Audi now employs two generations of Spocks as spokesmen and Axe body spray hawks a space voyage sweepstakes to hormonal jocks with tshe promise that chicks dig astronauts. Tired of ninjas, pirates, robots, and zombies, edgy advertisers appear to have set their fad-hungry gaze on space as the current (if not final) frontier of Awesome—the somewhat-undefinable quality that high-fives our inner ten year-old. And maybe an aging generation of underfunded aerospace engineers is wise to seize the moment as a bid for relevance; after all, it was the media-savvy Comic-Con set who pitched in last summer to buy up Nikola Tesla’s old lab and convert it into a museum, spurred on by a Kickstarter Project that cashed in on the late scientist’s re-branding as Awesome.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, to those of us who clicked on astronaut Chris Hadfield’s now-viral YouTube video of the song that he recorded in a space station, what followed was a surprise. A piano gently pined with seventh chords as we saw our slowly turning planet from orbit. Then, balding and with a speckled mustache, Hadfield appeared onscreen and sang in a boxy, thin warble, “Ground Control to Major Tom.” Hadfield’s zero-gravity performance of David Bowie’s classic “Space Oddity” appears to reach back to the lunar landing of 1969, but viewed from this moment of identity crisis in our culture’s own sense of “progress,” it does so with remarkably little preciousness or delusion. Hadfield manages to sing a wholly different relationship of humankind to its future than the Audis and Axes of the Internet would have us imagine.

The proto-glam original of “Space Oddity” may cast the singer as Major Tom, but David Bowie’s musical storyline has always been that of the alien. Hadfield stages none of Bowie’s dire theatrical camp and instead focuses on the humanness of his last five months aboard the International Space Station. The 46-year-old Canadian changes lyrics here and there, replacing the song’s inflections of sci-fi and tragedy with references to the ISS Soyuz’s hatch and a simple assurance that “our commander comes down back to Earth,” revealing that the banal factuality of space needs no dressing up to seem remarkable. When he sings, “I’m floating in a most peculiar way,” there’s no trace of druggy psychedelia because we literally see him floating, sans special effects. Up there, everything is a space oddity. Hadfield understands this and is keen to share it—as is clear in the video where he giddily demonstrates to a science class back on Earth what it’s like to wring out a wet towel in space.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Little wonders like this are easy to lose track of because the media, politics, and economics have rendered space no longer the promising future that it once seemed. In fact, I’d be far from the first to acknowledge that somewhere amid the oil crises of the 1970s, the end of the Cold War, and having crossed the symbolic finish line of the millennium, the very idea of the future lost its shine.

In January 1986, I sat before a big screen TV with 20 fellow first-graders to watch the Challenger launch. Our school had primed us with a tremendous lead up to the event as a matter of pride in Christa McAuliffe—a teacher from our own little state of New Hampshire. We’d built a papier mâché space shuttle and there was cake. We didn’t really understand what happened next, but we knew it wasn’t supposed to go that way. As for culture at large, cynicism descended fast. Keith LeBlanc’s 1986 single “Major Malfunction,” for example, lays down a metallic shuffle beat and samples Reagan’s assurance of “space pulling us into the future,” pitting it against repeated clip declaring “technology works” while its music video juxtaposes the Challenger explosion with mushroom clouds.

That day might not have been the singular end of western culture’s belief in space exploration as manifest destiny, a wide-eyed and righteous progression into the endless wonder of our own inevitable fulfillment. But it surely dealt a blow—especially because around that time my classmates and I started spending our lunch break huddled around the school’s first computer, which promised that the future lay more in the infinitesimal than in the infinite.

But if Chris Hadfield’s “Space Oddity” is too maturely earnest to be labeled as Awesome, then it’s also too forward-looking to hear as nostalgic or mourning. Musicians Joe Corcoran and Emm Gryner made the instrumental backing track glossy enough to seem sonically less like post-2000 rock (where pianos and strings aim for rugged indie authenticity above shininess), and more like the neo-symphonic scores of post-2000 videogames—seemingly the last corner of pop culture as-of-yet unconquered by Instagram retro aesthetics. Hadfield’s verse about returning to Earth is no less literal than his floating; he landed yesterday, but hints at the continuation of humankind’s explorations.

Remarkably, by recording this song in space, alone amid all the unglamorous gray stuff of functional technology, he has removed the sheen of the metaphorical and made it intensely personal. The song is no longer epic, and we should be glad because given the way “epic” has been fully conscripted as a synonym of Awesome in recent years, this allows us to strip space and the future of its needless and jokey faux-bigness. Instead, through this intensely personal reflection on real time spent in real space, Chris Hadley reminds us the future’s wonder can and will exceed the facile fuzziness of memory and the inarticulate thing we call “hope.” He reminds us that whatever lies ahead is not an awesome advertisement, a hipster wisecrack, or an historical eulogy; it’s there to grasp and feel in all its realness.

S. Alexander Reed is a professor and musician. He is the author of Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford University Press, June 2013).

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Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that the Eurovision Song Contest has a unique appeal. Although often seen as tacky, extravagant and occasionally politically controversial, that doesn’t stop around 125 million people around the world watching it each year! It has helped to launch careers, in the cases of ABBA and Bucks Fizz, as well as destroy them (cast your memories back to Jemini, aka ‘nul points’).

To celebrate the 58^th contest which takes place tomorrow night, we’ve put together a playlist of the best and worst entries in Eurovision history as well as some interesting (as well as bizarre) facts about the competition.

Fun facts about Eurovision

• The first Eurovision Song Contest took place in Switzerland, with only 7 countries competing.
• This year’s competition takes place in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. Did you know that Malmö’s football team, Malmö FF, is where footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović began his professional career?
• Ireland is the most successful country in the Contest, winning 7 times, 3 of which were in consecutive years (1992, 1993 and 1994).
• Portugal has competed since 1964 and is yet to finish in the top 5. The highest they have placed is 6^th, which was in 1996.
• Norway’s Alexander Rybak is the record-holder for the highest amount of points, scoring 387 in 2009. Closely followed by last year’s winner, Loreen from Sweden, who won with 372 points.
• The maximum duration of each performance is 3 minutes.
• A Eurovision song must always have vocals; purely instrumental music is not permitted.
• No live animals are allowed on stage during a performance.
• However, the costume options are pretty much limitless . . . . .

