An architect argues to stay the wrecking ball and reuse older buildings, a historian recalls Martin Luther King Jr.’s timeless economic message, a master storyteller brings a new set of tales, an engineer conjures a children’s book with a robot’s-eye view of the deep ocean …

But hark! — yet more. Personal essays on nature spanning a biologist’s career, a best-selling author’s take on America’s unprecedented president, and a thoughtful book about books themselves, their past and their unwritten future. Plus jazz and classical recordings from faculty in the UW School of Music.

As the year comes to a close and festivities abound, some ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý faculty creations can make great gifts for the thinking Dawg on your giving list. Here’s a quick look at some gift-worthy books and music created by UW talents in the last year or so.

Michael Honey, “To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice.”

Fifty years have passed since King’s 1968 assassination. In a new book, Honey, a UW Tacoma historian, notes that economic justice and labor rights were always part of King’s progressive message. “He said in Memphis, ‘It’s a crime in a rich nation for people to receive starvation wages,’” Honey says. “That remains a basic issue right now across the country, where it seems like the economy is doing really well but there are millions of people in poverty.” Published by .

Dana Manalang, “.”

After years working on a cabled observatory that monitors the Pacific Northwest seafloor and water above, Manalang, an engineer with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory, decided to share the wonder of the deep sea with younger audiences. The result is this new children’s book published by Virginia-based , which combines images of the deep ocean captured during UW School of Oceanography research cruises with rhyming couplets and a cartoon robot illustrated by UW designer .

Charles Johnson, “.”

A prolific author and UW professor emeritus of English, Johnson spins a dozen yarns in this new story collection, from realism to light science fiction and beyond, laced gently with humor and philosophy. Calling him a “modern master,” Kirkus Reviews said his stories “can be as morally instructive as fables, as fancifully ingenious as Twilight Zone scripts, and as elegantly inscrutable as Zen riddles.” Asked how he knows when a story is done, Johnson said: “When I can’t add another line (or word) to it without disturbing the delicate balance of music and meaning, sound and sense that comes from relentless revisions.” Published by

Kathryn Rogers Merlino, “Building Reuse: Sustainability, Preservation, and the Value of Design”

Tearing down buildings and discarding the energy and materials embodied in them is contrary to the values of sustainability, writes Merlino, an associate professor of architecture in the UW College of Built Environments. We avidly recycle and compost, but have no cultural ethic about reusing our largest manufactured goods — our buildings. “We quickly demolish buildings in the name of new, ‘green’ structures, rather than looking for the possibilities of how we can work with what exists,” Merlino says. To me there is an inherent conflict in there, and I think we can do better.” Published by .

David Shields, “No One Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention.”

In his latest release, Shields, a UW professor of English and New York Times best-selling author, deconstructs the mind of the current president of the United States. The book, is “at once a psychological investigation of Trump, a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power,” publisher’s notes say, “and above all a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse — a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump.” He calls it “a manual for beating bullies.” Published by .

Kenneth Pyle: “”

After the United States ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it then conducted “the most intrusive international reconstruction of another nation in modern history,” writes Pyle, a UW professor emeritus of international studies. Only now, amid geopolitical changes of the 21st century, is Japan pulling free from American dominance and constraints placed on it after the war. The book, distilling a lifetime of research, examines how Japan, with its conservative heritage, responded to the imposition of a new liberal order and tracks the now-changing relationship between the two nations. Published by .

Amaranth Borsuk, “ ”

Borsuk, a UW Bothell assistant professor as well as a poet and book artist, explores the book, its past and possible futures in this compact volume. “Rather than bemoaning the death of books or creating a dichotomy between print and digital media,” she writes, “this guide points to continuities, positioning the book as a changing technology and highlighting the way artists in the 20th and 21st centuries have pushed us to rethink and redefine the term.” Published by

Jim Kenagy, “”

Kenagy, a professor emeritus of biology, presents a collection of 13 nature essays set in time across his life, from freshman field trips through his  dissertation and career at a major university. “These stories are not the scientific reports of a research professor, nor are they an attempt at popular science,” state publisher’s notes. “These are personal essays that spring forth from observation and discovery of what nature has to show anyone who is willing to pay attention.” Published by .

Pimone Triplett, “”

In her new book of poems, Triplett, a UW associate professor of English and creative writing, says she explores “the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled ‘supply chain’ that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and our age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world. Published by .

Multiple authors, “”

This reference book was first published in 1973 and became an instant classic for its innovative style and comprehensive illustrations. Now, botanists at the UW Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture have created this updated second edition, which includes the reclassification or renaming of about 40 percent of the taxa covered by the first edition. Published by .

