Allan Gurganus,

He will also read at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 9, 2012 in the Avaya Auditorium, ACE 2.302, on the southeast corner of Speedway and 24^th Street on campus.  The event is free and open to students and the public.  Parking is available in the nearby UT Garage at San Jacinto and 24^th.

Gurganus’s work has been translated into twenty languages. His first novel sold two million copies. Adaptations of the fiction have won four Emmys, his books awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the O’Henry Short Story Prize.  Paris La Monde said of Gurganus, “A Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch.”

With this type of endorsement we thought no one would be a more suitable interviewer for his Q&A than Gurganus himself. ShelfLife@Texas is proud to present an interview with Gurganus, by Gurganus.

Welcome to campus. You yourself studied with authors as gifted and various as Grace Paley, John Irving, Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Do you bring their examples into your classroom?

Their voices and wisecracks go with me everywhere. Sentence by sentence, I know what each of them would say about my next line. This holds true in my own classes and student conferences.  I can literally hear what the now-deceased Grace Paley is urging me to tell a given student.  The one way to repay great teaching is trying to perfect that art yourself.

By now, my students are growing famous as my teachers were. Elizabeth MacCracken of the Creative Writing Department here, was my own pupil a few decades back at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She remains not only among the most gifted students I’ve ever taught; she is also easily the kindest.  I remember where I was sitting when I read certain of her start-up stories.

Have you looked over the fiction of your UT students you’ll work with during your residency?

Oh yes. I’ve covered pages with many checkmarks and, to earn my keep, some questions. I’m now eager to see if each of them resembles the person I imagined wrote each tale. (Sometimes I can pick a writer out of a group of other strangers on the basis of her prose. Just showing off!)

One thing that wowed me—how different each writer is. Here there is no median talent or typical story. Everybody seems wildly themselves. Talent! For me, that is the holy of holies. I literally worship it, valuing it over physical beauty. It sure lasts longer.

Though I will be in Austin less than a month, I hope to encourage students to build upon their own best instincts. Everybody is launched already, and obsessed.

After writing myself for forty-four years, I’ve bumped into certain technical shortcuts, some simple insights that—if presented dramatically and modestly—might prove useful.

You are slated to give a reading on campus on February 9th. Will you be offering a selection of “Oldest Living Widow,” your most famous work?

Oh no. Just as students find the nerve to show me brand-new work as yet unpublished, I’ll return the favor. Only fair. No matter how many books a writer has in print, the blank page never grows less abashing. In fact, that whiteness leaves you ever more snowblind. You have used up all your charm and tricks; you fear you’ve already plundered the true ore of autobiography.

It is important to demonstrate to students that I’m still a student. I’ll read from a long novel in progress called “The Erotic History of a Rural Baptist Church.”  It investigates the confusion between spiritual longing and the raw upsurge insistence of sexual desire. That makes for a combustible mix. I plan to read a passage based on an actual incident from my hometown circa 1900. A baby elephant escapes from a visiting circus. It gets pursued by a posse of local boys and girls and farmers. It takes a local preacher to pray over this event, to try and justify or explain the random violence we all wade in daily.

What advice can you offer beginning or graduate writers? It seems a field with one long apprenticeship, then rewards unevenly distributed.

Well-said. Yes, people write because they have to. There is no other excuse for it. American culture only valued Faulkner once he’d won the Nobel, once Hollywood hired him to make his own brilliant novels terrible movies. His books were out of print. Suddenly he became ‘hot’ then valid.

I’ve been needing to put things on paper since 1966. If tomorrow I learned that no other word I wrote would ever be published, my daily schedule would not change. I’d still rise at six thirty and cohabit with my desk till early afternoon. I rarely even take the Sabbath off. Stopping and starting is the hardest part of writing. Far better never to turn off the tap.

Universities provide one essential ingredient all writers need: an interested enlightened audience. I encourage people to find a group of others, working at their same level of experience. To meet alternate weeks at least and read new work aloud. Sometimes our ears know more than our brain does. There are two of them! Music is truly what we seek to write. Fiction rests somewhere between being a Law and a Song. By hearing other people hear your work, you learn to make it rock or sway or pound. The goal is helping others Laugh, Cry, Wait and Know.  Seeing that happen, in real time, thanks to sound-waves, is one great reason to endure all its attendant tortures.

