printable versionHumanities Center book party toasts -- and roasts -- Stanford authors
BY BARBARA PALMER
Sharon Long, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, spoke stirringly about the achievements of the authors and musicians feted at the 12th annual Stanford Humanities Center Book Celebration in Levinthal Hall on Feb. 23. "I'm in awe of the courage of writing," she said, looking out over tables holding 82 books and eight CDs published in 2004.
But since the event's trademark is a witty roast, the dean had brought along a few zingers of her own, the fruit of browsing online at Amazon.com. Did the audience know, for instance, that a site search for English Professor Rob Polhemus' Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women's Quest for Authority, which explores the power dynamic between younger women and older men, would bring up an offer to add the book to a wedding gift registry? Or an advertisement for a home defibrillator?
Long then turned the festivities over to Humanities Center Director John Bender and Associate Director Elizabeth Wahl, who honored faculty and staff authors with their tongues, for the most part, planted in their cheeks. A genuine spirit of fun suffuses the ceremony, Bender said; besides, "we never give more than 30 lashes with an ostrich feather."
Bender and Wahl first offered a statistical analysis of the works: Weighing in just under 90 pounds, they had a total length of 23,686 pages and 4 hours and 26 minutes of musical recording. And after being too close to call in recent years, this year's event had a clear heavyweight champion: the 3-pound, 11.7-ounce Harvard History of German Literature, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature. The featherweight champ was the elegantly slim Excursions to Empire: Finding Bloomsbury in Ceylon (2.9 ounces), by Peter Stansky, the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus.
Bender also reported on what he called the "saga of the great war between the departments of English and History." At the last two celebrations, the rate of book production in the English Department had been higher, but in 2004 the History Department edged ahead—by one title. (Special recognition was given to new faculty member Londa Schiebinger, professor of history, whose three books helped tip the balance.)
The department with the highest ratio of books to faculty was the Art and Art History Department: One of every four faculty produced a book. But when CDs are factored in, the Music Department achieved the highest ratio: 10 books and CDs produced by a 14-member faculty.
Several faculty and staff were cited for individual achievement, including Margaret Cohen, professor of French and Italian and of comparative literature, who was presented the Everything You Wanted to Know (About Flaubert) But Were Afraid to Ask award, for a critical edition of Madame Bovary. (Cohen provided a perfect 1:1 ratio of text to context in the book.) In the Not Our Mother Tongue award category, Dagfinn Follesdal, the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy, won an honorable mention for Referential Opacity and Modal Logic. That "counts as a foreign language for some of us," Wahl said.
For the fiction work a*hole, Hilton Obenzinger, associate director for honors writing in the office of Undergraduate Research Programs, won a double award: Shortest Title and Most Judicious Use of an Asterisk. History Professor Clayborne Carson also won two awards: the I'd Just Like to Thank award for writing eight pages of acknowledgments for Threshold of a New Decade, Vol. V of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the Most Documented Book award. The volume not only has the longest index, it includes a 56-page calendar of documents, a 24-page chronology and six pages of abbreviations.
The book party's finale was a quiz, dubbed "Not My Field," in which a volunteer was asked to field questions "about a subject in which we hope our contestant has no expertise whatsoever," said Wahl.
Josh Landy, an associate professor of French and Italian, gamely took on the content of a Stanford-based chapter in Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley, by Margaret Pugh O'Mara, acting assistant professor of history.
Landy missed one question that, judging from the surprised murmuring in the audience, apparently stumped many at the gathering:
In 1953, what proposal did downtown (Palo Alto) merchants make to counter the success of the Stanford Shopping Center? Was it: a) build an overpass across El Camino Real to allow Stanford students easier access to University Avenue; b) raze the existing downtown and put the Stanford Shopping Center there instead; or c) change the zoning for the Stanford Shopping Center to restrict further expansion to housing only and the development of a new research park.
The correct answer: b.
