This presentation from Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, titled Advanced Social Media for Book Critics and Others in the Book Biz, was delivered at the annual NBCC membership meeting on March 11, 2010 at The New School in New York, NY.

Prof. Sreenivasan is Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia Journalism School & contributing editor for DNAinfo.com.  More information about his workshops can be found at sreetips.com.

The Business of Book Reviewing: Changes and Challenges, a panel of NBCC members, coming up at Virginia Festival of the Book:

Fri. March 19th, 2010 - 4:00 PM

With Ron Charles (Washington Post), David Montgomery (Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Beast), and freelancers Rebecca Skloot and Katharine Weber. Hosted by Bella Stander, Book Promotion 101.

Moderated by: Bethanne Kelly Patrick
Location:
City Council Chambers
605 E. Main Street
Charlottesville, Va.

National Book Critics Circle Announces Its Winners for the Publishing Year 2009

On Thursday, March11, 2010, at the New School’s Tishman auditorium in New York, the National Book Critics Circle announced its award winners for the publishing year 2009. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Holt), a Booker Prize winner last year, won the fiction award. The board saw it as an extraordinary accomplishment, original in voice and ambitious in style, that brings us into intimate contact with a compelling Cromwell.

The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout’s Versed (Wesleyan University Press) for its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading.

The nonfiction award went to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon), a book that links science and literature, re-creating a period that we associate with poetry—thus making new links and moving our thoughts in a whole new direction.

The criticism award was given to Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf), a quintessential essay collection that reveals emotional truths about our country. In biography, Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (Knopf) won the biography award for a powerful example of reportage, a close reading of the life and the circumstances that delivers a superlative understanding of who the writer was. Finally, in autobiography, the board honored Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End (Norton) as a funny, exact, philosophical reflection, told from the end of the author’s life yet never presuming that age grants special wisdom—only some affecting and unexpected stories.  

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member James Marcus discusses poetry finalist Rae Armantrout's Versed (Wesleyan University Press)

For much of her lengthy career, Rae Armantrout has cocked a skeptical eye at the American language—as if it needed a background check and a good body frisk. It wasn’t the music of words that aroused her suspicions. It was their capacity to sneak in bad faith and political flab under the radar. And yet Armantrout’s poems, with their tendency, as she has said, to “focus on the interventions of capitalism into consciousness,” have nothing of the ideological hall monitor about them. They are instead playful, poignant, and metaphysically alert—never more so than in Versed, her tenth collection.

Here as elsewhere, she has a fondness for the snub-nosed, snapped-off line bequeathed to American poetry by William Carlos Williams. Her attitude to the sort of humble objects that prompted Williams’s famous credo (“No ideas but in things”) is a little more complicated. She begins “Name Calling” with a tongue-in-cheek denunciation: “Objects are silly. / Lonesome / as the word ‘Ow!’ / is.” And yet in the next stanza, she seems more than willing to pay them mind:

Could we grant them

a quorum—

 

dense,

 

with the shiny

glossolalia

of the leaves,

 

the resilience

of open-ended

questions?

She is similarly ambivalent about the very idea of metaphor. On one hand, it strikes her as an endless series of bogus equivalencies. In “Equals,” such representations seem downright sinister: “One lizard / jammed headfirst / down the throat / of a second.” In “Integer,” Armantrout is even more straightforward: “Metaphor / is ritual sacrifice. / It kills the look-alike.” Yet her own poems are constructed out of marvelous (if strictly rationed) bits of figurative language, and she knows we are more or less stuck with the “mesh / of near / approximations.” In “Scumble,” a witty riff on the arbitrary relationship of words to the things they represent, she asks:

What if there were a hidden pleasure

in calling one thing

by another’s name?

Oh, but there is. Doubters need only immerse themselves in Versed, whose vigilant, often beautiful poems seem to reset the reader’s mental instrumentation—what Armantrout calls the “whirligig / of attention, / the figuring and / reconfiguring / of charges / among orbits / (obits) / that has taken forever.”

Click here to see Rae Armantrout read from Versed.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Art Winslow discusses nonfiction finalist Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)

By 1921, Henry Ford’s company had a lock on more than half the U.S. automobile market, turning out 2 million Model Ts a year, with a cost of production 60% lower than it had a decade beforehand. This was not the “race to the bottom” of today’s globalism, searching for the cheapest possible labor, either, for when Ford announced he would pay workers an incentive $5 dollars a day, it was twice the industry standard of the time. It was not the production line per se but the close and careful choreographing of multiple processes simultaneously that allowed for the industrial efficiency, the approach that came to be known as “Fordism,” as Greg Grandin explains in Fordlandia.

Grandin’s book is an account of a Ford project little known today, the establishment of a rubber plantation on a tributary of the Amazon in the Brazilian jungle, but along the way it also presents a lucid and nuanced analysis of the contradictions built into Ford’s brand of paternalized capitalism. Even as he catalogues its failures, Grandin notes that Ford’s impulses toward social engineering “compare well with what is available in much of the world today.”

Over the course of nearly two decades, Henry Ford pumped tens of millions of dollars into funding two American towns in Brazil, “complete with central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospitals, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, golf courses, and of course Model Ts and As rolling down their paved streets,” Grandin writes. (Ford, born on a farm in Michigan, hated cows; today one of those golf courses is grazeland for cattle.)

The major purchase of Brazilian property, on the shore of the Tapajos River, was roughly sketched out by two employees Ford sent there in 1927, who drew a line on the map encompassing 5,625 square miles. The state of Para ended up ceding Ford slightly less, but the nearly 2.5 million-acre swath was about the size of Connecticut, and the half that represented public land was given to Ford free, the government was so eager for development in its backwater regions.