“My Dearest Nellie: The Letters of William Howard Taft to Helen Herron Taft, 1909-1912″ consists of 113 letters that “not only reveal the inner workings of a presidency at decisive moments but also humanize a chief executive to whom history has been less than kind” says Gould, Eugene C. Barker Centennial Professor Emeritus in American History at The University of Texas at Austin.

Filled with his commentary on current political issues and rationale for his decisions as well as his growing distaste for Theodore Roosevelt, frustration with his weight and golf score, and even the hottest gossip from the nation’s capital, Taft’s collection of letters to his wife Nellie are rivaled only by those between Harry Truman and Bess.

Gould recently sat down with ShelfLife@Texas to talk about Taft, the value of letter writing, and the birth of the modern United States.

“My Dearest Nellie” is the most recent in a long list of books you have written or edited about the presidents of the first two decades of this 20th century. What draws you to this particular topic in American History?

I had teachers at both Brown and Yale in the 1950s and 1960s who explored the national politics of the Progressive Era in fascinating ways. Soon I was intrigued by, and then committed to understanding, the period when the modern United States was emerging. I came to it after studying state politics first in Wyoming and then in Texas, but even in writing those books I was interested in the interaction between public life on the national level with developments in the states. But turning to Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson felt like coming to a natural area of emphasis.

Watch Lewis Gould discuss his new book on C-SPAN Book TV.

What is the value in reading the private letters of presidents past, and why do you think no one had really taken the time to look at those between President Taft and his wife Nellie before?

The cliché is that historians read other people’s mail for a living, and the quality of letter writing in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era was more impressive than in our own day. With email and Twitter, there is not the care and thoroughness with which people once conveyed their thoughts. President Taft wrote many of his letters in longhand. Others he dictated to a secretary at the end of a busy day. Either way, speaking to the one person he trusted above all others, he conveyed his problems, gripes, and accomplishments with a high degree of freedom. In the process, he revealed much about his relations with Congress, the press and the public. He was very direct and often indiscreet, and his letters turned out to be fascinating. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, whose letters have been published in eight volumes, and Woodrow Wilson, whose papers have been published in almost seventy volumes, Taft’s letters are still available only on microfilm. This small volume of 113 letters is my attempt to redress the balance.

You say that although these letters will not warrant calling him a great President, they do reveal a more thoughtful occupant of the White House than scholars have acknowledged. Can you give us an example? Did anything you read surprise you, even as an expert of this historical period?

The extent to which Taft involved himself with legislation was a surprise. In the various battles of his administration over the tariff, for example, in 1909 and 1911, the President courted lawmakers, used leaks to the press, and wielded patronage to get his goals enacted. Things didn’t always work out as he planned, but it was not because he was aloof. Many people have argued that Taft was lazy. He procrastinated a good deal, but when he put his mind to it he could produce speeches, messages to Congress, and letters to other politicians with great efficiency. He was also well read — not the speed-reader that Roosevelt was, but a man who knew the classics and Western literature. How many recent presidents could toss off an allusion to a Latin poet in the course of a letter to their spouse?

What do you most hope readers will take away from “My Dearest Nellie?”

Taft was a very unpretentious and down-to-earth chief executive. The wife of a Texas congressman called him “the most perfect everyday gentleman” she had known among the presidents of her time. His letters are filled with human touches and an awareness of his own foibles. In the summer of 1912, when it was clear that the American people were not going to give him a second term, he wrote to Nellie: “I have held the office of President once, and that is more than most men have, so I am content to retire from it with a consciousness that I have done the best I could, and have accomplished a good deal in one way or another.” The rationalization of a losing candidate? Sure. But it also reflected a lack of bluster and arrogance that one rarely finds among modern politicians. Spending a decade reading Taft’s mail was a rewarding experience.

The idea for this book came to you while you were writing another book called “The Modern American Presidency.” Did any new ideas strike you while writing his one?

Right now I am resting from the work of editing the Taft letters for publication and writing a brief biography of Theodore Roosevelt that has just been published by the Oxford University Press.

Born on Prince Edward Island in Canada in 1934, Strand began college in the 1950s studying painting—and the visual arts continue to be an important part of his creative life—but he soon turned to poetry, completing a Fulbright year abroad translating Italian poetry, then earning an MFA at the Iowa Workshop in 1962.  Over his long career he has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Iowa, and the University of Chicago and now divides his time between Spain and New York, where he is a professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts writing program. From his home in Madrid, he answered questions about his work.

A past U.S. laureate, recognized with the poetry world’s top honors and scores of books to your credit, you have a curious track record of publicly giving up poetry—first back in the 1980s, when you took a years-long hiatus from publishing poems, and again last year, when you said in an interview that you had “nothing left to say,” and were turning again to the visual arts, your first calling.  Is this a kind of break-up/make-up cycle in a lifelong love affair with poetry, or something else?

It is true that I have given up the writing of poems several times. Once a book is written, I feel that I have said what I had to say. And it also seems that what I had written never measures up to what I had hoped to write. So I decide that it might be best for me to do something else. Lately, this “something else” has been the making of collages, something I have dabbled in in the past, but which now seems to have become a fixed daily activity, and one that I have no desire to relinquish. So, I don’t know if I’ll write more poems. It seems more likely that I shall write more prose pieces, that I’ll finish a memoir on my parents, and that I’ll write more essays about painting.

If you’ve written about childhood and family experiences in your poetry, how is it different to approach it in prose, with this memoir?

I don’t really care for the few autobiographical poems that I have written. One becomes a secretary to oneself. And the facts take on a disproportionate importance. I am less interested in my outward biography than I am in the other biography—the inner one, the move from poem to poem, thought to thought, etc.  The book about my parents—and I have written only the first draft, a mere 85 pages—is being written because their story is interesting and unusual. I may be the only poet in America whose father served four years as an inmate in San Quentin Penitentiary.

Even your earliest work was often concerned with absence and endings, almost from the viewpoint of a much older person surveying life’s losses. How does your 70-something self reflect on those poems now?

Those early poems only show that I have always been conscious of mortality.  I have always felt lucky to be alive and, at the same time, wondered when my luck would run out.

Though humility requires that you argue the point, the rest of us can agree that you, W.S. Merwin and the Arab poet Adonis are three strikingly handsome poets of the same generation, something that’s often been commented upon. Do you think the public’s perception of a writer’s physical appearance alters in ways—good or bad—their perception of the work?

I cannot say with any certainty that my looks have impacted positively or negatively the public consideration of my work. But if one takes the whole of his life into account, rather than just the writing life, I would say that it is better to be good-looking than not.

Mark Strand will read at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 26, 2012 in the ACE Building, Avaya Auditorium 2.302, located on the southeast corner of 24th and Speedway on campus.  The event is free and open to the campus and Austin community.  Parking is available in the nearby UT Garage at San Jacinto and 24th.

Special guests will include Carol Ann Sayle, of Boggy Creek Farm, and Stephanie McClenny, of Confituras. Enjoy special tastings inspired by the book along with Saint Arnold Brewing Company beverages.

About the book: Combining the study of food culture with gender studies and using perspectives from historical, literary, environmental and American studies, Engelhardt examines what Southern women’s choices about food tell us about race, class, gender and social power.

Shaken by the legacies of Reconstruction and the turmoil of the Jim Crow era, different races and classes came together in the kitchen, often as servants and mistresses but also as people with shared tastes and traditions. Generally focused on elite whites or poor blacks, Southern foodways are often portrayed as stable and unchanging—even as an untroubled source of nostalgia.

“A Mess of Greens” offers a different perspective, taking into account industrialization, environmental degradation, and women’s increased role in the work force, all of which caused massive economic and social changes.

Engelhardt reveals a broad middle of Southerners that included poor whites, farm families, and middle and working-class African Americans, for whom the stakes of what counted as southern food were very high.

About the author: Having grown up in western North Carolina and spent much of her life in the South, Engelhardt is dedicated to preserving Southern culinary heritage. Her other books include “Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket” (University of Texas Press, 2009), “Beyond Hill and Hollow: Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies” (Ohio University Press, 2005), and “Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature” (Ohio University Press, 2003). She is the coordinator of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Texas branch of the Southern Barbecue Trail Oral History Collection.

BookPeople is located at 603 N. Lamar Blvd. Visit the BookPeople website for more about the event.

Fore more about “A Mess of Greens,” read Engelhardt’s Q&A.

How, you ask?

Here’s the formula: “Smart Thinking” requires developing Smart Habits to acquire High Quality Knowledge, and to Apply Your Knowledge to achieve your goals.” In his upcoming book “Smart Thinking,” (Perigee Books, January 2012) Markman teaches readers how to do just that. He will be at book signing events in Austin at 7  p.m., Wed., Jan. 4 at BookPeople and in San Antonio at 5 p.m., Thurs., Jan 5 at The Twig Book Shop.

