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Archive for the ‘Great reads’ Category

Stanford psychologist partners with ‘30 Rock’ actor

October 12th, 2012
Photo by Jason Anfinsen

'30 Rock' actor John Lutz. Photo by Jason Anfinsen

“Comedian JOHN LUTZ, who plays a sketch writer on the popular TV series 30 Rock, is often the fall guy for others’ mischief and the target of practical jokes on the show. So when I read in a recent Arts Beat blog entry about a new endeavor titled The Lutz Experiment, I naturally assumed he’d be the lead role in some sort of new reality TV show where he would eat strange and unusual foods, perform death-defying acts and, in general, test his emotional and physical limits,” LIA STEAKLEY, a social media producer for the Medical School, posted recently on the school’s SCOPE blog.

Jamil Zaki, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford

As it turns out, Lutz has teamed up with JAMIL ZAKI, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford, for a series of experiments and a book.

In that New York Times Arts Beat piece that Steakley refers to, Zaki describes Lutz as “the perfect lab rat.”

“You see him on 30 Rock and he comes off as this total goofball, a little bit of a doofus, even,” Zaki said. “It’s so strange to then meet him and see this incredibly well-spoken, thoughtful guy in the same body.”

Read Steakley’s full post on the SCOPE blog.

Archives of experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie now in Stanford University Libraries

September 12th, 2012

Bruce Baillie

Two years ago, Stanford University Libraries acquired the archives for Canyon Cinema, one of the leading distributors of avant-garde independent films. Now it also has the archives of Canyon founder BRUCE BAILLIE, a major figure in the development of counter-cultural filmmaking in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Baillie’s films been described as “poetic documentary.” The archives, which document Baillie’s life and work as a filmmaker, strongly reinforce Stanford’s focus on independent, alternative and documentary films and filmmakers. The collection of papers, correspondence, notes, files and other materials will be housed in the libraries’ Department of Special Collections, where it will be permanently preserved and made available to researchers.

“Baillie’s work addresses the impact of experimental filmmaking on techniques and styles that permeate all forms of cinema,” said HENRY LOWOOD, curator for film and media collections.

Baillie, who turns 81 this month, founded Canyon Cinema in 1961, when he started showing new films in his backyard in Canyon, Calif. Canyon became the world’s leading collective of independent filmmakers after its humble beginnings. Later, Baillie also co-founded the San Francisco Cinemathèque with experimental filmmaker CHICK STRAND.

From Baillie's 1961 film "Mr. Hayashi"

One of Baillie’s films, Castro Street (1966), was added to the National Film Registry in 1992. The Registry selects films for the Library of Congress that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” That film documents the sights and sounds on the city of Richmond’s Castro Street, which runs by the Standard Oil Refinery. Other Baillie films document street life in San Francisco, the life and rituals of Native Americans, people Baillie encountered and other topics drawn from his varied interests and observations.

The new collection includes copies of the original notebooks for Castro Street (the originals have been lost), written as Baillie was editing film at the Morning Star Ranch in Santa Rosa. He scribbled in the notebooks by flashlight after what he calls the “singularly complicated editing process, in my homemade tent under the stars with my dog, Mama.”
—Cynthia Haven, Stanford University Libraries

 

 

 

 

Stanford Libraries launches user-friendly website; changes name

September 5th, 2012

The Stanford University Libraries’ website, which gets about 10,000 visits a day, hasn’t had a major overhaul in a decade. “In web years, that’s 200,” said CHRIS BOURG, assistant university librarian for public services.

Now the libraries’ Internet presence has been revamped to match the times: A brand-new website went “live” on Aug. 28 – with a lot of input from faculty, students, staff, researchers and a range of other users.

“The new site was built with their voices in our heads,” said STU SNYDMAN, who coordinated the redesign as manager of digital production & web application development.

For the past 18 months, the libraries have been offering lottery tickets and Coupa Café coupons to encourage participation for in-depth interviews, postcard wish-lists and rapid-fire user testing. The new website is the result.

An integrated search function makes looking for resources in the collections or in the library far more straightforward. The homepage highlights a chat link for contacting librarians – not a new feature, but one previously buried under layers of clicks. It even helps students find places for group study – “That’s a piece of information we didn’t have on the site before,” said Bourg. “Students learned about the Bender Room maybe by the time they were seniors.” It also directs users to subject librarians, who can give special help.

