It is difficult to read any thoughtful account of urban life in twentieth-century America and not draw comparisons, voluntary or otherwise, with Jane Jacobs’ landmark study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). As a resident of Greenwich Village, many of her observations derive from her experience as a New Yorker during Robert Moses’ postwar infrastructural purges, but in Death and Life Jacobs generalizes her analysis of one aspect after another of American urban planning. While she devotes much attention to the impact of monumental civic architecture and eminent domain projects on urban life, I have always regarded her analyses of street-level structural detail as ultimately more significant. Having read it, a city dweller cannot help but observe how sidewalk width, window height, and the length-width ratio of city blocks, to cite only a few examples, all contribute to the intangible character of a neighborhood. In Jacobs work the minutiae of the urban landscape grows rich with significance and consequence.

Previously invisible aspects of cities are also the subject of David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. But if Jacobs’ study focuses on the causal relationships between infrastructural detail, large scale planning, and social welfare, Harvey brings our attention to the movement and accumulation of capital that silently guides the creation and destruction of civic space. We hear echoes of Jacobs in his deep antipathy for the forces that guide development and “renewal”, but where she takes issue with the methods chosen by the city planners of her age, Harvey – also the author of the superbly informative A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2007) – lays the blame for urban dysfunction squarely at the foot of liberal capital markets themselves, made manifest here in the form of leviathan real estate developers in bed with civic leaders beholden to the “Party of Capital.” Modern cities, chez Harvey, are expressions of the worst ills of late capitalism, dense accumulations of self-perpetuating wealth and power whose leaders routinely betray the citizens that sustain them; the city itself is a mechanism for facilitating the net transfer of capital from poor to rich (an image that resounds throughout much of Harvey’s work). Harvey illustrates this mechanism in case studies of considerable detail in cities both domestic and international. Upon finishing Rebel Cities, it is difficult to object to Harvey’s conclusion, which he draws again and again in a variety of contexts: absent political intervention, the house always wins.


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Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution A work of urban theory by David Harvey Verso , 2012 206 pages Review by Scott J. Ordway

In his 1897 book Le Suicide, Emile Durkheim defines the concept of ‘anomie’ as ‘man’s activity’s lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings’. Durkheim asserts that, ‘in anomic suicide, society’s influence is lacking in the basically individual passions, thus leaving them without a check-rein.’ For Durkheim, individuals in society need a moral structure in order to limit their desire. It is free-running desire, or limitless aspiration, which leads to anomie. Events such as economic disasters disrupt the usual moral structure(s) which govern the limits within which individuals in a society may aspire, leading to anomie. Greater still is the structural influence of (de-regulated) industry, whose boundless markets and endless drive towards growth lead to ubiquitous anomie; ‘There, the state of crisis and anomy is constant and, so to speak, normal. From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain.’

Liah Greenfeld’s new study of the influence of culture on schizophrenia and manic depression, Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, has Durkheim’s concept of anomie at its centre. Greenfeld describes anomie as a ‘cultural insufficiency – the inability of a culture to provide individuals within it with consistent guidance.’ This lack of guidance, for Greenfield, leads to difficulties in identity formation and mental functioning. Greenfeld sees this phenomenon of anomie as a significant causal factor in the illnesses of schizophrenia and manic depression. But whereas Durkheim examines specific cultural causes of anomie, (deregulation of industry, economic disaster etc.), Greenfeld’s approach focuses instead on the influence of nationalism.

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Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience A work of critical theory by Liah Greenfeld Harvard University Press , 2013 688 pages Reviewed by Catherine McKenna

Blackness marks a position betwixt and between—blackness marks a dis-lo-ca-tion. Where is the black? How does blackness reposition blacks in, or as exiled from, the world? How does blackness displace? These questions hide in the margins—betwixt and between the lines and pages—of Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination: Between the Nation and the World. The geographical tension embodied by the black position (read: blackness, black positionality), the struggle to place blackness on the map, whether that map is psychic, political, or ontological, permeates Dunbar’s text as she writes of black authors who “think more dynamically about their metaphorical and literal positions in the world” (emphasis mine). It drives and exceeds her project, and, in part, makes it compelling, creating a text that is a liminal region of its own, betwixt and between, black.


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Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World A work of literary scholarship by Eve Dunbar American Literatures Initiative , 2012 214 pp Reviewed by John Murillo III

Revisiting The Group, fifty years later

Mary McCarthy’s under-acknowledged 1963 novel The Group takes place in Roosevelt’s New Deal America. All the cultural markers of the 1930s New York creative class are there. Psychoanalysis is a rite of passage and the college kids are versed in dialectical materialism. The US is rising gradually, hopefully, out of the Depression, but bristling with anxiety over Europe’s prolonged slide toward war. The Group follows eight Vassar graduates, class of ’33, through their post-college struggles with spouses, careers, children and politics. Though often labeled a satire, this masterpiece of feminist literature reads more like a dead sincere hybrid of contemporary sociology and epic tragedy.