He recently sat down with ShelfLife@Texas to discuss the book and some of his most exciting findings.

In the introduction to your book, Chief Learning Officer for Procter and Gamble Craig Wynett and Dr. Mehmet Oz praise you for developing a unique mix of “leading edge science” and “news you can use.” Why do you think so few books like yours are being published?

This kind of book is a tough one to get right.  There are a lot of great scientists who know the research on thinking, but few of them have spent time working with people outside of the research community that would provide experience to guide practical recommendations. In addition, most researchers focus on a narrow area of study. Books like this require drawing from across the discipline of psychology. There are also a number of books by people who have worked in business and executive education settings. These books provide recommendations for more effective thinking, but they are not rooted in the underlying science.  As a result, the recommendations are brittle. They work in some cases, but when they fail, it is not clear why.

You are adamant that “smart thinking” and intelligence are not the same thing. What is the difference?

There are lots of tests out there that aim to measure intelligence and aptitude. These tests often focus on abstract reasoning abilities. But, being smart is really about solving problems effectively in real situations. That kind of problem solving requires knowing a lot about the way the world works and having good strategies for applying that knowledge when you need it. Those abilities are just not tested by intelligence tests. As a result, we all know people who “test well” but are not successful in life, and others who are not “book smart” but always seem to find a way to do something interesting.

How and when did you start developing your ideas for “Smart Thinking” and what research did you draw upon to develop the “smart thinking” techniques?

I have always had an interest in how to bridge the gap between research and the application of that research in the world.  About seven years ago, I started working with companies to help them bring research into their businesses. For the past six years, I have worked with the people of Procter & Gamble.  They asked me to teach some classes to their employees to help them be more effective problem solvers. The information in this book emerged from those classes.

I had to synthesize research from many different areas.  One core component of this book draws from work on habits and habit change. You cannot be smart without developing good habits. The second core element comes from work on learning and knowledge. A key to smart thinking is understanding how things in the world function. There is a lot of important work exploring the difficulties of acquiring this functional knowledge and examining ways to improve this type of learning. Finally, many solutions to difficult problems arise as the result of analogies between a problem and a solution from another area of expertise. The book draws extensively on research on how analogies are formed and used.

You have a wonderful anecdote in the book in which you use these techniques to help your son figure out an answer to a tough question on his homework using his own existing knowledge. Have your children begun to embrace these smart thinking techniques? How do you try to incorporate your advice into your own life?

I certainly hope my kids have started to use some of these techniques for themselves, though I’m not qualified to write a book on parenting. I do try to use these techniques myself. I talk a lot in the book about ways to redescribe problems to improve your ability to find good analogies. I spend a lot of time using those techniques in my work as a scientist.  In addition, I have used a number of the suggestions for developing and changing habits for aspects of my life including learning to play the saxophone as an adult and changing the way I eat.

In “Smart Thinking,” you emphasize the fact that “smart habits enable us to perform desirable behaviors automatically.” What do you mean by this and why is it important that we perform our daily tasks without much thought?

It is hard to have to think about your behavior all the time. Most of the time, when you are thinking about your behavior it is because there is one thing you would like to do, but you have to fight against your habits to do it, which is exhausting. It is much more effective to structure your world in a consistent way so that the things you want to do happen automatically. After all, who wants to think about the route they take home from work, where to find the trash can in the office or how to flick on the light switch in the kitchen?  The more things you can compile away as habits, the more you can focus on what interests you.

Throughout the book you have written little interjections called Instantly Smarter, which are tips that readers can begin employing immediately. What are some of your favorites?

I like the tips on remembering names, because so many of us have difficulty with names. We have trouble with names because they are completely disconnected from every other aspect about a person. We want to learn facts that are connected to the person rather than independent ones. So, our difficulty with names reflects something important about the psychology of memory. There are two other sets of Instantly Smarter tips I really like:  One focuses on the importance of sleep in being smart.  The other examines ways to help you pay attention when you feel like you’re losing it in a meeting or class.

What is one habit of smart thinkers that you think will most surprise readers?

