked like Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth: a band whose song appears on either Rock Band or Guitar Hero is almost guaranteed an instant and enormous commercial boost. Back catalogs are illuminated, obscurities arbitrarily enthroned. Weezer’s “My Name Is Jonas,” first released in 1994, reportedly increased its sales tenfold after being featured in Guitar Hero III. Rock Band currently has a library of about 500 songs; since its launch, there have been more than 28 million downloads.

I do wish that the article had dug deeper into the sales figures to determine if CD sales of Foghat Live or Mountain’s Climbing! had increased due to the new exposure for Slow Ride and Mississippi Queen. 

(Shhh, I’m developing a new game titled “Page Turner! The University of Illinois Press Edition”).

The New York Times’ review of Amazon’s new Kindle is worth reading.

The point everyone is missing is that in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences.

The 81st annual Academy Awards ceremony included two prominent film figures who happen to be the subjects of forthcoming books in our Contemporary Film Directors series.

Jerry Lewis received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Albert Maysles created the video introduction to the documentary film category presented by Bill Maher (who also mentioned Maysles in his remarks).

Both books, by Chris Fujiwara and Joe McElhaney respectively, will be available this fall.

Tools of Change for Publishing has posted Jason Epstein’s keynote address given at the recent TOC conference.

I don’t have to tell anyone here that we are at the end of the Gutenberg era; at the threshold not only of a new way of publishing books but of a cultural revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg’s, assuming we survive our financial calamity, our 20,000 nuclear weapons, and our melting ice cap, all of them by the way unintended consequences of the western civilization that Gutenberg’s technology made possible.

The February 26, 2009, issue of London Review of Books includes a review of volumes 1 & 2 of Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, published late last year in paperback.

[Goldman’s career] as her adoptive country’s most notorious anarchist [is] richly displayed in these two volumes of documentary history.

February 19th is the annual Day of Remembrance when we reflect on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The day this year marks the 67th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt. With that Order nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were citizens by birth, spent the war years imprisoned for no crime other than ancestry. Without due process, Japanese Americans were denied the very basic civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S.
Constitution. The removal of civil liberties extended to the right to photographic representation as well. Cameras were classified as weapons, in the same category as guns, bombs, and ammunition and were prohibited.

How would you react if you had your camera taken away from you? Government officials believed that they were discouraging sabotage but at the same time they took away the ability for Japanese Americans to represent themselves photographically. During the years in the camps, significant rites of passage escaped photographic memorialization, and Japanese Americans were denied the ability to verify their mistreatment or harsh conditions.

Photography was and remains such a vital vehicle for the definition of self in American life that many Americans regard access to photography as a fundamental right. As the example of the prohibition of cameras in the World War II camps reminds us, to take the right to photographic representation away is tied to the deprivation of other citizenship rights, even if there is not a specific right to photograph in the Constitution. Next time you pick up your camera or post a photograph online consider the power you have to represent your world the way you see it.

*****

Jasmine Alinder is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of the new book Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration.