As Jay Parini ambles his way into Steve’s Park Diner on an icily bright February morning, “Hollywood” is the last word that comes to mind. When I see a middle-aged man with slow, deliberate movements ease into the diner I doubt that it could be Parini — this guy was too ordinary, too normal to be an established writer hedging his way onto the silver screen with a feature film adaptation of his critically acclaimed 1990 novel, The Last Station.

Steve’s has a diminutive presence on Merchant’s Row at the edge of Middlebury’s snow-pocked campus. Narrow as a trailer with its stormy-hued exterior and hopeful American Flag it could be Anyplace, USA; but it’s not. It’s the infamous locale of Parini’s fastidious morning writing routine. Once inside it is easy to see that there is a safety in Steve’s ruggedness that could be conducive for cozying up with some work. With antique cans of maple syrup lining the counter, smells of pancakes wafting from the open kitchen, white ceramic plates veined from usage and hushes of breakfast conversations, the diner is a warm hug to the senses.

Like the diner itself, Parini oozes small town Vermont. He is tall, but un-intimidating in his maroon sweatshirt, Franciscan haircut and rimless glasses. His shape is not round, but soft and when he smiles his kind eyes squint up under dark brows. We take a seat in a wooden booth close to the front, and he easily delivers his order without looking at the menu (eggs, potatoes, extra crispy bacon, toast, coffee) to a waitress who knows his name; a testament to his well-known ritual of writing in this small space with a dime-store notebook, a pencil and a volume of poetry for inspiration.

However, “he has a very deceptive presence,” as his mentor and author Alastair Reid observes. “Even though he looks as though he’s completely lost in the world, he is extremely acute, extremely attentive and very imaginative.”

Parini is a modern day man of letters. In addition becoming a fixture during three decades at Middlebury College and the prestigious Breadloaf Writers Conference it hosts every summer, he has produced a steady stream of biographies, fiction, criticism, essays, and poetry that would be the envy of any writer. Despite his prodigious output, Parini has managed to hover beneath the mainstream radar. Some time back an uncle even lamented, “with your brains you could have been a lawyer.” And in the words of one friend, Parini just may be the “hardest working writer you’ve never heard of.”

All that may be about to change since his film’s September 4 premier at the Telluride Film Festival premier. It will garner even more publicity as it is released in North American and European cinema by October. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s tragic last year is at the epicenter of the feature, but Parini’s story is told through the concentric viewpoints of Tolstoy’s fragmented entourage. The film is already inciting Oscar buzz on websites like The Film Experience and Oscar Frenzy. An A-list line-up includes Academy Award Winner Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoy, Academy Award Nominees Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy and Paul Giamatti as Vladimir Chertkov and James McAvoy as Valentin Bulgakov. Michael Hoffman is the writer/director.

This movie venture is just the tip of the iceberg as Hollywood is currently enamored by turn-keying Parini’s novels into films and Parini continues to be up for the challenge. Hoffman is working on an adaptation of The Apprentice Lover; a collaboration is in the works between Parini and a well-known, un-named Irish Director for an adaptation of Benjamin’s Crossing; and Parini is co-authoring a script with Andy Breckman that will be a biopic of Robert Frost’s life. Francis Ford Coppola had Parini adapt his first novel, The Love Run, for the big screen, but Parini dislikes the story and would be just as pleased if it were never made.

“There seems to be so many film projects swirling around my work that I am put in touch with a lot of people in the theatre and film world,” Parini muses. His tone strikes a delicate balance between an acceptance of his accomplishments and a modesty about them. “I think I’ve been, even to myself, surprisingly successful.”

Although Parini sees himself primarily as a poet who happens to dip into other genres, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ascribe him such a simple epithet. Poetry is Parini’s literary home base; it is where he entered the writing world, it is at the core of his scholarly work and it provides the content for most of the courses he teaches at Middlebury. It is also a form of spiritual contemplation for Parini who uses his daily sessions as a vehicle to balance his life and make sense of his experiences. “The goal of poetry is like the goal of meditation and the goal of religion,” Parini explains. “It helps us organize our thoughts, it helps us be in touch with our feelings, it helps us get closer to the earth.”

Parini situates himself as a traditional poet who’s natural free-verse rhythm helps him explore both personal and political realms. As an earnest reader, Parini’s mind is always filled with the voices of other writers and his poetry is heavily dotted with their echoes. He has been seen as an authority on the value of poetry and was recruited by Yale University Press to write Why Poetry Matters (2007). The book has since been reissued in paperback and is now widely being used as a textbook for poetry in introductory poetry courses.

Reconciling the voice of Parini as an ethereal poet with that of a screenwriter rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s top tier isn’t as problematic as one might think. Since the nascent days of his career in academia and writing, Parini has been blind to genre-boundaries. After publishing his first collection of poems, Singing in Time, in 1972, he has entered each new literary frontier effortlessly. He debuted as a biographer of Theodore Roethke in 1979 and premiered as a novelist with The Love Run in 1980. Although he notes today that both were “pretty lousy,” they set the precedent for his unprecedented career. “I don’t know if there is another American writer who has worked in virtually every genre,” Parini observes. “I don’t think there is anything I haven’t tried my hand at.”

Poet and College of William and Mary English Professor Henry Hart was one of Parini’s earliest students when he first started his teaching career at Dartmouth College in 1975. Hart is equally impressed by Parini’s incessant willingness to explore unchartered territories. “Nothing surprises me about Jay. If you told me he was getting into shape to climb Mount Everest so that he could write a book about the experience, I still wouldn’t be surprised.”

Parini’s youth in working-class Pittston, Pennsylvania set the stage for his uninhibited genre-jumping. Parini’s parents were not the “bookish” type. His mother had dropped out of the local high school in the ninth grade to become a waitress and his father took a short reprieve from school at the age of 12 to help his family by working on local farms. Their educational journeys allowed them to be the ideal parents for an experimental writer; they were supportive of Parini’s literary ventures, but completely void of judgement and agenda. “I was totally free to do whatever I wanted in the realm of writing.”

Since Parini views the aim of all writing to be clarity, truth and understanding the category of writing that leads him to that place is insignificant. “You don’t pick up one of his books and wave it about as if it defines him.” Reid explains. “Everything he’s written has been part of a whole.”

The notion of a distillation toward silence is insisted upon through much of his bibliography. In the namesake poem of his collection The Art of Subtraction, he writes “I’m back this afternoon, in autumn, / sitting where I used to, / trying, once again, to clear my head, / subtract the last things I don’t need, / get down to only / what cannot be shaken loose or said.” Again in his essay on “Poetry and Silence” Parini writes that “The greatest irony of poetry, and language itself, is that the most complete expression involves a total erasure of the medium as the speaker arrives at a condition of understanding so complete that speech becomes superfluous.”

Brian Boyd was in his forties when he became a literary Darwinist, though he would prefer that you not use that term. “Evolutionary critics,” he writes in his new book On the Origin of Stories “should appeal not to a founding father”—such as Darwin—“but to a live and empirically accountable research program.”

Boyd, an English professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, made his academic reputation as Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer.  He now sets out to understand not just one man’s imagination but that of the whole species.  Boyd is determined to prove that our affinity for inventing stories plays a role in the survival of humankind. 

In On the Origin of Stories, he makes his case for “evocriticism,” the term he’d like you to use, as the “first truly comprehensive literary theory.”  Since the first known cave paintings in Chauvet, France, he argues, fiction has proven socially strategic for human beings.  Imagining scenarios we have yet to confront in reality prepares us to respond more creatively to future circumstances as they arise.