Annie Leyman is Marketing Executive for Music books at Oxford University Press.

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Image credits: (1) Photo of ABBA. By AVRO (FTA001019454_012 from Beeld & Geluid wiki) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons (2) Photo of Lordi performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin (http://nagi.ee/photos/sAgApO/824612/in-set/17031/) [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (3) Photo of Verka Serduchka performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (4) Photo of Jedward at ESC 2011. By Frédéric de Villamil (Flickr: DSC_9298) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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I recently travelled with the band Victoire for a brief residency at the music school of a large university. As well as performing a concert, we spoke to the music majors there on the topic of “alternative career paths” in classical music. By “alternative” I mean career paths other than playing in an orchestra or teaching at an academic institution. In our case, the musicians of Victoire all work predominantly in the performance and composition of contemporary classical music.

During the workshop one of the school’s composition students asked me how I approach playing the clarinet in Victoire differently from how I approach playing clarinet in Newspeak, another contemporary music ensemble I perform with and co-direct. It was a good question, and showed that the asker had done enough background research to know how much these two ensembles differ. It was the kind of question that might lead to long and interesting discussions. But it stumped me; I simply hadn’t thought about my playing in these terms before.

In some ways the question made no sense to me. All I could answer was, “I don’t.” As far as I was concerned my approach to these two projects was the same as my approach to any piece of music. I put the music on my stand, figure out the technical requirements and stylistic characteristics, and play it. Does that count as an approach? If so, I approach all music in the same way. Compare these two excerpts from Newspeak and Victoire:

Newspeak
B & E (with aggravated assault)
By Oscar Bettison
From the album sweet light crude

Listen to this track.

Victoire
Cathedral City
By Missy Mazzoli
From the album Cathedral City

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s true that these two excerpts sound different from one another. Oscar Bettison’s work is louder and more aggressive (as well as being played on bass clarinet). The Victoire track (written by Missy Mazzoli) is less accented, more mellifluous. But I don’t put on vastly different hats when I perform with these two groups. Over the next few weeks the question continued to bother me. Did I have different approaches? Should I have different approaches?

Perhaps, I thought, I would have answered differently if the question had mentioned projects I’ve worked on that were stylistically further from one of these excerpts — like playing works by Matthias Spahlinger with Wet Ink or Oliver Knussen with Signal Ensemble. If I moved between more widely separated styles — like classical music or jazz or Klezmer — then perhaps I would switch “approaches” between styles (a question I look forward to discussing with colleagues). Or perhaps it would have made more sense if I had been asked if I approach playing something older like Mozart differently to the more contemporary music I usually play. In that case, having considered the piece stylistically, I would try to use Mozart-appropriate timbres, phrasing and articulations. But it’s all the same process — choosing techniques and stylistic elements that are appropriate — that I would follow for any piece. The specifics of the end result are different, but it doesn’t seem like an entirely different approach.

Most musical instruments (and I might with bias say especially the clarinet) have the potential to make an enormously wide range of sounds. This is one of the underpinnings of the explosion of modern music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the classical tradition for various reasons — acoustic and aesthetic (enough for another post) — instrumentalists have tended to stay within a smaller range of possible sounds. However, from the 1950s onwards, composers and performers, perhaps spurred on by the infinite sonic possibilities of electronic music, experimented a lot more with sounds that in the past had been rejected as incorrect — so-called extended techniques: multiphonics, air sounds, squeaks, different articulations, etc. These days as a performer it is pretty much de rigueur to learn to use and control at least some of these extended techniques.

The compositional landscape we inhabit now is, happily, stylistically diverse, with composers taking inspiration from any and all past streams of classical music, as well as from other kinds of music and from pure sound. So instead of always having exactly the same set of tones and articulations, an instrumentalist might at times use not just “extended” techniques but timbres and techniques borrowed from other kinds of music or even other instruments.

The result is that one player can be equipped with a huge range of sound possibilities. Each piece, or situation, involves the choice of a range of sounds, like colors from a paintbox: for Mozart a particular sound world; for Spahlinger another; still others for Knussen or Mazzoli or Bettison. Of course there is almost always overlap, as many of the basic sounds and techniques will be the same. So, to answer the original question: instead of “approach” I would say that each piece has a different “palette” and within that are different techniques and timbres that are achieved in various ways (which is perhaps what the question was intended to be about). The important thing is to “approach” each piece as being open to a full range of possibilities, so that a piece by Lachenmann doesn’t necessarily have to sound like one by Mozart, or Mazzoli like Bettison.

Clarinetist Eileen Mack grew up in Australia and is now based in New York. She is a member of post-minimalist band Victoire and the amplified ensemble Newspeak (which she also co-directs), and has performed with many other New York new music groups including Wet Ink, Alarm Will Sound, Signal Ensemble, the Bang on a Can All Stars and the Wordless Music Orchestra.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Image credit: Clarinet. © THEPALMER via iStockphoto.

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When the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in 1956, the BBC was so late in entering that it missed the competition deadline, so it was first shown in my native England in 1957. Nonetheless, it seems as if this curious example of pan-European co-operation, which started with seven countries and is now up to 40, has been around forever. Certainly as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the contest created a degree of national fervour in Britain, and I suspect in most other parts of Europe. At its peak, it’s estimated to have drawn in around 600 million viewers worldwide.

