Gibbs Smith and University Press Books

Invite you to an author event with

Shelley Rideout and Ed Herny, co-authors

with Katie Wadell of

Berkeley Bohemia: Artists and Visionaries of the Early 20th Century

Wednesday, May 7, 2008, 5:30-7:00

The concept of bohemia, or a place of unconventional lifestyles, flooded the city of Berkeley at the turn of the century. It was a city of scholars, a crossroads of cultures and a magnet for visionaries. This unique combination of ingredients provided fertile ground for individuality, eccentricity and creative expression. Bohemians from Berkeley, with their Grecian architecture and flowing robes, imagined themselves in the Athens of the West. Because freethinking was welcome, Berkeley was a nurturing environment for the likes of Florence Boynton, who introduced natural living; John Muir, who led the ecology movement; and Charles Keeler, who founded the Cosmic Religion. In Berkeley Bohemia, Herny, Rideout and Wadell provide glimpses into the lives of the artists, writers and philosophers who had a profound influence on what the city has become today. The artistic creations of novelist Jack London, photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, architect Bernard Maybeck and writer and artist team Charles and Louise Keeler, to name a few, continue to inspire. Their words are imprinted in the sidewalks of Addison Street, their homes, such as the Hights, are open for tours; and the schools they founded continue to enlighten and educate despite the passing of time. Berkeley Bohemia is both a cultural history and a celebration of the extraordinary.

Ed Herny has served on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Historical Society since its founding in 1978. He began studying and collecting the works of Charles and Louise Keeler several years earlier. He is president of the San Francisco Bay Area Post Card Club, an ephemerist and an "active student of history."

Shelley Rideout's fascination with history stems from childhood visits to family homes, looking through old photo albums and dressing up in vintage clothing she found in the attic. While working on a BA in Theatre Arts at Sonoma State University, she participated in the founding of the Women's Studies Program and co-taught a student sponsored class on Women in History. In 1993, she was awarded an MA in Museum Studies from San Francisco State University, where her focus was the curatorship of historic costume and textiles. She is an active member of the Costume Society of America and has served as the Western Region president. Upon moving to Berkeley in 2000, she joined the Berkeley Historical Society and has been a board member and a volunteer in the archives.

 

Cambridge University Press and

University Press Books

Invite you to an author event with

Albert Ascoli, author of

Dante and the Making of a Modern Author

Thursday, May 8, 2008, 5:30-7:00

Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri - minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, daring experimental poet - into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously ‘authoritative’ cultural figure in the Western canon. This is the first comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova, through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important new point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

Albert Russell Ascoli, Ph.D. is Professor at U.C. Berkeley. His principal field of study is Medieval and Early Modern Italian culture from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Teaching and research interests include the relations between literary form and history; intertwined configurations of authorship and readership; the construction of Italian national identity from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento; literary politics of gender; Dante, Machiavelli, Ariosto. His point of departure is always the close, historically and culturally informed, reading of texts, literary and other; these readings, however, frequently give rise to methodological and/or theoretical interrogation of critical practice. Most significant recent published works include Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (edited, with Krystyna Von Henneberg, Berg Press, 2001), and a series of publications on Dante's evolving conceptions of authorship and authority.

 

Rutgers University Press and

University Press Books

Invite you to an author event with

Elizabeth Betita Martinez, author of

500 Years of Chicana Women's History

Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 5:30-7:00

Cancelled, to be rescheduled!

The history of Mexican Americans spans more than five centuries and varies from region to region across the United States. Yet most of our history books devote at most a chapter to Chicano history, with even less attention to the story of Chicanas. 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History offers a powerful antidote to this omission with a vivid, pictorial account of struggle and survival, resilience and achievement, discrimination and identity. The bilingual text, along with hundreds of photos and other images, ranges from female-centered stories of pre-Columbian Mexico to profiles of contemporary social justice activists, labor leaders, youth organizers, artists, and environmentalists, among others.  With a distinguished, seventeen-member advisory board, the book presents a remarkable combination of scholarship and youthful appeal. In the section on jobs held by Mexicanas under U.S. rule in the 1800s, for example, readers learn about flamboyant Doña Tules, who owned a popular gambling saloon in Santa Fe, and Eulalia Arrilla de Pérez, a respected curandera (healer) in the San Diego area. Also covered are the “repatriation” campaigns” of the Midwest during the Depression that deported both adults and children, 75 percent of whom were U.S.–born and knew nothing of Mexico. Other stories include those of the garment, laundry, and cannery worker strikes, told from the perspective of Chicanas on the ground.