The evocritical approach is in part a response to the dominance of post-structuralist theory and the claim that any reading is informed by culture. On the Origin of Stories attempts to ground literary studies in fundamental questions about human life usually addressed in the sciences.  In doing so, it strives to give literary scholarship  renewed relevance in the eyes of those who run universities and fund research.

One of Boyd’s strengths is his willingness to confront the many arguments others have raised against evocriticism, but he fudges his rebuttal to at least one of those critiques. In response to the claim that our affinity for fiction is not an adaptation in itself but a byproduct of other strategic developments, Boyd responds, “An evolutionary approach to literature…simply requires that we take seriously that evolution has powerfully shaped…our minds and behavior. We can do that whether…fiction is an adaptation, byproduct, or some combination of the two.” 

The greater weakness of On the Origin of Stories is unfortunately fundamental. Boyd claims that there is an evolutionary basis for our attachment to fiction in a moment when, with regard to literature, at least, that attachment is on the wane.  He asks, in developing his counter-argument, why, “in a world of necessity, we choose to spend so much time caught up in stories that both teller and told know never happened and never will?”  Even for those who deeply appreciate fiction, the logic of this question resonates more than Boyd’s attempt to refute it.  Perhaps thousands of years will prove nonfiction a momentary preoccupation, but in the meantime, it is hard to agree that fiction has served us more than fact. ♦

Michael Van Valkenburgh stands on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the traffic of Robert Moses’ two-tiered Brooklyn-Queens Expressway roaring beneath him. He looks out on the post-industrial wasteland of Piers 1 through 6, an unsightly expanse of exposed concrete and asphalt, framed by the downtown Manhattan skyline. It is hard to imagine that this stretch of grays and browns will be turned into one of New York City’s largest green spaces within the next decade. It is equally hard to imagine that this man in the thick-framed glasses, paint-speckled gray hooded sweatshirt, and sage scarf will oversee this historic feat of urban planning and landscape design. With his copious laugh lines and perma-tousled hair, bordering on an uncombed faux-hawk, he looks more like an aging indie rock star or a celebrity chef than this generation’s answer to Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer responsible for Central Park and Prospect Park.

“This Promenade is something that our park has a very strong dialogue with,” he says, as he looks over the ledge at the construction site of the future Brooklyn Bridge Park. “This is a perch, a prospect, a thing above, a thing for looking down. Our park is all about activating and engaging the water’s edge. This is the more classic. I think this is something that distinguishes what we’re doing from what Olmsted might have done.” There is an undertone of the class warrior in this statement, whether intentional or not. Moses’ Promenade was for the residents of Brooklyn Heights. His park will be for everyone.

Stretching from the Manhattan Bridge south toward Atlantic Avenue, the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park will represent one of the largest expansions of parkland in Brooklyn since Olmsted completed Prospect Park in the 1860s. Encompassing the long-defunct Piers 1 through 6, which became obsolete with the advent of container shipping, the park will reclaim these lifeless vistas and replace them with great lawns, rolling pastoral meadows, and tidal saltwater marshes. In a bold move for a New York City park, the landscape will also be highly connected to the water. Floating wave attenuators will create a safe harbor that allows visitors to actually enter the East River without worrying about the smashing wakes from passing ships. One of the most innovative design features of the park involves cutting off the piers from the land, essentially turning them into islands which will be connected to the park via footbridges.

Though his projects are uniquely modern in their embracing of contemporary design concepts like ecological sustainability and reclamation of toxic post-industrial sites, Van Valkenburgh’s ideas are in constant dialogue with the great urban planners of New York City’s past, such as Olmsted and Robert Moses. Paul Goldberger, New Yorker architecture critic and co-editor of the upcoming Michael Van Valkenburgh: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Yale University Press), writes in the book’s foreword, “Where Van Valkenburgh finds complete common ground with Olmsted is in his commitment to the notion of the public park as an expression of the democratic idea. Both landscape architects embrace the notion of public space as the equalizer, the place open to all where distinctions diminish, social classes fade into the background, and peaceful coexistence prevails. Van Valkenburgh shares Olmsted’s democratic idealism.”

Although Van Valkenburgh agrees with Olmsted’s overarching views on the role of public spaces, the two designers differ significantly in their ideas about copying nature. Like Brooklyn Bridge Park, Olmsted’s grand creations were wholly constructed and man-made, but he worked to obscure this artificiality. As Goldberger writes, Olmsted was “quite willing to let you think that the park’s designer was not Olmsted but God.” Van Valkenburgh has no such delusions. Anita Berrizbeitia, associate chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s landscape architecture department and Goldberger’s co-editor, argues that Van Valkenburgh is consciously upfront about the artificiality of his designs. “He doesn’t want to tell people that it’s natural,” Berrizbeitia says. “Michael is very committed to showing people the necessary artificiality of nature because of what we have done to the cities before.” Because of the devastation caused by industrialization, designers can no longer pretend that their parks are untouched or natural.

Ironically, despite this fundamental difference in theory and approach, Van Valkenburgh’s designs often incorporate the unkempt naturalism better associated with the nineteenth-century designers. Michael Van Valkenburgh has become the go-to landscape architect for projects which require an aesthetic complexity, one that stands in stark contrast with the Zen-like simplicity of contemporary, corporate landscape design. Goldberger writes, “Van Valkenburgh is not one of those modernist landscape architects who you suspect would rather be designing buildings. He shows no interest in embracing the minimalist aesthetic of his architect colleagues, like so many of his fellow landscape designers.” One imagines the archetypal city plaza, tucked between two sleek skyscrapers, constructed with elegant pavers and straight rows of thin, perfect trees – a far cry from Van Valkenburgh’s Teardrop Park in Battery Park City. Completed in 2006, the park contains granite boulders, naturalistic plantings, a small constructed wetland area, and an imposing rock wall made from New York State sedimentary rocks. The nearly two-acre space, surrounded by four high-rise apartments in downtown Manhattan, is dynamic and wild. It represents an escape from the rigidness of the surrounding buildings, not a reflection of them.

While in Austin on a speaking gig at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), one of the world’s largest digital media conferences, the thing that struck Khoi Vinh above all else had nothing to do with digital media or technology.

“Silly as it may seem,” he later wrote on his popular design blog, subtraction.com, “the one thing I really can’t stop thinking about is how bad the conference schedule, map and badges were this year.” The printed materials were unusable, in his opinion.

So Vinh did what he does best—sat down and designed a better one. Diagrammatic sketches laid out his ideas: perforated pages so that pages could be discarded as days passed; a booklet small enough to fit inside the conference badge pouch; a fold-out map beneath the schedule so that both could be scanned simultaneously, color codes coordinating events with their geographical locations on the map. Together, these innovations are designed to guide interaction between the products and the users who encounter them.

If Vinh can do for journalism what he did for SXSW’s print materials, perhaps the ailing industry has a chance of survival. That’s why The New York Times hired Vinh as design director three years ago to direct their website, nytimes.com.

“I think in the next year or two news organizations will have to make some major decisions about the role of print versus online,” said Times executive editor Bill Keller in a Q&A in January. “The fact is, we don’t really know yet how the behavior of readers and advertisers will evolve.” But, he added, “I’m optimistic because there are a lot of smart, creative people in the company studying the business model for quality journalism and devising ways to change it.”

Khoi Vinh is one of those people. With the help of innovators like him, publishing outlets like the Times are trying to redefine how news can be experienced—and maybe, just maybe, save journalism in the process.

