Enfilade

Sarah Bartmann is part of the story as recounted by Radke; from Simon & Schuster:

Heather Radke, Butts: A Backstory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1982135485, $29.

Whether we love them or hate them, think they’re sexy, think they’re strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman’s butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out.

Spanning nearly two centuries, this “whip-smart” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. Along the way, she meets evolutionary biologists who study how butts first developed; models whose measurements have defined jean sizing for millions of women; and the fitness gurus who created fads like “Buns of Steel.” She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, once known as the “Venus Hottentot,” Josephine Baker, Jennifer Lopez, and other women of color whose butts have been idolized, envied, and despised. Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.

Heather Radke is an essayist, journalist, and contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab, the Peabody Award­–winning program from WNYC. She has written for publications including The Believer, Longreads, and The Paris Review, and she teaches at Columbia University’s creative writing MFA Program. Before becoming a writer, Heather worked as a curator at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago.

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In her piece for The New York Times (28 November 2022), Marisa Meltzer narrates a visit to The Met with Radke to discuss the variety of bottoms—and attitudes toward them—across the history of art.

From the University of Hertfordshire Press:

Malcolm Thick, William Ellis: Eighteenth-Century Farmer, Journalist, and Entrepreneur (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2022), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1912260492, £17 / $34.

William Ellis, who lived and farmed at Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire in the first half of the eighteenth century (d. 1759), is an important figure in English agricultural history. In his time the most prolific writer on agriculture in England, he authored many works that were read not only at home but also in the American colonies and continental Europe. Ellis was essentially an agricultural journalist, then a relatively new occupation. He wrote about his own life as well as those of the ordinary people of Little Gaddesden and further afield—he travelled extensively throughout the southern half of England. Most of his copy was derived from conversations he had had with farmers, their wives, and other rural folk, the sheer immediacy of his books outshining those of his rivals.

Ellis’s style was discursive, particularly so in The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750). As well as providing a compendium of household management, cookery, and medicine, Ellis delighted in relaying gossip. He included the activities of farmers, wives and maids, labourers, travellers, and beggars, as well as the gentry and aristocracy, rich pickings for social historians.

Ellis also used his books to advertise his business as a supplier of agricultural instruments, seeds, plants, trees, and fowls—an innovative approach. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm visited Little Gaddesden in 1748 to inspect Ellis’s farming and the various farm implements he advertised for sale. The two men didn’t warm to each other, but Kalm’s independent observations add to what we know about Ellis.

Piecing together the scant facts about Ellis’s early life, Malcolm Thick has uncovered new information on his time before he commenced farming and unravelled some of the complexities of his two marriages. The book’s central focus is on Ellis’s agricultural writings, which provide a fascinating picture of rural life in the period and shed light on the evolution of English farming. This is the first book about Ellis for over sixty years and the first to consider him fully in the round—as a farmer, an active member of his community, an innovative salesman, and a wonderfully curious mind.

Malcolm Thick is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a winner of the Sophie Coe prize for food history writing. He has published books and papers on early modern gardening, food, and agriculture, including a critically acclaimed biography of the early scientist Sir Hugh Plat and a history of market gardening around London. He also wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ellis’s Country Housewife’s Family Companion and has contributed a chapter on “Plants as Staple Foods” in volume 3 of A Cultural History of Plants (Bloomsbury, 2022).

C O N T E N T S

1  Introduction
2  Life before Little Gaddesden and at Church Farm
3  Agriculture
4  Advertising and Trading
5  Food, Drink, and Medicine
6  Ellis the Man
7  Other Matters
8  Conclusion

From Fonthill Media:

Iain Gordon Brown, Auld Greekie: Edinburgh as the Athens of the North (Fonthill Media, 2022), 368 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1781558928, £30.

Around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially in the years between about 1810 and 1840, Edinburgh—long and affectionately known as ‘Auld Reekie’—came to think of itself and to be widely regarded as something else. The city became ‘Modern Athens’, an epithet later turned to ‘the Athens of the North’. The latter phrase is very well-known. It is also much used by those who have little understanding of the often confused and contradictory messages hidden within the apparent convenience of a trite or hackneyed term that actually conceals a myriad of nuanced meanings.

This book examines the circumstances underlying a remarkable change in perception of a place and an age. It looks in detail at the ‘when’, the ‘by whom’, the ‘why’, the ‘how’ and the ‘with what consequences’ (for good or ill) of this most interesting, and extremely complex, transformation of one city into an image—whether physical or spiritual, or both—of another. A very broad range of evidence is drawn upon, the story having not only topographical, artistic and architectural dimensions, but also social, cerebral and philosophical ones. Edinburgh may well have been considered, for one reason or another, as ‘Athenian’. But, in essence, it remained what it had always been. Maybe, however, for a brief period it was really a sort of hybrid city: ‘Auld Greekie’.

Iain Gordon Brown FSA FRSE, whose academic career began as a student of ancient history and classical archaeology, was principal curator of manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, where he is now honorary fellow. He has held the office of curator of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s national academy, and has also been president of the Old Edinburgh Club and a trustee of Edinburgh World Heritage. He is consultant to the Adam Drawings Project at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

Published by Zone Books and distributed by Princeton UP:

Anthony Cascardi, Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique (New York: Zone Books), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-1942130697, $40 / £30.

Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique probes the relationship between the enormous, extraordinary, and sometimes baffling body of Goya’s work and the interconnected issues of modernity, Enlightenment, and critique. Taking exception to conventional views that rely mainly on Goya’s darkest images to establish his relevance for modernity, Cascardi argues that the entirety of Goya’s work is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds, of which it nonetheless remains an integral part. The book reckons with the apparent gulf assumed to divide the Disasters of War and the so-called Black Paintings from Goya’s scenes of bourgeois life or from the well-mannered portraits of aristocrats, military men, and intellectuals. It shows how these apparent contradictions offer us a gateway into Goya’s critical practice vis-à-vis a European modernity typically associated with the Enlightenment values dominant in France, England, and Germany. In demonstrating Goya’s commitment to the project of critique, Cascardi provides an alternative to established readings of Goya’s work, which generally acknowledge the explicit social criticism evident in works such as the Caprichos but which have little to say about those works that do not openly take up social or political themes. In Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique, Cascardi shows how Goya was consistently engaged in a critical response to—and not just a representation of—the many different factors that are often invoked to explain his work, including history, politics, popular culture, religion, and the history of art itself.

Anthony J. Cascardi is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Consequences of Enlightenment; Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics; The Subject of Modernity; and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Secularization and the Aesthetics of Belief
2  A Promise of Happiness?
3  Goya, Modernity, Aesthetic Critique
4  The Limits of Representation
5  Conflicts of the Faculties: Goya and Kant
6  Extremities
7  Freedom and the Face of Darkness
8  Beauty and Sympathy

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Image Credits