And to accompany your reading, here are some recent recordings from faculty in the UW School of Music:

Cuong Vu 4-Tet, “”

The latest CD by Vu, trumpeter and UW Jazz Studies professor and chair — created with his “4-tet” — is landing on critics’ best-of lists for 2018. Guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Ted Poor, bassist Luke Bergman and Vu all contribute new music on this follow-up to the group’s 2017 album. A London Jazz News critic called the results “uniformly excellent.” Released by RareNoise Records.

Craig Sheppard, “” and “”

Sheppard, UW professor of music, released two CDs this year, documenting live performances at Meany Hall. For one, he presents the revised score of Bach’s master work, left incomplete upon the composer’s death. The other is a deluxe collection of Brahms’s four sets of lyrical piano miniatures,
Opus 116 through 119. Released by Romeo Records.

Michael Partington, “”

An artist in residence at the UW School of Music, Partington returns to the 19^th century repertoire that formed the basis of his early musical development in this collection, performed on a mid-1800s French Romantic guitar. Released by Rosewood Guitar.

What is a “book” in the digital age — and what will it become?

In a new book of her own, discusses the idea of “the book” through its incarnations as clay tablets, papyrus scrolls and the bound sheets of a on to the hyperlinked, multimedia format of the digital age.

Borsuk is an assistant professor in UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences and associate director of its . A poet and scholar whose work embraces both print and digital media, she is the author of several books of poetry, including a .

Her latest, “,” was published by MIT Press earlier in 2018.

“Rather than bemoaning the death of books or creating a dichotomy between print and digital media,” Borsuk writes in the introduction, “this guide points to continuities, positioning the book as a changing technology and highlighting the way artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries have pushed us to rethink and redefine the term.”

Borsuk answered a few questions about “The Book” — and the nature of the book in general — for UW News.

How did you come to write this book?

A.B.: It seems that each year a new article is published bemoaning the death of the book. Whether the National Endowment for the Art says people aren’t reading as much as they used to, or pundits are complaining that e-books can’t live up to the physical experience of holding a book in your hands, or readers are shocked to find libraries giving over shelf space to community rooms and public computers, we keep having the same conversation that says physical books are going to disappear.

I am immediately skeptical of dichotomies, and the idea that one must choose between print or digital reading devices suggested to me that there is a more nuanced perspective on what a book can be and do.

The was an ideal platform in which to explore these questions. It offers concise and accessible introductions to big topics in nicely-designed volumes, and it allowed me the freedom I needed to enter the conversation.

I come to this book as a scholar, poet and book artist, and I bring to it the perspective of a practitioner who has long been interested in the way a book’s form and content can be put into dialogue. In my creative work over the last decade I have been exploring books at the intersection of print and digital media. The pop-up book you mention above, “” (SpringGun Press, 2016), explores the relationship between these two surfaces we are told must be diametrically opposed. Created collaboratively with , the book contains geometric shapes that can only be deciphered when it is opened before a webcam, causing the poems to leap off the page like a virtual pop-up book.

I have continued to explore hybrid books using interactive technologies and physical media, collaborating on “,” an artist’s book with a free iPhone/iPad app, and “,” a book you read by gesturing over an infra-red controller.

What do you think the future holds for the physical book?

I think that physical books will not disappear any time soon because of their utility, affordability, and the ease with which they are transferred from person to person. They meet the needs of particular readers at particular moments, which is why different technologies of the book have had staying power historically.

I expect we will continue to see publishers differentiating print from e-book offerings by reveling in the material possibilities of the codex form (a stack of pages bound on one side and enclosed between covers, which is what most of us picture when someone says the word “book”) — books that are visually interesting, complex, colorful and worthy of space on the shelf. We’ll also see increased use of e-books for those volumes that don’t do much with their physical form, including romance novels, essay collections, and other works publishers can easily pour from one medium into another.

The book is such a malleable concept it can be difficult to define. So I undertook a project to collect answers to the question, “What is the/a book?” from contemporary artists, writers, scholars, publishers, and librarians. My hope is that these ideas, published at , might give us a better sense of what books can be and do in the twenty-first century.

You write, “Content does not simply necessitate its form, but rather writing develops alongside, influences, and is influenced by the technological supports that facilitate its distribution.” What would be an example or two of this?

An early example would be the development of clay tablets in Mesopotamia. Sumerians had already developed sophisticated techniques for working with their most readily available material, clay, for their houses and goods when they began to develop the earliest writing support around 3300 BCE, a clay ball with tokens inside whose shapes were pressed into the ball’s surface.

