University of Michigan Press Blog

University of Michigan Press author Marilyn Hacker wins Argana International Poetry Award

The Press congratulates Marilyn Hacker, author of Unauthorized Voices: Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1987 - 2009 (2010), for winning the 2011 Argana International Poetry Award. The honor, bestowed by Morocco's Bayt Achiir (House of Poetry), was created in 2002 as a symbol of poetic friendship. Morocco World News reports that in a statement Bayt Achiir said it was "keen to explore, by granting the award to Hacker, new horizons and establish openness to other poetry experiences in today's world."

An acclaimed poet, translator, and editor, Hacker has been the recipient of many awards, including the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the National Book Award for her own poetry, and her translation of Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.   

(Author photo copyright Margaretta Mitchell.)

"Illuminating Childhood" author recounts her travels in Czech Republic and India

At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, faculty blog, U-M Press author Ellen Handler Spitz recounts her recent travels in the Czech Republic and India.

"My trip started in the Czech Republic, where I am researching the children’s drawings from Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp," she begins. "Since first visiting the camp 20 years ago, I have written and lectured on the opera and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, the Bauhaus-trained artist who became the children’s art teacher. Over 4,000 drawings survive today, saved and hidden by her before she was taken to the gas chambers of Auschwitz; to write on them is my next project."

Handler Spitz describes her experiences in Prague before beginning the next leg of her journey, traveling to India, where she had been invited to give several lectures.

For the full story, including photos, head over to TalkingHeads@UMBC.

Illuminating Childhood: Portraits in Fiction, Film, and Drama is available now in hardcover from the University of Michigan Press; a paperback edition will be released in March.

Q&A with Ole Bjerg, author of 'Poker: The Parody of Capitalism'

The popularity of poker is on the rise not just in the United States but throughout the world. A number of guides and strategies have been published to help players navigate the complexities of the game, but there are few studies of how poker functions as a game and its meaning both to players and the broader culture. Ole Bjerg's new book, Poker: The Parody of Capitalism represents an intriguing new scholarly perspective on poker, capitlalism, and the surprising ways one relates to the other. Bjerg is a sociologist and associate professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, and we spoke with him briefly about Poker, available now from the University of Michigan Press

University of Michigan Press: To begin with, I’m hoping you can talk a little about how poker functions as a “parody” of capitalism. Briefly, what do you mean by this?

Ole Bjerg: The notion of parody is a concept that I have found in Baudrillard. The idea is that games in general and poker in particular seem to simulate features of the ordinary or "serious" non-game world. I demonstrate that the way money circulates in No-Limit Texas Hold'Em, which is currently the most popular form of poker, is comparable to the way that money circulates in contemporary financial capitalism. However, the difference between capitalism and poker is that the former comes with a whole ideological system of explanation and justification while the latter makes no attempt to justify itself. Poker does not pretend to be fair, efficient, or productive. It just is. This means that the parody shows us the mechanisms of the system but without the ideological superstructure.

Your book considers poker as an expression of culture, along the lines of art and literature. What does poker tell us about the people who play it and the cultures to which they belong?

My research has shown that different people have very different reasons for playing poker. This is one of the faschinating features of the game.

It enables people to play with very different emotional investments.

Some play just for amusement. Some play because the dream of being professionals. Some are professionals. Some play because they are compulsive gamblers. And even the ones that are compulsive gamblers have different attachments to the game. However, if there is one thing that all players have in common, I think it is the sensation that there is something in poker which transcends the ordinary life outside of poker.

People who do not play poker themselves often tend to think that poker players play to win money. This is much too simple. People play poker to play poker. One of my favorite quotes from the reservoir of poker folklore is by Nick "the Greek" Dandalos: "The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing." I think that sums up beautifully what poker is about.

Continuing the analogy, can there be a “great work” of poker, which I would think would amount to an extraordinarily well-played hand?

Yes, certainly. "Great works of poker" come into being precisely at those moments when the game seems to transcend life itself. Poker provides the player with the opportunity to test and display character.

Great works of poker come into being when the player has the courage and wit to become one with the game in a way that makes it seem as if the game itself is on his side. Similar moments may happen in music when the musician becomes one with the music.

Poker as Poetry of Money

Guest blogger Ole Bjerg is the author of Poker: The Parody of Capitalism, available now from the University of Michigan Press. His book argues, among other things, that the poker is a form of cultural expression not unlike fine arts and literature, and here he discusses briefly how to consider the game in similar terms.

