Illinois Press Blog http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress Author appreciation, broadcast bulletins, event ephemera & recent reviews from the University of Illinois Press Mon, 28 Jul 2014 20:34:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Book trailer for Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15432 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15432#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2014 18:18:31 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15432 Continue reading ]]>

Robert G. La France, co-editor of Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years, talks about the life and work of the influential sculptor in this video.

In the book trailer, La France, former Curator of Pre-Modern Art at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana campus, shows off some of the museum’s Taft collection.

 

 

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Sci Fi Friday: Ray Bradbury makes an impact on the Moon http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15346 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15346#comments Fri, 25 Jul 2014 17:40:01 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15346 Continue reading ]]> On July 26, 1971 the Apollo 15 mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center with a mission to explore Earth’s moon.

Four days later, on July 30, 1971 Lunar Module landed on lunar surface. During the mission astronauts David Scott and James Irwin honored Ray Bradbury by naming an impact crater Dandelion Crater, after the author’s classic 1957 novel Dandelion Wine.

It was a tribute to a longtime supporter of their dream and their mission. Through speeches, interviews, and articles for Life magazine, Ray Bradbury spent the 1960s as one of the most enthusiastic public proponents of space exploration in general and the Apollo program in particular. To him, the race to the moon meant nothing less than a necessary step in the evolution of the human race.

When Apollo 11 made its historic landing on the lunar surface in 1969, Bradbury was in London taking his usual summer holiday with his family. He nonetheless found reporter Mike Wallace and did an interview broadcast via tape delay by CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite at NASA Houston. As Jonathan Eller notes in the forthcoming UIP book Ray Bradbury Unbound:

Bradbury presented space exploration as the great moral substitute for war: “War is a great toy to play with. Men and boys love war . . . let us eliminate war because the proper enemy is before us. All of the universe doesn’t care whether we exist or not, but we care whether we exist . . . this is the proper war to fight.”

There was no scientific introspection here; Bradbury was not capable of it, and never pretended to be. But Walter Cronkite’s live studio audience at NASA Houston burst into applause for the final words of the writer who still listened to the whispers of the boy within.

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Q&A with Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution author Barbara Foley http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15334 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15334#comments Thu, 24 Jul 2014 13:56:05 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15334 Continue reading ]]> Barbara Foley is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro. She answered some questions about her book Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution.

Q: How is Jean Toomer best known?

Barbara Foley: Toomer, author of Cane (1923) is widely known as the first—and for some critics the best—writer associated with the movement that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. He is also widely acknowledged to be an experimental modernist of the first rank, since his Cane—an amalgam of prose, poetry, and drama—defies generic classification. A light-skinned man of partly African descent, from a relatively privileged class background among Washington DC’s “Negro Four Hundred,” Toomer was an early interrogator of racial categorization—although what is for some critics a cagey critique of racial essentialism is, for others, a flight from being identified as African American. Finally, Cane—which is based on Toomer’s three-month stay in the Deep South in 1921—is widely read as a nostalgic evocation of a folk way of life on the cusp of disappearance with modernity. While he is credited with acknowledging the harshness of Jim Crow, however, he is generally seen as an apolitical writer. This last point is one that I contest vigorously in my book.

Q: How did you determine that Toomer had significant intellectual and political connections with socialism, and how do these affect the way we can read Cane?

Foley: I first encountered Toomer’s strongly leftist political views in his early published writings in the Socialist Party press, where he proposed a class-based analysis of the causes of race riots and a critique of imperialist war-profiteering. I then found these views buttressed in his unpublished journals and autobiographies. These discoveries led me to reread Cane (which, I must confess, I had originally read as largely apolitical!). I discovered not only references to well-known instances of lynching and debt peonage but also a symbolic subtext alluding to contemporaneous historical events, such as the 1919 race riot in Washington and the Russian Revolution. Perhaps most significant has been the discovery—which will no doubt be contested in reviews of my book—that Cane’s preoccupation with rape, infanticide and failed maternity can be read as a commentary on not just the violent exploitation entailed by Jim Crow but also the crushing of revolutions (except in the USSR) in the wake of the Great War. This symbolic subtext constitutes what I call—invoking Fredric Jameson’s work—the “political unconscious” of Cane.

Q: You also make the case that Cane testifies to the presence of certain repressed family secrets. What are these, and how do these complicate the notion of the “political unconscious,” which is usually seen as a broadly social, not an individual, phenomenon?

Foley: Well, I don’t want to create a “spoiler”; I want people to read the book! Suffice it to say that there is good reason to argue that Toomer discovered that the second wife of his father, Nathan Toomer, had been Amanda America Dickson, said to be the richest colored woman in America. He learned, too, that her adult son had come close to sexually violating his adolescent step-sister, Nathan Toomer’s youngest daughter (and hence Jean Toomer’s half-sister). Traces of this quasi-Gothic saga, I propose, can be found in Cane, where personal emotions of anger and shame interface with Toomer’s radical critique of the economic basis of Jim Crow in capitalism. Embedded in my argument that the political unconscious of Cane is at once broadly social and deeply personal is a call for greater attention to authorial biography in Marxist approaches to literary analysis.