Attendees line the walls. The room is the largest in the 2009 SXSWi conference, but this event is overbooked. Vinh is tall and gangly, dressed in all black, his boyish face dominated by a sweep of black hair and a pair of oversized wireframe glasses. The crowd cheers as he walks onto the stage and takes his place at the table behind his microphone.

“My name is Khoi Vinh,” he says to the packed room. An anonymous fan lets out a loud “wooo!” to cheers and laughter.

“Thank you,” Vinh deadpans. “I’ll have that twenty bucks for you after the talk.”

Despite Vinh’s attempt at levity, the gathering is serious: it’s a panel discussion entitled “Designing the Future of The New York Times,” and Vinh is a featured speaker along with his boss, Tom Bodkin, current assistant managing editor of graphics and design director of the Times’ print edition.

“What does the future of newspapers look like?” Bodkin asks the audience in the panel’s introduction. “Nobody, including us, knows for sure.”

That print journalism is fighting for its life isn’t exactly breaking news. The Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy in December 2008; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed its print business in March and The San Francisco Chronicle may be headed for the same fate. On April Fools’ Day, The Guardian announced it would begin publishing only 140-character “tweets”—a prank story, but one that rings eerily plausible these days. The Times itself has had a rough year. This April, it reported a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million, dwarfing 2008’s loss of $335,000. Advertising dropped 28.4%, and the very existence of The Boston Globe is now in doubt.

Oddly enough, the Grey Lady doubles as a veritable new media journalism laboratory. It has been rolling out its experiments on nytimes.com in rapid succession: blogs have popped up in every section, encouraging direct reporter-to-reader interaction. Times People, the paper’s social network, enables users to share and discuss their favorite stories. A Global Edition (now linked to the newspaper’s global edition, The International Herald Tribune) allows users to view the paper depending on their interest in international news. A Times Extra feature posts links to external news sources on the same topic—a practice that the paper’s philosophy once precluded. Times Extra is especially significant, Vinh points out, because the Times, like many mainstream media outlets, was at first reluctant to acknowledge outside news sources. Now that aggregation is all the rage, perhaps even the Times’ editors realize that it has a place in their own publication.

These experiments are the fruits of Vinh’s expertise. He is a different kind of a designer, concerned less with how the site looks than the way readers interact with it. The goal, he says, is for the Times to become a medium-agnostic publication, whether read on a web browser, on a mobile phone or via future technologies.

Vinh is a pioneer in the field of interaction design, which defines the interactive relationship between content and user. Imagine the relationship between the reader and newspaper as an ongoing “conversation”: the content itself can react to its readers’ actions. In a system like Times People, users don’t just read the content. They build a community with the tools Vinh provides—tools which are continually refined as the community grows (or fails to).

“We really look at our work as trying to create a platform,” says Vinh. “nytimes.com is really a platform that helps people make the most of our content—not just read the content, but to make as much use of it as they can.”

Investigative journalist Alyssa Katz stared across the table at the two developers. “One looked like she hadn’t been out of her car in a month,” Katz recalls. The other, she observed, “had either just come off a bender or needed the services of a top dermatologist.” But Katz pitied the dreary characters—who took over her co-op and were under intense pressure to sell—even though they represent some of the most culpable parties in the country’s recent real estate bust. Katz’s new book, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (Bloomsbury USA, 2009), explores the mortgage crisis’ long history and far-reaching impact. It reads like a post-mortem on the financial mechanisms, government policies and social phenomena that led to the current crisis—ending with Katz’s own experience navigating the shark-infested waters of New York City real estate.

Most Thursdays, Katz can be found at Ditmas Workspace in Ditmas Park, a recently gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood noted for its historic homes and other landmarks. The Workspace, founded by journalist and Politico.com blogger Ben Smith, is an office co-op that rents out desk space by the month. With its dark wood trim and picture windows, the converted Victorian feels more like a bed and breakfast than a neighborhood office. Katz calls the Workspace a sort of newsroom, where she can share ideas and resources with editors, writers and other journalists working there. Writers Nancy Scola and Geronimo Madrid both keep desks at the DW, as do playwright Scott Organ and Smith himself.

“She’s incredibly well-placed to explain the thing that everyone in America wants to know, which is: What the hell happened to the housing market?” says Smith of Katz, whom he met about a year ago through the Workspace. “She’s got a kind of granular knowledge that’s really rare among people who don’t work in the industry, combined with a broader perspective you rarely get from insiders.”

Just weeks from the release of the book, Katz is geared up for promotion. Sitting at a small desk in one of the sunny side rooms, she answers questions at a breathless clip, propelled by the force of the facts she has stored. With unruly hair and wide eyes, Katz looks simultaneously focused and baffled. Her brow furrows as she speaks, her eyes widen, she gestures emphatically with her hands: Every ounce of her being seems consumed with getting her point across.

Katz is, to her knowledge, the first journalist to make the connection between a glut of increasingly risky mortgages and the financial interests of Wall Street. It all began when she was an editor at City Limits in the late ’90s, working on a story about mortgage loan fraud under the government-funded Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program. City Limits journalist Kemba Johnson received a tip from a local lawyer who claimed that tenants living in SRO (single-room occupancy) housing in Harlem were being kicked out under strange circumstances. Katz, who edited the story, said the tenants “woke up in the morning and there were guys literally knocking down their walls and telling them they had to get out.” As it turned out, nonprofits were sometimes buying homes that were not yet vacated, and contractors were unceremoniously running these tenants out once the properties were sold.

Johnson investigated further and discovered that these nonprofits, which were ostensibly helping poor residents, were actually dealing in real estate. Mortgage companies were buying properties cheaply in Harlem and other low-income neighborhoods, and then quickly selling them to nonprofits for prices up to 100 percent more than what the mortgage companies originally paid. Appraisers would approve the values for these homes, which were often rundown and in need of gutting. The nonprofits, believing they were creating more affordable housing, bought the homes using government-insured HUD loans, without seeing them or knowing how much the mortgage companies originally paid. This led to a tidy profit for mortgage companies and the appraisers that served them; and dilapidated, shoddily renovated homes for the nonprofits.

“It’s very similar stuff to that went on recently, lots of flipping and fake appraisals,” Katz says of the story. “When you have a lending program that isn’t very well managed or monitored, this is going to happen inevitably.”

Johnson completed her investigative piece, “The Harlem Shuffle,” in 1999. It led to convictions for several of those involved in the scheme and eventually turned up as a plotline on The Sopranos.

Katz left City Limits in 2005 when she was awarded Columbia University’s prestigious Revson Fellowship for urban studies. She decided to revisit the Harlem story to see how HUD reforms were faring. Soon she realized the subprime market had taken over the mortgage industry. Katz then proposed an investigative piece for Mother Jones in October 2005, with no idea of how timely her work would be. By the time the book was completed, the mortgage crisis had built to a crescendo and crashed, taking the world economy with it.

Katz traces the current crisis to changes in mortgage lending going back to the late 1960s, when riots, white flight and historically inequitable lending led to a Civil Rights Movement for fair access to credit. A political cry raised in the 1920s, again in the ’70s, and once more by Bill Clinton in the ’90s touted homeownership as a way to turn troubled neighborhoods into prosperous communities where residents were invested in the quality of their homes and blocks. Access to fair credit for everyone was presented to minority residents in particular as the solution to everything from poverty to crime. The problem, Katz says, lay in the rapid deregulation of mortgage loans to give urban poor that access.

“This isn’t just the story about a terrible, misguided campaign,” she points out. “One of the great tragedies here was that the misguided efforts that were driven by politics and greed and naiveté had grown out of a Civil Rights Movement push to promote access to home ownership.”