The competition’s only seldom been part of the pop mainstream, and at the time when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were becoming world famous in the 1960s, Britain entered the bland sounds of Kathy Kirby and Matt Monroe instead. It took Britain’s first two wins, by Sandie Shaw in 1967 and Lulu in 1969 to bring about a convergence of pop culture and the more mainstream vocal entertainment of the contest. Meanwhile 1950s heart-throb and subsequent film-star Cliff Richard was controversially beaten into second place in 1968 with “Congratulations” — a song that has stood the test of time rather better than Spain’s winning “La La La,” (sung in Spanish by Massiel after the original Catalan entry by Joan Manuel Serrat was withdrawn by the Franco regime). Abba’s success with “Waterloo” in 1974 marks one of the few genuine moments when the contest reflected wider international taste. They aimed squarely at winning and did so, bringing their distinctive sound and utter professionalism to a vastly greater audience through their success in the competition. Some other acts were successfully launched on the world stage as a result of first being seen by an international audience during the finals, including early appearances by Julio Iglesias and Céline Dion.

Yet that is one of the reasons the contest is so fascinating. At a time when European monetary and political convergence is a burning question for governments, the Eurovision contest demonstrates just how varied approaches are to popular songs and entertainment across the continent, from Portugal to Azerbaijan, and from Norway to Israel. Dance moves, costumes, gestures, lyrics, and language convey insights into how other European countries go about the business of entertainment in a far more insightful way than almost any other television spectacular. Ukranian drag queen Verka Serduchka’s antics and lyrics upset Russia in 2007, but in 2006 Finnish heavy metal band Lordi took the world by storm in an over-the-top performance with latex masks, prosthetic beards and horns. Amazingly, they managed to convey rock and roll as a religion without alienating too many special interest groups.

Even back in the 1960s as we crouched round the flickering image of our black and white televisions, the voting system seemed arcane. It still does. The results can sometimes be skewed by blocs of countries who vote together for, one suspects, not entirely artistic reasons. Announced first in French and then English, the underdogs who only score “nil points” often become popular with the viewing audience for that very reason. Poor old Jemini gave the UK its first “nil points” in 2003, but in 1997 Portugal and Norway shared the ignominy of no votes at all, and in 1983 the same fate befell Turkey and Spain. Norway still holds the record for the greatest number of “nil points”. The term has entered the European vernacular, in many countries, describing a competitor who tries hard but with no hope of winning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So now this year’s contest is under way in Malmö, Sweden, what can we expect? The sheer number of competing countries now means two nights of semis before the final, which takes place this Saturday, 18 May 2013. The bookies are backing Denmark and Norway to triumph in this very Nordic contest, but I have a hunch that after Engelbert Humperdinck’s not entirely satisfactory entry last year, the Scandinavians will be given a run for their money by British entry Bonnie Tyler. A legend of 80s pop with her great hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Tyler is a Welsh singer who has the rare distinction of also topping the charts in France. She has also had hit records in Norway, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. When it comes to tactical voting, she’s potentially got a lot of different countries on her side! At least the title of her entry is a little more modest than Cliff Richard’s from 1968: it’s called “Believe In Me”.

Alyn Shipton is the author of Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter, to be published on July 18. He is also a critic for The Times in London and presents jazz programmes on BBC Radio.

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The build-up to the release of Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic, chromatic interpretation of The Great Gatsby was a wild ride for several of us who live and breathe F. Scott Fitzgerald daily. One minute you’re grading end-of-the semester papers, fighting the losing battle against the extinction of the apostrophe, the next you’re fielding phone calls from NPR or the Associated Press. The experience has been a whirlwind introduction to media relations. I’ve learned, for example, never to declare, “I’m a homer!” when asked my feelings about Fitzgerald over a static-crackling phone line. Mishearing will confuse even the best of reporters.

I’ll say unabashedly that the movie delighted me, as it did many scholars I admire, including such leading Fitzgerald folks as Jackson R. Bryer, James L. W. West III, and Anne Margaret Daniel, as well as my writer pal Therese Anne Fowler, author of the current bestseller Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Frankly, any flick that can make Rex Reed’s pacemaker misfire is aces by me. And while I appreciate the objections of The New Yorker and Salon, I honestly think a razzle-dazzle, Adderall-induced Gatsby is what we need at this moment in time—or maybe what I need after so many years now of struggling to persuade students and other resisting readers that Fitzgerald’s lapidary prose isn’t “boring.” For whatever credibility it might cost me, I’m genuinely less interested in what David Denby or Peter Travers think than in watching general audiences dress up as flappers, slip on 3D glasses, and “fangirl” on Tumblr and Facebook. After all, I’ve been “fanboying” since long before I ever presumed to understand the novel.

Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

That said, I was struck that, for all the familiar lines and symbols incorporated into Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s screenplay, how many of my personal moments didn’t end up on the screen. After returning from a late-night sneak preview, I sat out by my pool (which, unlike Gatsby’s, has no monogram at the bottom) and reread the book for the zillionth time. If nothing else, the resulting list shows how inexhaustibly intricate The Great Gatsby is.

10. The Dedication. By 1925, Fitzgerald had already dedicated his first short-story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), to his wife/muse, Zelda Sayre. Rather than simply repeat himself he crafted an elegantly metrical acknowledgment of her inspiration that has since become a poignant proclamation of how all roads in life led back to her: “Once Again to Zelda.” Gertrude Stein famously complimented the melody of the phrase, telling Fitzgerald, “[I]t shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort.” It’s since become one of the most quoted dedications in literature, providing Marlene Wagman-Geller a wonderful title for her 2008 study of “The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications.” I even borrowed the line for a recent reminiscence in The Southern Review on reading Nancy Milford’s biography Zelda in college.

9.  The “frosted wedding cake of the ceiling.” When we first see Carey Mulligan as Daisy it’s amid the whip-cracking flutter of curtains at the Buchanans’ East Egg estate. These “pale flags” nearly suffocate Nick Carraway and viewers alike for a few seconds, giving us a sense of what it’s like to be swathed suddenly in opulence. Yet I’ve always been struck more by Fitzgerald’s clever description of the trim and plaster in this “rosy-colored room” as a decorated cake, a metaphor that glides by as smoothly and effortlessly as a spatula stroke of icing. It’s indicative of how finely detailed and sculpted even passing details are. Weirdly enough, Ernest Hemingway would rip off this line in his least graceful novel, To Have and Have Not (1937).

