Front Table 9/9/2022

On this week's Front Table, travel through oceans and centuries studying the transformation of cultures: from Europe's eastern borderlands, seeing through migrant's eyes during World War II to the beginning of interest - what once was considered usury has now become the "price of money." Find the following and more at semcoop.com

Peace and Friendship 
(USA Oxford University Press)
Stephen Aron

For over 35 years, the dominant histories of the American West have been narratives of horrific conflicts. Framed in terms of empire building, these histories use modern constructs of ethnic cleansing and genocide to reckon the costs of centuries of conquest and settler colonialism. This vocabulary, and the interpretation it supports, sharply contrasts with older accounts of the winning of the West, which had exulted in the triumph of civilization over savagery, making America great -- and great again. As dark and as bloody as western grounds have often been however, there were also important episodes of concord, instances of barriers breached, accords reached, and of people overcoming their differences as opposed to being overcome by them. Aron traces the origins of these episodes and thoughtfully considers the factors that led to their ultimate undoing.

Sound Experiments
(University of Chicago Press)
Paul Steinbeck

Founded on Chicago's South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical and musical investigation of the collective, analyzing individual performances and formal innovations in captivating detail. He pays particular attention to compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, the Association's leading figures, as well as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis (and his famous computer-music experiment, Voyager), Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, along with younger AACM members such as Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Nicole Mitchell.

Tales from the Borderlands
(Yale University Press)
Omer Bartov

Focusing on the former province of Galicia, this book tells the story of Europe's eastern borderlands, stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans, through the eyes of the diverse communities of migrants who settled there for centuries and were murdered or forcibly removed from the borderlands in the course of World War II and its aftermath. Omer Bartov explores the fates and hopes, dreams and disillusionment of the people who lived there, and, through the stories they told about themselves, reconstructs who they were, where they came from, and where they were heading. It was on the borderlands that the expanding great empires--German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman--overlapped, clashed, and disintegrated. The civilization of these borderlands was a mix of multiple cultures, languages, ethnic groups, religions, and nations that similarly overlapped and clashed. The borderlands became the cradle of modernity. Looking back at it tells us where we came from.

The Art of Diremption
(Seagull Books)
Leonhard Emmerling

One of the most astonishing aspects of the discourse on contemporary art is the firm and unwavering belief that art has the power to transform society for the better. There seems to be a consensus around the idea that art, especially visual art, is greatly suited to addressing all manner of social, political, economic, ecological, and other imbalances. Celebrated as a powerful remedy for social grievances, art finds its justification in the service it seems to provide to society. But as art historian Leonhard Emmerling contends in this timely volume, this presumptuous heroism shows willful blindness towards art's subjugation to contradictions inherent in social relations. He argues that the narrative of the power of art has its specific history. In trying to reconstruct this history in Art of Diremption, he discovers instead art's fundamental powerlessness as the foundation for art's political relevance. Art is weak, argues Emmerling. It, therefore, requires an ethics of weakness, which rejects the discourse of impact and power to enable a politics of art containing the permanence of reflection, the unreliability of thought, and the emergence of form as the event of the new. With a meticulously studied and well-argued case about the "powerlessness of art," Art of Diremption will be an important contribution to the field of art, aesthetics, and philosophy.

The Book of Minds
(University of Chicago Press)
Phillip Ball

Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them--including in plants, aliens, and God--Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the "space of possible minds." By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will?



The Literary Mafia
(Yale University Press)
Josh Lambert

In the 1960s and 1970s, complaints about a "Jewish literary mafia" were everywhere. Although a conspiracy of Jews colluding to control publishing in the United States never actually existed, such accusations reflected a genuine transformation from an industry notorious for excluding Jews to one in which they arguably had become the most influential figures. Josh Lambert examines the dynamics between Jewish editors and Jewish writers; how Jewish women exposed the misogyny they faced from publishers; and how children of literary parents have struggled with and benefited from their inheritances. Drawing on interviews and tens of thousands of pages of letters and manuscripts, The Literary Mafia offers striking new discoveries about celebrated figures such as Lionel Trilling and Gordon Lish, and neglected fiction by writers including Ivan Gold, Ann Birstein, and Trudy Gertler. In the end, we learn how the success of one minority group has lessons for all who would like to see American literature become more equitable.

The Price of Time
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
Edward Chancellor 

In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. The practice wasn't always popular--in the ancient world, usury was generally viewed as exploitative, a potential path to debt bondage and slavery. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk. All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest is often described as the "price of money," but it is better called the "price of time: " time is scarce, time has value, interest is the time value of money. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, interest rates have sunk lower than ever before. Easy money after the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 has produced several ill effects, including the appearance of multiple asset price bubbles, a reduction in productivity growth, discouraging savings and exacerbating inequality, and forcing yield starved investors to take on excessive risk. The financial world now finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place, and Edward Chancellor is here to tell us why. In this enriching volume, Chancellor explores the history of interest and its essential function in determining how capital is allocated and priced.