Ford understood “that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumers.” In an ideal sense Ford was an admirer of Emerson, and he pictured in his methods a kind of holism that Grandin interprets as “an American pastoralism that didn’t oppose nature and industrialization, or man and the machine, but saw each fulfilling the other. “ Yet “both his car and his factory system worked against the world he hoped to bring into being,” Grandin asserts.

The eccentricities and worse of the man—Ford’s anti-Semitism, for example—are well explored by Grandin, who rounds out his chronicle of hubris and steady slippage in the Amazon (including uprisings by the workers) with accounts of Ford’s penchant for attempting to create self-sustaining village industries and planned communities, several of those in Michigan. When production of latex proved extremely problematic, Ford’s mission was then rationalized as a civilizing one. Ford hated FDR’s New Deal, but the 1930 revolution in Brazil that brought Getulio Vargas to power, propelling pro-labor, FDR-style legislation, helped him a great deal, but one of the multiple ironies in Fordlandia.

As Grandin sees it, “Born more from political frustration at home than from the need to acquire control over yet another raw material abroad, Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and Americanism.”

Click here to read an excerpt from Fordlandia.

Click here to watch Greg Grandin discuss Fordlandia (courtesy of Democracy Now!)

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Carlin Romano discusses biography finalist Stanislao G. Pugliese's Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (FSG)

After World War II, Silone became Italy's leading liberal intellectual, co-editing the prestigious journal Tempo Presente from 1956 until 1968 when he learned, to his dismay, of its covert funding from the CIA. He resigned and thereafter devoted himself wholly to writing. After his death, in 1996, another controversy broke out about Silone's loyalties when Italian historian Dario Biocca found letters suggesting that Silone may have been a minor informer for the Fascist Party during his 20s. The issue remains cloudy. The whole of Silone's life better indicates that whatever favors he may have traded with a Fascist policeman for specific purposes, and whether he was a double agent or a triple agent, he was never, ideologically, a Fascist sympathizer. A fairer assessment was the one delivered by Italy's president upon Silone's death in 1978: Pescina's cultural warrior as the "noble, rigorous, inflexible, democratic conscience of contemporary Italian culture."

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Eric Banks discusses nonfiction finalist Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin)

In The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger relates a Tamil story retold by her late colleague A.K. Ramanujan that could serve as a metaphor for her enterprise. The Brahmin wife of a sage is sentenced to death by her husband. At the moment she is to be beheaded, she embraces a Pariah, and both are decapitated. When the husband remorsefully restores them to subsequent life, their heads are transposed by mistake—and the resulting Brahmin-with-a-Pariah-head and Pariah-with-a-Brahmin-head require a unique set of sacrificial practices. “Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a felix culpa.” Drawing on that felicitous fault—the mismatched heads a proxy for mixtures of caste but also the pure-gods-go-crazy meeting of southern India and north, the boomerang between earthy folklore and venerated text --Doniger asks “not where the disparate elements originate but why they were put together and why kept together. The political implications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodge-podge or, on the other hand, culturally homogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier, to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations.”

Trickier is an understatement in The Hindus: Like any good recovering Orientalist, Doniger is profoundly moved by her subject’s polyvalent inclusiveness and radical plurality, its sometimes impossible-to-square dualities, its centuries-long knack for sticking the wrong head on the wrong body. The history she tells in The Hindus--which is very different from saying “her history of the Hindus”--involves as one might imagine vigorous explorations of the Rig Veda, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and those epics of the Indian imaginary, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But what makes The Hindus a stunning and audacious work of cultural history is her equal commitment to that little tagline of the subhead: “An Alternative History.” In focusing on the experiences and representations of women and the outcast/outcaste Dalits as well as the fluctuating symbolic, economic, and sacrificial place of various animal species (particularly horses, cows, and dogs) across epochs, Doniger’s story alternates like a Slinky in perspectives and values and meanings—and portrays a Hinduism absorbing and refracting a cluster of heterogeneous practices.

For all its historical sweep, The Hindus is a surprisingly personal text, written with vivacious pluck and playful verve. Doniger switches back and forth between a lens wide enough to pack in the panorama of several centuries of subcontinental dynastic history and conquest and one microscopically sharp enough to sort through the granular life in the hoariest myth. Whether writing on bhakti devotional practices of the South or the complicated aftermath of Raj Orientalism, Doniger never misses the bigger picture for the intimate or allows the broad view to get in the way of the key detail. Much as the dynamics of exclusion are a central—maybe the central—part of her interpretation and understanding of the religious complexes of South Asia, The Hindus is acutely sensitive to delve into much in addition to the canon of revered texts. (“To the accusation," she writes, "that I cited a part of the Hindu textual tradition that one Hindu ‘had never heard of,’ my reply is: Yes!, and it’s my intention to go on doing just that.”)

The Hindus is the passionate distillation of a career’s work by one of the most accomplished Sanskritists of the past century, a generous and ambitious and gregarious book. As she writes about placing the Ramayana in its historical context, she amply shows how “the human imagination transformed the actual circumstance of the historical period into something far more beautiful, terrible, challenging, and elevating than the circumstances themselves.” At a moment when fundamentalisms of all stripes make absolutist demands on the imagination, Wendy Doniger’s gift of The Hindus stands as a blessed alternative.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Hindus.

Click here to read an interview with Wendy Doniger on The Hindus.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.