Most people think that smart thinkers think differently than they do. That message was even brought out explicitly in Apple’s great ad campaign “Think Different.” In fact, even the smartest thinkers are using the same procedures that everyone has. Where they differ is in the range of things they know about and in their ability to find descriptions of problems that enable them to use the knowledge they have when they need it.

What is the primary piece of advice you hope readers take away from “Smart Thinking”?

The main piece of advice is that you can become smarter.  A musician improves her skills through dedicated practice and an understanding of music theory. Likewise, by understanding the way you use knowledge to solve problems, you can develop smarter habits to learn more about the way the world works and to describe problems effectively.

Twenty-one authors will be available to visit with the public and sign copies of their latest books, which Humanities Texas will offer for purchase at a discounted price. Proceeds will go to the Bastrop Public Library, which suffered losses to its collection during the September wildfires.

The lineup includes:

H.W. Brands, the Raymond Dickson, Alton C. Allen and Dillon Anderson Centennial Professor

In “Greenback Planet,” Brands charts the dollar’s astonishing rise to become the world’s principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. In The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield, Brands traces the downfall of a notorious New York City figure and brings to life New York’s Gilded Age. More…

Oscar Casares, associate professor of English

“Amigoland,” set on the South Texas border with Mexico, is the story of estranged brothers Don Fidencio Rosales—querulous, nearly 92 years old, and living in a nursing home—and Don Celestino, twenty years his junior and newly widowed, who finds himself somewhat ambivalently involved with his young cleaning woman, Socorro. The housekeeper is a catalyst for the brothers reconnecting, and the improbable trio takes off on a bus trip into Mexico, where the siblings hope to settle a long-standing dispute about how their grandfather arrived in the U.S. and Socorro hopes to find clarity in her unlikely romance. The trip stirs up powerful issues of family and pride and about how we care for the people we love. More…

Don Graham, the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature

In “State of Minds,” Graham brings together and updates essays he published between 1999 and 2009 to paint a unique picture of Texas culture. In a strong personal voice—wry, humorous, and ironic—Graham offers his take on Texas literary giants ranging from J. Frank Dobie to Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy and on films such as “The Alamo,” “The Last Picture Show,” and “Brokeback Mountain.” More…

James Pennebaker, the Regents Centennial Liberal Arts Professor and chair of the Department of Psychology

“The Secret Life of Pronouns” examines how and why pronouns and other forgettable words reveal so much about us. Partly a research journey, the book traces the discovery of the links between function words and social and psychological states. Written for a general audience, the book takes the reader on a remarkable and often unexpected journey into the minds of authors, poets, lyricists, politicians, and everyday people through their use of words. More…

Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy

Nation-building is in America’s DNA. It dates back to the days of the American Revolution, when the founding fathers invented the concept of popular sovereignty—the idea that you cannot have a national government without a collective will. The framers of the Constitution initiated a policy of cautious nation-building, hoping not to conquer other countries, but to build a world of stable, self-governed societies that would support America’s way of life. In “Liberty’s Surest Guardian,” Suri looks to America’s history to see both what it has to offer to failed states around the world and what the nation should avoid. More…

L. Michael White, the Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins and the director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins

In “Scripting Jesus,” White challenges us to read the gospels as they were originally intended—as performed stories of faith rather than factual histories. White demonstrates that each of the four gospel writers had a specific audience in mind and a specific theological agenda to push, and consequently wrote and rewrote their lives of Jesus accordingly—in effect, scripting Jesus to get a particular point across and to achieve the desired audience reaction. More…

Park for free in the St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church’s large lot on the northwest corner of 15th and Rio Grande Streets, and enjoy coffee and a bake sale of donated and homemade treats. Go to this website for more information about the authors and their books!

Drawing from his experiences as a counsel to the House Antitrust Subcommittee, Winslow (B.A. History ‘56/JD Law ’60) based the book upon the findings of the committee’s investigation of unbridled corporate takeovers. And, in the wake of the Meltdown of 2008-09, he decided to revise the book and give it a new title to show exactly how and when corporations become so big that the meltdown became unavoidable.

“[I wanted] to show that it and our committee findings clearly forecast the Great Meltdown: if its warnings against inordinate corporate amalgamation are ignored again, the Meltdown is certain to recur,” says Winslow, a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission attorney who has served on Congressional and regulatory legal staffs and has written on economic regulation for The Nation and The Washington Monthly.

We spoke with Winslow about “The Acquisitors” and his conviction that “we threw away antitrust protection that would have prevented the Great Meltdown.”