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The Group A work of fiction by Mary McCarthy Harcourt Brace, 1963 492 pp Reviewed by Erin Becker

Philipp Melanchthon (1497 – 1560), the protestant reformer, describes St. Bernard’s encounter with the devil in the latrine thus:

Dicitur de sancto Bernhardo, qui cum aliquando in latrina oraret Psalmos, venit ad eum Diabolus et obiurgavit eum dicens; Quare tu in latrina oras sanctos Psalmos? Respondit ei S. Bernhardus: Illud, quod ex ore exit, Deo offero; sed id, quod infra ex ventre eiicio, tu comedas.

(It is told of St. Bernard that once when he was praying the psalms in the latrine, the Devil came to him and reproached him, saying, “Why do you pray the holy psalms in the latrine?” St. Bernard answered him saying, “That which comes out of my mouth, I offer to God; but that which I cast down below from my belly, eat it!”)

This oft-quoted passage, Martha Bayless notes in Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture, introduces ‘the essential dichotomies that make up the medieval system of thought about purity and pollution,’ and inform the structure and argument of her monograph. It is well established that medieval culture took the full range of human experience as symbolic, and interpreted it largely via Christian theology. To the medieval mindset, cleanliness is associated with rising, the face and heaven, whereas the devil and sin are perceived in excrement, lowering, the backside and the latrine. An individual’s internal purity and righteousness were reflected in their physical cleanliness and health; corruption and sin, in scatology, were associated with disease and deformity. Purity and filth were fundamental to the period’s entire symbolic order.


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Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine A work of medieval scholarship by Martha Bayless Routledge , 2011 266 pp Reviewed by Rebecca Dobson

On February 25, an excerpt of a letter appeared on the taxidermy blog Ravishing Beasts, in which the writer confesses: “When I see taxidermy I get severe panic attacks. I have no idea why. It started when I was 4 and I don’t remember a point in my life when I wasn’t scared of taxidermy. It’s lead [sic] to extreme paranoia.” The letter writer is not alone in her dread of taxidermy’s spirited but motionless denizens. Taxidermy appears to us as something “mysterious, unsettling, provocative, and overwhelmingly visually magnetic”; it embodies numerous contradictory states—alive/not-alive, animal/not-animal, present/absent, life/death, beauty/repulsion, natural/artifice. Taxidermied animals, writes author, scholar, and occasional taxidermy curator Rachel Poliquin, exist “just beyond full elucidation.” The Breathless Zoo takes as its subject just this “beyond” to and from which we are simultaneously and so powerfully attracted and repulsed.

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The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing A work of critical taxidermy by Rachel Poliquin Penn State Press , 2012 272 pp Reviewed by Danielle McManus

For most people (academic historians unfortunately included), the history of American popular music begins in the enormous cultural shifts that followed World War II. The story goes that American popular music developed alongside other post-war inventions such as the television, the suburbs, and the teenager. Those with somewhat longer perspectives might begin in the 1920s, citing landmark recordings which laid the foundations for country, blues, and jazz, as well as, crucially, the increasing ubiquity of the commercially available gramophone player. David Suisman pushes back even further, locating American popular music’s origins in the final decades of the nineteenth century, nearly half a century before the advent of jazz, and more than eight decades before the world first heard of “rock ‘n’ roll.” By casting his critical eye on these crucial early decades of the American music industry, Suisman is able to unearth some of American popular music’s unexpected roots.


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Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music A work of music scholarship by David Suisman Harvard University Press , 2012 368 pp Reviewed by Joshua Busman

In the last mass extinction the Earth had seen, an asteroid collision blanketed the Earth in darkness and toxic fumes. First to fall were the prehistoric behemoths, their armor plating and fanged arsenals unexpectedly ineffectual against the suffocating darkness. Those that survived were not the apex predators – not the titanic dinosaurs nor the well-adapted pterosaurs – but instead the small and the meek, the scurriers and the burrowers. It was they who outlasted and outlived.

Colson Whitehead’s Zone One imagines a subsequent descent of darkness upon the world, this time that of a zombie plague that nearly extinguishes the global population. Like those who once found an Earth littered with the bodies of their reptilian brethren, Zone One’s survivors emerge from their bunkers to find toppled ruins haunted by “stragglers.” These are not, however, your run-of-the-mill zombies, but rather, inanimate tableaus of their former selves, frozen into upright comas. Unlike “skels,” their ravenous, ghoulish kin that were quickly hunted down and eliminated early into the outbreak, stragglers are as harmless as they are pathetic – locked in the interminable banality of riding in a bus without wheels or standing next to a copy machine long since broken.


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Zone One A dystopian novel by Colson Whitehead Anchor Books, 2011 336 pages Reviewed by Allen Zhang

About a quarter of the way through the first part of Don Quixote —after the windmills but before The Man who was Recklessly Curious —Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come upon an odd sound, “the sound of rhythmic pounding, along with a certain clanking of iron and chains that, accompanied by the fury of the water, would have put terror in any heart other than Don Quixote’s.”

The night, as we have said, was dark, and [Don Quixote and Sancho] happened to walk under some tall trees whose leaves, moved by the gentle breeze, made a muffled, frightening sound; in short, the solitude, the place, the darkness, the noise of the water, and the murmur of the leaves all combined to cause panic and consternation, especially when they saw that the pounding did not stop, the wind did not cease, and morning did not come.

