University of California Press Blog

In Memoriam: Bryan Reardon

It is with tremendous sadness that we announce the passing of UC Press author, Professor Emeritus of Classics at University of California, Irvine, and revered scholar, Bryan P. Reardon.

Professor Reardon was first brought to UC Press by our esteemed Director Emeritus, August Fruge, who championed Reardon's work on establishing the novel as an ancient Greek literary form. Reardon translated scores of Greek novels that has been forgotten since the Renaissance, and introduced these tales of romance and adventure to modern readers. His work shaped both perceptions of antiquity and contemporary pop cultural studies.

ICAN, the International Conference of the Ancient Novel, started in part by Reardon, continues to meet every few years. The UC Press staff was honored to work with Professor Reardon on an updated edition of his magnum opus, Collected Ancient Greek Novels for the 2008 conference in Lisbon. The book included a new foreword by J.R. Morgan, an intellectual successor and colleague whom Professor Reardon had the utmost praise for.

We at UC Press will miss the Professor Reardon's delightful transcontinental phone calls, his gentility, and his commitment to impeccable scholarship. He was an inspiration.

2009 Guggenheim Fellowships Fund Creativity, Scholarship, Innovation

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 180 Guggenheim Fellowships this year. Among the recipients are several UC Press authors, honored for their outstanding achievements in Poetry, Film, Classics, Folklore/Popular Culture, and Anthropology/Cultural Studies. The winners, selected from around 3,000 applicants, will receive grants to fund ongoing projects or take their work in new directions.

By funding innovation, creativity, and scholarship, Guggenheim Fellowships contribute to the world's cultural and educational wealth. Fellowships are awarded to exceptionally accomplished and promising individuals working in any area of the arts, sciences, or academics—from fiction and film to chemistry and statistics. Grant amounts are tailored to the Fellow, and as there are no spending restrictions, Fellows may use the grants to further their work any way they choose. Congratulations to all the 2009 Guggenheim Fellows!

The 2009 Guggenheim Fellows and UC Press Authors are:

Poetry

Lyn Hejinian, author of The Language of Inquiry (2000)

Classics

Denis Feeney, author of Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (2007)

Folklore and Popular Culture

Joshua Gamson, author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (1994)

 

Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Veena Das, author of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2006); and coeditor, with Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, of Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (2001); Violence and Subjectivity (2000); and Social Suffering (1997)

Kathryn Linn Geurts, author of Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (2003)

Film

Lynn Hershman Leeson, subject of The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I (2005), edited by Meredith Tromble

 

 

The Seer in Ancient Greece

Michael Flower is Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and editor, in collaboration with John Marincola, of Herodotus, Histories, Book IX, author of Theopompus of Chios: History and Rhetoric in the Fourth Century B.C., and editor, with Mark Toher, of Georgica: Greek Studies in Honour of George Cawkwell. Flower is also the author of The Seer in Ancient Greece, which was published by UC Press in March 2009. In his blog entry below, Flower correalates modern day psychics to ancient Greek seers.

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By: Michael Flower

As the economy shrinks and jobs disappear, one sector of the workforce is experiencing an unprecedented increase in business.  As an article in the New York Times informs us, “Psychics say their business is robust, as do astrologers and people who channel spirits, read palms and otherwise predict the future (albeit not the winning lottery numbers). Their clients, who include a growing number of men, are often professional advice-givers themselves, in fields like real estate and investments, and they typically hand over anywhere from $75 to $1,000 an hour for this form of insight.”   The author then anticipates the likely reaction of most readers by asking the obvious question: "Quackery? Whatever. But after all, the nation’s supposed experts on the economy, from pundits on the networks to billionaire investment bankers, have not been exactly reliable." (From “Love, Jobs & 401(k)s” by Ruth La Ferla, Published November 21, 2008)

I should admit right now that I have never been tempted to take my concerns to a psychic, even though one has set up shop right across the street from my office.   But when I listen to psychics explain what they do and how they interact with their clients, I am struck by the similarities between their role and that of seers in ancient Greece.  The Greek seer (called a mantis) saw himself (or herself) as helping their clients make difficult decisions.  Like many contemporary psychics they could charge enormous fees, while at the same time providing a social service that was greatly in demand.  It may come as a surprise to most readers that even the famous pillars of Greek rationality, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, accepted the value of divination as a system of knowledge. Individual seers were sometimes accused of "quackery", but no one argued that divination itself was bunk.

