List: Top Picks at the Texas Book Festival
Writers and readers of all stripes and flocking to Austin this weekend for the annual Texas Book Festival. The schedule is always a bit daunting for the two day event, so here is a selection of notable events (with descriptions from the festival schedule) featuring some familiar AMS faces (Elizabeth Engelhardt and Robert Abzug, to name two) as well as a few others worth seeking out amidst the flurry of activity.
Saturday
A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender & Southern Food
with Dr. Elizabeth EngelhardtDate: Saturday, October 22, 2011Time: 11:15 - 12:00Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.030While staples of Southern foodways are often portrayed as stable and unchanging – the stories of their origins generally focused on elite whites or poor blacks – Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt uses methods of food culture and gender studies to reveal their troubling complexities. An associate professor of American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, Engelhardt was lead author of Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket.
James Evans
the Big Bend photographer on his new book Crazy from the HeatDate: Saturday, October 22, 2011Time: 1:00 - 1:45Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.012James Evans goes well beyond his highly regarded black-and-white work in Crazy from the Heat, displaying magnificent landscapes in full color - including panoramas that fold out to reveal the immensity of the desert. Evans’ work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Art Museum of South Texas, as well as in many private collections.
American Reinventions: The Fiction of Leaving Home
with Jillian Lauren, Jennifer Niven, and Kerry ReichsDate: Saturday, October 22, 2011Time: 2:15 - 3:15Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.028"There are no second acts in American lives." F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation has always been treated as a kind of literary scripture, but is it really true anymore? Jennifer Niven, Jillian Lauren, and Kerry Reichs' new novels reveal characters willing - or desperate - to reinvent themselves, with all the excitement and uncertainty reinvention implies. Maeve Connelly's epic road trip in Kerry Reich’s new novel, Leaving Unknown, is taking her through every colorfully named tiny town in America on her way to the far less imaginatively named Los Angeles, California. Velva Jean Hart, the fiercely independent heroine of Jennifer Niven's new novel, Velva Jean Learns to Fly, is at the heart of this captivating adventure of a woman bristling at the limitations faced by a woman in rural Appalachia and fueled by the memory of her late Mama telling her to "live out there." Bebe Baker, the antihero of Jillian Lauren’s new book Pretty: A Novel, is an ex-everything: ex-stripper, ex-Christian, ex-drug addict, ex-pretty girl who looks for something to believe in before something – her past, the dangerously magnetic men in her life, her own bad choices – knocks her off course again.
The Rolling Stone Years
with Rolling Stone photographer Baron WolmanDate: Saturday, October 22, 2011Time: 3:15 - 4:00Location: The Sanctuary at First United Methodist Church (1201 Lavaca, enter from Lavaca St.)The Rolling Stone Years features the work of Baron Wolman, the first chief photographer to work for America’s legendary Rolling Stone magazine. Many of Wolman’s images from the late sixties and early seventies have become iconic shots from rock’s most fertile era. Wolman shares his insights on the world of rock, and the brilliant yet sometimes flawed characters that inhabit that world.
The Journals of Spalding Gray
with Nell Casey; this session is a collaboration with The Harry Ransom CenterDate: Saturday, October 22, 2011Time: 4:15 - 5:00Location: Capitol Auditorium Room E1.004In The Journals of Spalding Gray, Nell Casey allows us intimate access into the life of Spalding Gray, the actor/writer who invented the autobiographical monologue and perfected the form in such celebrated works as Swimming to Cambodia, before committing suicide in 2004. Culled from more than 5,000 pages and including interviews with friends, colleagues, lovers, and family Nell Casey gives us a haunting glimpse into the life of a creative genius.
Sunday
The Globalization of American Culture
Don't Fence Me In: Genre-Bending Fiction
with Lev Grossman, Erin Morgenstern, Thomas Mullen, and Charles YuDate: Sunday, October 23, 2011Time: 12:30 - 1:30Location: House ChamberIn 2009, noted science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin took Margaret Atwood to task, believing that Atwood shunned being labeled a science fiction writer because she didn't "want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto," as Le Guin called it, the place where science fiction, zombie novels, thrillers, fantasy, and mysteries live. A place where literary fiction thrives is not, presumably, a ghetto. Or is it?A number of the 2011 Festival's literary writers (besides the ones appearing in this session) are moving outside the confines of literary fiction by crafting narratives with complex characters and lyrical language but with plots that are more accurately called science fiction, fantasy, or thrillers (check out Colson Whitehead, Russell Banks, and Hillary Jordan's novels, for starters). Join us at this session for a conversation with Lev Grossman, Erin Morgenstern, Thomas Mullen, and Charles Yu, four imaginative, restless writers whose new novels are literary fiction, while stepping outside that realm to engage readers.