Katz began her research for the Mother Jones article (which would become Chapter 4 of the book) in Cleveland, Ohio. She wanted to discover why there were so many foreclosures in the area. A self-described “data geek,” Katz was content to sit among the stacks at Cleveland Law Library, poring over city records to find the juicy bits of information that, collectively, formed a frightening pattern.

Sean Shesgreen’s Introduction to Literary Theory class begins with a thud. Students sit up straighter, at attention. The short, compact Irishman drops the Norton Anthology of English Literature—all four pounds of it—onto a desk. “Here is the canon,” he exclaims, grinning back at the startled faces.

Since the publication of its first edition in 1962, the Norton has set the reading lists for British Literature courses throughout the world—its impossibly thin pages introducing Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to generation after generation of college students. The condensed version comes in at just under three thousand pages. But this venerable institution, which has sold roughly nine million copies over eight editions and accounts for more than a third of the publisher’s total revenue, has made a little enemy in the cornfields of Illinois.

Shesgreen, distinguished research professor of English at Northern Illinois University, puts high stakes money and intrigue front and center in his essay “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of the Norton Anthology of English Literature,” published in the Winter 2009 issue of the journal Critical Inquiry. He presents documents that depict the competition between the Norton and the upstart Longman Anthology of British Literature—first published in 1999 and now in its third edition—as an ivory-tower death-match, with Norton going to any lengths to remain on top of the academic textbook heap.

The essay has sparked outraged responses from the Norton’s defenders who call Shesgreen unqualified and his work a hatchet job. But Shesgreen, a specialist in 18th century British literature and longtime admirer of the Norton, did not start out to cause a stir.

Shesgreen, whose cropped goatee frames a mischievous smile, characterizes his academic life as the study of “marginal people and outcasts.” Aptly, his most recent book, Images of the Outcast, examines how London’s urban poor have been portrayed in various visual arts. Shesgreen has found himself an outcast several times in his own life. He entered a monastery as a young man in Ireland, which soon sent him abroad to the United States. He arrived in America amid the social upheaval of the sixties and quickly realized the monk’s life was not for him. He fled to pursue a Ph.D. in English at Northwestern. He was an exile from his home country and now from his religion as well.

Soon, he alienated himself again, this time from one of literature’s most powerful organizations. In 1969, Shesgreen and several colleagues interrupted a Modern Language Association conference in New York to protest the organization’s apolitical stance on the Vietnam War. The protests temporarily closed down the conference, and Shesgreen was arrested along with two confederates.

“I spent the night in the Tombs of New York,” he recalls, laughing. “As a result of our protest the hotel was shut down, and I think it did move the MLA to become more politically active.”

Despite his agitator past, Shesgreen says he intended merely to write a conventional history of the Norton. HHe had long been interested in the list of editors on the Norton’s title page. How were these people chosen? And what effect did they have on the study of British literature? He began collecting every edition, including the first. That list of editors contained no women and was packed with what he calls “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants exclusively from elite universities.” Shesgreen wanted to know how these original editors influenced the content of later editions: what had changed and what remained the same?

In, 2003, at the encouragement of then Norton general editor M.H. Abrams, Shesgreen traveled to Cornell to examine materials relating to the construction of the original anthology from 1962, including Abrams’ original notes and personal correspondences. What he found did not amount to much.

“He didn’t look at his files before I came out to see if the material I was looking for was there,” Shesgreen says. “When I got there I found exactly three letters covering the beginning of the Norton.” He feared his trip had been a waste of time.

Near the end of his stay, however, Abrams gave Shesgreen a folder that he had just recently found. Shesgreen’s eyes went wide at what he found inside: a series of e-mails from 1998 exchanged between the anthology’s editors and Norton executives in New York. Shesgreen saw an organization obsessed with the threat posed by the new Longman Anthology of British Literature, and used what he terms “cutthroat tactics” in his article to undermine the competition.

As discreetly as he could, he rushed to the photocopier before catching his flight back to Illinois.

“At that point I knew I was onto something,” he remembers. “I had new information about the economics of the Norton.”

Academic publishing normally conjures images of musty libraries and stiff English professors. Shesgreen’s discoveries, on the other hand, seem ripped from the pages of a corporate thriller.

In 1998, the Norton’s new general editor Stephen Greenblatt met with Longman editor David Damrosch at a bar near Columbia University, where Damrosch shared some ideas he had for the upcoming Longman. Greenblatt passed this information to his publisher.

Shesgreen quotes a breathless e-mail to Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, from Norton vice president Julia Reidhead, in which she praises the renowned professor’s “bold infiltration of the opposing camp.”

“I want both to thank you for and to compliment you on that daring conversation,” she writes. “I keep thinking of James Bond suavely lifting a glass with Dr. No.”

Greenblatt’s spy games only left Norton executives wanting more. The Longman was the first competing anthology to be published in years, and according to Shesgreen, Norton was desperate to get a complete copy of the Longman’s table of contents. Later that year, they got it. Shesgreen again quotes an e-mail from Julie Reidhead.

Michael Musto.

You got your start writing movie reviews as a child and then theater criticism for The Columbia Spectator in college. What prompted your interest in this form of writing at such a young age?

I was an only child. I still am. I didn’t even have imaginary friends. As a result, I found that the best way to spend my time was to go to the local Cineplex or the theater. I was keeping it all for myself. That’s how I developed my snarky voice. I rolled my eyes at everything. I didn’t trust anyone. It was a healthy attitude to have as an outsider.

So was that tone something you worked on, or was it just an extension of your natural voice?

I didn’t work on it as a shtick. It just came as a defense mechanism for being an outsider. And it stuck for life.

Who were you reading at the time?

I was reading Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, a lot of what was called the New Journalism. Breathless, first person narratives.

Speaking of New Journalism, The Toronto Star once called you “the Hunter S. Thompson of Snark.” What does a title like that mean to you?

I thought it was redundant being called the Hunter S. Thompson of Snark! It’s like being called the Paris Hilton of Socialites. But I was honored to have been put in the same sentence as Hunter S. Thompson. Now I sound like one of those Oscar nominees! But he has been the basis of so many bad movies.

You’re widely considered one of the best practitioners of snark, but how do you go about defining the term? Does it actually mean anything?

I think I have a different form of snark. I’m not afraid to show that deep down I’m a fan. I’m not out to throw mud at everyone. It becomes tiresome to be snarky all the time. You look like the outsider trying to bring down celebrities. If you don’t temper that with positivity, then it becomes a parade of meanness. Some websites do snark on full throttle. Then you just come across as a bully in the corner making fun of the football team and the cheerleaders.

Do you have an unwritten code of snark ethics? Are some people off limits? Who is open to your criticism?

Anybody who does something stupid could potentially be my victim. Celebrities live under a giant microscope. I always say that if we were looked at as closely as celebrities are, we would all be considered giant fuck-ups.

So what are your favorite targets?

Hypocrisy is my favorite target. I hate when people carry on about love and peace when they are leading this closeted lifestyle. A famous person coming out could help so many people. Celebrities always say they don’t want to talk about their private lives, but they’ll talk about everything else but their homosexuality. They pimp their kids, they talk about their alcoholism. They’ll talk about everything else.

Snark has been under attack recently because of the publication of David Denby’s book on snark. Have you read it?

I have read about it, and I totally understand where he is coming from. Having a bratty point of view nonstop is not constructive. It is not constructive for bloggers to constantly be attacking people bigger than them. But I do think snark can be extremely valuable. From the beginning of civilization, there have been snarky gay people responding to their oppression, snapping their fingers at oppressors.

