We Have Moved

Tuesday Studio: Alice Neel's "Painted Truths"

The visually striking and emotionally intense works of Alice Neel earned her a reputation as one of the 20th century's most significant painters. A groundbreaking figure for women in art, Neel painted portraits at a time when the role was frequently reserved for male artists. She painted friends and family (including her son Hartley, who graced the cover of YUP's Spring/Summer 2010 catalog), as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, including Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, and Meyer Shapiro.

A new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston celebrates Neel's psychologically acute portraiture. The accompanying catalogue is distributed by Yale University Press. The MFAH has posted photos of the special media preview of "Alice Neel: Painted Truths" that occurred earlier this month and was attended by members of Neel's family, as well as none other than the Iceman himself, Val Kilmer. (See if you can spot him!) The exhibit is now open to the public through June 13.

For a further look into Neel's life and career, check out the trailer for the documentary produced by her grandson Andrew Neel. If you're in the area, you can catch the film this afternoon at 5 at the MFAH.

Follow Friday Links: March 26, 2010

   
This new regular blog feature presents a weekly roundup of interesting links related to Yale University Press, courtesy of the keen-eyed citizens of the Twitterverse:

@cafsimard reflects on Alberto Manguel's troublingly negative review of Roberto Bolaño's latest work.

@flloydpk quotes a particularly tongue-twisting passage from Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters.

@GeneDillenburg catches us up on @Lileks's clever plan to create a Twitter account for John Cage.

@mediabite wants Terry Eagleton for pope.

@amytetreault reviews the Peabody Essex Museum's "Fiery Pool" exhibition in @nsartthrob.

Tuesday Studio: A revolutionary new take on Mayan art

This morning, members of the press were treated to a special advance showing of Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea, a new exhibition of Mayan artwork at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Though many past interpretations of Mayan art have centered around the symbolic representations of fire and blood lineage, this groundbreaking exhibition draws upon new research suggesting that instead water held a central place of importance in Mayan culture.

Featuring over 90 unique works, many never before seen, Fiery Pool will enchant visitors with its wide variety of objects and fundamentally change the way we view the artwork of the Mayan empire. If you're interested in getting a further sneak peak before the exhibit opens to the public on Saturday, the Peabody Essex Museum has posted a gallery of representative works on their website, and the exhibition catalogue, featuring beautiful photography as well as essays by curator Daniel Finamore and professor of archaeology Stephen D. Houston is available now through YUP.

YUP nabs 10 nominations for Foreword's Book of the Year Awards

This week, Foreword Magazine announced the finalists for their 2009 Book of the Year Awards, which were selected from 1,400 entries in 60 categories, representing more than 360 publishers.

Yale University Press picked up 10 nominations in eight categories, with two YUP titles represented in both Philosophy and History. Click here to view a slideshow of YUP's nominees. A full list of YUP finalists is available after the jump:

Guest post: Michael Slater on Charles Dickens’s chalet, a writing retreat now in need of repairs

When, in late 1864, Charles Dickens was halfway through the writing of his last completed novel Our Mutual Friend, the romantic actor Charles Fechter gave a striking demonstration of his gratitude for all the help and advice Dickens, a great admirer of his, had given him during his management of London’s Lyceum Theatre. He made Dickens a present of a two-story wooden Swiss chalet which arrived at Dickens’s Kentish country home, Gad’s Hill near Rochester, in ninety-four pieces.

Dickens was delighted with the gift and took great pleasure in arranging for the chalet to be assembled on a leafy piece of land he owned on the opposite side of the Dover Road from Gad’s Hill itself. Later he had a tunnel dug beneath the road so that he could reach the chalet more conveniently. "In the summer (supposing it not to be blown away in the spring) the upper room will make a charming study," he wrote to his friend Forster and so it proved.

The chalet became his favorite place for writing during the spring and summer. He had five wall mirrors fitted in the upper room and wrote rapturously to his American publisher James Field that "they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river … the birds and butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows." He wrote at a plain deal table (now to be seen in the Charles Dickens Museum, London) and this retreat became his favorite workplace. He had "never worked better anywhere," he wrote to Fechter in July 1865, adding, "It is a most delightful summer atelier." It was here on the afternoon of June 8, 1870 that he wrote his last pages of fiction, chapter 23 of the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. These pages contain a most beautiful description of a summer dawn in the Kentish countryside directly inspired by his situation in the chalet.

Some time after Dickens’s death the chalet passed into the ownership of Rochester City Council, now the Medway Council, and was re-erected in the grounds of the Eastgate Museum (Dickens’s model for Westgate House in Pickwick Papers and the Nuns’ House in Edwin Drood). It has been twice restored but has now fallen again into disrepair and the interior is no longer safe to enter. The Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship in association with Medway Council has launched an appeal for the £100,000 that will be needed to restore the chalet and relocate it to a nearby site. The intention is that it should become a focus for cultural events, including ones involving a writer in residence so that the chalet’s upper room may once more become a setting for acts of literary creation, honoring the memory of England’s greatest novelist. This is a fine and highly appropriate aspiration and it is greatly to be hoped that the appeal will be a most triumphant success.