Knight and squire go to investigate the noise. After turning a corner, “there appeared, clear and plain, the unmistakable cause of the terrible-sounding and, for them, terrifying noise that had kept them frightened and perplexed … it was … six wooden fulling hammers that with their alternating strokes were responsible for the clamor.” Sancho begins laughing and Don Quixote becomes sad and melancholy—no adventures here, only embarrassment at their mis-hearing. The knight mistook the sound of machinery for that of a giant.

Quixote’s most famous adventure is that of the windmills—where his mind misunderstands his sight. These misapprehensions beg the questions: What is the relation between sound and action, between sound and the world? How does hearing rethink sight? How does hearing rethink the subject?


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Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art A work of sound theory by Salomé Voegelin Continuum , 2010 256 pages Reviewed by Devin King

Hip-hop can’t seem to escape its own history, and that’s probably a good thing. Two recent books on this multifaceted art form and its broader reverberations in American culture trace hip-hop’s path through the postindustrial twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as a means of understanding it in the present day—and, crucially, using this understanding to make claims about what hip-hop will be in the future.

Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop is a hefty volume, meticulously researched, chronicling the now nearly four-decade-long history of hip-hop by tracing the money: a productive lens that lets Charnas examine the various relationships and institutions that have made hip-hop possible and shaped its direction through the years.

Tricia Rose’s The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters is an incisive commentary on, well, exactly the debates referred to in her title. Rose lists the “top ten debates in hip-hop” and then elegantly dissects each one, bringing the lengthy and intertwined histories of hip-hop, American race and class dynamics, and late twentieth-century media and corporate practices to bear on each debate. Her careful analyses point the way forward for a progressive reimagining of hip-hop, one that Rose believes to be truer to the better angels of hip-hop’s nature than aspects of our current musico-political climate.


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The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop A Work of Music Criticism by Dan Charnas New American Library , 2010 672 pages

The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters A Work of Music Criticism by Tricia Rose Basic Civitas Books , 2008 320 pages Reviewed by Meredith Aska McBride

Listen as Chris Wiewiora reads from his issue #12 nonfiction piece “This is Tossing.”

We’re not responsible for the pizza you might order or the nostalgia you might as call up.

“A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world. A writer who is afraid is no true writer.” By the time she wrote this in 1937, Irmgard Keun knew a lot about writing and fear. Born in Berlin in 1905 and initially trained as an actress, Keun wrote a series of brilliant novels in the early 1930s depicting the sex lives and career struggles of young urban women in Germany. The Nazis, however, were less impressed by her work. Keun’s novels were withdrawn from circulation and publically burnt, though she bravely – perhaps ironically – sued the Gestapo for loss of earnings. Refused membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature, a necessary condition for publication under the Nazis, Keun left Germany in 1936, spending the next four years in a host of European countries and the United States. It was during this exile that she wrote After Midnight, an intense and darkly comic portrait of life under Nazism.

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After Midnight A novel by Irmgard Keun Translated by Anthea Bell Melville House, 2011 169 pages Reviewed by Richard Martin

¨(Name)! Have a great day!¨ ¨Happy Birthday (insert nickname)!¨ (NAME)!!! Muchas Felicidades!!!!! ¨ Or, in Morse code, “HB2U”: …. -… ..— ..-

Countering our revulsion with Facebook´s mercurial privacy-settings is our fascination with the social economics of its Birthday feature. The give and get of Facebook birthdays is unquestionably a feature of real simplicity and power. Yet, if history repeats, increasing efforts on behalf of Facebook to make birthdays ever more special may be symptomatic of the decline of the social network’s cultural cache and stock value.

During the great depression, with the telegraph industry in a tailspin, Western Union began offering users similarly cheap, prefabricated birthday greetings and other holiday messages such as ¨ I´m just a little tot, I haven´t much to say, just want to wish you a happy Mother´s Day¨ (cost .25 cents). The ¨Fixed Text¨ campaign was designed to ¨embrace sociability¨ and to help alter the public perception that telegrams were restricted to business correspondence, stock trades, and sensational news. In short, these bland, canned birthday messages were a ploy to introduce the medium to a broader audience and give everyone something to say (and pay for).

Americans sending long-distance artificial greetings is one thread in the band of distinct, though often tangled, lines of similarity that run between current Internet practices and the approximately century-long rise and fall of telegraphy. Hochfelder’s Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 does not mention Facebook, but it does begin to parse that cluster of lines, methodically charting the telegraph’s technological development—from single-circuit, sender-to-receiver transmissions, to the self-relaying quadraplex systems able to transmit numerous messages simultaneously over the same wire—and the corresponding social changes that, Hochfelder’s writes, ¨proved as significant to human experience as the invention of writing in the ancient world and the printing press revolution of early modern Europe.¨

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The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 A study in the history of technology by David Hochfelder Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012 264 pages Reviewed by Dan Wuebben

It’s possible that you overlooked this item amid the recent rush of news, but while the world watched revolutions in the Middle East, the Japanese tsunami, and a Libyan civil war, a team of scientists claimed to have discovered the site of the vanished civilization of Atlantis. Richard Freund of the University of Hartford locates the ruins a few miles north of the Spanish port city of Cadiz, in a marsh overlooking strawberry fields. In the 360 BCE dialogue Timaios, our earliest extant source, Plato locates the mythic island between the Pillars of Heracles at the mouth of the Mediterranean, which scholars have long identified as the stone formations of Jebel Musa in Morocco and the Rock of Gibraltar. The team led by Dr. Freund has announced, not without controversy, that their dig is consistent with the clues from antiquity up to present research.