8. Myrtle Wilson’s change, in a single chapter, from crêpe-de-chine to muslin to chiffon. In a book in which stacks of custom-made shirts can bring a woman to tears, every mention of fabric is a significant index of character texture. In Chapter II, Tom Buchanan’s mistress changes clothes three times in rapid succession as Fitzgerald dramatizes her hopelessly vulgar pretensions to style. From what I remember, Isla Fisher only sports two different outfits in her initial sequence with the adulterous Tom Buchanan, but the clothes are emphasized less than her Cupid’s bow lips and boop-boop-de-doop delivery (a slightly anachronistic nod to Betty Boop, who wasn’t born until 1930).

Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson, Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, Adelaide Clemens as Catherine, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Kate Mulvany as Mrs. McKee in The Great Gatsby.

7. Mr. McKee’s underwear. I burst out laughing when Eden Falk came on-screen with the silliest mustache this side of Matt Damon in True Grit. But the parvenu photographer Chester McKee is barely more than an extra in the movie and his most famous scene in the book is nowhere to be found. At the end of Chapter II, after an inebriated ellipsis, Nick discovers himself next to a bed where McKee is described as “sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.” And while “great portfolio” is not a euphemism, the sudden appearance of underoos has launched a thousand seminar and book-club debates about Nick’s sexual leanings.

6. That tear. The first Gatsby party Nick attends is a stylistic tour-de-force of style and technique, with Fitzgerald employing synesthesia and tense shifts to dramatize the sensory dissociation of a wild time. My absolute favorite passage in the “blue gardens” interlude concerns the drunken chorus girl who sings as the revelry gives way to sleepy exhaustion. The singer brings herself to tears, causing her mascara run in rivulets. “A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face,” Nick reports. Going into the movie, I was sure that staves and staffs would float off the 3D screen at me and that I would bathe in that tear. Alas.…

5. Gatsby’s guest list. Whole academic careers have been spent chasing down potential Long Island analogues for the social register Nick recites of “those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.” Luhrmann does give us a Clarence Endive, but I missed Dr. Webster Civet, Willie Voltaire, the Smirkes, the Scullys, and Edgar Beaver, for whom I’ve always felt a pang of empathy: “[His] hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no reason at all.”

4. The bad driver motif/Myrtle’s “left breast … swinging loose like a flap.” Cars abound in the movie; the driving-into-Manhattan scenes are so fast and furious I kept expecting Vin Diesel to squeal into the frame. But while Luhrmann includes the drunken fender bender at the end of Gatsby’s first party, we don’t get the motif of bad driving as a symbol for moral irresponsibility. This is largely because in the book it’s staged between Nick and Jordan Baker, whose romance is excised from the movie. (As Jordan says, “It takes two to make an accident,” so as long as she sticks around careful people her own carelessness isn’t dangerous.)

Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.

Myrtle Wilson’s hit-and-run demise, meanwhile, has always posed a potential tonal turn into Pure Corn. Neither Shelly Winters in 1949 nor Karen Black in 1974 pulled it off. (Winters mainly because of a risible special effect). While in recent years YouTube has hosted a bizarre string of dangerous reenactment videos—made, one assumes as high-school English class projects—no director is likely to visualize the most gruesome image in Gatsby. Myrtle’s nearly severed breast, which dangles like the amputated car wheel in the fender bender scene. The disfigurement is indicative of the Jazz Age’s morbid fascination with the damage automobiles and new machine technologies in general could inflict on a human body.

3. Wolfsheim (or Wolfshiem, depending on your preference) skipping Gatsby’s funeral. Among the most inventive of Luhrmann’s decisions is his casting of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, a gangster based on Arnold Rothstein (newly rediscovered thanks to Boardwalk Empire). The casting is a clever way to sidestep the charges of anti-Semitism that dog the character. But the new Gatsby leaves out the gangster’s weaselly explanation for missing his protégé/front’s funeral (“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it”). The movie also avoids one of the strangest literary coincidences ever by not showing the name of Wolfsheim’s business, “The Swastika Holding Company.” Fitzgerald apparently chose this ancient symbol without knowing Adolf Hitler had adopted it for the Nazi Party in 1920.

2. The unnamed obscenity. In the final two pages, as Fitzgerald builds up to his “boats against the current” climax, he shows Nick erasing a dirty word scrawled by a trespasser on Gatsby’s immaculate white steps. Had Hemingway written Gatsby we’d have known exactly what that word was. At the very least, we’d have had the f—ks and c—s—rs he was forced to put in their place. (And Scribner’s wouldn’t even let him get away with c—s—r.) In his worst alcoholic stupors Fitzgerald reportedly rained down F- and C-bombs like artillery shells. Part of his charm, however, is that in his writing he was averse even to “violent innuendo,” much less the “obstetrical conversation” of the meretricious young men at Gatsby’s parties. Erasing the word is Nick’s way of keeping even the detritus of Gatsby’s dream in the polished state of his naiveté.

1. Taking Ravenously, Taking Unscrupulously. In the novel, Fitzgerald breaks up the backstory of Daisy Fay and Jay Gatsby’s 1917 romance into at least three separate flashbacks. The middle one concerns the apotheosizing kiss by which the penniless soldier “wed[s] his unutterable visions to her perishable breath”—a long, intricate passage full of stars and flowers that I’ve seen grown men weep over when read aloud. Later, however, we discover a description of Gatsby first “taking” Daisy out of less noble intentions (“He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand”), implying the intriguing possibility that the transformative kiss occurs after their first sexual encounter.