When I was working on this book an astrophysicist whom I knew casually inquired about my research and asked me a typical question.  When the seers discovered that they could not make accurate predictions on the basis of looking at the entrails of sheep, why did they not just give up the practice?  Well, I responded, it was because the system worked for them.  Divination worked for the Greek seers because they saw in the livers of dead sheep and in the flight of birds what they needed to know in order to advise their clients.  Within their own system of belief, Greek methods of divination were successful over a period of many centuries.  Now I realize that this response of mine needs a great deal of explanation and qualification, for I certainly do not mean to imply that absolutely anything, even something that defies the laws of nature, is possible if people merely believe that it is.  What I try to show in my book is how divination, although seemingly irrational in terms of modern western science, was a pervasive, socially acceptable, and socially useful method of solving problems and making decisions for the ancient Greeks.

Ancient Scepticism

Harald Thorsrud is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Agnes Scott College and the author of Cicero's Ethics. He is also the author of Ancient Scepticism, which was published by UC Press in January 2009. Below, Thorsrud talks about scepticism and personal convictions.

By: Harald Thorsrud

We disagree about most things-politics, religion, morality, sports.  But what should you do when you disagree with someone who seems just as intelligent and has access to the same information?  Philosophers are paying a lot of attention to the problem of disagreement these days.  That's good since it challenges the rationality of holding any belief that reasonable people might disagree about.  

The notion that political, religious, and moral convictions are irrational, or at least unjustified, strikes many as threatening.  Although it seems better to define oneself in terms of convictions than in terms of possessions, these might be equally arbitrary.  Perhaps it is no more reasonable for me to be a Libertarian, Jewish, Steelers fan than to be a Socialist, Catholic, Cardinals fan.  If so, it would be no more reasonable to understand myself in terms of the car I drive.  There are equally good reasons for driving a Toyota as for driving a Honda; and (perhaps) there are equally good reasons for being a Libertarian as for being a Socialist.

To make matters worse, lots of people find comfort in their convictions.  In troubling times, people suppose not merely that their convictions are true, but that they know them to be true. 

Maybe there is a way to disarm the problem of disagreement-(but if so, the solution will probably be subject to further disagreement).  In any case, there are lots of other sceptical challenges lurking.  In general, the sceptic is bent on undermining conviction.  But why?     

Socrates thought he needed to undermine his fellow Athenians' conviction that they knew what they didn't.  As long as I'm convinced that I know the Earth is in the center of the Solar System, I won't be able to learn the truth.  It may be uncomfortable to acknowledge my ignorance, but I'm supposed to be better off knowing how much I don't know. 

The Pyrrhonist sceptic Sextus Empiricus, also thought of himself as a philanthropist.  His sceptical medicine consists of balancing the rational force of arguments on both sides of an issue to remove the inclination to believe.  For Sextus, the problem of disagreement is not so much a problem as an opportunity.  Once we've managed to shuffle off our convictions we are supposed to find the tranquility we'd been seeking. 

I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether and how to reckon with the challenges and promises of ancient scepticism.  But I hope this book provides an engaging tour through the issues.

Interview with Roger Martin, author of Racing Odysseus

In the September 17 issue of Shelf Awareness: Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade, the editors had a chance to interview Roger Martin, author of Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again. In the interview below, Martin talks about his love for books on classics and higher education.