It’s doubtful this news was overlooked by poet, essayist, and translator Durs Grünbein, one of the most celebrated writers in Germany today. Cosmopolitan in sensibility and temperament, he is originally from Dresden in the former East Germany but has lived in Berlin since 1985. He came of age as an artist after the fall of the Berlin Wall and has since been hailed as a leading voice of the reunified German nation. In addition to his essays, Grünbein—not yet 50 years old—has published twelve volumes of poetry, an opera libretto, and several translations of Greek tragedies.


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The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays A Collection of Essays by Durs Grünbein Edited by Michael Eskin Translated by John Crutchfield, Michael Hofmann, and Andrew Shields Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 2010 352 pages Reviewed by Chris Brunt

Of the first generation of composers working through the aleatoric and performative impetus John Cage gave to music, and now known primarily for his radical innovations of the operatic genre, Robert Ashley’s most famous early composition is a piece of “noise music”: The Wolfman (1964). Noise music traces its roots back further—Futurist Luigi Russolo’s book The Art of Noises (1913) is an early theoretical text—but The Wolfman is one of the earliest noise experiments in feedback. The piece dictates that a “sinister nightclub vocalist” appear on stage surrounded by “an environment of loudspeakers in which the amplification is turned up to the level at which any sound entering the microphone will result in feedback.” The performer then sings vocal phrases into the microphone (under certain directives given by Ashley) resulting in a pandemonium of positive feedback, functioning here as compositional bedrock. “It was, at the time,” Kyle Gann notes in Robert Ashley, part of the University of Illinois Press’ American Composers Series, “the loudest music most of the audience had ever heard.”


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Robert Ashley (American Composers) A work of music criticism by Kyle Gann University of Illinois Press , 2012 184 pages Reviewed by Devin King

Meddling, in colloquial terms, is not usually a good thing. There’s something threatening about it, something that suggests unwanted or unwarranted intrusions. To meddle is to complicate, to create or uncover tensions that may not have been visible before. Yet in Meddle English, the latest book from writer and performance artist Caroline Bergvall, meddling is not only desirable, it is also necessary. It becomes a foray into the very foundation of language, the very tools of speech. And speech, in her words, “highlights the social machines that underpin the work of writing: the voices, the languages, the pleasures, the complex nexus of cultural and literary motivations with their access markers, their specific narratives.” Meddling, for Bergvall, is writing. It’s writing that calls language itself into question—writing that searches endlessly for hints of word origins, geographic markers, class structures, and sonic or syntactic associations. It’s writing that won’t leave language alone.

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Meddle English: New and Selected Texts New and Selected Texts by Caroline Bergvall Nightboat Books , 2011 128 pages Reviewed by Mary Wilson

Perhaps the major strand of opera scholarship in the last twenty years has been a turn toward studying social movements and contexts rather than simply studying composers. In this regard, the flood of recent work on aesthetic movements and the reception of opera – including work by Steven Huebner (Oxford 1999), Alexandra Wilson (Oxford 2007), and Gundula Kreuzer (Cambridge 2010) – is especially revealing. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker’s book marks the first time this developing trend has taken the form of a book written for the lay audience. In A History of Opera, Abbate and Parker present opera as a spectacle consisting equally of poetry, drama, acting, and music. While A History of Opera naturally takes detours to explore each of these arts in turn, the authors focus on opera as it is, and has been, perceived by operatic audiences; that is, they present opera in its totality as an event or an experience, as something heard, seen, and felt. The result is a full re-imagining of opera’s history: not as a succession of “great” works by “great” composers, but as the emergence of the modern operatic repertoire over time.


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A History of Opera A work of musicology by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker W.W. Norton , 2012 604 pages Reviewed by Matthew Franke

Alfred Hitchcock looms large in the minds of film scholars and enthusiasts alike. Primarily associated with the visual aspects of his films, however, Hitchcock’s work in both silent and sound cinema is marked by similarly radical innovations in the use of music in film as well. As David Schroeder notes in the preface to his text, Hitchcock’s Ear, “[m]uch has been written about Hitchcock and his music in the past few decades, although a fair amount of this is fairly inaccessible to Hitchcock enthusiasts.” Working from this premise, Schroeder writes in a manner accessible to professional and amateur alike, addressing topics including music’s principle functions within Hitchcock’s films, recurring thematic musical elements therein, Hitchcock’s early musical influences, and his employment of music to further the depiction of ambiguity versus order that permeates each plot. Importantly, Schroeder does not focus solely on every film score, but rather, on “music as an underlying force in generating the type of aura [Hitchcock] wished to capture, as a way of prompting visual images, and even having a possible bearing on structure for parts or the whole of a film.”