“I wish we could just run away…” – Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan)

The chronology is vague, but the ambiguity reinforces a critical truism: The Great Gatsby isn’t a love story—it’s the story of American self-making. Yet Luhrmann depicts Gatsby as such a romantic naïf in his flashback scenes that true love seems his compelling motivation. Instead, for Fitzgerald, the romance merely validates his hero’s “Platonic conception of himself,” with Daisy a means to an end.

Luhrmann’s insistence that Gatsby is a “great, tragic love story”—a melodrama on the order of Gone With the Wind—is partly why he’s taking such a critical drubbing. But the paradoxes of Gatsby’s “colossal” delusion are probably too complex for a splashy movie, and I found the love story surprisingly affecting, especially the added moment when Daisy attempts to telephone Gatsby just as Wilson arrives to avenge Myrtle’s death. The scene made me empathize with Daisy emotionally rather than intellectualizing her predicament as the book leaves me to do. Maybe that’s the greatest benefit of pushing the romance angle: if a reinterpretation spares me from having to explain one more time why Jay Gatsby would fall for a ditzy “bitch goddess,” I’m down.

In the end, I’m glad we have a version that is controversial and divisive as opposed to the suffocating reverence of the 1974 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow snoozefest, which makes the Jazz Age seems about as fun and dangerous as a dinner with one’s parents. Perhaps I have low expectations for literature and reading at this point, but any version that stops audiences from using “dull” and The Great Gatsby in the same sentence is performing a public service for me. On my way out of the sneak preview I overheard an excited teenage girl declare, “I didn’t cry this much at the end of Titanic.”

Mission accomplished, Luhrmann. Mission accomplished.

Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at Troy University’s Montgomery, Alabama, campus, where Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in 1918. His publications include A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2004), the novels Breathing Out the Ghost (2008) and Dixie Noir (2009), and Brian Wilson (2012). He is currently at work on a reader’s guide to Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.

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Image credit: All images from thegreatgatsby.warnerbros.com. © 2013 Warner Bros. Ent. Used for the purposes of illustration.

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What is it about the sounds of baseball that make them musical, and so easily romanticized? In Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball, George Plimpton says that “Baseball has these absolutely unique sounds. The sounds of spring and summer….The sound of the ball against the bat is absolutely extraordinary. I don’t know any American male that doesn’t hear that in the springtime and get called back to some moment in the past.” These sounds are especially vivid in a game that’s often so quiet.

It’s been made the subject of numerous songs, many of which are collected and fully digitized in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Each song is freely available to the public to peruse and parody, including one of the most iconic American songs ever written, “Take me out to the ballgame,” written by Albert Von Tilzer, with lyrics by Jack Norworth. (I’ve been wondering lately if all of Norworth’s lyrics make him sound like a freeloader. He doesn’t pay for the game; he doesn’t pay for the concessions. Maybe the fact that he’d never been out to a ballgame when he wrote the song can be explained by the fact that no one wanted to take him.)

Baseball even gave us the first documented use of the word “jazz.” According to the OED, in 1912 a professional pitcher describing his curve ball was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.”

Despite its connections with the musical world, I have to admit now to a long-standing personal indifference towards the sport. My first-hand experience is limited to a third grade T-ball championship and some horrifying moments in co-ed little league. Baseball was never on TV at home when I grew up, and I’d become immediately bored if I even glanced at a game.

I’ve slowly come around to it (thanks in part to my boyfriend, who wrote the article on baseball songs linked above) to the point where I was comforting myself the day after the Boston Marathon bombing by watching the New York Yankees’ home game against the Arizona Diamondbacks on TV. As Plimpton said, the sounds of the game do bring me back to old memories of summer days (though I’m actually an American female, I think it still counts), and watching the game was having a calming effect on me.

After two and a half innings, the commentators told the audience at home that the song “Sweet Caroline” was going to be played in the stadium, and that they’d broadcast it for those watching at home.

I was moved: “Sweet Caroline” is a Boston song. I know next to nothing about baseball culture, but I learned that much from my two years living in Massachusetts. It’s been played at Red Sox games for years, despite the lyrics having no obvious connections to either sports or Boston.

A 2005 story in the Boston Globe traced the origins of the song’s  use there to Amy Tobey, who was in charge of picking the music that would play at Fenway Park from 1998–2004. She’d heard the song at other sporting events and decided to play it in Boston. It was very well-received. The song has been played in the eighth inning of every home game there since 2002; that’s more than 800 eighth-inning sing-alongs over the last decade.

Experience has taught me that, prior to the game on the 16th of April, singing “Sweet Caroline” in Yankee Stadium would probably earn you a few dirty looks, which must be difficult for all those Yankees fans who also happen to be Neil Diamond enthusiasts. So, taking advantage both of an opportunity to show that they were thinking of Boston’s residents and of the only chance they might ever have to yell “So good! So good!” in the stands at Yankee Stadium, the crowd looked like this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I found the gesture incredibly touching. When I described it to other people the next day, I remembered it being exclusively full of joyful, smiling singers-along. When I watch that video now, almost a month later, it feels a little more staid. Maybe a lot of people felt too sad about the attack to express support that way; maybe a lot of people just didn’t like singing. Maybe in my excitement at recognizing this sports-culture event as it was happening, I remembered it being a little more dramatic.

The crowd looked smaller than the reported attendance of 34,107, but there were still thousands of people for the camera operators to focus on. I wonder why they chose the ones they did, the fans who were in turn waving at the camera, leaning on each other, talking, slowly eating an ice cream bar without getting any on their beards, swaying, belting out the refrain, and then, quickly, getting back to the game. They didn’t even play the whole song. In short, it looked like any other baseball sing-along. But the good will coming out of my TV that night was palpable.

The soundtrack of baseball includes an outside score as well as the rhythms created by the game itself, and musical touchstones like “Sweet Caroline” are fascinating. The opening lyrics (“Where it began/I can’t begin to knowing/But then I know it’s growing strong”) might as well be pulled from quotes from the fans in the Boston Globe article about why they sing the song—as far as they knew, Boston fans sing it because they’ve always sung it, despite the fact that the tradition was only a few years old when that article was written.