Another change: When getting help at the information desk, the librarians’ online search often didn’t look like anything you ever saw on the home page. Here’s one reason why: The information center site website had been updated more recently, as had many of the branch library sites. Think of a dinosaur surrounded by racecars. Now the dinosaur has been traded in for a Maserati, and all the vehicles are going at the same speed, together. They’ll be using the same website you’re using.

And it’s going to get even better. “A hundred library staff members are building content, starting now. That’s highly distributed authorship,” said Snydman.

According to Bourg, “The bottom line is that research, teaching and learning at Stanford will be easier now because the new library website rocks!”

The careful viewer will notice another change: The campus network of library, technology and publishing services previously known as SULAIR (that is, Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources) is now called simply “Stanford University Libraries.” In early August, a quiet announcement to this effect went to the staff.

– Cynthia Haven, Stanford University Libraries

 

First up: Julián Castro

September 4th, 2012

San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, ’96, is scheduled to give the keynote address tonight at the Democratic National Convention. Photo: jamesgatz

Tonight, San Antonio Mayor JULIÁN CASTRO, who earned his bachelor’s degree in political science and communication from Stanford in 1996, is scheduled to make history as the first Latino to give the keynote address at a Democratic National Convention.

“The keynote honor is typically bestowed upon a rising star within the party. In 2004, BARACK OBAMA, then a little known state senator from Illinois, took the stage and vaulted to national attention. Such selections, however, aren’t just about grooming up-and-comers; they’re carefully calculated decisions to help win the coming election,” writes Sam Scott in a Stanford magazine online exclusive.

Scott interviews political science Professor GARY SEGURA, chair of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Segura researches political representation and the politics of America’s growing Latino population.

[Update: Castro was introduced by his twin brother JOAQUÍN, also a Stanford alum.]

Read the interview with Segura on the magazine’s website.

 

Newly aquired book includes original Manet etching

August 29th, 2012

There’s a new cat at the Art and Architecture Library in the Cummings Art Building—and it’s well over 100 years old.

The 1869 cat is featured in an original etching by the famous French artist ÉDOUARD MANET (1832-1883). The feline is hidden away between the pages of a newly acquired book, the deluxe edition of an 1870 art classic called Les Chats, by JULES-FRANÇOIS-FÉLIX HUSSON, who used the pen name “Champfleury.” The etching is an aquatint that uses a powdered rosin to create a muted gray-blue background. Manet made the plate by hand, etching fine lines with a needle.

“Le Chat et Les Fleurs” is described as one of Manet’s most subtle combinations of the complex and simple. According to the late art historian Jean C. Harris, the etching shows the traces of Japanese influence, with its flatness of spatial arrangement and the “rather freely drawn and widely spaced strokes to describe the flowers,” which “help to animate the surface and to relieve the monotony of the uniform aquatinting.”

The etching had been sold separately as a stand-alone work prior to this edition. The new acquisition recalls a time when it was much more common for books to include original artwork, including engravings, etchings, lithographs and even paintings. Too often nowadays, they are razored out and sold separately, but this etching is presented as the author and artist intended. Les Chats is one of well over 1,000 such books at the Art and Architecture Library, which now has about 150,000 books on site.

Cat-lover and assistant art librarian ANNA FISHAUT discovered the book while shopping online at a favorite London rare books store and had to have it, “because it is one of the great artists’ books and because I have a penchant for cats.”

It’s not the only new cat in town—from the same British dealer, the library acquired a 1918 limited-edition book of original woodcuts from the Omega Workshops, affiliated with LEONARD and VIRGINIA WOOLF’s Hogarth Press. It includes woodcuts from ROGER FRY, VANESSA BELL, DUNCAN GRANT—and a cat by French artist SIMON BUSSY.