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Hitchcock’s Ear, Music and the Director’s Art A work of music criticism by David Schroeder Continuum , 2012 263 pages Reviewed by Paula Musegades

In an interview with her publisher, Danielle Dutton talks about the origins of her most recent novel: “In the wake of 9/11, I, like everyone else, was thinking a lot about America, about what we are, inasmuch as we are something. We spread out. We seek edges [...] I was thinking about the suburbs, about sprawl.” Dutton’s S P R A W L is the result of this exploration. Unfolding over the course of its single, sprawling 140-page paragraph, S P R A W L satirizes the strained marriages, backyard pools and countertop crumbs of American suburban life. Yet, in lieu of an easy, acerbic disdain, Dutton opts for a sly lampooning, one that even gives a hint of something resembling mild affection. For all its facetious discourse on the monotonies of floral arrangements, cupcakes, and other suburban detritus, S P R A W L criticizes without ever condemning. It is in this that its charm and power lies.


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S P R A W L A novel in one paragraph by Danielle Dutton Siglio , 2010 143 pages Reviewed by Erin Becker

Living in a city, contact with strangers is perpetual and, accordingly, often monotonous. But occasionally a contact will prove surprisingly fruitful.

In June 1983, the artist Sophie Calle finds an address book on the Rue des Martyrs in Paris, and, before returning it to its owner, photocopies its contents. “I will contact the people whose names are noted down. I will tell them, ‘I found an address book on the street by chance. Your number was in it. I’d like to meet you’…Thus, I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances. I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.” So begins The Address Book, Sophie Calle’s piecemeal and peripatetic biography of the man we come to know as “Pierre D.”, who, as chance would have it, turns out to be a documentary filmmaker. Calle’s project was first published in the Paris daily Libération, and comprised 28 photographs paired with short interviews and essays. It now reappears thirty years later in a handsome hardcover edition from Siglio Press, with the same “red cover with a black spine” of the original address book as Calle describes it. With the exception of a limited edition of lithographs, this is the first publication in English of The Address Book—suppressed until after Pierre D.’s death on account of his vociferous objection to the work.


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The Address Book A photo-journal detective memoir by Sophie Calle Siglio, 2012 104 pages Reviewed by Daniel Benjamin

In a bed in Moscow in March of 1852, his nose covered by leeches, his backbone palpable through his shrunken stomach, attempting – as ordered by a fanatical priest – to starve the devil within him, a mad Gogol perishes of inanition at the age of 42. Ten days earlier, he had burned – also at the priest’s suggestion – the manuscript of the second volume of his final, masterful Dead Souls, which he had been composing for the last decade. This was not Gogol’s first burning. In 1829, his first non-anonymous (but still pseudonymous) poetic foray – a Romantic German idyll titled Hans Küchelgarten – fell stillborn upon the Muscovite literati, and in his shame, Gogol and a servant rushed between booksellers, gathering and incinerating in a rented hotel room the unsold copies of a printing he had personally financed.

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Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Granta Books, 2012 435 pages Reviewed by Jordan Wingate

“You never heard such sounds in your life,” boasts the website of ESP-Disk’, a wonderfully diverse, and perverse, record label that – having weathered a remarkably turbulent career of fits and starts, death and rebirth – is, against all odds, approaching its fiftieth anniversary next year. Such hyperbolic statements have had pride of place in the label’s discourse; a 1966 Billboard ad, reproduced in Always in Trouble , declares, “When nobody else would listen, we opened our minds and our hearts. Where nobody else would go, we ventured. What nobody else would do, we have done.” Entirely the product of the eccentric curatorial practices of its founder, Bernard Stollman, ESP opened its doors on a lark in 1964 with the release of Ni Kantu en Esperanto (“Let’s Sing in Esperanto”), “the first sing along record in the international language… an invaluable learning aid to the linguistically oriented,” a modest exercise intended for the members of the worldwide Esperanto movement – a universal and purposefully apolitical language introduced by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish doctor, in 1887 – of which Stollman has been a part since 1960.

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Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk’, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America An oral history of the experimental record label by Jason Weiss Wesleyan University Press, 2012 314 pages Reviewed by Farley Miller

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Swimming Home feels like a cliché. Set around a holiday villa on the south-eastern coast of France, it exposes British middle-class angst to glaring sunlight. The motifs of a conventional thriller are present and correct: a body in the pool and guns in the house, a marriage in crisis and a mysterious intruder, a speeding car and a mountain at midnight. The characters are archetypal, too: a cocksure poet, a war reporter, a teenage girl, a lonely neighbour, a handsome waiter. With these familiar elements in place, the novel teases us with predictions of a terrible event or critical revelation. Yet, when its climatic moment arrives, it is much stranger than expected – a twist which drives us back through the text hunting for additional clues.


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Swimming Home A novel by Deborah Levy Bloomsbury, 2012 176 pages Reviewed by Richard Martin

Thanks to everyone who joined us at the Hideout for the MAKE 12 release party.