But the message from the Yankees as they blared their rival’s anthem at home that night was clear to anyone tuned in to the game. And in a situation like the one that week, where it was easy to feel useless and helpless, that simple musical gesture was very deeply felt. The music of baseball is a part of it that even I can appreciate.

Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, including “Glissandos and glissandon’ts” and “Wedding Music”. You can read more about Albert Von Tilzer, Jack Norworth, and popular music in Grove Music Online.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Image credit: young baseball player hitting the ball. © Tomwang112 via iStockphoto.

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When did you first read Jekyll & Hyde?
Well, being Scottish I was brought up with an innate respect for Robert Louis Stevenson, but really fell in love with his books when I was about 17; Kidnapped and Catriona were my first reads. I was becoming really attracted to the romantic and gothic novels — The Mysteries of Udolpho for example — and so turned to Jekyll and Hyde feeling pretty confident of what to expect. It left me shocked. Being a novella it has the ability to really absorb you but with an economy of style and a necessity to get to the essence of the action that leaves you feeling slightly stunned. You are thoroughly immersed in the world and then spat out feeling dazed and, without sounding too melodramatic, grief-struck. I went straight back to the start and read it all again, desperate to re-visit the people and places, and seek to understand more of the hows and whys of Jekyll’s downfall.

Do you think gothic fiction translates naturally to stage adaptations?
There are definitely elements of gothic writing which lend themselves to a theatrical context; strong characterisations and the hugely atmospheric settings for a start. There is always a latent sense of danger too, whether that is danger from an outside source, or an inner conflict within our hero or heroine leading them into nail-biting situations. The fact that Jekyll and Hyde is a gripping thriller, full of suspense, certainly helps to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

Do you think it is possible to be completely good or evil? Is it as simple as Jekyll is the hero and Hyde is the villain?
No — is the simple answer! Stevenson puts man’s evil nature centre stage (excuse the pun) and not only that, he makes it flesh; gives that evil a face, a name, and even feelings. It is Hyde who weeps in fear of the gallows in his last few days, Poole the butler even feels pity, so is Stevenson asking us to feel pity for a murderer and abuser? It is a complex interpretation of the baser elements of man’s character — shocking even now. In making Jekyll such a flawed hero, Stevenson forces the reader to question the pillars of society. The letters after Jekyll’s name signal him as a man of the highest achievement and learning in British society and if those at the top can court their evil nature, encourage it, and let it loose on society, then whom can we trust? Stevenson digs deep into the most pressing fears of Victorian Britain and strips it of the facade of gentility. In many ways Jekyll is the villain for giving Hyde life and then shielding his deeds, Hyde is just being Hyde.

What do you think is Stevenson’s conclusion on the concept of good and evil?
Well I reckon Stevenson was a canny Scot and knew that a book too overtly controversial would end up banned and he wanted a bestseller. Of course there is the moral at the end, that man trying to play God and dabbling with evil can only lead to doom and great unhappiness. But he raises so many questions within the book that it is impossible to suggest where his sympathies lay. It would take a thesis to break down these arguments fully but I would tentatively suggest that Stevenson was trying to raise the lid on repressed feelings in a society where people cannot be self-expressed leading to internalisation, festering desires, and therefore greater moral depravity. Early on in Jekyll’s confession he states that his desire to be respected amongst his peers led him to hide his true nature; in essence and quite by accident he became innately a liar and a fraud in all his relations. Stevenson lays the blame at the feet of a society rigid in its conformity. I think it’s a call for change and a call to re-evaluate the nature of man and desire.

What are your thoughts on the physical representation of Hyde written by Stevenson, and how will it be portrayed in your adaptation?
Well, it is a tricky one as there have been so many interpretations of the story over the years. Particularly successful are the film adaptations as the outward transformation is a make-up artist’s and designer’s dream. But I think the challenge in production is to capture the inner essence of Hyde. Stevenson mentions physical traits such as ‘troglodytic’ and ‘deformed’ — although no-one can say quite what the physical deformity is — but what is more important to Stevenson is the feeling Hyde evokes in people. It is almost as if buried deep in our human nature we can sense evil, like a dog can smell fear. Also, Hyde walks the streets of London, he takes hansom-cabs, goes to the bank. (In today’s banking establishments one could argue he would fit right in!) The point is he is not so physically repugnant that he can’t function on a day-to day basis. Utterson summarises that it is the ‘radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through and transfigures its clay continent’ — so not too much of a challenge for the actor!

The novel is very descriptive of the Victorian era. How is this incorporated in your adaptation?
It is a brave picture of London that Stevenson paints: brave in that it is very unflattering. It is an isolated, overcrowded, seedy heart of the Empire; the great and the good living cheek-by-jowl with the lowest of the low. It is a dangerous London where a young man can lose himself in the dead of night; absently wandering abandoned streets. It is also a London that is a playground for Hyde to act out all his debased, violent impulses and as Jekyll describes, ‘Pleasures which…soon began to turn towards the monstrous’. So it is that dangerous London, a London that undercuts the Victorian image of middle-class pleasantry that I want to evoke. In a way London becomes a metaphor for Jekyll’s problem, how he wants to appear, and how he really is.

Creation Theatre’s new production of Jekyll and Hyde will be held in Blackwell’s Bookshop from 8 June-6 July 2013.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveler. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales is edited by Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London. Stevenson’s short novel, published in 1886, became an instant classic. It was a Gothic horror that originated in a feverish nightmare, whose hallucinatory setting in the murky back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Official poster for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ provided by Creation Theatre.

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The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opens in the United States tomorrow, and like Gatsby himself — as a new trailer reminds us — the novel is “guarding secrets.”

In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.

We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door.”

Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.” The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”

What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.

Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past. In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.

Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint. The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda — for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.

Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing in “The World’s Work” (June 1921 issue)

Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel, he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”

Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain — and more to the point — why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.

It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’ possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” (sic).

In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp. The novel reflects this moment — the moment Gatsby wants to recover, in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.” 