The relationship between money, economy, and gambling is comparable to the relationship between language, prose, and poetry. In prose, the functioning of language is more or less taken for granted, and language is used as a medium for conveying meaning, for instance, stating a fact or telling a story. In (good) poetry, however, there is a wondering and probing into the very character of language. Rhythm and rhyming make us aware of language as an independent entity with material properties; verbal ambiguity questions the very signifying function of language; and so on. Similarly, in our use of money in “ordinary” economy we take for granted its function as neutral medium of exchange, measure, and store of value. In gambling, however, money enters a different kind of circulation whereby the very functioning of money is put into question. Playing with money means experimenting with money, revealing properties not otherwise immediately visible. In this sense, gambling may be viewed as a kind of “poetry of money.” Gambling offers the opportunity to play with money in the same way that poetry offers the opportunity to play with words.

In Slavoj Zizek’s words, “Poetry takes place within language, but twists and turns it against itself, thus making it tell the truth.” Truth in poetry is not the kind of truth found in propositions about a factual state of affairs in the world. It is perhaps rather a kind of truth about language itself. Along similar lines, there is a certain kind of truth about money that reveals itself in gambling.

In gambling, money enters a form of circulation that is distinct from the way it circulates in the “ordinary” economy. As we know from the Marxist analysis of the transformation of money into capital, the properties of money are contingent upon the form of circulation in which they appear. The same applies to money in gambling. When money is introduced into the gambling game, the very properties of money are transformed. This extends to poker in general and Texas Hold ’Em in particular. What is particular about Texas Hold ’Em as a gambling game is that it offers the opportunity to play with money in a way that is both distinctively different from the circulation of money in the “ordinary” economy, yet at the same time very similar to the “ordinary” economy. Texas Hold ’Em is an eminent parodic simulation of the circulation of money in contemporary financial capitalism.

 

British Press Adores 'First Actresses' Exhibition

The First Actresses, an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery celebrating the first women to take to the stage in Britain following the Restoration in 1660, has set tongues wagging in the major UK newspapers. Focusing largely on two portraits of Nell Gwynn, an actress and mistress of King Charles II, The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Daily Telegraph have all weighed in with praise for the exhibition. From The Times (subscription required):

From Lely to Lawrence, the leading artists of the day took them into their studios, the singers and dancers as well as the actresses, there to capture to our enduring benefit something at least of what it was they had, that so charmed their world. ...

Yet this is a show not about them, but about the beautiful and talented women they celebrated ... and first among them all, lovely Nell Gwyn. The full package indeed.

In October, the University of Michigan Press published Gil Perry, Joseph Roach, and Shearer West's The First Actresses: From Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons to coincide with the NPG's exhibition. The book offers new insights on the often controversial nature of women on the stage in Restoration theatre and examines how celebrity culture emerged around female performers in the 18th century.

"When Protest Makes Policy" Author Speaks with Time Magazine on Occupy Wall Street

As Occupy Wall Street nears the end of its second month and the future of encampments across the country becomes an increasingly pressing question, Time magazine spoke with When Protest Makes Policy author S. Laurel Weldon for her perspective on what has become an international movement. In the article, Weldon suggested that the two most likely outcomes for any large protest movement are victory or a gradual fading.

“Protests are successful when they generate attention or influence the political agenda,” Weldon says as the movement has already spread across over 70 U.S. cities. “Occupy Wall Street protesters want attention to an issue, not policy. Their power lies in their ability to talk about a solution, forcing elected officials, political candidates and business leaders to respond to the protesters.”

When Protest Makes Policy was released in February 2011, before the events of Occupy Wall Street and during the early days of the Arab Spring. Yet the massive protest movements all over the world this year have made her book especially timely, with its stufy of role and efficacy of social protest groups for disadvantaged groups.

"Conjuring the Folk" Author Joins Georgetown Press as Editor

Dr. David G. Nicholls, author of Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and editor of Harlem Calling: The Collected Stories of George Wylie Henderson (2005), has joined Georgetown University Press's Georgetown Languages Division as an acquisition editor. He will be responsible for acquiring multimedia foreign language learning materials, linguistics texts, and reference works. Previously, Dr. Nicholls had served as the Director of Book Publications for the Modern Languages Association and has been involved on committees with the Association of American University Presses and the Association of American Publishers.

We at the Press heartily congratulate Dr. Nicholls on his new position!