And special thanks to readers Tovah Burstein and Ted Mathys (pics soon!); interviewee Tim Samuelson; bands Like Pioneers and Soft Speaker; and our host Adam Burke. And, of course, to the Hideout!

Monika Pawlak of Better Looking Photography is responsible for the great shots.

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In their book on compulsory schooling, Gordon Cox and Robin Stevens cover those places across the world where, as Shakespeare’s Jacques puts it “all the men and women are merely players” – that is, those countries where music education finds a welcome, mandated home in the national curriculum. In The Origins and Foundations of Music Education, twenty contributors, spanning fourteen nations on six continents, locate world musics in their individual spaces, places and times, in relation to local compulsory musical teaching systems. Starting from a place of optimism – that music can be a powerful universal learning tool – they critique the shortcomings and strengths of diverse contemporary pedagogies. Robin Stevens and Eric Akrofi’s concluding chapter – differing slightly to those accounts preceding it, with a focus on music beyond, rather than inside, the classroom environment – provides a possible grand thesis to the publication: the top-down employment of the education system, including compulsory schooling, is seen to provide the structural support for the coherence of society as a whole. Even more boldly – engaging, indirectly, here with ideas expressed by the ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes in his article “Music and the Global Order” – they suggest that it may be precisely as a result of music that societies arise in the first place, rather than vice versa. Music, when treated properly, is understood as a source of immense potential, with history and individual circumstance determining whether for good or for harm. The collected essays of (The Origins and Foundations of Music Education revolve around such questions, treating both local and global identities.


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The Origins and Foundations of Music Education: Cross-Cultural Historical Studies of Music in Compulsory Schooling A work of music criticism edited by Gordon Cox and Robin Stevens Continuum, 2011 242 pages Reviewed by Angela Moran

“There were things under things, as well as things inside things.” Thus does H.D. — in this reprint of her classic twentieth-century memoir, Tribute to Freud — prove herself in one sweeping statement a true catechumen of the Professor.

By her own account, she was more Freud’s “student” than analysand, or analytic patient. Accordingly, the portrayal of Freud here is an intimate one, tempering the more catholic attention to his methods that lurks in the corners of this book. The first part, “Writing on the Wall,” addressed “to Sigmund Freud, blameless physician,” was written in London in the autumn of 1944, with no reference to the Vienna notebooks of spring 1933. The second, “Advent,” is both a continuation of the first part and its prelude — a gloss.
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Tribute to Freud A psychoanalytic memoir by H. D. New Directions, 2012 (First published 1944 / 1956) 144 pages Reviewed by Betsy Chunko

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In December 1981, the French writer Pierre Guyotat entered a coma induced by the harsh rituals of fasting that had become an integral part of his writing ethic. He was 41 at the time, an age “which as a child I had decided never to live beyond.” On the night of December 8, lying in a cot near the door at a friend’s home, Guyotat, whose emaciated condition causes him to chronically slip into and out of sleep, has a dream “in which Beethoven composes and directs pieces from an unpublished quartet: his warm breath surrounds and envelops my head, steam wafts from the remains of dinner on a back table, musicians, the young inside the half-circle, plump cheeks, the older and graying along the sides, play the almost imponderable, silent music that B. hands them from the piano in large sheets that crackle loudly as they touch. The image of the scene blurs as I faint on the chair from which I am listening…”

Incapable, like Nerval, of distinguishing between dream and life, Guyotat draws no hard distinction between his dream of Beethoven and his sudden fall, on the physical plane, from the cot onto the hard tiled floor: “It is within that dream that I feel myself dying, and an angel marks the ground and the bottom of the door with its imprint (its wing). It is morning.” Guyotat’s pained, unsentimental entry into a comatose state, marked by an angel (in that familiar French Catholic perception of the saints and martyrs, who before some divinely ordained extinction, endure a vision of seraphs and thrones gathered around the Cross), delivers him not unto death but unto a hermetic rebirth–one which would produce an account, an Orphic testimony from the Greek underworld, down where the dead converse with and reveal secrets to the living. The blur of the dream-screen blurs in a flashback mode reminiscent of film sequences that transfer from a present chronology to a previous one; in Guyotat’s case, the transfer is from cinematic subjectivity to corporeal objecthood–he is returned to life brutally by the same musical forces that had distracted him from it. Beethoven fades out, along with his unpublished quartet, but the after-image, a multiple and necessarily multiplied one, is vitally retained: that of his externalized body at an intimate remove from the scriptum that constitutes the matière et mémoire of Guyotat’s Coma (2006), a return to memory (to the “I” of memory which Guyotat had so long attempted to fracture and efface in his life and work) and a return to the kinematics of voice, speech, and physicalized language that would rehabilitate his waking back into life, into authorship.

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Coma A memoir by Pierre Guyotat Translated from the French by Noura Wedell Semiotext(e), 2010 232 pages Reviewed by Jose-Luis Moctezuma

“We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house.” There is a peculiar sense of betrayal that shadows political hope. From Obama’s presidency to the Arab Spring, the initial euphoria of change is often swiftly followed by disillusionment, with all its attendant cynicism, outrage and cries of hypocrisy.