It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart “war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.

Will the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

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Image credit: Images one and three from The Great Gatsby movie copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment. Used for purposes of illustration. Image two from The World’s Work (The World’s Work (June 1921), p. 192) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Few composers embrace such a span of disciplines — musicological, philosophical, historical, political, philological — as Richard Wagner. To what extent does the wide-ranging, comprehensive nature of Wagner’s works militate against a true understanding of them? How close are we, in his bicentenary year, to an understanding that does them justice? The following illustrations from The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World demonstrate the variety of perspectives on Wagner, from outdated stereotypes to new reappraisals.

• Postcard showing the Red and White Lion

   

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  In which Wagner was born on 22 May 1813. Ironically the house was situated in the Jewish Quarter of the city. (Collection Tom Phillips)

• Christoph Marthaler’s Bayreuth production of Tristan und Isolde (2005)

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner1710enrico.jpg

  Emphasised the characters' chronic dysfunctionality, each occupying his or her own physical and emotional space. © Bayreuther Festpiele/Enrico Nawrath

• A postcard showing Tannhäuser’s face

   

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  Composed of the minstrel himself, Venus and her roseate attendants. (Collection Tom Phillips)

• Alberich’s theft of the gold (a scene from the Ring)

   

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  By Franz Heigel, 1865 – 66. © Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds, Munich

• Brünnhilde on her rock refuses to give up the ring

   

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  In spite of the pleading of her sister Valkyrie Waltraute. Drawing by Franz Stassen, c. 1910, © Private Collection, Munich

• The Ride of the Valkyries

   

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  By William T. Maud (1890). The trumpet is not authentic, but Wotan's two ravens, seen in the foreground, are.© Gavin Graham Gallery, London

• Wagner holds court at Wahnfried.

   

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  W. Beckmann's oil painting of 1882 imagines Cosima, Liszt and Wagner's disciple Hans von Wolzogen all appropriately enraptured by the Master's reading. © Richard Wagner Museum, Triebschen

• Portrait of Wagner

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner134tsb.jpg

  By Friedrich Pecht, a friend of the Paris years. The picture was painted c. 1864-65 for Ludwig II, whose bust is visible in the background, though a misunderstanding over the fee caused a political scandal. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• Viennese caricature

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner135tsb.jpg

  By Karl Klic (1873), turning the tables on Wagner and his anti-Semitism. © Ernst Kreowski and Eduard Fuchs, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur, Berlin, 1907

• One of a series of eight photographs of Wagner

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner139tsb.jpg

  Taken by the photographers Elliot & Fry on 24 May 1877, during his English visit that year. © Photo Elliot and Fry

• The sensual extravagance of the Magic Garden in Parsifal

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/agner158tsb.jpg

  As conceived by Paul von Joukowsky and executed by the Brückner brothers (1882), © Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn, Cologne

• ‘Frou-Frou Wagner’

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner13184.jpg

  From Der Floh, 24 June 1877. Caricature depicting Wagner acquiring pink satin by the yard and being shafted by the journalist Daniel Spitzer, who published the letters to his milliner. © Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna

Barry Millington is chief music critic for the London Evening Standard and the editor of The Wagner Journal. He has written and edited, or co-edited, seven books on Wagner, including The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World (2013), The Wagner Compendium (1992), The Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (1993), and the New Grove Guide to Wagner and his Operas (2006). In addition to his writing, he has also acted as dramaturgical adviser to several international music festivals.

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By Hal Gladfelder

The opening-night audience at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera—first performed on 29 January 1728 at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—can’t fully have known what sort of theatrical experience awaited them. The play’s title, for a start, must have struck them as nonsensical. What could a beggar have to do with an opera? To London audiences of the time, opera was a form of entertainment for the elite: prohibitively expensive to attend; composed and performed by foreign artists in a language, Italian, which few understood; musically and dramatically over-sophisticated and abstruse. Meanwhile, far from the heroic and mythic realms in which operas of the time were set, beggars belonged to the squalid realm of the modern city—especially, the megalopolis of London, with its poverty, violence, hubbub, and filth. To bring those realms together was absurd. Even Gay’s close friends Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve were unsure what he was up to, and uneasy as to how this “odd thing” The Beggar’s Opera would be received.

As things turned out, they needn’t have worried: Gay’s odd, hybrid work was to prove the hit not just of the year but of the century, running for a record-breaking sixty-two performances in its first season, and revived countless times since, including performances by a troupe of child actors, “The Lilliputians,” in season two. What drew audiences may at first have been the mere novelty of the piece, its incongruous mix of elements from disparate pre-existing forms, which is reflected in the name of the genre Gay had invented: the ballad opera. As Gay conceived it, the ballad opera alternates spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes, chiefly folk tunes or street ballads, but also songs stolen or parodied from other, current plays and operas. In formal terms, the ballad opera was the model for all those later works that combined spoken and sung elements: the German Singspiel, the Savoy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Broadway musical. But one of Gay’s cheekiest, and most commercially astute, moves was to use melodies his audience already knew and loved. Doing so not only saved him the expense of hiring a new composer but allowed playgoers the pleasures of the familiar. The music offset the harshness of the play’s satirical equation of high and low life, whereby the underworld of thieves and whores is just a mirror image of the elite world of politicians and courtiers, both of them run according to a system of mercenary betrayal. Building his story around some of the most popular tunes of the day, Gay created not only the first musical but the first jukebox musical: precursor, unlikely as it may seem, to such theatrical hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, and such television and film works as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen classic, Singin’ in the Rain, all of which reused songs that were already well known in other contexts.