Blogs in particular have been considered the main forum for snark. Do you approach your print column any differently than your blog?

I generally have the same tone in my columns and in my blog posts. In the columns, I do more interviews. I don’t interview someone like Craig Bierko unless I like them. I wouldn’t want to waste their time for ninety minutes and then smear them in my column. The blog is a forum for my current frustrations. The country is plummeting into a giant toilet bowl.

You blogged recently about how you think Tyler Perry should come out of the closet. How do people respond to blogs or columns like this one?

I recently wrote a blog about Barry Manilow. I had no idea there were so many middle-aged women who still cling to the idea that he is straight. These are the same people who thought Clay Aiken was straight for so long.

Are there any celebrities you spare?

Nobody’s spared my venom, but I do like to champion celebrities. Even Paris Hilton. I wrote something saying that we need her. She’s the Mickey Mouse of the new Depression. She can help us get through it. I thought Lindsay Lohan was a good actress, and I liked Britney Spears.

I have seen you interviewed many times on television, and you come across as a charming person. Do you think critics like David Denby too often conflate a sarcastic style of humor with a mean personality?

People often ask me what the most shocking thing about me is, and I say it’s that I’m actually a nice person. People think that I’m exactly like how I sound in my columns. That’s like saying that Anthony Hopkins must be a serial killer. The tone is definitely me, it’s not affected. But I’m responsible. I’m a good friend, I’m loyal. I sound like a dog now. I’m basically that nice kid from Brooklyn, just old now.

What are your thoughts on the future of snarky media?

I’m pro-snark, so I’m okay with it. I think that’s the direction we’re going in. It’s always been a wonderful tone. In the 80s, there was a magazine called Spy. It was like the predecessor to Gawker, but it was done with a lot of wit. I was definitely victimized by them, but it was a refreshing burst of fresh air. It was coming out at the same time that Vanity Fair was running puff pieces about celebrities.

Liz Smith was recently dropped from The New York Post. What do you make of such a move?

Liz was very supportive of me from the start. Her dismissal is representative of the rise of snark. She refused to deal in snark. She loved celebrities, and she actually hated gossip. Her good gal position I guess couldn’t work in this new environment. The blogs allow anyone to be a gossip columnist. The tendency for anyone is to be snarky when you write about celebrities, to take out aggressions and frustrations on them. People are not usually super-sweet to celebrities. That’s a thing of the past. ♦

]]> http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/the-outsider/feed/ 0 http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/age-of-enlightenment/ http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/age-of-enlightenment/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:03:22 +0000 abakkvapil http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/?p=49

Astra Taylor. Photo via Minnesota Public Radio.

Philosophers have never been touchstones for the millennial generation. Baudrillard, Barthes, and de Beauvoir may still be de rigueur in Intro to Philosophy courses, but they seldom emerge in the casual conversation of young urbanites. At the Greenwich Village IFC Center on a cold weekday in early March, tonight’s screenings of director Astra Taylor’s new philosophical documentary, Examined Life, is sold out. No one in the long line looks particularly like an academic. Most are well under 35 and outfitted in tight jeans, plaid shirts and ironic glasses. Is philosophy suddenly trendy?

Inside the theater, Taylor a slim, tall 29-year-old with large brown eyes accentuated by straight bangs, is fielding questions from the audience. A man in his 20s raises his hand. “Don’t you think that only people with a background in philosophy will get this movie?” he asks skeptically. “Do you really think it has something to offer people who aren’t already schooled in this stuff?”

Taylor tells me later she has heard this reaction before. Taylor doesn’t look the least bit fazed. “You know, the only people who ever ask that are academics who have PhDs and like to think that only they hold the key for understanding the material on screen.” After the Q&A, the man’s girlfriend approaches Taylor quietly. “You’re right about him,” she says, “he just got his PhD.”

Examined Life operates on a simple conceit. Eight philosophers expound on their worldviews while walking, rowing, or driving and generally interacting with the “real” world. Taylor’s motivation is partly cinematic, a way to escape the hackneyed “talking head” documentary style. But it’s also the basis of her own belief — that philosophy is a part of, not apart from, the world. The film boasts a roster of some of the most respected and well-known modern philosophers and thinkers: Slavoj Žižek, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Peter Singer and Avital Ronell. They’re each allotted ten minutes to grapple with conundrums of contemporary life, including consumption, revolution, and interpersonal connection.

Onscreen, the philosophers are introduced by name only, san credentials, because Taylor is set on allowing the audience to educate themselves. “People were trying to get me to add biographies of the subjects,” she says. “They’d say, ‘In a fun sentence, describe this person’s life work.’ I can’t even conceive of what that sentence would be.” If a viewer wants to know who Peter Singer is, they can look him up on their iPhone. “I’m more interested in people misinterpreting the film in an interesting way than I am in them knowing the entire back story and history of thought that got them to this point,” she says.

Filmed in smooth tracking shots from locations like New York’s Thompson Square Park to the shores of Lake Michigan, Examined Life is unusually beautiful to look at, the polar opposite of the jerky handheld camera work and stock footage that make up the standard documentary. At times, the camera drifts away from the philosophers to focus on representative images around them. When Peter Singer talks about the questionable ethics of buying expensive shoes while other people live in poverty, his speech is intercut with rows of shopping bags lining the arms of tourists. As Martha Nussbaum points out that we’re all to some extent disabled during childhood and old age, a girl and her grandmother are shown strolling nearby.

Universal might be a better word than trendy when describing the appeal of Examined Life. Both 90-year-olds and 19-year-olds approach Taylor telling her they love the philosophers in her movie (especially Cornel West). Truck drivers, dentists, students, and housepainters have all had something positive to say about the experience of watching thinkers pontificate in her film. J. Hoberman, in his review of Examined Life for the Village Voice, offers evidence of the growing popularity of the philosophical film by coining a catchy name for the genre—the “philoso-doc.”

Could this be the beginning of the end for the cultural cliché of Americans as content in their ignorance, uninterested in questions and theories? The intellectual tradition has been the backbone of European culture for centuries, but in America, philosophy doesn’t even make it into the required course list for college freshmen. Taylor believes that in the U.S., “there is a massive underestimation of what people are capable of and what people are interested in.” In an e-mail exchange, Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago writes that studying philosophy is “so rare, so let’s hope this is the beginning of something. Because I believe that what philosophy provides is absolutely fundamental to democracy.”

Michael Hardt, a Professor at Duke University and co-author of the Neo-Marxist Empire, regards Taylor’s quest to bring philosophy into the real world admirable, but he has reservations about ignoring the entertaining function of film. “The combination between philosophers and film is an awkward and difficult one,” he says. “I think intrinsically philosophers are pretty boring. One goes to the cinema to be entertained, and there’s no way that philosophers can come through on that.” He makes a valid point. But if Examined Life is full of boring philosophers, why are young people eagerly buying tickets to see them speak? Hardt qualifies that some philosophers have a knack for performance, singling out the dramatic Cornel West, and the willfully absurd Slavoj Žižek. Certain thinkers have the ability to engage through sheer force of personality, and Taylor concentrates on philosophers who possess an inherent charisma.

Taylor has always been drawn to humanitarian and sociological subjects. Her first film project was as co-director of The Miracle Tree, a short film about Senegalese infant malnutrition, in 2001. She went on to produce the documentary Persons of Interest, centered around the arrests of Muslim-Americans, post 9/11, which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival. But her first feature film, made in 2005 when she was only 26, was also her first attempt to make philosophy cinematic. A documentary about Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, appropriately titled Žižek!, it established her as a serious director. She floated the idea to Lawrence Konner, the producer she had worked with on Persons of Interest, but he only agreed to the project after seeing the 2002 philosophy documentary Derrida. “The Derrida film created a little opening and he recognized that,” Taylor says. “He had actually gone to see Derrida at Film Forum and thought, ‘These films can work. Let’s give it a go.’”