You inveigh against giant corporate takeovers in your book. What’s wrong with them?

If we had restrained giant corporations’ takeovers of other corporations we’d have no companies too big to fail. Hence, no Great Meltdown.

After you left the University of Texas, how did you end up in Washington, writing about the evils—as you say—of corporate takeovers?

No entertainment was better than my history courses in Garrison Hall. Lectures on

John Winslow

late 19th-century robber barons especially intrigued me. When I graduated from the University of Texas Law School, Chairman Emanuel Celler, of the House Judiciary Committee, was about to subpoena documents to see whether Congress should expand the Celler-Kefauver Act—forbidding mergers of competing companies—so that it would outlaw mergers of any two major corporations even if not competitors. The soaring merger rate alarmed the committee.

So you joined the Judiciary Committee staff?

Eagerly, as a legal counsel. But the giants weren’t eager to open up their takeover files to us. They weren’t always glad to see the co-counsel and me. But when we’d find a document that raised eyebrows, we’d know what other documents to search for. Then we’d have more threads to pull to unravel the flimflam.

Flimflam?

International Telephone & Telegraph Co. (ITT), for one, claimed that it strengthened the hundreds of companies it acquired by infusing them with ITT management ability. But its documents showed plots to shift its debts incurred from prior takeovers to its future takeovers – thus to gain money from them for more takeovers. You hardly strengthen a company by loading it with needless debt. The book seeks to explain those parasitical gimmicks. After you scrape off the camouflage, the gimmicks appear easy and simple. They have to be simple to work.

We don’t hear much about ITT now. Is your book still relevant?

Do you ask if your medical history is relevant? We do hear about JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, each bailed out with $45 billion, only because they made themselves too titanic to let sink through takeovers—by employing other camouflaged gimmicks our investigation uncovered. Now we read that both banks, thanks to anticompetitive mergers, sold their customers grossly over-valued securities so that the banks could sell them short and cheat those customers out of hundreds of millions.

Your book’s back cover cites a comment from Peter F. Ward, assistant director of the Federal Trade Commission: “With all the corporate and regulatory horrors dredged up in this book, and no effort by Congress to remedy them, perhaps Mr. Winslow will consider a sequel.” Are you writing a sequel?

“The Acquisitors” is the sequel. The original book published by Indiana University Press, “Conglomerates Unlimited: Failure of Regulation” predates the Great Meltdown, and “The Acquisitors” revises that book to show that other companies, such as Bank of America, grew too big to fail (i.e., exempt from bankruptcy) by employing the parasitical gimmicks our investigation uncovered years before. Bank of America took over a thousand banks then ruined them by forcing them to underwrite subprime mortgages. AIG ballooned into a trillion-dollar megalith requiring a $175 billion bailout.

Why didn’t your investigation prevent the Great Meltdown?

The Judiciary Committee was ready to act upon our revelations and prepare legislation to halt mergers between giant corporations even though they weren’t competitors (thus not threatening to monopolize any industry). But at that moment the Justice Department announced it would create that very prohibition with judicial precedent – by suing to prevent ITT from taking over Hartford Fire Insurance Co. It would be the largest merger then of all time. ITT plotted to create such a mass of employees from acquired companies (Sheraton Hotels among them). It would use them as its own customers, insulating itself from the rigors of a free market.

Did the Justice Department win the case and establish that precedent?

It never even tried. Though sure of victory in the Supreme Court, it settled the case. It announced it couldn’t penalize ITT by prohibiting the Hartford merger because that would send its stock down and ITT was so big American investors would suffer massive losses. The government said in effect, “ITT is so titanic any penalty against the acquisitor is a penalty against America.” Thus was born the syndrome of too-titanic-to-let sink or penalize, that plagues us now.

What legislation did Congress enact based on your investigation?

None. The Justice Department had pulled the rug out from under the Judiciary Committee by promising that, thanks to its suit against ITT to create legal precedent, new legislation to curb corporate bigness wouldn’t be needed.

Have you published any other book on corporate or government misdeeds?

I have published “The Accurst Tower,” a novel based on my work with regulatory agencies, hoping to show that government regulation of industry is no substitute for natural regulation by free competition among companies not too big to fail.

Do you side with the Marchers Against Wall Street?