Q: How was Toomer involved with or influenced by the New Negro Movement and the project of Young America?

Foley: Toomer’s ties with Young America—and particular its leading figure Waldo Frank—have been well documented in other Toomer criticism. What I add to ongoing debates is, I hope, an appreciation of the complexity of Toomer’s attitude toward Frank, whom he greatly admired, even as he was skeptical of Young America’s claims to cultural pluralism.  As regards the New Negro Movement, I argue that, when he wrote Cane, Toomer viewed himself as a Negro and—while he would later retell the story—had a productive working relationship with Alain Locke, editor of The New Negro: An Interpretation. Critical to a full understanding of Toomer’s connection with the New Negro Movement, I propose, is a fuller understanding of his key relationships with a Washington-based group of African American women, a number of whom had significant ties to the socialist left.

Q: What contributions will your book make to scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance?

Foley: Well, time will tell!  Perhaps, above all, I am hopeful that Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution will remind scholars of the necessity of keeping global movements in mind when considering what appear to be nation-based historical phenomena. Toomer might have written Cane had there not been a Russian Revolution; but it would have been a very different book.

 

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The University of Illinois Press seeks Desktop Publisher http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15381 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15381#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2014 21:54:44 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15381 Continue reading ]]> The University of Illinois Press has an opening for a Desktop Publisher.

The Press is seeking a Publisher to compose books and journals for the Press using InDesign/CS6 for Macintosh.

Details on the position and how to apply can be found here: – Desktop Publisher/Coordinator postition

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Happy birthday Alison Krauss http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15192 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15192#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:08:50 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15192 Continue reading ]]> Born on July 23, 1971, Central Illinois native Alison Krauss has been awarded with more Grammys than any other female artist. The singer and fiddle player has put up sales numbers greater than any other living bluegrass act. Yet, as Murphy Hicks Henry writes in her book Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass, her career “initially caused great angst for any in the bluegrass community who didn’t know whether to love her or leave her alone.”

Krauss has been embraced by any number of audiences, no matter what to genre she has been marketed. When it comes to authenticity, her country music credibility was cemented when she became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1993.

In Pretty Good for a Girl, Henry writes about the beginning of the bluegrass superstar:

Alison’s story begins with her family–mother Louise, father Fred, and older brother Viktor–living quietly in Champaign, Illinois. Louise and Fred took parenting seriously and put their two children into every program imaginable, including music. Violin was five-year-old Alison’s choice of instrument, and she stuck with classical lessons until age eleven, when she started to chafe at the rigid confines of the music. Fiddle contests, with Alison began entering at age eight, offered the thrill of competition along with freedom from the printed page. Soon Alison was studying the music of the great contest champions like Randy Howard and Mark O’Connor, and bluegrass fiddler Stuart Duncan. She took first place at the prestigious Winfield, Kansas, fiddle championship in 1984 and by 1985 had added state championships from Illinois, Indiana, and Tennessee to her trophy case.

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Exploring Illinois: Ayers Sand Prairie http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15237 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15237#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2014 14:45:30 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15237 Continue reading ]]>

Ayers Sand Prairie in Carroll County was once the western edge of the Wisconsin Glacier. Among the small dunes explorers can spy plants and animals friendly to the dry growing conditions such as the birds-foot violet and the Olympia marble butterfly.

Ayers Sand Nature Preserve is featured in Exploring Nature in Illinois: A Field Guide to the Prairie StateThroughout the book naturalists Michael Jeffords and Susan Post invite you to discover fifty preserves, forests, restoration areas, and parks in the Land of Lincoln.

Each Wednesday we’ll preview some of the unexpected beauty of Illinois’s prairies, lakesides, river bottoms, and woodlands found within the book. . . . just in time for you to plan a weekend trip.

You’ll find maps and descriptions of these wild places in Illinois, including many hard-to-find sites, within the pages of the book.

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INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED: Scopes loses but Darrow wins http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15178 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15178#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2014 16:00:40 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15178 Continue reading ]]> On July 21, 1925, John T. Scopes was found guilty of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.

Despite losing the case, Attorney Clarence Darrow’s relentless witness-stand grilling of the prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan (the eventual winner of the case) is often cited as as a victory for Modernists.

In Intelligently Designed: How the Creationists Built the Campaign Against Evolution, Edward Caudill writes:

The ridicule of Bryan. . . . served the immediate purposes of proevolutionists. It was easier to assail an individual than a system of beliefs that was inconsistent, ill defined, and scientifically illogical. Bryan, its flag-bearer, was a distinctive and public target. But the verbal barrage was inconsequential in the long-term battle, in which Bryan’s defenders glorified his self-sacrifice and righteousness in defense of a holy cause. . . . Historians and filmmakers have judged Darrow the winner, even though he lost the case. The contrived event grew into a forum on science and religion, modernism and fundamentalism–charismatically presented by Darrow and Bryan.