]]> http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/age-of-enlightenment/feed/ 0 http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/smashing-the-template/ http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/smashing-the-template/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:52:26 +0000 dkoo http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/?p=285 Elliot Jay Stocks is a storyteller who works without words. Currently a successful freelance web designer based in Cheshire, England, 27 year-old Stocks has made a name himself in the global design community, cultivating a popular blog at his website elliotjaystocks.com and traveling the world to speak and host workshops about new media design at conferences such as An Event Apart, SXSW, Web Developers’ Conference and The Future of Web Design.

Visual design, in Stocks’ mind, is not a passive endeavor but a form of communication—design is part of the message, not a shiny coat over the message. If the trends in design currently tilt toward simplicity and transparency, Stocks presents a strong counterargument for using aesthetics to tell the story in a different light. The grungy, painterly aesthetic and complex visual structure of his blog—in which every visual element leads to another—demonstrate that his theories can be used to make a website a work of narrative art.

I spoke with Stocks via e-mail while he was in Norway about his theories of narrative design, and how designers can affect their own craft through the very act of design.

    

Elliot Jay Stocks. Photo via Flickr.

Which is more important to you as a designer: aesthetics or usability?

Aesthetics, hands down. I’m not saying aesthetics are more important than usability in general, but personally, my interests lie more in aesthetics. That’s why I’m in this business, and that’s certainly why people employ me—for my aesthetics.

Can you elaborate on this a bit?

I think it just comes down to the simple fact that safe, non-experimental design bores me, and I get sick of seeing it absolutely everywhere. I don’t think I’m that experimental, really, but it’s obvious the vast majority of designers are afraid to step outside current design trends.

You’ve spoken in the past about using narrative cues to create direction and resolution in visual design. What does that narrative focus add to a visual design for, say, a website?

Well, in applying narrative theory to web design, I was trying to look at how experimental design creates a sense of tension—a pleasing level of tension akin to the one experienced as a narrative builds to a climax—and how, if it’s wrapped up in an aesthetically pleasing design, we can reach a happy conclusion, with the status quo changed for the better.

So my application of narrative theory to web design is more about the way in which we experience design, rather than a model that says we should design in a narrative way.

Can you give some examples of how this theory plays out in a practical sense? Why would you say most design on the web is less narrative than a medium like print?

It’d be nice to see more art direction online, and see sites breaking free from the rigidity of templates. Think of the impact of a featured article in print and then its tame representation online; it’s just not comparable.

I think a lot of it comes down to the lack of art direction in web design, especially when compared with a site’s counterpart in print. Jason Santa Maria’s site is an example that’s often cited to demonstrate how this could be changed: every post looks different.

So you think print still has a future in the annals of design?

Although the web is a continuation and expansion of print design, it’s still very different. It’s not just the way we design for each—it’s about the experience.

The way you experience a printed newspaper or magazine is totally different from the way you experience their counterparts on the web. Because of that, print will always have a place.

But what about new media technologies like blogs that are having such a big impact on traditional print publishing?

I think blogs have had—or are currently having—a huge effect on traditional idea of what journalism actually is. In the nineties, when everyone had personal home pages, they were just sites. But because blogs are instantly so comparable to offline newspapers and magazines, we’ve seen a bigger shift towards citizen journalism.

On the one hand, this is great since it removes a lot of the elitism present in traditional journalism. But the flip side is that, perhaps that was there for a reason!

So, while it’s great that everyone can be a journalist, we should bear in mind that most people are not journalists by trade for a reason. Unfortunately, the quality of writing on the web is still largely inferior to that in traditional publications.

What about aggregators, which compile content from multiple professional sources?

Aggregators are changing the way in which we experience news, because the source is becoming decentralized. Potentially, this is a great thing, since the focus is then on the content and not on the source. Aggregators, by their very nature, pull from a variety of sources, and therefore we should—in theory—be heading towards a more objective system.

Hand-in-hand with your advocacy of narrative design is your argument that designers can affect the habits of their audience by intentionally degrading the experience in one medium versus another (for example, enabling certain features in Firefox but disabling them in Internet Explorer). How can designers use this “intentional degradation” to affect how people interact with design?

Intentional degradation—and, by implication, progressive enhancement [rewarding good habits with more complete design or enhanced features]—has to be considered within the context of the website, or more specifically, according to the target audience.

Put simply, you can’t let the site look bad in Internet Explorer if that browser is used by the majority of your readers.

But even so, we shouldn’t get too caught up about getting websites to look the same in every browser. Even if an IE version does degrade to something less pretty than what Safari users will see, that doesn’t necessarily matter—as long as the IE version doesn’t appear to be broken.

So you think that advocating for preferred browsers is the way to go?

I’m not advocating that we only support new browsers and drop off support for older browsers as soon as possible. Just that we remain aware of the inevitable difference between browsers, and that we design according to our target audience.

What got you talking about your theories of web design?

I used to build Flash-only websites and it was fine, but I started to get frustrated by the amount of complex code I had to write to achieve relatively simple results, and the Flash IDE [integrated development environment, or the software used to design in the Flash medium] is a real pain.

There’s something more tangible about HTML [The simple markup language that defines most websites’ structure and textual content]. And I like the idea of it being accessible to everyone, in spite of the inconsistencies across browsers.

Who or what are some of your most important design influences?

I think Dave McKean had a big influence on me as a young designer and artist. I still love his work, especially his early covers for The Sandman [the graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman] in his pre-Photoshop days.

In general, I’m a fan of anyone who sets trends instead of following them, and who embraces the idea of making the web look beautiful.

Who do you think we should be watching to bring design on the web to the next level?

Khoi Vinh, for his work at The New York Times. Jason Santa Maria, for the art direction stuff that I mentioned earlier. John Gruber, for the fact that he manages to charge a subscription fee for an enhanced version of his RSS feed [laughs].

Quick—the homepage of nytimes.com: messy or brilliant?

Why can’t messy also be brilliant? ♦

]]> http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/smashing-the-template/feed/ 0 http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/un-forbidden-fruit/ http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/2009/06/un-forbidden-fruit/#comments Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:23:17 +0000 jkaplan http://www.newyorkreviewofideas.com/?p=129 For the Common Good, by Matthew W. Fink and Robert C. Post.]]>
For the Common Good: Principles
of American Academic Freedom
by Matthew W. Fink, Robert C. Post
Yale University Press
272pp, $27.50

It all started a few thousand years back with a naked couple and an apple. Since then, scholars have been toiling with what knowledge is acceptable to consume and share. In their new book, For the Common Good, Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post provide a context for the current debates regarding what professors can and cannot do, in and out of the classroom.