These receipts for livestock and other goods gradually lost their round shape as it became clear that the impressions themselves could stand in for the number of sheep or sheaves of grain that had been exchanged — and the tokens were no longer necessary.

Those indentations in clay eventually developed into writing, which was made possible by both the clay offered up at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (how Mesopotamia got its name) and the reeds that grew there in abundance, offering the first stylus that could be pressed into the tablet’s wet surface to create the wedge-shaped marks for which this early writing is named.

With an alphabet comes the ability to record poetry, song and narrative, like the , in addition to the more administrative documents for which these interfaces were developed. With the desire to write down stories comes the need for a labeling principle to help readers find the next tablet in a sequence, so a system for that had to be developed too.

We continue to see writing both influencing and being influenced by its medium of distribution, whether we are looking at an artist’s book in which the form and content are inextricable or at a comic book designed for iPads that takes advantage of the device’s tilting and movement to create a parallax effect, trigger sound, or otherwise animate the story.

What are your own reading habits? For a good pleasure read, do you reach for a Kindle or some dusty old tome?

I find myself reading both in print and electronically. On a practical level, I read a lot of contemporary poetry for pleasure, and those volumes still circulate primarily as slim paperbacks and handmade books (because the layout of the text is so important to a poem’s meaning), so I have a large collection of those. I read most of my novels in paperback as well.

But it really depends on the occasion. When I am doing research, I love spending time in special collections looking at hand-made books and the occasional “dusty tome,” as well as tracking down scholarly volumes in the stacks. I also use e-books and PDF articles, which allows me to access a wealth of knowledge that is easy to annotate, cite, and organize. I couldn’t do what I do without access to both print and digital media.

I have also been a longtime fan of audiobooks, thanks to my parents. As a commuter, I love to listen to short stories ( is the perfect length for my drive to Bothell.) And as a new parent, I’ve been grateful to find Seattle Public Libraries makes it easy to access both e-books and audiobooks through . I’m currently reading “” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

“The process of the book’s adaptation to its readers is not yet over,” you write. You add a hope that your book will “offer a path forward for those interested in shaping the book’s future.” Briefly put, what does that path look like to you?

My hope is that writers and publishers alike will remain attentive to the interface through which readers encounter their work. Rather than treating it as something transparent — what 20^th century typographer and calligrapher called a “crystal goblet” through which we can appreciate the appearance of the wine within — I expect they will approach both the printed book and the e-reader as interfaces that fundamentally influence the experience of reading.

The book will continue to mutate, and I think we can embrace its slipperiness.

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For more information, contact Borsuk at 425-352-5292 or aborsuk@uw.edu.

The conference, called “,” sponsored by the UW and organized by three UW Bothell faculty members, will explore the importance of creativity in activism. It will be held in the Petersen Room of Allen Library from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Then from 7 to 10 in the evening, many of those participating will convene in the Microsoft Auditorium at the for a free public performances of their poetry.

“Each of our selected performers has been inspired by — and deeply engaged with — the surge of public and digitally inflected social movements,” said co-organizer , assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences and interactive media design at UW Bothell and director of the .

Joining cárdenas in organizing the event are and , both also assistant professors of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at UW Bothell.

“Hashtags such as #Blacklivesmatter, #sayhername and #blacktranslivesmatter have become incantations — the poetic phrases that have helped mobilize social movements via social media and other digital networks, building new solidarities as they go,” said Borsuk.

“We are bringing together a unique group of poets who are also activists to reflect on this unprecedented historic moment, following up on the Jan. 21 marches, which numerous media outlets named as the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.”

Several local artists will join these conference participants for the evening performances at the library:

• , founder of the School of Our Lorde, an inter-generational multi-media education initiative
• , assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara
• , writer, performance artist, activist and UW doctoral student in gender, women and sexuality studies
• , assistant professor at New Mexico State University, editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol and publisher of Noemi Press
• , Arizona-based poet and recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship

The day’s discussions, cárdenas notes, are academic in nature, aimed at “advancing questions on a theoretical/aesthetic front,” and the evening’s performances are more geared toward a general audience — but press are welcome at both.

“Since Seattle’s role in both Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March has global significance,” cárdenas said, “we will be reflecting this back to earlier moments such as the WTO in 1999, in which Seattle was also at the center of global movements for social change.”

Co-organizer Dowling added, “We strive to bring these conversations to the larger Seattle community and celebrate the voices of poets who are fusing their practices of activism and poetry.”

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For more information, contact cárdenas at 425-352-5350 or michamc@uw.edu.