On your nightstand now:

Colin Thubron's In Siberia. It's 90 degrees outside; plus I love reading travel books.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I didn't read much as a child and paid for it later on. But one of my earliest memories is reading Alan Moorehead's Gallipoli, which opened my eyes to history and to the world.

Your top five authors:

Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Plutarch and Aeschylus. Having had very little interest as a student in Greek literature and philosophy, I got to read these authors in my early 60s and only then realized how much I had missed.

Book you've faked reading:

Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics (all 14 volumes), which I was required to read in Divinity School. To impress my professors and fellow students, I went to public places like the university library and pretended to be reading it. But I was actually sound asleep.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Derek Bok's Our Underachieving Colleges. Bok's thinking about higher education in America is quite profound.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. All 14 volumes sit prominently on my bookshelf at home, and friends and colleagues who visit think that I am very smart.

Book that changed your life:

The Bible. It's not only great literature, but continually inspires me to be a better person.

Favorite line from a book:

A great line in Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins, Harry Ashmore's wonderful biography of the fabled president of the University of Chicago, says it all for college presidents like myself: "A university president has at least five constituencies: the faculty, the trustees, the students, the alumni, and the public. He could profitably spend all his time with any one of the five. What he actually does, of course, is to spend just enough with each of the five to irritate the other four."

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

I don't mean to overplay the Great Books theme, but the book I would read again for the first time is Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. Written almost 2,500 years ago, it is about (among other things) the downfall of Athens when it tried unsuccessfully to impose its political and social values on the rest of the known world. This book is a "must read" for whoever gets elected the next President of the United States!

UC Press Podcast Featuring, Joel Best and Roger Martin

Statistics and a 61 year-old college Freshman are the topics of this month's edition of the UC Press podcast series, which is now available.  In August's episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews Joel Best, the author of Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data and Roger Martin, author of Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again. You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at www.ucpress.edu/podcast or on the individual book pages using the embedded player.

Listen to an interview with Joel Best, author of Stat-Spotting.

Listen to an interview with Roger Martin, author of Racing Odysseus.

Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again

In 2004, Roger Martin, former Harvard dean and then President of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, enrolled as a college freshman at St. John’s College in Annapolis Maryland. When this undertaking captured the headlines of the national media, Dr. Martin appeared on NBC’s Today Show and was interviewed by NPR’s Scott Simon. His book, Racing Odysseus: A College President becomes a Freshman Again (UC Press, July 2008) now tells the whole story in a way that will be enjoyed by young and old alike. Today Dr. Martin serves as President of the British Schools and Universities Foundation in New York City. His book Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian England is still an authoritative work on the early ecumenical movement.

GIVEN THEIR DRUTHERS: What Baby Boomers Really Want To Do

By Roger Martin

I kid you not.

Given their druthers, most Baby Boomers would quit their jobs in an instant, go back to college and move right into their children’s residence hall!

Take, for example, the 45 year old mother we know who, last Fall, delivered her first child to college.

Like many Boomer parents and their Millennial Generation children, Mom and daughter were very close. So during orientation week, they attended all the sessions together, hearing about the college’s academic and social programs and being told “not to drink until you’re twenty-one”. Mom even stayed in her daughter’s room (to the great consternation of her daughter’s roommate, I might add). When orientation was over, Mom couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye, and so she lingered on...and on. The Dean of Students finally had to tell Mom it was time to go home.

One moonlit night, after classes were well under way, campus safety discovered Mom hiding in the bushes below her daughter’s window. When asked what she was doing there, Mom replied somewhat mournfully “I wish I could be in there with her. I just wish I could go back to college.”

This is perhaps an extreme example of the Boomer urge to relive their college years, if possible with their children. But the truth is that for many Boomers, college was the high point of their lives. They remember with great fondness the Daisy Chain at Vassar, tailgating at the University of Virginia, singing the Notre Dame Fight Song. They would love to do it all over again.

Not only that, but if they could, they would also go out for an intercollegiate sport and relive their glory days on the playing field.