Elizabeth 'Betita' Martinez has been described by her colleague Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz as "a national and international treasure. Her life and work provide a model of internationalism and solidarity, as well as local organizing. 'Think globally, act locally' was her practice long before the slogan was created. From work for decolonization at the United Nations, to the Civil Rights Movement, to pioneering the women's liberation movement, to local organizing in New Mexico and California, to top-rate journalism and political theory, Betita continues to blaze trails and create priceless legacies, mentoring countless social activists." She lives in the Mission District of San Francisco, where she is involved in many different projects and campaigns. Her main project is the Institute for MultiRacial Justice, which she co-founded in 1997. She serves as the co-chair of the Institute and edits the Institutes publication, Shades of Power.

 

University of Chicago Press and

University Press Books

Inivte you to an author event with

Leo Bersani, co-author with Adam Phillips, of

Intimacies

Thursday, May 22, 2008, 5:30-7:00

Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here present a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination—though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential. In pursuit of new forms of intimacy they take up a range of concerns across a variety of contexts. To test the hypothesis that the essence of the analytic exchange is intimate talk without sex, they compare Patrice Leconte’s film about an accountant mistaken for a psychoanalyst, Intimate Strangers, with Henry James’s classic novella The Beast in the Jungle. A discussion of the radical practice of barebacking—unprotected anal sex between gay men—delineates an intimacy that rejects the personal. Even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Bush administration’s war on terror enter the scene as the conversation turns to the way aggression thrills and gratifies the ego. Finally, in a reading of Socrates’ theory of love from Plato’s Phaedrus, Bersani and Phillips call for a new form of intimacy which they term “impersonal narcissism”: a divestiture of the ego and a recognition of one’s non-psychological potential self in others. This revolutionary way of relating to the world, they contend, could lead to a new human freedom by mitigating the horrifying violence we blithely accept as part of human nature. Charmingly persuasive and daringly provocative, Intimacies is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.

“In this fascinating and disturbing book, two writers with prose styles and intellectual styles that are at once famously identifiable and intimately personal celebrate the possibility of relationships that defy identity and undo personality. Braiding together brilliant psychoanalytic reflections on fiction and film, on the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the invasion of Iraq, on suicidally unsafe sex and Socrates’ theory of love, Bersani and Phillips at once dream of shattering the ego and, in their own distinct voices, display its miraculous, tragicomic persistence.” Stephen Greenblatt

“This tremendous accomplishment showcases the talents of two agile, wonderfully erudite minds. As they weigh our desire for intimacy and explain why it so often fails, Bersani and Phillips grapple with issues as weighty as aggression and state-sanctioned violence. Every facet of the subject is handled with impressive care and intelligence. Intimacies is often lyrical, even occasionally elegiac, but for a book about impersonal narcissism I found it surprisingly poignant, personal, and affecting.” Christopher Lane,

“Intimacies is a very incisive and gentle exchange between two writers who have thought and rethought psychoanalysis in powerful terms for contemporary culture. The dialogue enacts the kind of relationality it seeks to know, moving beyond the traditional narcissism of authorship, probing the important difference between being a psychological subject and finding a way to be present to another person. Psychoanalysis is moved beyond the theory of the ego and developmental norms, returned to primary questions of how and why pleasure is often at odds with self-preservation, and how such enduring tensions are presented in visual media, sexual practice, dialogue, and clinical exchange. Practiced here is an intimacy that explores the regions of impersonal co-existence where losing the self expands the capacity to love. This a beautifully crafted book, one that underscores how the social life of the psyche is a matter of risk, wager, suspense, excitation, bodies, talk, and all manner of thing both dangerous and sustaining.”Judith Butler

Leo Bersani is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California Berkeley. He has worked extensively on 19th- and 20th-century, the relationship of psychoanalysis and literature, literature and the visual arts, and cultural criticism.