They’re not marching far enough. They rail against corporations too big, but never think to ask how they got that way. They’re demanding only monetary penalties against megabanks and reduction of giant bank accounts. But we know too well the government will protect those banks because they’re too big. So what’s the point of monetary penalties? The answer is to break them back into their premerger parts. Then competition would control them. That’s the message of “The Acquisitors.” I first heard it in Garrison Hall.

Providing a comprehensive analysis of a transformative era in pop music, Simpson describes how radio stations began to develop “formats” in order to cater to their target audiences. As industry professionals worked overtime to understand audiences and to generate formats, they also laid the groundwork for market segmentation. Audiences, meanwhile, approached these formats as safe havens where they could reimagine and redefine key issues of identity.

In his book, Simpson describes the era’s five prominent formats and analyzes each of these in relation to their targeted demographics, including Top 40, “soft rock,” album-oriented rock, soul and country. The book closes by making a case for the significance of early ’70s formatting in light of commercial radio today.

Simpson recently sat down with ShelfLife@Texas to talk about this time of transformation in commercial radio, his fascination with Billboard’s top music charts – and what’s next.

What motivated you to write Early ‘70s Radio?

First of all, I’ve been a pop music junkie as long as I can remember and keep updated Billboard chart reference books at my bedside. My wife can verify this. When my idea hatched sometime in the late 90s to explore this subject, I’d been keeping “factoid” notes on various hit songs – even the ones I hated. Once I’d gathered up notes about every Top 40 song in 1972, I realized there was much more going on during the much-maligned pop music era of the early 70s than mere silliness.

I had also made the discovery around the time that the radio pages of Billboard during the early ‘70s crackled with commentary and general unrest in a way you didn’t see in other eras. Researching Record World and Cash Box, the other two big music biz trades of the day, bore me out. I’d discovered that the early ‘70s represented a very distinct “moment” in both radio history and American culture that certainly deserved its own book.

How did you conduct the research for Early ‘70s Radio?

Because Billboard had such an impact on how I was now hearing the music of the era, I felt it was a good time for someone to incorporate the trades a bit more aggressively into pop music historiography. Their absence probably has to do with factors like their glaring business orientation, mistrust in the chart ranking process, and their unfashionable “top down” aura in a field more geared toward social history. Another definite factor is that they’re a real pain to find. I had to go to the Library of Congress to leaf through an uninterrupted early ‘70s run of Record World, and luckily the Dallas Public Library was one of few places that held Cash Box.

The ephemerality of so much music business source material can really be maddening, so I’m hoping that this book can demonstrate its usefulness, to some extent.

What’s next?

Something that requires more record listening, which is where the energy is for me. An encyclopedia-type companion guide to the hit songs of the early ‘70s would be the logical next step. This would allow me to take full advantage of all of my notes and geek out in a way I couldn’t really with “Early ‘70s Radio.” I could shine the spotlight on songs I love but didn’t talk about, like Liz Damon and the Orient Express’s “1900 Yesterday” and Sailcat’s “Motorcycle Mama.” Think anyone would buy it?

(From left) KUT's Rebecca McInroy, Jay Trachtenberg, and Kim Simpson at the Early '70s Radio "Views and Brews" event at the Cactus Cafe on October 24.

About the author: Kim Simpson is a radio show host for KUT’s Sunday Folkways. A critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and guitarist, Simpson taught university courses in pop music and published articles in American Music and Pop Matters. In 2007, he served as a consultant for the Peabody Award-winning rockabilly radio documentary “Whole Lotta Shakin’”. His 2009 CD Mystery Lights: Solo Guitar has appeared in national TV shows and commercials, and his song “Looking for That Girl” (credited to The Mad Dukes) charted in a number of radio trade papers in 2006. Simpson also works in the administration department in The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law. For more about his work, read his blog Boneyard Media.

American Studies Professor Julia Mickenberg will discuss her book “Tales for Little Rebels” on Sunday, Nov. 13 at 12:45 p.m., and on Monday, Nov. 14 at 12:45 p.m.

Synopsis: Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, 20th century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in power. “Tales for Little Rebels” collects 43 mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips, primers, and other texts for children that embody this radical tradition. These pieces reflect the concerns of  20th century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights, gender equality, environmental responsibility, and the dignity of labor. They also address the means of achieving these ideals, including taking collective action, developing critical thinking skills, and harnessing the liberating power of the imagination.