Boomers as a group are not couch potatoes. They are the most physically active, the most in-your-face, the most involved generation ever. Their secret wish is to kick that winning field goal “just one last time!”

My bet is that as his presidency winds down, America’s Baby Boomer-in-Chief, George Bush, is in the Oval Office secretly fanaticizing about butting heads on the Rugby field with his former Yale teammates (me included) rather than butting heads with more formidable adversaries like a recalcitrant Congress or a bear economy. You’ve got to believe that he too wishes he could go back to college.

Well, guess what? I actually lived out these fantasies. I spent six months doing what most Boomers can only dream about doing.

After eighteen years as a college president, I wanted to better understand the current generation of college students. So, taking advantage of a scheduled sabbatical, I decided to become a college freshman myself.  I enrolled at St. John’s College, the Great Books school in Annapolis, Maryland, took the freshman course of study reading ancient Greek philosophy and literature, and, at age 61, even went out for crew racing in an intercollegiate regatta in Northern Virginia with eight high testosterone teenagers. And I lived to tell the tale in my book Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again.

I helped kick that proverbial field goal!

This is a great book for Boomers and XGens who want vicariously to relive their college years.  It’s a book for parents sending their kids off to college who want to get the inside story on what’s really happening on campus. And it’s a book for wannabe athletes like myself, tired of being couch potatoes.

It’s a book for the young at heart.

Slave Revolts in Antiquity

Theresa Urbainczyk is Senior Lecturer in Classics at University College Dublin and author of Spartacus, among other books. In her latest release, Slave Revolts in Antiquity (UC Press, May 2008), Theresa talks about slave resistance and the meaning of freedom in Ancient Rome and Greece. Furthermore, Theresa talks about the inspiration for her book in the blog below.

By Theresa Urbainczyk

I read somewhere that Stalin put forward the thesis that the revolt of Spartacus had brought down the Roman Empire. Whoever was commenting on this, remarked that 500 years was rather a long time-span for the effect to result from the cause.

I was reminded of this when reading in a recent book (Spartacus: Film and History edited by Martin M. Winkler, Blackwell 2007) that in 1960 the Universal film studios wanted an academic to write an article advertising Kubrick’s forthcoming movie, Spartacus, and in the specifications instructed, ‘If you feel that Spartacus’ revolt contributed to the downfall of the great Roman Empire, please emphasise this’. 

The response this generally evokes is similar to that some of us have to rather comical mistakes in students’ exam scripts but I was struck by two people making the same comment, especially since it was unlikely that the film executive was familiar with Stalin’s arguments.

Part of me hesitates to admit that another movie Gladiator was one of the reasons I started to study slave revolts. In fact I probably was too much of a snob to go and see Ridley Scott’s film at all if I hadn’t been living in New York and feeling lonely. Any invitation was (almost) better than none when you know hardly anyone in a new city so I went with a couple of classicists. The young American woman beside me murmured at the end ‘Oh that was wonderful.’ The older English man on the other side snarled ‘Spartacus was much better’. I hadn’t ever seen that film and when I did I assumed most of it was pure invention. Which was how I came to look at the ancient sources on slave revolts.

To me they were intrinsically interesting and worth writing about and I was mystified as to why my colleagues weren’t as fascinated as I was. And they most certainly weren’t.  After I gave what probably was an overenthusiastic talk on the unexpected (to me at any rate) amount of information there was on slave revolts in antiquity in our ancient texts, one professor chipped in ‘Yes but so what? What effect did the large slave wars have on the course of events of Roman Republic? None at all as far as I can see.’

Thinking about just how much effect the wars did have on this particular period of history, helped explain to me how in both the USA and the USSR the same seemingly ridiculous theory could have arisen. A common confusion for students is the way historians use the term Roman Empire. At the time of the Roman Republic, the Romans had an empire but it wasn’t the Roman Empire, in that they did not have emperors.  If we substitute the term ‘Republic’ for ‘Empire’, the theory is not so far-fetched. In fact, expressed in these terms, it’s a commonplace in our historians from antiquity. It’s only in more recent times that the threat of slave revolts has been played down.