For the left, few historical events have provoked as much hope or led to greater disenchantment than the Russian Revolution. First published in French in 1932 and now enjoying the status of a NYRB Classics edition, Victor Serge’s novel Conquered City captures the passions, the disappointments, the mundanities and the tragic ironies of the revolution’s aftermath. It is set in an “exhausted, besieged” St. Petersburg during the Civil War that followed the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in 1917. Indeed, St. Petersburg itself is the novel’s main subject and its tracking of urban rhythms calls to mind Dziga Vertov’s famous Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
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Conquered City A novel by Victor Serge Translated by Richard Greeman NYRB Classics, 2011 224 pages Reviewed by Richard Martin

The film journal Cahiers du cinéma is best known as the crucible in which the founders of the French New Wave – Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut – conceived the innovations in form and content with which they were to reinvent the process of film direction and alter the trajectory of the medium. But Cahiers was more than just a vessel for the cultivation of the practical application of film direction; it was, in fact, first and foremost a crucial agent in the development of a systematic and mature theory of film. Though profound theories of film had already been developed (the most famous, perhaps, being Eisenstein’s theory of montage), Cahiers du cinéma was the first “Western” journal devoted solely to the elevation of the analysis of film to the level of rigorous critical discourse.

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A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma A work of film scholarship by Emilie Bickerton Verso , 2011 (hardcover 2009) 156 pages Reviewed by Mark Molloy

According to Foucault: “from the point of view of the law that imposes it, public torture and execution must be spectacular; it must be seen by all almost as its triumph.” Yet as Larissa Tracy points out in Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity, the public spectacle of violence in medieval literary sources often backfires on those who employ it. At the center of this book is a fairly straightforward question: How is torture exercised via medieval texts—and why? The answer traces the murky divide between vengeance and justice, brutality and law. Ultimately, Tracy contributes to a new understanding of the function of medieval literature as a mode of popular dissent by examining the ways in which poets and their audiences envisioned themselves and their national identities in opposition to those cultures that sanctioned excessive brutality.

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Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity A work of literary scholarship by Larissa Tracy D. S. Brewer , 2012 336 pages Reviewed by Betsy L. Chunko

Ann Beattie published her first story in The New Yorker in April 1974, when she was 26. In the story, a young woman leaves her husband, finds a roommate named Sam, and grows attached to his quiet, docile presence. Sam eventually buys a motorcycle and moves out to explore the country. The woman goes back to her husband. At the story’s close, the woman pictures herself riding away on a motorcycle, journeying off with Sam. The action is both subdued and rapid; without close attention, one might not see it at all. The ending is ambivalent. Does the woman yearn for independence? Is she disappointed in herself? Is she resigned to life with her husband? Trapped? Both? Here, Beattie offers a clue about what would become a main draw of her work to follow: an ambiguity that gives her characters depth and her plots the ruddy complexity of life.
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The New Yorker Stories A collection of short story collection by Ann Beattie Scribner , 2010 514 pages Reviewed by Erin Becker

Wow, wait, we just released an issue with stories, poems, and essays in both Spanish and English. Also, there’s a full-color, double-sided poster accompanying. It kind of feels like we forgot to tell you. There were those three Exchange/Intercambio events (podcasts coming soon); and visiting authors (thanks for coming to town, Santiago Vaquera-Vaquez, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Álvaro Enrigue, Brenda Lozano, Aguillón-Mata–and Valeria and Maia too); and then visiting authors who were trapped by Sandy (not an ideal way to vacation in Chicago, but we enjoyed your company); and the election. THE election. We may have been a little distracted, but we would like you to know we’re really, really proud of this issue and all of the contributors, translators, artists, editors, and designers who deferred sleep to get it to the printer.

And, yes, #12 is leapfrogging over #13. Because…publishing a literary magazine is not an exact science? Look for issue #12 teasers online, including new work from Randa Jarrar! Issue #12, the electronic version, will be available in advance of the print.

Until the end of the year, we’re offering some really fine subscription specials.

Help MAKE get 50 new subscribers by Thanksgiving  the end of the year. We’ve been at this for a while, and we think you’ve been meaning to subscribe. Let’s make now the time. We’ll donate 20% of every purchase to the Chicago Food Bank. Not because we think it will help us get more subscribers, but because we’d like to do so. (This time of year can be so magical and so tough too.)

Would you like to send a subscription as a gift? Just add the address and any message to the receiver in the “Notes” section of the order form. If you have any questions, please write to editors at makemag.com

HOLIDAY 2-Issue Sub Special: #13 + #12 + vintage tote. Postage included. Offer ends December 31!
Exchange/Intercambio
Price: $20

HOLIDAY 3-Issue Sub Special: #13 + #12 + #14 + vintage tote. Postage included. Offer ends December 31!
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Price: $30

Caleb Kelly’s Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction investigates the intersection of music, performance art, and sound studies in the object of media that has been “cracked.” “Cracked media” are, according to Kelly, “the tools of media playback expanded beyond their original function as a simple playback device for prerecorded sound or image. ‘The crack’ is a point of rupture or a place of chance occurrence, where unique events take place that are ripe for exploitation toward new creative possibilities.” Cracked media, then, include damaged or destroyed vinyl LPs, compact discs, altered turntables and CD players, broken tape loops, production of excessive feedback and noise, and so forth. Rather than being unwanted artifacts of wear and tear or user error, these effects are intentionally created and deployed by these artists as an integral part of their aesthetic.