Sanford Levinson, professor of law, will discuss his book “Constitutional Faith” on Sunday, Nov. 18 at noon and 7:15 p.m., and on Monday, Nov. 19 at 12 p.m.

Synopsis: In this intriguing book, Levinson examines the history and the substance of our ‘civil religion’ of the Constitution. Echoes of this tradition are still heard in debates over whether the constitutional holy writ includes custom, secondary texts and history or is restricted to scriptural fundamentalism. Of equal age and intensity is the battle over the proper role of the priests. Is the Constitution what the Justices say it is or does it have a life of its own?

Interviews scheduled for broadcast the following weekend include:

· Steven Weinberg, professor in the departments of physics and astronomy, will discuss “Lake Views” on Sunday, Nov. 20 at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., and on Nov. 21 at 12 p.m.

· Lewis Gould, professor emeritus of history, will discuss “My Dearest Nellie” and “Theodore Roosevelt” on Sunday, Nov. 20 at 10:30 a.m., and on Nov. 21 at 12:30 p.m.

· Robert Auerbach, professor of public affairs, will discuss “Deception and Abuse at the Fed” on Nov. 20 at 10:40 a.m., and on Nov. 21 at 12:40 p.m.

A C-SPAN film crew interviewed the faculty members in the university’s Main Building on Oct. 24 following a weekend of covering the annual Texas Book Festival in Austin. Broadcast dates and times for the other faculty members interviewed for the C-SPAN2 Book TV program will be announced later.

The other faculty members are:

• Martha Menchaca, professor  in the Department of anthropology, discussing “Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants”
• James Galbraith, professor in the Department of Government and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, discussing “The Predator State”
• Jeremi Suri, professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, discussing “Liberty’s Surest Guardian”
• Ami Pedahzur, professor in the Departments of Government and Middle Eastern Studies, discussing “The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Toward Terrorism”
• Neil Foley, professor in the Departments of History and American Studies, discussing “Quest for Equality”

Sam

Luckily, the job has fallen to man of voracious intellectual curiosity, who has written widely on politics, literature and culture.  His 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and a new volume, The Death of Conservatism, is winning great acclaim.  UT Michener Center for Writers’ Director James Magnuson, who has invited Tanenhaus to campus to work with writers in the MFA program, calls him simply, “a person who knows everything about everything.”

That Tanenhaus produces remarkable prose and brilliant criticism of his own is even more impressive in light of the fact that the NYTBR receives as many as 1000 new books each week,  20 to 30 of which will get reviewed.  Deciding just who gets that coveted coverage involves a massive and highly subjective winnowing which he has overseen since 2004, when he took over as editor-in-chief after having been on its staff for several years, a former editor at Vanity Fair, and a long-time freelance journalist and author. Eight to ten pre-reviewers, each working in an area of specialization — literary or experimental fiction, poetry, economics, geopolitics, children’s literature, etc. — cull the hundreds down to perhaps a few dozen which are assigned to on-staff and outside reviewers who write what eventually appears in the Sunday section each week.

The Times has run a book review section since 1896, and while there are dozens of equally prestigious reviews in the United States alone today, it remains the gold standard. A bad review in its pages can be, for an emerging author especially, as useful as a rave:  It at least brings a book into the public eye, not an easy feat in an industry that cranks out millions of titles each year, 1 percent of which are ever reviewed anywhere.  The power of any criticism to make or break an author’s fortunes and to influence what the reading public buys means that Tanenhaus’s tastes and predilections are parsed endlessly for clues to a marketplace that has always been chimerical, but is now shape-shifting as quickly as the technology and socioeconomic forces that fuel it.

Sam Tanenhaus will share his unique perspective on the book world in a lecture, “Does the Novel Still Matter?” at 7:30 pm on Thursday, November 3, 2011 at Avaya Auditorium, ACE 2.302.  He’ll discuss the state of the novel today and the authority of the novelist in what he calls a “post-literary” culture. The lecture is sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers, where Tanenhaus is in residence to work with students in Stephen Harrigan’s “Long-Form Journalism” seminar, co-taught by Texas Monthly editor Jake Silverstein.  While on campus, he’ll also hold a seminar with Plan II Honors students, “Recognizing Good Writing:  A Critic’s Criteria.”

The auditorium is located on the southeast corner of 24^th and Speedway on campus.  Parking is available in the nearby San Jacinto Garage and the event is free to students and the public.