How to Spot a Demagogue

by Loren J. Samons II, author of What's Wrong with Democracy?

During this election season, the following tips may be helpful to those wishing to identify the native North American demagogue (Demagogus americanus). This prolific creature inhabits all areas of the United States, but congregates especially in the mid-Atlantic coastal region, where the combination of warm (not to mention hot) air, popular politics, and movable wealth create a fertile environment for demagoguery. Demagogues are often found along with great numbers of the semiparasitic companion species the North American lobbyist.

The North American demagogue—descended, it is believed, from the ancient Greek demagogue and closely related to the great crested European demagogue—may be identified chiefly by his song. He tends to sing in refrains of a particularly short length (known to specialists as “sound bites”) and returns frequently to certain themes. The “my opponent’s radical views” theme and the “what the American people want/deserve” theme can be heard with particular clarity in the fall of each year. Every two years, the demagogues become especially vocal, and every fourth year their calls and the accompanying rites of display reach a fever pitch, a phenomenon that demagogologists have come to call “the big song and dance.”

The migratory habits of the demagogue have proved tremendously interesting. Not unlike the Atlantic eel (which returns to the Sargasso Sea, the place of its birth), the North American demagogue leaves the mid-Atlantic coast and returns to the place of its spawning for short visits. During these times, demagogues attend well-publicized events at quaint local establishments (especially schools, churches, and American Legion halls) and feed voraciously. The preferred diet of the demagogue consists of publicity and contributions, without a steady supply of which demagogues deteriorate quickly. Captured demagogues have been known to expire after a mere twenty-four hours without mass media exposure.

Demagogues, like white-tailed deer and telemarketers, have become a nuisance species in most parts of America. Multiplying wherever elections are held, they quickly become almost impossible to eradicate. Their highly repetitive and shrill calls tend to infect the songs of other species (especially those of the North American journalist and the closely related common pundit), until it becomes difficult to pick out the cry of the demagogue from the calls of those around him. Although demagogues can breed in almost any environment, they much prefer democracy and proliferate among a relatively apathetic and narcissistic population.

No one has yet devised an effective means for ending demagogue infestation, but some believe that they can be controlled through the introduction of a competitor species, the North American leader. This species can sometimes be recognized by its very unusual song, especially by refrains of “Ask not what your country can do for you,” and “I believe the majority of Americans are wrong about this.” However, only a character test can prove conclusively that a leader (which resembles the demagogue superficially) is present.

Unfortunately, a North American leader has not been positively identified in some years, and many specialists have concluded that the species has long been extinct.

Know Before You Go

Do you remember those dark days when well-read travelers were forced to learn about their future destinations from brisk summaries in the backs of geography books and ominous-looking brochures that appeared in the mail? Be prepared to forget.

On September 24, the Travel Magazine section of the New York Times ran an article on how to spend 24 hours in the “real” Los Angeles. The piece aimed to point naive out-of-towners towards the best of old Hollywood as well as some of the newer locales favored by celebrities. It also gave a suggested reading list for those wanting to freshen up on their LA history. Among such classics as You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again and City of Quartz, UC Press’s new title Pop LA: Art and the City in the 1960s was listed at number two.

Two more recently released UC Press titles join Pop LA in seeking to educate travelers beyond ordinary guidebooks. Designed for the international art tourist, Destination Art is the first comprehensive look at more than two hundred major modern and contemporary art sites around the world. In addition to listing practical information, such as directions to the sites and admission fees, this lushly illustrated book includes essays exploring fifty key destinations in depth.

Those more history-inclined travelers who are heading to Rome might want to grab the upcoming Rome and Environs: An Archaelogical Guide, which brings the masterful native scholarship of Filippo Coarelli to an English-language audience for the first time, complete with plenty of maps.

Being an educated tourist will never be the same.