—Michael Slater, author of Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing

Tuesday Studio: William Kentridge comes to New York

South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) is best known for his stark charcoal drawings and works of animation, collage, and sculpture. In "William Kentridge: Five Themes," now on view at the Museum of Modern Art and available as a beautifully designed catalogue and DVD from Yale University Press, the curators explore the five main themes that have dominated Kentridge's creations since the 1980s, including the long shadows of apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism.

The exhibit also includes materials related to the artist’s staging and design of Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, which premiered earlier this month at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. For a better sense of the exhibit's style and scope, be sure to visit MoMA's excellent dedicated website, and check out Kentridge at work in the video below.

Note: Tuesday Studio will be a new regular feature of the Yale Press Log showcasing multimedia takes on the latest YUP publications in art and architecture. Check back next week for more.

Arthur Green's "Radical Judaism" in Tikkun magazine

The cover story on the new (March/April) issue of Tikkun magazine is “God and the 21st Century” and its centerpiece is Rabbi Arthur Green’s thought-provoking and original new book Radical Judaism, published by YUP this month. Tikkun decided to use excerpts from the book to start a new discussion about God for their readers, and then asked some of the world's most significant and creative religious thinkers to tell how they understand God.

This is a wonderfully appropriate choice, because Radical Judaism itself is a concise and highly accessible distillation of its author’s lifelong philosophical pursuit. As a religious humanist, Rabbi Green reframes the questions of theology through both humanism and mysticism, giving his book both a very personal dimension and a terrific relevance to the contemporary moment. And as Tikkun’s cover story clearly demonstrates, Radical Judaism is likely to be a significant subject of conversation in religious circles in the coming weeks and months—and for a very long time after.

Did you catch that? John Cage's 4'33" performed live

John Cage's silent masterpiece 4'33" is one of classical music's most controversial compositions. In his new book, No Such Thing as Silence, musician and critic Kyle Gann not only explains why the piece incited such a stir but also why it is still best experienced live. "Cage didn't believe in recordings and wouldn't listen to them," Gann writes. "He doubtless preferred his 4'33" live and in situ."

So would we, but for those who can't experience the piece in person, this YouTube clip will have to suffice.

The literary magic of "Hocus Bogus"

In the early 1970s, Romain Gary had a career any writer would envy. A former French airman and diplomat fluent in seven languages, he had already won the nation’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1956. Yet Gary was tired of the life he lived—so he invented another one. Writing under the name “Emile Ajar,” Gary achieved the impossible by winning the Prix Goncourt for a second time in 1975. Ajar's unlikely success incited a nationwide manhunt and precipitated the creation of Gary's most perplexing work yet: a novel whose protagonist writes fiction under the pseudonym Emile Ajar.

That book, Pseudo, or Hocus Bogus as David Bellos translates it in a new English edition from Yale University Press, is a riotous romp that has been embraced heartily by critics, including most recently the Washington Post's Michael Dirda. "To read Hocus Bogus in Bellos's superb translation," Dirda writes, "is to marvel at its dizzyingly distorted syntax ('I don't speak Danish, but not well enough'), constant wit ('reptiles are always first in the firing line when it comes to hate speech') and sheer energy."

Fortunately, you won't merely have to take Dirda at his word to appreciate the literary magic of Hocus Bogus. The Wall Street Journal has posted an excerpt that contains further Gary/Ajar-ian gems like, "I hired another lawyer, and then another, but they kept on dropping me...Some were certain that I didn't exist and were afraid about getting their fees paid."

And for more literature in translation from Yale, keep close watch on the Margellos World Republic of Letters series, of which Hocus Bogus is just the latest volume.

Fact checking the "Skeptical Environmentalist"

Amid recent reports that climate change skeptic Patrick Michaels had financial ties to big polluters, Yale University Press author Howard Friel finds himself in a tangle with another big-name climate skeptic, Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg.

Friel's new book, The Lomborg Deception, probes and questions the research underpinning Lomborg's two bestsellers, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It (2007), meticulously checking every data point and note to argue that Lomborg employs deceptive analysis and sourcing methods to arrive at faulty conclusions about climate change. Last week, Lomborg responded to Friel's claims with a document posted on his website, lomborg.org. This week, Friel countered with his own response, writing:

Bjørn Lomborg’s comments about my book. . . display all of the features that characterize [his] two books. . . .Before I read Cool It in fall 2007, my experience in the hermeneutics of deception mostly dealt with books and texts that sought to justify war. Lomborg’s books are no worse than those, but they are no better. Perhaps twenty or fifty years from now, if and when the fuller impacts of man-made global warming are more apparent, people might argue that they were worse.

In her recent Newsweek column, Sharon Begley took a closer look at the developing debate by analyzing three of Lomborg's contested claims related to polar bear populations, the effect of global warming on disease, and the breakup of Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf. Through her own fact checking, Begley took issue with a number of Lomborg's citations and found that "Friel pretty much blows [Lomborg's claims] out of the water".

Though her review of The Lomborg Deception is not without its own critiques, Begley's main qualms focus on Friel's tendency to at times exchange "reader-friendliness" for his commitment to thoroughness. Yet, in his concerted search for truth about the climate, we're fairly certain that that's criticism Friel is willing to accept.