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Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction A work of music criticism by Caleb Kelly The MIT Press , 2009 400 pages Reviewed by Meredith Aska McBride

Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a 78-page rabbit hole of a novel. Written in 1968 and algorithmically structured – with accompanying flowchart, designed by Jacques Perriaud at the Computing Service of the Humanities Research Centre in Paris, and included in the text’s inside and back covers – The Art of Asking takes the reader through various possible steps an employee – “you,” in the work’s second-person narration – could take to meet with “your” boss, “mr x,” to discuss a raise.
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The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise A novel by Georges Perec Verso , 2011 96 pages Reviewed by Reviewed by SD Allison

The study of film music, despite its current popularity in both musicology and cinema studies, nevertheless remains a relatively new subject of analysis in both respective fields, and as such has been, arguably, lacking a definitive treatment. While some texts that treat the topic provide a broad overview of historical developments within the film music industry, others touch on its practical / technological processes, and still others deal with the changing theory of the film score. Very few, however, provide all three elements within one source. Julie Hubbert’s Celluloid Symphonies Texts and Contexts in Film Music History, providing just this, is an important addition to this lacuna of film music research.
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Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History A work of music criticism by Julie Hubbert University of California Press, 2011 507 pages Reviewed by Paula Musegades

The beautiful #12 was completed on the heels on #13.  Since we already had events scheduled for #13, we’ve chosen print #12 in late November.  As an all-volunteer staff dedicated to publishing a quality magazine, we think this is in the best interest of all contributors and subscribers.

“Architectural” will be released as an electronic issue in early November and will have its very own release party later this year.  Thanks for understanding.  We do our best to bring you the best (even if it’s not always timely.)

The text of the Old English poem known as Beowulf is frustratingly ambiguous from its very first word: Hwæt, a slippery and hard-to-translate expression often employed as an interjection, a call for people to quiet down at the start of a story. It was also used as a kind of conjunctive adverb, though—like ‘thus’ or ‘however.’ That is, the poem commences mid-thought before unfolding through its ambling series of “fitts,” or piecemeal sections. In what has proven arguably the most notable ‘new’ translation of the work, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney rendered that initial word as a somewhat disappointing: “So.” Thomas Meyer, in this translation, gets it just right—striking the balance between call to attention and thoughtful pause. “Hey Now,” his text begins. This is not just an opening, though; it’s a conjuring from the past, an invocation.

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Beowulf A translation by Thomas Meyer Punctum Books , 2012 312 pages Reviewed by Betsy Chunko

For more information on all three events, click here.

For the Facebook event page, click here.

In “On Exactitude in Science,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of a fictional empire so devoted to the art of cartography that its citizens constructed “a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire,” corresponding “point for point” with reality. When the following generations, finding the creation “useless,” deliver it up to the vicissitudes of the desert, we see the irony of the 1:1 map: the impracticality of its perfect data, of utterly objective replication. Indeed, contemporary cartographic “[s]imulation,” Jean Baudrillard has written, “is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance,” but rather “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality…[the] territory [neither] precedes the map, nor survives it.” Free of the onus of exact representation, the map must serve more subjective agendas. The question of just whose agendas – be they legal or political – is the subject of Mark Monmonier’s No Dig, No Fly, No Go.

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No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control A discussion of the politics of an (inter)national cartography by Mark Monmonier University of Chicago Press , 2010 242 pages Reviewed by Jordan Wingate

Where Art Belongs, the latest volume by Chris Kraus – art critic, author, and editor at the influential publishing concern Semiotext(e) – is a loose confederation of thoughtful art-crit essays collected and published last year as a part of the eye-catching “Intervention” series from Semiotext(e). Kraus’s own persona and individual preoccupations as an Artist-reflecting-on-Art have always occupied a central position in her work, but these essays find her traversing a broader set of themes and geographies than in her previous collection, 2004’s L.A.-centric Video Green. Though also less explicitly polemic than some of her previous writerly and editorial outings with Semiotext(e), Where Art Belongs nonetheless retains a firm political grounding. And, in fact, it seems more fitting than ever―at a moment when the very notion of critique as a practical writerly comportment is coming under fire in academic and theoretical communities (see Marcus & Best, Latour, etc.)―that Kraus’s prose should derive its primary energy not from the sustained, analytic skepticism of the critical tradition, but rather from a kind of creative resonance, an exploratory non-fictional impulse set loose at the intersection of theory, history, memoir, and reportage. The essays of Where Art Belongs find Kraus in a more expansive relation to her material, drawing upon the form’s more literary valences to complement her wonted clarity and directedness of vision.
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Where Art Belongs A work of art criticism by Chris Kraus Semiotext(e), 2011 160 pages Reviewed by Chris Catanese