They begin with the benchmark 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure drafted by the American Association of University Professors, and the subsequent 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure jointly drafted by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. These documents establish the expectation that “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

Throughout much of history, this was not the case. That initial demand that “…of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat…,” has persistently haunted free-thinking academics. Until the Middle Ages, professors were used as marionettes delivering only the bits of information that were pre-approved by the church, institutional administrators or private university donors. If they transgressed the regulated boundaries of thought, there were consequences. In 1633 the church persecuted Galileo for touting heliocentrism. In 1915 Wharton’s Board of Trustees condemned a professor whose socialist teachings went against their benefactor’s capitalistic mission. Even now, public opinion continues to censor what universities can do. In 2003, outraged conservative citizens protested the University of North Carolina’s liberal freshman reading assignment–Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

This later type of antagonism has been dominating the academic freedom conversations of the last decade. It’s no secret that the Bush administration elicited powerful reactions from a largely liberal professoriate; those emotions have been funneled into the classroom, much to the chagrin of conservatives and fundamentalists who are painted as the academic-freedom-nemeses of the 21st century. Prior to the Declaration, the debates focused on “whether academic freedom should exist, contemporary controversies assume the desirability of academic freedom and attempt to spell out its implications.” Does academic freedom now imply that that these professors have the right to do whatever they want in their classrooms? Or, are these politicized classrooms merely furthering the personal interests of opinionated professors instead of furthering the common good?

The professoriate may be above the manipulative strings of administrations and politics, thanks to the Declaration. They are not, however, granted the leisure to run buck-wild with the First Amendment:

Academic freedom is not the freedom to speak or to teach just as one wishes. It is the freedom to pursue the scholarly profession, inside and outside the classroom, according to the norms and standards of that profession.

This common understanding clarified by Finkin and Post has been adopted by hundreds of educational institutions around the country. It permits for a relative uniformity in the rights of the American professoriate. Professors are free to research, create and publish new knowledge, as long as they conduct that research according to professional expectations. They are free to teach what they want within the realm of their expertise, as long as they educate their students and don’t indoctrinate them with limited perspectives. And, finally, they are free to speak as citizens regarding matters on and off campus as long as those expressions don’t render them unfit for the classroom. “Free to” and “as long as” being equally significant.

Finkin and Post explain the theoretical justifications of their tenets of academic freedom methodically. They also try to make each freedom relevant; they pull from precedent cases where AAUP’s Committee A clarified discrepancies between professorial leaps and the consequent penalties. They do this most effectively in their chapter on “The Freedom of Teaching”; this is the only aspect of academic freedom that they highlight with contemporary controversy. Modern accusations of teachers misusing their freedom are in regards to the introduction of extraneous “political or ideological commentary into their courses and their failure to maintain neutrality.” All other chapters go so far as to highlight touchstone AAUP cases, but stop short of providing a context for how that freedom fits in with the modern academic atmosphere.

As professors of law (The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Yale, respectively), Finkin and Post are careful to offer caveats regarding material not covered within the 155 pages of text and the 106 pages of periphery resources. However, certain omissions interfere with their ability to make this synthesis of academic freedom fully rounded. For example, it is curious that the deep connection both authors have with AAUP’s Committee A is not made explicit (Finkin was chairman from 1980-1990 and is presently a consultant and Post has been a consultant since 2008).

The defined principals of academic freedom and the pragmatic legalities upheld by AAUP’s Committee A are thoroughly and clearly explained. However, the philosophical motivation for pedagogical liberty is parsed in a less satisfying way. The fuzzy title of “common good” sounds noble, but in a society as complex and diverse as America, its meaning is nebulous. If all academic freedom is meant to serve the common good, then who gets to decide what that good is? ♦

Corey Creekmur, Associate Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, coauthor with Mark Sidel of Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia.

It’s now common to view the Partition of India as the most significant, and traumatic, event in modern South Asian history, and a few critics have noted its muted presence or striking absence in popular Indian cinema, but Bhaskar Sarkar’s Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press) is the first full-scale study of the deep impact of the Partition—whether treated directly or, more often, repressed—on Indian film.

Another, quite different, exploration of the cultural politics of representation in popular Indian cinema is the project of Neepa Majumdar’s Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-50s (Indiana University Press). Arguably, the star is the most important feature of Indian cinema, and Majumdar’s book is a long-overdue account of the debates and negotiations around the controversial creation of female stars in Indian film. Her study is even more remarkable because it creates a vivid sense of an era from which many key films no longer survive. While contemporary “Bollywood” film gets increased scholarly attention, works like these—both genuinely ground-breaking works of historical interpretation—provide the necessary background to think about popular Indian cinema in its present incarnations.

Tejaswini Ganti, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Culture & Media at New York University and author of Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema.

Though the near ubiquity of elaborately choreographed and lavishly produced song sequences have become the marker of popular Indian cinema’s distinctiveness in the global media landscape, the significance of music in Indian cinema had not warranted much scholarly attention until recently. Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minnesota 2008) edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti redresses this serious gap in the scholarship. What I appreciate about this volume is that it examines film music from a variety of dimensions—production, consumption, economic, narrative, musicological, and performative. Though I was aware of the circulation and influence of Hindi film songs on local music in sites like Nigeria and Greece, I was surprised and intrigued to learn from this volume that the Israeli state used Hindi song and dance sequences in a series of promotional commercials in the mid-1990s.

Another book that also deals with an understudied aspect of Indian cinema is Preminda Jacob’s Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India (Lexington Books 2008). Most of the scholarship on Indian cinema has focused on Hindi cinema—aka “Bollywood,” to the neglect of the rich diversity of filmmaking in other languages in India – and primarily on the narrative elements and thematic significance of these films rather than their associated material and visual culture. Jacob’s book deals with the vibrant visual culture associated with Tamil cinema and its very intense culture of celebrity by focusing on the production and reception of the gigantic, hand-painted billboards that advertise films and the towering portraits of political leaders that dominate the urban landscape of Chennai.

Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema, SOAS, University of London, and author of 100 Bollywood Films.

I’ve just started to edit two series of books on South Asian Cinemas. They largely overlap although some titles will appear only with Oxford University Press, Delhi, and others only with Indiana University Press. The first book in the series with Oxford University Press is Valentina Vitali’s book on action cinema, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies. It looks at the economic factors working in India at various times, their implications for the film industry—chiefly production, distribution and exhibition – and how this impacted specifically upon films of the respective periods as cultural products. The approach reconciles an account of the economy of the film industry with an analysis of cinema.

The second book is Greg Booth’s Behind the Curtain. Although Hindi film music is India’s popular music, there has been little serious academic research into this unique form until the recent work of a handful of ethnomusicologists (Arnold, Manuel, Morcom). In Behind the Curtain, Greg Booth presents a fascinating oral history of the Hindi film music industry, allowing the words of the musicians who performed this music to be heard for the first time. Behind the Curtain cannot be ignored by any student of Indian cinema, public culture or the history of film music.

Sudhir Mahadevan, Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington.

I would recommend Priya Jaikumar’s Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Duke University Press, 2006). I’m increasingly convinced that the history of Indian cinema, or of the cinema in India (are they the same? I think not, at least at the level of historical method) cannot be narrated without a foot in Britain and one in the U.S. Although its focus is primarily on what she calls “the intertwined histories of British and Indian film policy and culture in the 1930s”, what the book actually does is to narrate the dynamics of a triangulation—India, Britain and the U.S. Jaikumar reveals the extent to which British and Indian film policies were entangled in the 1930s, when Hollywood dominated both British and Indian screens.

Drawing on a variety of archival sources—memoranda, legislative bills, policy proposals and publicly recorded debates—Jaikumar exposes the fractious and sometimes incoherent architecture of imperial bureaucracy. What makes Jaikumar’s book essential reading? At a historical moment when the British empire was being questioned in public opinion on the home front, and was subject to nationalist agitation in India, Jaikumar shows how British film policy—beleaguered by Hollywood’s dominance—sought to recast empire as a space of proto-global trade rather than as territories conceived as fixed points of production. This should be of enormous interest to those who are interested in debates on globalization and its history, as well as film historians seeking a comparative history that is productively dispersed across multiple locations. ♦

Lawrence Osborne is not your mother’s travel writer. Ironically, he may be your grandmother’s. This is not to suggest that his new book, Bangkok Days: A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, is stodgy or uptight. Quite the opposite. Osborne is not above dabbling in the local methamphetamine of choice yaa maa, visiting sex clubs, dutifully accepting a line of expensive coke, and playing gigolo—for one unsuccessful night—for an aging Japanese woman.

