The cultural dynamics of speed outlined in new book from Duke

Egg-headed car lovers are lumped together with scholars of modernism, historians of technology, and “materialist critics” as the audience for The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism, by Enda Duffy. We’ll see if this book crosses over from an academic readership to say, readers of Car and Driver Magazine. Duffy illuminates speed as a logic for and genuine pleasure of modernity. That would be pedal-to-the-metal all the way. He draws on what he calls “adrenaline aesthetics” in such works as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ballard’s Crash, and even the cautionary consumerism of Ralph Nader. He doesn’t stop there. As a cutting edge social theorist and professor of English at UC - Santa Barbara, Duffy takes news stories, photography (think of the old-fashioned racecar images of Lartigue, and the classic Robert Frank picture of a couple speeding along in a convertible), advertising, movies, and safety media to provide a breakneck tour of speed and how it continues to define American culture.

Duffy looks at the marketing of cars and how their mass-production enabled masses of people to experience speed, and by extension know modernity: -- to feel modernity in their very bones. Speed became the chief thrill of leisure. Duke did a recent book called Mobility without Mayhem, by Jeremy Packer, and that book looked at America’s fear and fascination with driving in general, a cool cultural history of a phenomenon. Duffy’s book is different and equally valuable in that it takes on speed all by itself, and eloquently explains its political as well as cultural connotations. Speed explains who we are, where we are going (getting there fast), and the whys and wherefores of the sometimes reckless impulse to get a move on.

Gastronomy deconstructed through the naughty Victorians in quirky literary study coming from Ohio

Leave it to a gourmet chef, food writer, and general woman-about-town to write an unpredictable and fascinating study of Victorians and their alimentary behaviors as displayed in their literature. Here we have food, drink, drugs, and whatever they could stuff into their mouths. The book is Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Gwen Hyman, an assistant professor of humanities at Cooper Union in New York, and the co-author of a recent cookbook, Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food. And it seems that those appetites were voracious indeed. The very act of eating, drinking and getting high, along with whatever else is left to the imagination, seems to be the very thing itself that makes a man a man in this world. And boys will be boys. Drawing on food history, theory, literary criticism, anthropology, economics, and social criticism, along with close readings of novels of the time, especially those of Jane Austen, Professor Hyman breaks it all down for endlessly uptight, gorging, anxious, and generally hot-and-bothered Victorian culture. In this world you really are what you eat.

You also have the monster metaphor, Count Dracula and his uncontrollable thirst for blood, and the men who obsessively hunt him down. There is the drawing room, the dining room, the opium den, and the cocaine lab as manifest sets where Victorian males act out their power and uneasiness. The act of consuming, or even starving himself, can be the hinges that make or break the nation. This is an innovative, thought-provoking, and meaningful social study of what it means to be Victorian, and offers an original thesis about the embodiment of power and how alimental behavior can make, unmake and even remake the man.

Harry Potter Lexicon to finally see the light of day

January 12, 2008 will be a faithful day for all champions of fair use in copyright law. This is the day RDR Books of Muskegon, MI will publish The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials, by Steve Vander Ark ($24.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-57143-174-5). RDR has been embroiled in a lawsuit over intellectual property rights with author J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment since October 2007. The Lexicon is an encyclopedic reference work that covers all seven novels in the Harry Potter series, and is based on a web site that was heavily used by Rowling and her publishers concerning all manner of things from the fictitious world of Harry Potter – http://www.hp-lexicon.org/

The decision by Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr. to allow the book to press, with some minor changes and stipulations, is a triumph for the doctrine of fair use. It’s clear that over-zealous copyright holders can reek havoc on well-meaning chroniclers, as is the case outlined eloquently in the book Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, a comic book primer on fair use doctrine for documentary filmmakers, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins. RDR also enlisted the lawyers at Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project to testify in their favor. The Patterson ruling will most certainly help authors of similar books in the future.

Brookings Institution Press chimes in creatively to help guide a new Obama administration and congress

Brookings is taking its place as a creative nerve center in Washington, with several important books coming out by key authors on issues of critical importance to the new leaders in Washington. Acting in Time on Energy Policy, edited by Kelly Sims Gallagher of the Harvard Kennedy School, comes out in May 2009. Gallagher gathers together her colleagues from the Kennedy School and they tackle important issues that pertain to energy policy – climate change, oil and security - and explain why acting in time, and not waiting until politics demands action, would make a huge positive difference. Obama made energy policy a cornerstone of his Presidential campaign, so this book will be a welcome addition to the ongoing debate about energy.

Plug-In Vehicles: What Role for Washington is edited by David B. Sandalow, an experienced expert on energy policy at Brookings, and comes out in February 2009. With the big three automakers scrambling for a bailout from lawmakers in Washington, the contributors to this timely volume discuss what can and should be done to advance the role of plug-in electric vehicles. It would seem that this book could be very influential, especially since it gathers experts from government, business, and academia. The other thing is that Obama comes from Illinois, a state with a powerful coal lobby. Obama talked about investing in clean coal technology in his Presidential campaign, and while it’s not clear just what clean coal involves beyond the flashy advertisements, it would seem that electric cars are the wave of the future, riding a wave of replacing electricity for oil products in the future.

Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform is edited by Benjamin Wittes of Brookings, and will be published in July 09, at a critical time for new leaders in Washington: -- it is being published in cooperation with Hoover Institution and Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law. This book shows that the US desperately needs a new legal framework to fight terrorists. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the many controversial laws that were enacted as a reaction to that event under Bush, it’s clear that an entirely new statutory law is needed to govern this fight. Contributors to this essential book look to balance the need for security with the rule of law and constitutional rights of freedom. Restoring the Writ of Habeas Corpus for accused terrorists would be a good start. There are a whole host of issues discussed here, from improving interrogation laws to immigration to modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Act. Congress will have its hands full trying to sort out these challenging dilemmas as it tries to set new ground rules for the war on terrorists, and this thoughtful book should be a big help to them.

Finally, there is an eloquent book called Repairing Paradise: The Restoration of Nature in America’s National Parks, coming out in July 09 by William R Lowry, a prolific author and professor of political science at Washington University in St Louis. This book is a departure for Brookings because Lowry writes a highly personal and persuasive account about reversing the mistakes of the last eight years to preserve four National Parks: -- Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades, and the Grand Canyon. Lowry has spent considerable time in these iconic American parks, in addition to making concrete and sensible policy recommendations for the good of nature and animals there, he also is a master prose stylist and makes a poetic case to restore the natural health and glory to some of the world’s most wondrous places.

Wire and Tower

Chicago fashioned itself over time and became a distinctive place as a result of its own unique history and various natural and unnatural forces at play. The city has a history deeply ingrained in its rebirth as a mighty industrial metropolis after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Rudyard Kipling came to Chicago and hated it … it was like taking a bite of raw wild onion and cringing. Eager for American experiences, Kipling the world-wise traveler, only saw greed and avarice there, from his 1891 book, American Notes:

“I know thy cunning and thy greed,Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,And all thy glory loves to tell of specious gifts material.”

I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

The sense of place can be overwhelming, and if you’re not prepared for its extreme conditions, or if you have never encountered it’s like before, Chicago can be like a slap in the face. Some things never change. The city grew up quickly out of the lakeside wilderness and became larger than life, a microcosm of the New World, America in all its guts and glory. Wave upon wave of immigrants made their way to Chicago and formed it into a mass of humanity and blood. The people made the town tick, as the poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently stated, "The people yes. The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on."

The landscape, Calcutta-like, is uncompromising and harsh, the four seasons reeking havoc with wind and rain, snow and ice, intense heat and humidity, subzero temperatures, and spectacular thunder and lightening storms. With a certain fearlessness and innovation, the people molded Chicago into a kind of urban jungle, a place of high and low culture, again recalling Calcutta, and used their 19th century innovations to transform the landscape into the international city we know today.

The water tanks that dot the urban terrain of commercial and factory buildings in Chicago hawk back to a different time and place. They were built to last, made from the finest clear-cut redwood and cypress boards. No imperfections were allowed, and each board was 18 feet straight and 2 ½ inches thick. As long as the tanks have water in them they will never rot.

-- Alternative introduction to Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green -- http://www.wickerparkpress.com/WToC.html


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Georgia to publish a different kind of bird book

Spirits of the Air: Birds and American Indians in the South is what you might well call “a passionate read.” Wonderfully illustrated in color, author Shepard Krech III, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, is a lifelong birder and naturalist. One reviewer has called this book “superbly researched and splendidly illustrated tour of Southeastern Indian ethno-ornithology.” – Raymond D. Fogelson, University of Chicago. Krech is the author of the previous book, The Ecological Indian (Norton, 1999), and here he explores bird mythology, and he examines the complex and immutable influences of birds on Native American culture and their unique worldview. It moves beyond mere identification and habitat to really seek out the many cultural connections between birds and native peoples.

Birds were clearly important as spiritual beings, and many natives’ donned feathers and plumage, and sought to evoke avian powers in their ceremonies and dances. Bird imagery is adorned on pottery, cravings, and jewelry. Birds also played a central role in ritual healing practices, folklore, religion, and even warfare. The winged creatures of the air clearly had a remarkable and lasting impact on Native American life in the South, and probably elsewhere, and what is being called the whole Indian-bird dynamic. It takes a distinguished ecological ethno-historian like Professor Krech to put it all together for readers in one dynamite package.

Chicago Neon Signs reviewed in Midwest Book Review

Chicago Neon Signs
Dan Zamudio
Wicker Park PressPO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305-5318, ISBN 9780978967628, $24.95, www.wickerparkpress.com

Once a ubiquitous feature of Chicago's landscape, the neon sign is gradually disappearing because of the deleterious impact of Illinois winters. The result of the harsh climate and the entropy of neglect, the neon signs of neighborhood businesses are decaying, fading, rusting, and manifesting empty spaces where colorful glass tubes used to be. Chicago librarian and artist Dan Zamudio photographed many of Chicago's neon signs with a camera called 'Diana', which is made of plastic (including the lens) and thus produces as slightly blurred focus that creates beautiful and memorably surreal images. In "Chicago Neon Signs", Zamudio has compiled sixty of these black-and-white photographic images that will prove to be enduring monuments to this once great commercial advertising art form to be found in every Chicago neighborhood but which is now, year by year and decade by decade, disappearing from the scene. "Chicago Neon Signs" is an original compilation which is highly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library Photography reference collections -- and would serve as an excellent template for similar photographic studies with respect to other American cities.