As Caudill points out by mentioning “filmmakers,” the courtroom theatrics would later inspire the 1955 stage play Inherit the Wind, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which in turn would serve as the basis for the 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy.

 

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Mancini’s Pink Panther hits 50 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15273 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15273#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2014 14:11:25 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15273 Continue reading ]]> In the spring and summer of 1964, the Blake Edwards film The Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers, became a huge hit. The farcical tale of an incompetent French detective matching wits with a suave jewel thief, The Pink Panther dropped slapstick and Sellers’s signature broad antics into a more or less straight heist story to create a comedy at once classic, ridiculous, and sophisticated.

Making just as big of an impact was Henry Mancini’s iconic score, now commemorated with a 50th Anniversary release. Mancini had already written hits, including the jazz-influenced ”Peter Gunn Theme” for the TV detective series Peter Gunn and the Oscar-winning “Moon River” for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Audrey Hepburn sang the latter in the film. Just about everyone with a recording contract covered it afterwards.

Yet Enrico Nicola Mancini would enjoy days of wine and roses far in excess of even these triumphs. When Blake Edwards, a collaborator from the Peter Gunn and Tiffany’s days, asked Mancini to score Panther, it proved a fateful assignment. Mancini answered with one of filmdom’s most famous themes and a future musical staple that to this day unites marching bands, PA systems at baseball games, and no-name jazz combos around a signature piece of Mancini magic. As John Caps reports in his book Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music:

That sound and that theme became great examples of an important Mancini principle of scoring: intentionally “funny” music behind a comedy scene is redundant and destructive. The “Pink Panther Theme,” though witty in itself, is not a joke, not a novelty number. It is, besides its grin, a seriously swinging piece of jazz-pop with an invigorating sense of both fun and sophistication. So it does not overkill the comedy. We first hear the theme during the film’s animated main title sequence, which, famously, morphs that panther-shaped flaw in the stolen gem into a wry, mischievous cartoon panther, which spends the credit sequence taking great liberties with the graphic lettering that spells out the movie’s cast and crew.

Early in the film’s postproduction process, once the idea of an animated main title sequence was discussed, the animators asked to hear a finished piece of main title music against which they could time their cartoon sketches. At that stage Mancini had not yet fixed his own ideas, but he said he would give them at least a rhythm. They created the panther, Bugs Bunny-like in the long ancestry of animated anarchists, to that bass line alone. The theme itself came after. It begins with a suspended chord of open fifths by the piano and a small hand chime with a triangle tapping out the tempo for three bars until a low piano/vibe/two basses/guitar combo plays the sneaking motif, first ascending, the descending unresolved. This creates, most efficiently, the suspense of a detective story while also making fun of it. At bar 12, or where Peter Sellers’s name appears in the credits (already undermining David Niven’s supremacy as the star), we hear Plas Johnson’s tenor sax with its unmistakably jazzy accents as it moves so naturally up in parallel fifths and then does a dying fall, slurring the last note like a bluesman.

Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music is available in at the special ebook price of $2.99 throughout July. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.

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Exploring Illinois: Kickapoo State Park http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15223 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15223#comments Wed, 16 Jul 2014 13:23:28 +0000 sfast http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15223 Continue reading ]]>

The middle fork of the Vermilion River runs through Kickapoo State Park. Just a short walk from Middle Fork Woods Nature Preserve, explorers will find forest-lined bluffs and a a multitude of creatures.  Large dragonflies patrol the banks along the river and calling frogs hop about the deep water ponds.

Middle Fork Woods Nature Preserve and Kickapoo State Park are featured in Exploring Nature in Illinois: A Field Guide to the Prairie StateThroughout the book naturalists Michael Jeffords and Susan Post invite you to discover fifty preserves, forests, restoration areas, and parks in the Land of Lincoln.

Each Wednesday we’ll preview some of the unexpected beauty of Illinois’s prairies, lakesides, river bottoms, and woodlands found within the book. . . . just in time for you to plan a weekend trip.

You’ll find maps and descriptions of these wild places in Illinois, including many hard-to-find sites, within the pages of the book.

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Judy McCulloh http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15308 http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15308#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2014 18:32:36 +0000 michael http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=15308 Continue reading ]]> Judy McCulloh, who worked at the University of Illinois Press for 35 years and was recognized for building our music and folklore lists during her tenure, died at home during the early morning of Sunday, July 13.  She had been battling cancer for many years.

Among many accomplishments, in 2010 Judy was named a NEA National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts.  See this website for more info:  http://arts.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/judith-mcculloh

We’ll miss you, Judy.

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