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation
with David GoldfieldDate: Sunday, October 23, 2011Time: 4:00 - 4:45Location: Lone Star TentCountless books have been written on the Civil War: its causes and effects, its battles and heroes. David Goldfield’s exciting new work America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation does not simply reiterate these facts but rather reinterprets them in light of a new thesis: that the Civil War was an avoidable tragedy caused by an Evangelical fervor that stifled debate by raising political discussions to the level of religious arguments - where the sacred was non-negotiable. David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of many works on Southern history, including Still Fighting the Civil War; Black, White and Southern; and Promised Land.For a full schedule of events, click here.
5 Questions with Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller
Today, we bring you a discussion with American Studies affiliate faculty member Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller, who also holds appointments in the History and Music departments.
What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?I’ve been working on two basic projects. My first book was my dissertation, and I got really into that. And, of course, I have to say that’s one of my favorites because that’s what I’ve spent the most time on. I really enjoyed that book partially because it’s the one that taught me how to write. It’s the one that taught me how to put long-ranging arguments together. I was getting pretty good at – well, okay at – writing the twenty-page seminar paper, but writing a 300-page book was kind of mysterious to me. It wasn’t until I got deep into re-writing after the dissertation and after I was working that I started getting into this kind of long arc of a narrative and long arc of an argument, and figuring out that as a form. As a learning experience, that was really exciting to me.My second project that I’m working on right now I’m really thrilled about in a whole new way. I’m writing about the history of amateur musicians and their effect on popular music across the 20th century. I find this really exciting because I get to focus on a completely unexplored topic. My first topic was on blues and country music and there are bookshelves and bookshelves and books about blues and country music. Amateur musicians, there’s a real dearth of serious scholarship about them. They’ve kind of been dropped out as popular music studies has become really, in many cases, either about folkloric groups or synonymous with professionally-recorded commercial artists – Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones. In fact, popular music in the United States is diffuse, it’s millions of people playing it every day. I’m really excited to have this clear open scholarly space to explore a new topic and trying to figure out what that means, rather than trying to elbow my way into an existing one.[On source material] That’s part of the thing. The source material for blues and country, although you can find a lot of new stuff if you’re really digging, a lot of it’s already out there. So you just have to follow in other people’s footsteps. For this project, I’m really having to try to be creative about where I find source material.One of the biggest sources I’ve found is the industry press for musical instrument industry, because musical instruments are selling primarily to amateurs. Reading industry insider press from musical instrument retailers is a great way to gauge change over time and who’s buying what. You really get a sense of the shift from the accordion being the most popular instrument to the acoustic guitar being the most popular instrument of the post-war years. It explodes in the 1960s with the British invasion and the folk revival and millions of people wanting to be the next Beatles or the next garage band. I’m reading a lot of sociology, good ol’ Lynds’ Middletown sociological studies, which are remarkable in their problematic design and they give you a real sense of change over time and numbers.I’ve even gone through New York Time and LA Times and other newspapers to find hundreds of articles about noise complaints about noisy neighbors playing music next door. It actually reveals a lot about what amateur musicians are playing, and how they’re denigrated and derided for playing different kinds of music rather than others. It gives you a sense of the way in which pop music functions in an urban landscape. One person’s dream is another person’s noise pollution. I love that kind of problem.I’m looking at a lot of cultural studies, a lot of musical examples that talk about being alone, and talking about amateur musicians from the Beach Boys “In My Room” to Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room,” a piece of experimental electronic art music.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society?I’ve focused on using popular music as a way to get into larger debates about American politics and American culture. Popular music in my first book is really interested in ideas about crossover, about genre, about relationships between race music and money. My book there tries to talk about the kinds of social construction of musical categories. We kind of assume that race is socially constructed, and that becomes a point of departure rather than a conclusion. In my book, I’m trying to back it up and look very specifically at precisely how it is constructed in different places and at different times. For me, one of the interventions I was trying to make into this was looking at concepts of racialized music, whether it be early blues or country music or African American music as a whole, as a really interesting sight of continued struggle and renegotiation rather than as what Amiri Baraka would call “the changing same.”I don’t see a lot of the same. I see a lot more of the changing.The reason that I think I see a lot of the changing is because I think a lot of our concepts about how music works and how culture works more generally are deeply indebted to anthropology and folklore of the late 19th and early 20th century. My real goal in that book, one of them, was to investigate the construction of anthropology and folkloristics in the early 20th century, which gives us this whole concept about music and race as being an important and long-standing tradition. That intervention was partially into very specific music literature, but I kind of tried to do it in a way that was expanding into these larger questions about how meaning is constructed in academic traditions.My latest book also came out of trying to intervene and help us understand the destruction of the music industry as we know it in the 21st century with downloading and filesharing. I came up with George Lipsitz as a hero when I was in grad school, and George Lipsitz and Robin Kelley and Tricia Rose and this group of people that were writing in the1990s which were kind of invigorating American Studies and music studies at the time. For me, at least, they’re the ones that really got me going.And then I do my dissertation on the early 20th century, and I poke my head up, and it seemed like a lot of the people who were writing really influential music books in the 21st century aren’t cultural studies people, they’re lawyers interested in parsing out intellectual property and using intellectual property and copyright as the primary mode of framing questions about the music industry and filesharing. While they’re very useful – love my Lawrence Lessig – I was always kind of pining for what would George Lipsitz or this other group of cultural historians say about these new debates about musical ownership. We can go ask them, but I was trying to write in that mold. So this book is about amateur musicians, it’s about people being creative in their everyday lives, but I kind of got to it as a way of addressing filesharing, downloading, and taking these debates about musical ownership beyond copyright into the realm of creative ownership, community ownership, and cultural ownership.Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired your work?I get inspiration from absolutely everything. Of course. I’m standing on the shoulders of legions of great scholars. I’m inspired by every musician I’ve known, from the famous people I’ve had the opportunity to meet (very few), to the legions of unknown hacks who have ruined their backs carrying amplifiers into their hatchback every night after their club gigs. And that’s one of the things that inspired both of these projects, looking at music as an everyday job, rather than as a key to fame, or a way to speak politically, or a way to be an organic intellectual. Those are all good things, but for most people, music is an everyday occurrence. I’m really inspired by all the hacks that you don’t know, and you never will.I’m inspired by people who’ve trained me and other people who I’ve read. I’m inspired by my father and my mother who are both intellectuals if not scholars; I enjoyed the vigorous intellectual debate around the kitchen table every night. That got me going and I never stopped.What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?When I graduated from high school I wanted to be a rock ‘n roll star, or a jazz musician, so I went off to music school at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Boston opened my eyes to the amazing urban culture in the United States in a way that I’d never seen before, but Berklee – you get really good at playing your instrument, but you don’t have to read books. I felt it was making me dumb. And so I went to Macalester College in Minnesota, which was one of the only schools I had ever visited; it’s where my parents went. I majored in history and focused on music. That kind of led me to NYU to study music history in the history department, and then I came here while I was still writing my dissertation and became a lecturer at UT.I’m really happy to be here. I showed up at my first graduate student class and we went around the room saying why we were in graduate school and everybody around the room had all these very thought-out reasons why they were there, and it got to me and I said, “This is my fallback for my music career.” And they all laughed at me. Because thinking of this very tough industry to try to make a living in as a fallback they saw that I was naïve at the time. And maybe I was.But I kind of still think that this – it’s a lot more likely that one puts in ten years preparing for a job in academia and is able to pay their bills than it is for them to put in ten years preparing to be a musician and pay their bills. So that’s how it influences my teaching. My background as a musician makes me very happy to have a job.What projects would you like to work on in the future? In what directions do you imagine taking your work?I’m still really in the thick of this amateur music project. My next book is going to be about cultural politics of abortion , using my long-term work in abortion provision and connection to abortion providers to talk about the musical and film and literary representations of abortion as a way of trying to step beyond this highly politicized and bifurcated language about abortion in the public sphere today. I’m very excited about that as well. I’ve already done some work on that and presented it at a number of conferences.So that’s the next thing. Down the line I’m not sure. I’m working with an organization called the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, which is a longstanding popular music organization, and we’re working on putting together a really great blog, which is taking up a lot of my time. Beyond that third book, I’m not quite sure where I’m going. It’s kind of wide open at this point. Hopefully it’s going to be good.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say? (bonus question!)At its best, American Studies is an escape hatch in order to get out of and beyond disciplines who are blinded by their own barriers they’ve constructed around themselves; American Studies typically has been a place where people can go to ask questions that other disciplines are unwilling to answer, or unwilling to ask.Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller has been at UT since 2001. His book is Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Duke University Press, 2010).
Watch This: Time Lapse of Migrant Mother (in pumpkin form!)
As any graduate student will tell you, free time to enjoy any kind of leisure activity is at a premium. Amidst catching up with work or preparing for upcoming work, though, it's important to find a moment to decompress and do an activity that exercises a totally different part of one's brain.But sometimes those activities manifest as completely odd diversions that still have some relevance to our work in American Studies. Here, we present a video (and sort of an art project) by Carrie Andersen, whose love for working with her hands has manifested in a strange, infrequent hobby: carving intensely detailed pumpkins. Take a look at this time lapse video to see an icon of American photography and life take form in a somewhat unexpected way...
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlPngLi-xRg?rel=0]
Read This: The Carbon Diaries
“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum. – 2006″ – Kurt Vonnegut, from his Confetti project
Last month, Sara Reardon’s research, “Climate Change Sparks Battles in the Classroom,” based on interviews with 800 members of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, reported that “climate change was second only to evolution in triggering protests from parents and school administrators.” I read this finding while I was immersed in Saci Lloyd’s three YA books about climate change and energy troubles, The Carbon Diaries 2015, The Carbon Diaries 2017, and Momentum. As I’ve mentioned on my blog before, I’m in the very preliminary stages of research for a new project on the ways that American environmentalists have used “future generations” as an argument for acting to forestall environmental disaster; I’m also very interested in the ways that we tell these “future generations” about the problems we’ve caused, and whether, and when, these narratives amount to apologies. To me, Lloyd’s books feel like something sui generis: YA science fiction that addresses these issues of intergenerational environmental justice head-on.Continue reading here.