—CYNTHIA HAVEN, Stanford University Libraries

 

 

Powerhouse in the pool: Roy Perkins to compete in Paralympics 2012

August 22nd, 2012

Roy Perkins competed in the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing. He’s preparing to compete in London next week. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

It’s difficult to believe that ROY PERKINS, ’13, was once terrified of putting his face in the water and didn’t learn to swim until he was 12. Now he’s preparing to compete in the 50-, 100- and 200-meter freestyle events, 50-meter backstroke and 50-meter butterfly at the 2012 Paralympics, which begin next week. Born without hands or feet, Perkins comes to the Games a powerhouse: In Beijing he won his category’s gold in the 50-meter butterfly as well as bronze in the 100-meter freestyle.

Stanford magazine caught up the Earth systems major before he headed to London.

Read SAM SCOTT‘s interview on the Stanford magazine website.

Poet Eavan Boland wins PEN award for essay collection

August 20th, 2012

EAVAN BOLAND, director of Stanford’s Creative Writing program and one of Ireland’s leading poets, has won a 2012 PEN Award for creative nonfiction with her acclaimed collection of essays, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, published last year by W.W. Norton.

PEN Center USA will fete three honorees and give 11 awards in particular genres at its annual awards festival on Oct. 22 in Beverly Hills. Grove/Atlantic Press publisher and Stanford alumnus MORGAN ENTREKIN will receive the Award of Honor, JOYCE CAROL OATES will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, and CBS correspondent LARA LOGAN will receive the Freedom to Write Award.

In addition to Boland’s award for creative nonfiction, the other genre awards are given for poetry, fiction, research nonfiction, children’s literature, graphic literature, journalism, translation, drama, teleplay and screenplay. (ANNIE MUMOLO and KRISTEN WIIG will receive the screenplay award for the feature film Bridesmaids.)

“I’m really honored to get the award. And especially from PEN, which is an institution that does so much to advocate for writers,” Boland wrote in an email from Vermont.

Boland has published 10 volumes of poetry – most recently New Collected Poems (2008) and Domestic Violence (2007), and an earlier collected volume, An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-87 (1996). She has received the Lannan Award for Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. She has published a previous volume of prose, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. She came to Stanford in 1995.

A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet traces Boland’s own development as a poet, and also offers insights into the work of SYLVIA PLATH, GWENDOLYN BROOKS, ADRIENNE RICH, ELIZABETH BISHOP and the German poet ELIZABETH LANGÄSSER.

Irish author COLM TÓIBÍN named it a “favorite book” – calling it “urgent and wise” – in the Irish Times last year. Britain’s Poetry Review called her “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century.”

Boland balances two worlds: free-spirited California and Ireland, a land of historical persecution and occupation, with its “painful memory of a poetry whose archive was its audience,” she said in an Academy of American Poets interview.

“I sought out American poetry because of that powerful, inclusive diversity,” she said. “I always remember I’m an Irish poet there, but at the same time some part of my sense of poetry feels very confirmed by the American achievement.”

In a PBS NewsHour interview last year, Boland said, “I’m really fortunate to be at Stanford. I go home every 10 weeks, but Stanford, apart from being just a wonderful university, is … part of a great conversation.”

The PEN Center USA, founded in 1943, has more than 800 writers including poets, playwrights, essayists, novelists, television and screenwriters, critics, historians, editors, journalists and translators. Incorporated as a nonprofit in 1981, it strives to protect the rights of writers around the world, to stimulate interest in the written word, and to “foster a vital literary community among the diverse writers living in the western United States.” Among the organization’s activities are public literary events, a mentorship project, literary awards and international human rights campaigns on behalf of censored or imprisoned writers.

— BY CYNTHIA HAVEN, English Department

 

 

Ask Stanford Med about Internet addiction

August 13th, 2012

To further explore how excessive Internet use may be harmful to our health, the SCOPE blog asked ELIAS ABOUJAOUDE, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic and the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic at Stanford Medical School, to respond to your questions on the topic for this month’s Ask Stanford Med.

Aboujaoude’s work focuses on obsessive compulsive disorders and behavioral addictions, including problematic Internet use. He was lead author of a 2006 paper that laid the groundwork to determine if compulsive online activity warranted a medical diagnosis. In his latest book, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, Aboujaoude explores how our online traits are unconsciously being imported into our offline lives.

