MITPressLog

A Graceful Event

The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum, will be celebrating that grand foremother of computing, Grace Hopper, on Thursday January 28, with a talk from Kurt Beyer, author of Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age.

For more information, or to book your tickets now, go to the Commonwealth Club website.

9,000 Strong

The start of a new decade brings us a milestone here at MIT Press: the nine-thousandth book we have published.

  Book #9,000 is Grammar As Science by Richard K. Larson.  This introductory linguistics textbook offers a novel approach to the study of syntax: it presents core topics of syntax as exercises in scientific theorizing and scientific thought.  The book (and accompanying software) emerged from a joint project, funded by the National Science Foundation, between the Linguistics and Computer Science department at SUNY Stony Brook. The goal of the project, and ultimately the book, is to help students develop scientific reasoning skills by analyzing language data. 

Larson's innovative approach to teaching linguistics remind us of the many new contributions to pedagogy made by MIT Press titles throughout our history.     

Award News: Asylum Wins Ken Book Award

We're pleased to announce that Chris Payne’s Asylum has won the 2010 Ken Book Award given by the National Alliance on Mental Illness of NYC-Metro (NAMI-NYC Metro). NAMI-NYC Metro is a grassroots organization that provides support, education, and advocacy for families and individuals of all ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds who live with mental illness. NAMI-NYC Metro works collaboratively with state and national affiliates to educate the public, advocate for legislation, reduce stigma, and improve the mental health system.

The Ken Book Award honors authors whose works have shed light on the realities of mental illness. Previous awardees have included Jane Pauley, Quincy Jones, Wally Lamb, Sylvia Nasser, Rick Moody, Kay Jamison, Simon Winchester, Sherwin Nuland, and Andrew Solomon.

Performing Downtown

A recent Bookforum article ("East Village People") from John Rockwell reminds us of the performing arts explosion that Lower Manhattan witnessed from the 1960s to the 1990s. It was a wild scene, an offbeat and avant-garde refuge for poets, artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians.

Rockwell writes that the entirety of the lower-Manhattan arts scene awaits its definitive chronicler. But there is no need to wait. Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series has been chronicling performers and characters of Lower Manhattan from that era such as Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, The Wooster Group, and David Wojnarowicz (the book on the latter—David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side—being in fact less a portrait of the man than a portrait of the entire scene that coalesced around him). Semiotext(e) itself played a significant role in that downtown scene era, when founding member Sylvère Lotringer organized the now infamous 1975 “Schizo-Culture” conference that quickly burst out of its academic framework into something of a large-scale performance of theory that proved to be both the last gasp of 1970s counterculturism and the opening salvo to French Theory’s infiltration of the Manhattan art scene in the 1980s.

The latest book in the Native Agents series, Bad Reputation, focuses on Penny Arcade, perhaps one of the biggest icons of that downtown performance scene. As a performer in the legendary NYC Playhouse of the Ridiculous at age seventeen, and an escapee from Andy Warhol's Factory scene at nineteen, Penny Arcade (born Susana Ventura) emerged in the 1980s as a primal force on the downtown art scene and as an originator of what came to be called performance art.
 
On Monday, January 25th, Penny will be celebrating the publication of her book in her own style, an "atmospheric extravaganza gala of erotic dancers, and performances". The event will feature Debbie Harry among other special guests, and will be held at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street - the former location of The Village Gate, whose 1993 marquee is preserved as a landmark and still advertises “Penny Arcade: Politics, Sex, Reality.”

Don't miss this one. More information can be found at http://lepoissonrouge.com/events/view/915.

And if you can't make it: Penny will be reading at St. Mark's Bookshop Reading Series at Solas on February 4th, in the From Here to the Corner reading series (focusing on "hidden and vanishing histories of New York City") on January 19th, and more events to be announced soon.

[photo of Penny Arcade © Jasmine Hirst 2010]

Remembering David Levine

As you may have heard, David Levine, who illustrated the pages of one of our favorite magazines, The New York Review of Books, passed away last week.  In his honor, we have pulled together some of our favorite of his caricatures of MIT Press authors.  

Bill Moggridge to Cooper-Hewitt

Congratulations to Bill Moggridge, who today was named the new director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. Moggridge is a giant in high-tech design, founder of the design firm IDEO, and the author of Designing Interactions, which tells the stories of the designers who changed the basic ways in which we interact with the world.

“I really thought my main goal in life was to design stuff,” he told the New York Times. “To have a national opportunity on a much greater scale is very exciting.”

Moggidge's tenure begins in March. And sources here say to keep your eyes open for another book from him in the not-too-distant future.