Author Archives: Laura Streett

Summer Reading Suggestions from the Faculty

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The semester is over and the summer seems to stretch out long and luminous in our collective future. Wondering what to read to make the next few months shine even brighter? A few of our favorite faculty members have suggestions:

 

WildStrayed, Cheryl. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
PS3619.T744 Z46 2012
My students in Senior Comp are reading Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild. It is a New York Times Bestseller, and was featured on Oprah’s show–it doesn’t need our endorsement. But can I say one thing about it? It’s not just the heartbreaking honesty of the writing that I like, or even the rarer quality, the grace that Strayed brings to her sentences; instead, what I want my students to understand, and perhaps even emulate, is how wide is the book’s appeal, how it has been written in a way that it speaks to a diverse readership. It was a quality that Shakespeare had in abundance, and we’ve lost it somewhere.
– Amitava Kumar, Professor of English

 

Story of Sushi

 

Corson, Trevor. The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
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If you ever thought that preparing sushi just meant cutting a piece of fish and putting it with some rice you need to read this book. It reads like a novel and follows a young woman’s journey to become a sushi chef in southern California.
– April M. Beisaw, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

 

 

 

havana feverPadura, Leonardo. Havana Fever. London: Bitter Lemon, 2009  PQ7390.P32 A6 2009
Havana Fever is impossible to put down.  It evokes the historical moment(s) quite powerfully–the reader can feel, smell, taste Batista’s Cuba, a particularly decadent era when the US-based mafia was a major power player and Cuban elites worked comfortably with the mafia to solidify (or so they thought) their own fortunes in a debauched world.  As Padura moves between Batista’s Cuba and Fidel’s of the early 2000s the reader also feels quite palpably the want of that era of scarcity–the absence of basic creature comforts, indeed of necessities, that so many Cubans experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Havana comes alive in Padura’s telling, and what emerges is the “real” Havana–or at least a Havana that feels amazingly familiar to this historian who has made it a central part of her professional life to learn as much as she can through reading and travel of the vida cotidiana of that extraordinary island.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s a “must read” for anyone interested in contemporary Cuba.
– Leslie Offutt, Associate Professor of History and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies

 

Casual VacancyRowling, J. K. The Casual Vacancy. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012. PR6068.O93 C37 2012
Rowling isn’t a sculptor of language or a profound philosopher, and some readers might be turned off by a few of the characters’ lewdness, which sometimes reads like an attempt to counterbalance in one book the absence of any real sexuality in her other seven books, but her debut novel for “adults” showcases the talent at storytelling that made her one of the most popular writers in history. Her creation of an intricate web of relationships and motivations among the vividly portrayed characters that populate the tiny English village of Pagford is masterful, and the plot, which might seem at first glance unpromising (the campaign to replace a deceased city councilman amid a local land-use controversy), unfolds with a ruthless blend of suspense and inexorability.
– Curtis Dozier, Blegen Research Fellow, Greek and Roman Studies

 

bad indiansMiranda, Deborah A. Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2013. E78.C15 M6 2013
This is a book that just came out and I just recently used in my Native American Women’s class. It had a profound effect on the students and myself. It’s a mosaic of poems, photos, personal narratives, charts, and so on, of Miranda’s coming to terms with her own history of violence and abuse and the legacy of terror that her Chumash and Esselen ancestors’ survived through the California Missions and the aftermath. A powerful book.
– Molly McGlennen, Assistant Professor of English

Pop-Up City(es)

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Carlos Ignacio Hernández, VC 2013, presented his Urban Studies thesis in the Library’s courtyard this week.  The Library was happy to provide Carlos with the space for his installation and event. Below is his description of his work.

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My project is titled Pop-Up City(es). It is located in the Art Library Courtyard at Vassar College, a normally deserted space with no real sociability or programmatic qualities. With this in mind, this project aimed to occupy the space with a temporary structure that “pops up” and activates the precinct. A wooden frame made out of birch supports a perforated pegboard roof. Through the orifices of the board, synthetic string pieces make their way from top to bottom, conforming proportionally almost all of the structure’s negative space. On the sides of the structure, timelapse projections of four cities relevant to me and my life are shown. Caracas where I was born, Hong Kong where I went to high school, Copenhagen where I studied the sleek angles of Scandinavian architecture, and New York City, a metropolis in which I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and as a result of the lack of timelapse videos of Poughkeepsie that were available online.

Georg Simmel wrote on the urban experience and stated that the IMG_0966 smaller“psychological foundation upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” (Simmel, Metropolis and Mental Life). I wanted to work with simulation of the idea of the city blasé attitude that fills our sidewalks and the replication of an urban journey that was overwhelming and over stimulating in visual terms.