'Bytes & Backbeats' Author Confronts Egan's 'Goon Squad'

Guest blogger Steve Savage, whose Bytes & Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age is available now from the University of Michigan Press, examines the factors that influence the sound of contemporary popular music--and how these factors are perceived.

Sometimes the greatest reinforcement for ones academic work comes in popular literature.  Such occurred for me as I was reading Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad.  With research on very contemporary issues there’s always the fear that the cultural issues your book engages will have dissipated by the time the book is available to the public.  This fear was quickly allayed for me by the following quote that sums up widespread attitudes toward the type of digital work that I address in my book.  In the brief space of one character’s dramatic inner dialog Egan sums up attitudes toward digitization, confirms the absolute commodification of popular music, and taints most contemporary media.  The speaker is a middle-aged record executive, reflecting on the current status of his record company and the music that it is releasing:

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he’d grown up with.  He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room.  Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape—everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out.  He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course)—above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he’d sold his label to five years ago.  But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit.  Too clear, too clean.  The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.  Film, photography, music: dead.  An aesthetic holocaust!  Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud (Egan, 23).

This expression of technological determinism amplifies the negative effects of digital technologies without acknowledging their creative potentials, misdirecting the speaker’s rage.  While there certainly may be problems in the brave new world of popular music, there is also much to celebrate regarding the enormous creative gifts that digital audio workstations (DAWs) have provided us in the realm of music production.  The ability to revise, recompose, reinvent, rearrange, reuse, reimagine, reimprovise—in short, the ability to repurpose audio has revolutionized the production of musical recordings.  At the same time the basic creative impulses and processes that have always been at the center of music production remain central to this new “constructionist” model of songwriting and composition. 

Notwithstanding Bennie’s tirade above—he’s right, popular music today may well be “too clear, too clean”—the heart of the problem is not to be laid at the feet of digitization.  The real demon that Bennie identifies in his tirade is manifested by his attempts “to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he’d sold his label to five years ago.”  Commodification is the primary force that squeezes the life out of music, not the details of the production techniques being used.  Francis Bacon said “There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”  It’s the notion that the marketplace will not tolerate strangeness that is at the heart of Bennie’s aesthetic holocaust. 

Author of forthcoming UM Press book selected to be Poet Laureate of Vermont

Syndey "Syd" Lea, author of a forthcoming book from University of Michigan Press tentatively titled Hundred Himalayas, has been selected Poet Laureate of Vermont by Governer Peter Shumlin. A public ceremony honoring Lea will be held on November 4 at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Montpelier.

Long a professor on the graduate faculty at Dartmouth, Lea has published extensively, in multiple genres, in a wide variety of places, including the New Yorker, The New Republic, and the New York Times. Among very many distinctions, he is the founder of the New England Review; he was a panelist in 2008 for the NEA poetry fellowships; a Hopwood Prize judge in 2002; and a panelist for fellowships for the Fulbright Foundation.

According to the Vermont Arts Council,

"The Advisory Committee found Sydney Lea’s poetry to be virtuosic in texture and form, yet likely to be engaging to a diversity of readers and listeners because of the work’s dramatic intensity, narrative momentum, and musicality, and because of this poet’s extraordinarily evocative descriptions of northern New England’s landscapes, animal and plant life, and the seasonal panorama. Through all of his books, Lea has paid particular attention to the stories of generations living alongside one another in north-country villages, including the interactions of 'old-timers' and relative newcomers. He continues the tradition of Vermont poets who are both singular — one of a kind — and broadly accessible."

Congratulations, Syd!

University of Michigan Press author Jacob Soll named MacArthur Foundation Fellow

Jacob Soll, a Professor of History at Rutgers University who has published both of his books to date with the University of Michigan Press, was named this week as a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. The fellowship, which carries a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for the next five years, is awarded to scientists, researchers, and exceptional people in the public sector based on "creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future."

Soll's books were mentioned extensively in his biography at the MacArthur Foundation. Three University of Michigan faculty were also named as fellows.

"Jacob Soll is a historian whose meticulously researched studies of early modern Europe are shedding new light on the origins of the modern state," the Foundation's site reads. "Drawing on intellectual, political, cultural, and institutional history, Soll explores the development of political thought and criticism in relation to governance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Western Europe."

Soll's first book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism, won the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. His second, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System, sold out in hardcover and is now available in paperback.

Congratulations, Dr. Soll!