There is an old-fashioned earnestness to Osborne that hearkens back to the Lost Generation. Save for a few pesky decades, he could fit right in with the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein. Like his disillusioned forebears, he is an expat looking for an escape. Paris no longer offers the chance to disappear that it once did. To truly get lost, Bangkok is the only viable option. A paralyzing mixture of ancient and ultra-modern, East and West, dignified and gaudy, traditional and cosmopolitan, Bangkok presents such a dizzying assault to every sense that it seems almost impossible not to lose oneself there.

In place of the expats of the 1920s are the so-called farangs (“foreign giants”)—middle-aged Englishmen, Australians, Scots, Spaniards, “lammers” looking for anonymity and an opportunity for self-invention. He writes, “Westerners choose Bangkok as a place to live precisely because they can never understand it, for even the Thai script, that variation of written Sanskrit, is impossible to master. It’s this ignorance which comforts the farang. However conversant in Thai culture, he will never get close to the bottom of it.”

Osborne resists the dual impulses of the contemporary travel writer: to sentimentalize and to sensationalize. He has not come to Thailand on a spiritual quest—to eat, pray, love, as it were. Nor has he gone the Travel Channel route and sought the most beautiful beach(!) or the weirdest food(!) or the sexiest women(!). Granted, the sex and the weird foods are there. Osborne eats a giant waterbug, procured from a shady “insect pimp” who wraps it delicately in a pink paper napkin. He introduces a young prostitute named Porntip who is passed around the expat community like a highly-recommended novel at a book club. He meets Thai sex workers who dress as nuns and work only in pairs. Yet for a book subtitled A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, Osborne deals with these subjects with surprising subtlety and discretion. We are spared the fluids, the motions, the sounds, the smells. Michel Houellebecq or Henry Miller, he is not.

Though Bangkok Days bursts with local color and historical context, the Thais and their perceived “exoticism” are not the central focus. It is the Western farang that is placed under the microscope for further inspection. Like these men, the book is equal parts heartbreak and humor. The travelers have accepted their fates as broken men, yet they do so with a kind of stubborn, good-natured resolve. These men are, above all else, lonely. But Osborne suggests that this loneliness is voluntary, brought on by the impulse to disappear completely. “No one ever truly appreciates how much Robinson Crusoe enjoyed his solitude,” he writes with a nod to Defoe’s lonely island dweller. He is a man alone, the city of millions his island.

Bangkok is a metropolis awash in stimuli—visual, aural, sexual—but Osborne sidesteps the rhapsodic, adjective-drunk prose of most travel writing. No “sun-drenched beaches,” “quaint cobblestone streets,” “picturesque vistas,” and “charming villages” for him. Yet when he allows himself to write sentimentally, his words take on a new grace and poignancy. His brief forays into the poetic seem earned and necessary, not frivolous or self-indulgent.

The Mae Nang shrine is draped with khanom garlands, submerged in incense smoke. Into the canal that runs beside it pilgrims liberate the eels and fish which they buy as karma-improving offerings from vendors nearby. It is lovely to watch them kneel by the water’s edge and pop open the plastic bags containing the animals, then watch them swim away—the latter startled, probably, and confused by their sudden good fortune.

We forgive him the infrequent tear in the eye because he has not spent the rest of the book weeping—over the beauty of a centuries-old temple, over the intrusion of American capitalism, over the irreparable damage that has come to a great city that has quietly accepted its role as the Las Vegas of the East. ♦

Children of the sixties and seventies may remember Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Over the course of a 17-day motorcycle trip across the northern United States, Pirsig’s narrator uses the relationship between man and bike to reflect on technology and reason. “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower,” reads a typical passage. Academics dismissed his ideas as New Age bunk. The public bought four million copies.

Thirty-five years later, Penguin Press is hoping to repeat Pirsig’s success with a new philosopher-mechanic of their own. In late May it will release Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford’s jeremiad against white collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it.

Crawford, who has a Ph.D. in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual language. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, financially, and intellectually satisfying than the white-collar information-processing jobs for which schools and colleges typically educate their students.

Crawford grew the book out of a piece he wrote for the conservative online journal The New Atlantis in 2006. The essay drew the attention of many, including 100,000 unique visitors on the web and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who named it one of the best of the year. Brooks joined Crawford’s condemnation of “the way managers take decision-making authority away from workers, the way parents take decision-making authority away from kids, the way educators close off options without any debate.” By the end of the day, Crawford’s agent had sold the book to Vanessa Mobley, a young editor at Penguin Press known for her way with big ideas.

In person, Crawford manifests the quiet confidence of a guy who got over himself a long time ago. Sitting in the lobby of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel this spring, he wears jeans, a pressed navy blue button-down shirt—tucked in, sleeves rolled—and clean black suede work boots. He is coming from a meeting with his publishers, manuscript in hand. He places it on the coffee table in front of him, along with some cover options. There’s a line of encrusted dirt and motor oil under all of his fingernails. The former academic is happy with the final product. “It’s nice to have written something on a topic that people care about rather than some ancient Greek crap,” he says.

Manual work has been part of Crawford’s life since he started doing electrical work at age fourteen in the Northern California community where he grew up. As an undergraduate physics major at UC Santa Barbara, he became a freelance electrician to support himself through the summers.

Crawford was an indifferent student until his senior year, when he happened on his roommate’s copy of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Written by University of Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom, the 1987 polemic was an angry, unapologetic defense of high culture. In it Bloom credited liberal relativism and rock music with the decline of American universities and the degradation of our intellectual life. The book sold close to a million copies and turned a little-known academic into a celebrity.

It’s a book Crawford is now wary of associating himself with, given the extreme, reactions it often provokes. “It blew me away,” he admits, after some hesitation. “Bloom offered a convincing diagnosis of contemporary life by tracing our intellectual genealogy, showing the sources of our confused, taken-for-granted opinions in the works of serious thinkers. It was incredibly liberating and exciting.”

Crawford applied to do his graduate work at the University of Chicago in the hopes of studying with Bloom, but when they met, Crawford says diplomatically, they “didn’t hit it off,” and Bloom died shortly after Crawford arrived. The department is the stronghold of the ideas of influential conservative philosopher Leo Strauss and arguably one of the past century’s most influential schools of political philosophy. Crawford ended up writing a dissertation on Greek political thought with Nathan Tarcov, Bloom’s literary executor and an influential Straussian in his own right

After earning his Ph.D. in 2000, he received a post-graduate fellowship at the University’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought to turn his dissertation into a book. When the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., offered Crawford a highly paid executive job, he accepted.

It turned out that his primary role was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to agree with those espoused by the oil interests subsidizing the Institute. “Coming up with the best arguments money could buy,” says Crawford, “wasn’t work befitting a free man.” He also felt that his boss was trying to turn him into the kind of knowledge worker whose plight he laments in his book, deprived of agency, carrying out instructions phrased in corporate “action” speak. He hated the job almost immediately.

Whereas Chicago had provided him with “an intensive apprenticeship in a shared set of authors, interpretive rubrics, ‘fundamental problems,’ a set of master keys that unlocked every door,” at the think tank he felt as if “the locks had been changed.”