The class session on Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building was equally pivotal in the creative stages of this process. For the architects, when architecture is dematerialized and equated to the dubious, Blur becomes an experiment in the construction of de-emphasis and media becomes physically tangible. Pop-Up City(es) aims to contest the space-building process through barriers or walls.IMG_0970 smaller Instead, the switch in physicality between the “barrier” and the inside emphasizes the negative space inside the suprasensorial structure. Like the Blur Building, my installation is “a habitable medium” and is meant to generate a sense of curiosity in the spectator and invite her/him to explore and interact with the project in order act against the mobility of image/immobility of spectator dichotomy that Friedberg introduces in her book The Virtual Window.

Brenner and Schmid’s Planetary Urbanisation manifesto brought ideas about international urban connections and transnationalism:

The creation of new scales of urbanization. Extensively urbanized interdependencies are being consolidated within extremely large, rapidly expanding, polynucleated metropolitan regions around the world to create sprawling “urban galaxies” that stretch beyond any single metropolitan region and often traverse multiple national boundaries.

Pop-Up City(es) is a city made out of cities. Through the timelapse projections of cityscapes around the world, this project aimed to comment on the global urban hierarchy and interdependence of cities around the planet, that grow as extensions of each other as a result of agglomerated urbanization. You can enter the structure on the Hong Kong side and exit through Caracas, or vice versa.

In Beatriz Colomina’s piece titled Enclosed by Images, the following introductory statement is made:

We are surrounded today, everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images. The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate. As if we-all of us living in this new kind of space, the space of information–could be diagnosed en masse with Attention Deficit Disorder. The state of distraction in the metropolis, described so eloquently by Walter Benjamin early in the twentieth century, seems to have been replaced by a new form of distraction, which is to say a new form of attention. Rather than wandering cinematically through the city, we now look in one direction and see many juxtaposed moving images, more than we can possibly synthesize or reduce to a single impression.

The combination of elements of this piece (a frame filled with strings, projected images and interaction with the spectator) make it a combination of the ideas mentioned above, which Colomina carefully articulates so well.

Audubon at Vassar

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Posted on behalf of Ron Patkus, Director of Archives and Special Collections

roseate spoonbill

One of the most talked-about exhibitions in New York this spring has been the New York Historical Society’s Audubon’s Aviary: Part I of The Complete Flock.  The show is the first of a three-part series which presents the preparatory watercolors John James Audubon produced for his masterpiece The Birds of America (1827-1838).  Altogether there are 433 of these watercolors, which represent a high point in American natural history and art.

Audubon collaborated first with the Scottish engraver William Lizars and then with the English engraver Robert Havell to create and sell by subscription the large hand-colored prints for The Birds of America.  Subscribers received five prints at a time over a period of years.  We do not know exactly how many sets were created, but today a little more than 100 survive in their entirety, mostly on the campuses of colleges and universities in the United States, including Vassar.   They are referred to as “double-elephant folios,” because of their great size.

Louisiana and Scarlet TanagersThe original owner of Vassar’s set was probably John William Clough of York, England (1773-1843).  We know that either he or his son (who was also named “John”), was an early subscriber to Audubon’s work.  On the back of some of the plates in the Vassar set appears the name “J. Clough,” which may have been written by the bookbinder as a note to himself about the owner.  It has been surmised that the Clough family sold its copy during the financial crisis of 1879; a note in pencil in the first volume indicates that with another of Audubon’s works, the set sold for $1,800.  In any case, Vassar received the set in 1897 as a gift from New Yorker Charles Senff, a well-known figure in the American sugar trade.  Senff was a major contributor to the fund which established the Audubon memorial in Trinity Cemetery, Washington Heights.

Additional evidence of the early state of Vassar’s set is provided by the first plate, which features the heading “Great American Cock” (later printings used only “Wild Turkey”).  Further, the paper of the first plates features an early watermark of the Whatman mill.  The plates are bound into four volumes; the first three each have 100 plates, and the fourth one has 135.  The binding is half morocco, with gilt decoration, and marbled endpapers.

The greatest scholar of the Audubon prints has been Waldemar H. Fries, who wrote an important reference work titled The Double-Elephant Folio: the Story of Audubon’s Birds of America.    Interestingly, Fries’ wife, Elizabeth, was a member of Vassar’s Class of 1921; she funded the purchase of the first display cases for Vassar’s Audubon folios.  The cases were presented in the fall of 1974, and on the occasion of the dedication, Mr. Fries gave a talk about the folios in the library.

Scarlet Ibis

Conservation work on Vassar’s set was performed in New York City in 1977 by Carolyn Horton and Associates.  A full listing of the repairs is tipped into the back of volume one.  The conservation work included treating the leather, putting down scuffs, cleaning all of the plates, and mending those that needed it.

In addition to The Birds of America, the Archives & Special Collections Library is fortunate to possess several other works relating to Audubon.  For instance, we have his 5-volume Ornithological Biography, also donated by Charles Senff, which was a text accompaniment to the original prints.  Moreover, we have a first edition of the octavo version of Birds of America, published in 1839.  The library also owns a first edition of another important, though more-neglected, work of Audubon, called The Quadrupeds of North America.   Other books for further reading are available in Archives & Special Collections, the Main Library, and the Art Library.