Chapbookapalooza, 2014

Lyric Hunter

Swallower

Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014

Mastering a bi-lingual prosody, these poems confront the idea of “city” and our romanticizing of containers. They show a brilliant mind disassembling trite societal structures.

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Once upon a time, before baseball drew crowds to America’s ballparks and English workers spent their Saturdays at the football grounds, one of the most popular spectator events in both countries was watching people walk. Pedestrianism had its start outdoors, as walkers set off on long-distance treks for the simple challenge of it–or to win a bet. In the 1870s, the sport moved indoors. Tens of thousands of spectators filled the great exhibition halls of industrial cities to watch pedestrians circle a track on the floor. The big event was the six-day race, in which racers competed to see who could cover the greatest distance in the allotted time. Winners typically exceeded 500 miles.

In his book Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport (Chicago Review Press, 2014), Matthew Algeo offers an engaging account of this curious chapter in the history of sport. As Matthew points out, 19th-century pedestrianism is a revealing episode in the history of the industrial age, as promoters launched new events and venues to entertain growing urban populations. Walking races also had many of the same features as contemporary sports culture, from doping scandals to merchandise featuring the star walkers. Pedestrianism was short-lived. But while the sport lasted, the great long-distance walkers were featured in newspapers and on cigarette cards, and crowds followed the races in massive halls and at local telegraph stations.

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Stardom has a history. Hideaki Fujiki‘s new book traces that history through a story of the transformations of Japanese film stars in the early twentieth century. Taking a deeply transnational approach to understanding the imbrication of film stardom and modernity in Japan, Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) considers modern stardom as a historical process that depended on not just the appearance of a star, but also the circulation of her name and image in the media, and the support of consumers of that media. The book identifies and explores three main periods of the history of early film stardom in Japan, looking in turn at the rise and popularity of early Japanese film stars (1910s-mid-1920s), American film stars in Japan (mid-1910s onward), and a new type of Japanese film star (after the early 1920s). Fujiki’s book is full of the stories of early Japanese benshi who narrated silent films for eager audiences, American actresses like Mary Pickford and Clara Bow who brought a new kind of physicality and sexuality to stardom in Japan, and film directors and critics who attempted to understand and theorize modern Japanese film acting. Making Personas also illuminates the institutional history of the Japanese cinema business, and considers the new forms of stardom that emerged with Japanese colonial modernity. It is a fascinating work on many levels, and well worth reading for fans of modern Japanese history and film history alike.

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The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921.

Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up against the edges of Mongolia and China. Indeed much of the book unfolds as an attempt to make sense of the movements and connections between east and west that at once held the empire together and, paradoxically, helped to undermine it as well.

Using Ungern as a guide to the empire, Sunderland’s detailed research exposes the Russian government’s interactions with its far-flung borderlands and in the process challenges some of our assumptions both about borders themselves and about the complicated politics of nationalism and imperialism that defined the history of Eurasia at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a very readable study, which comes across as both history and biography and is a welcome addition to the rich new scholarship that has appeared on the tsarist empire in recent years.

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Where does love come from and where will it lead us? Throughout the years various answers have been given to these questions. In Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (Yale University Press, 2013), William Chittick, professor at Stony Brook University, responds to these queries from the perspective of the rich literary traditions of Islam. He reveals how some Muslims explained the origins, life, and goal of love through a detailed investigation of authors writing in Persian and Arabic mainly from the eleventh to twelfth centuries. For these authors, love is manifest through the relationship between God and creation in all of its various iterations. Commentary and explanation are drawn from numerous sources beginning with the Qur’an but most extensively from Rashid al-din Maybudi’s Qur’an commentary, Unveiling of the Mysteries, and Ahmad Sam’ani’sRepose of the Spirits. In our conversation we discussed the role of the Persian Muslim tradition, the cosmological roles of Adam and Muhammad, the centrality of the heart in the spiritual psychology, states and stations, the macrocosm and microcosm, and the suffering of separation.

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At Chapbookapalooza, our headliner goes first.

And here she is with a stunning collection of poetry that subverts pop culture by placing it in direct conversation with everything it hints at but is too shifty to engage outright. With Elegant and cerebral verse, Leah Umansky shows us in Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014) that nothing is surface-level when minds are involved. Her unforgettable speaker engages with the fictitious Don Draper and everything he stands for in our consume/consumer/consumed reality. This book will make you happy. Don’t you want to be happy?

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Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giving our lives their meaning and value. This much is commonplace. What is not frequently noticed is that our practices of valuing and finding meaning in our lives draw upon the presumption that others will outlive us, that there will be generations of human beings continuing into the future. One way to grasp the significance of this presumption is to imagine a scenario in which we know that humanity has no future. How would this knowledge affect our lives in the present? Would the pursuit of our goals matter? What do our likely reactions to the imagined scenario tell us about value? And what does the envisioned scenario tell us about how we should regard our own death?

In Death and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2013), Samuel Scheffler carefully explores these questions. His surprising suggestion is that much of the value that we find in our own lives depends upon inevitability of our own death and the existence of others who will survive us.

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Staci Zavattaro is the author of the new book Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms (SUNY Press, 2013). Zavattaro is assistant professor of public administration at Mississippi State University.

Cities have received renewed interest from political scientists recently. Previously, Ravi K. Perry was on the podcast to discuss his book Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Zavattaro approaches the local subject from the perspective of public administration and an eye toward the marketing of cities. You’d be hard presses to live in a community that hasn’t launched a new publicity campaign or a new slogan to attract new residents.  Zavattaro tries to analyze these efforts and suggests that cities use six selling tactics to advance their interests: branding, media relations, in-house publications, use of volunteers and outside organizations as PR surrogates, aesthetic and affective appeal, and built environment via sustainability. Zavattaro acknowledges the limits of this metaphor and, in her conclusion, addresses the risks associated with a model of urban governance focused on marketing rather than other social values.

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Matt Grossmann is back on the podcast with his newest book, Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Grossmann is associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. He is also author of The Not-So-Special Interests, for which he appeared on the podcast in 2012.

In Artists of the Possible, Grossman ponders who moves policy? Is it an enraged public or talking heads on TV? Grossmann suggests that neither public opinion nor media attention explain much about what happens in national policy making. Instead, governing networks – work between legislators, executives, and interest groups – drives most policy making. He relies on the careful coding of policy histories starting in 1945. Grossmann ends his book by writing: “The best bet in Washington politics is always on the status quo… “Not much” is still the best answer for what might happen over the next decade.”

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Since the 1990s, the music industry has been going through a massive transformation. After World War II, the primary way audiences participated in the music business in the period between 1945 and 1990 was by purchasing records and attending concerts. The internet and the mp3 file, however, have changed how people are listening to music.

In Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry (Routledge, 2014), Tim Anderson explores how the music industry is changing from selling records as its primary purpose to a new paradigm in which artists must be entrepreneurial, audiences are end users, and record companies are investing in music brands, not simply records. Anderson’s book is a great guide for this new world. In his book, he draws on a wide range of examples from Moby and Lupe Fiasco to Amanda Palmer and Jonathan Coulton. He also introduces readers to the role that music supervisors, such as Alexandra Pastavas, are playing in film and television.

Dr. Tim Anderson is an associate professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts. He is also the author of Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording. Dr. Anderson can be contacted at [email protected]. His website is http://timjanderson.weebly.com.

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