Questions can be submitted to Aboujaoude by either sending a tweet that includes the hashtag #AskSUMed or posting your question in the comments section of the original post. The SCOPE blog will collect questions until Tuesday, Aug. 14, at 5 p.m.

For more information about Aboujaoude’s work and the ground rules for posting questions, visit LIA STEAKLEY’s SCOPE blog post.

NCAA profiles new tennis pro Ryan Thacher, winner of a postgraduate scholarship

August 3rd, 2012
Ryan Thacher

Ryan Thacher

The National Collegiate Athletic Association recently posted a profile of Stanford graduate and tennis star RYAN THACHER, who turned professional in July.

Thacher is a winner of a $7,500 NCAA postgraduate scholarship. The scholarships are awarded to accomplished student-athletes. According to the profile, Thacher, who earned a bachelor’s degree in history in March, hopes to become a doctor after he ends his professional tennis career. Thacher decided on a career in medicine after shadowing a doctor as part of the Stanford Immersion in Medicine Series.

The NCAA awards 174 postgraduate scholarships annually – 29 per gender for participants in fall, winter and spring sports. To qualify, student-athletes must excel academically and athletically, be at least in their final year of eligibility and plan to pursue graduate study. Student-athletes must also maintain at least a 3.2 grade-point average and be nominated by their institution’s faculty athletics representative. Created in 1964, NCAA postgraduate scholarships promote and encourage education.

Thacher will devote himself to professional tennis for a year. Late next summer, he plans to evaluate his progress, gauge his potential and decide whether to continue with the sport or begin pursuing a career in medicine.

Read the NCAA online profile.

 

 

 

Stanford Libraries’ exhibition celebrates the art of hand bookbinding

July 24th, 2012

Kindle and the era of the e-book have not entirely displaced the fine craftsmanship of the bookbinders’ art. A current exhibition at Stanford Libraries proves it with elegant bindings that are traditional and avant-garde, featuring overlays and cut-outs, Japanese calligraphy and pages that open into a circle.

The exhibition fêtes the Hand Bookbinders of California 40th birthday. The event, which is free and open to the public, will continue through Wednesday, Sept. 5, in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda of the Green Library. Contemporary bindings by the organization’s members are augmented with historical fine design bindings from the Libraries’ Special Collections.

Bindings by PAUL BONET and PIERRE LUCIEN MARTIN represent the strong French influence on the work of Bay Area teachers of binding, many of whom studied in France.

For example, Bonet’s rendering of PAUL VALÉRY’s Le Serpent, from the Stanford Libraries, has elaborate red and white onlays on black goatskin. His designs have inspired generations of French and French-trained bookbinders.

Also on display is work by some of the organization’s early members and teachers, including BELLE MCMURTRY YOUNG, PETER FAHEY, FLORENCE WALTER, BETTY LOU CHAIKA, DONALD GLAISTER, JOANNE SONNICHSEN, BARBARA FALLON HILLER and ELEANORE RAMSEY.

Well-known Berkeley bookbinder TOM CONROY’s rendering of Donn Byrne’s Destiny Bay exemplifies the finest of traditional binding styles, with blind and gold tooling on scarlet goatskin and hand-sewn silk endbands.

Donn Byrne’s "Destiny Bay," binding by Tom Conroy

Conroy and fellow binder and toolmaker PEGGY DE MOUTHE have also offered some of the tools of their painstaking labor for the exhibition: gilding tools, band nippers, polishing irons, a French leather-paring knife and other tools of buffalo horn, bone and even Teflon, one with a toothy opossum-jaw handle.

The Hand Bookbinders of California is devoted to promoting and supporting the craft of traditional Western hand bookbinding. The founding group included some of the Bay Area’s most influential collectors, among them DUNCAN OLMSTED and GALE HERRICK, and many binders and teachers of binding, such as STELLA PATRI and LEAH WOLLENBERG. It continues as a robust, active group with membership open to anyone with a passion for the craft.

The exhibition moves to Mills College this fall.

The Peterson Gallery is accessible whenever Green Library is open; hours vary with the academic schedule. To confirm library hours, call (650) 723-0931 or go to the Libraries website. First-time visitors and those without Stanford ID must register at the entrance to Green Library before entering the building.

— BY CYNTHIA HAVEN, Stanford University Libraries