A scene from The Beggar’s Opera painted by William Hogarth [public domain]

In such moments of cynicism and disquiet, The Beggar’s Opera exhibits affinities not only with the satire of Gay’s cronies Pope and Swift, but with the seeming misanthropic darkness of such later musicals as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (unsurprising, as this is an update of Gay’s work to reflect the social conditions of 1920s Berlin) and Stephen Sondheim’s bloody horror show Sweeney Todd. Sondheim’s musical might seem an extreme case of late twentieth-century angst, with its homicidal mayhem and cannibalism, and its vision of London as a hellish city of night. As he puts it in one number, “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it, / And its morals aren’t worth / What a pig could spit, / And it goes by the name of London.” But these darker elements were already vividly present in The Beggar’s Opera, set in the shadow of Newgate Prison. Gay, too, sees cannibalistic predation as integral to modern urban life: in the words of Lockit, Newgate’s jailor, “Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don’t live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks. —Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.” But it is not all darkness: in both plays, humor and especially music are sources of pleasure, by turns touching and exuberant. Sondheim has called Sweeney Todd a “love letter to London,” and Gay could have said the same of The Beggar’s Opera, with its comic vitality and anarchic spirit of fun.

Hal Gladfelder is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (2001) and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012), as well as the Broadview edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (2005) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (2013).

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: A scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Gooey chocolate and scoops of mouth-watering chocolate ice cream. Steaming hot golden French fries. Children see thousands of commercials each year designed to increase their desire for foods high in sugar, fat, and salt like those mentioned above. Yet, we know almost nothing about how this advertising onslaught might be affecting the brain.

A recent study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan, Oregon Research Institute, and Yale University starts to uncover how the brain responds to food commercials in teens. Thirty adolescents visited a lab to watch a typical television show that included commercial breaks composed of frequently advertised food (e.g., McDonald’s, Wendy’s) and non-food commercials (e.g., AT&T, Ford). But unlike a typical TV viewing experience, these participants had their brain response measured in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

While watching the food commercials, regions of the brain linked with reward, attention, and cognition were more active for all participants. After completing the fMRI scan, teens also remembered the food commercials better than the non-food commercials. Why does this matter? It appears that food advertisements (by far the most frequently marketed product to this age group) are better at getting into the mind and memory of kids. This makes sense because our brains are hard-wired to get excited in response to delicious foods. When these calorie-laden products are combined with $1 billion dollars’ worth of marketing by the food and beverage industry, it creates a potent combination.

Surprisingly, healthy-weight teens had greater brain activity in regions associated with reward and attention than obese adolescents. Why might this be? The study suggests that obese adolescents may have been trying to control their response to the food commercials, which might have altered the way their brain responded.

Yet, what happens after obese teens come into contact with more and more food cues later that day? Their self-control might decline in the face of an environment that pushes consumption of high-calorie foods. If a teen is stressed, hungry, or depressed, his or her willpower might be even more likely to falter. The healthy-weight adolescents might also be impacted by how their brain responds to food commercials, but the consequences might not be apparent immediately. A number of brain regions that were more responsive in the lean adolescents during the food commercials have been linked with future weight gain. It will be important to explore how brain responses to food marketing might be related to increased risk of obesity in the future.

This research highlights the possible ways that food advertising may affect younger generations. How do we prevent food advertisers from being the major driver of what our kids eat? We can rely solely on parents to police what teenagers buy or attempt to educate children about how advertising might impact them. We also may need to set guidelines that prevent marketers from aggressively targeting kids with commercials for unhealthy foods. The road ahead is not without challenges, but action must be taken to turn back the tide of childhood obesity.

Dr. Ashley N. Gearhardt is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on the overlap between addictive and eating behaviors, as well as the role of the environment in obesity. Gearhardt is a co-author of the study ‘Relation of Obesity to Neural Activation in Response to Food Commercials‘, which is published by the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) provides a home for the best human and animal research that uses neuroscience techniques to understand the social and emotional aspects of the human mind and human behavior.

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Image credit: French fries. By dja65, via iStockphoto

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To celebrate the release on this monumental album, Oxford Bibliographies has released an extensive bibliography on The Beatles with chapters on the early years of in Liverpool and Hamburg, Beatlemania, individual studies of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. In addition to the new bibliography article, Oxford Music Online has a comprehensive collection of articles on the fab four, with articles on each Beatles album. Each article talks about the history of the album, its creation and the impact it made on the music world. To celebrate Beatlemania, it’s now time for a quiz…

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

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On the fifth of May, many in the US and Mexico will celebrate Cinco de Mayo, the commemoration of Mexico’s victory over the French at the Battle of the Puebla in 1862. In this excerpt from Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, Jeffrey Pilcher looks at Cinco de Mayo and the first written instance of the word “taco.”

Although Manuel Payno introduced the taco to many readers in the 1890s, there was at least one prior literary reference to the snack, which likewise revealed ambiguities and social divisions within the national cuisine. This earlier mention, by another liberal author, Guillermo Prieto, came at a critical moment in Mexican history—the Cinco de Mayo victory at the Battle of Puebla by largely indigenous troops over the French invaders. But rather than exalting a national dish, Prieto used the taco to spoof the Europeans and bring them down to the level of Indians. Throughout the nineteenth century, elites perceived indigenous food as a shameful category within the national cuisine; such food was undoubtedly Mexican but associated with Aztec barbarism and backwardness. It was not a treasure to celebrate but rather a condition to overcome on the path to modernity. [...]

Tortillas and Tacos by Peggy Greb, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Good Forey!
You drank wine of the maguey
until you lost your head:
ate pipián and tamalli,
tlemolito with xumiles,
and tired yourself of mextlapiles
in your tacos of tlaxcalli.

In these brief verses, Prieto first spoofed the Frenchman for going native, getting drunk on pulque while eating tamales, pumpkin seed sauce (pipián), and, most degrading of all, stinkbugs (xumiles) in chile broth (tlemolito). Unspoken in the text, but obvious to contemporaries, was an equally cruel jibe at Almonte, the illegitimate son of a Native American woman, Brígida Almonte, and the priest and independence war hero Father José María Morelos. Although the conservative diplomat moved comfortably in European royal courts, speaking fluent English and French, Prieto dismissed him with racist stereotypes of the ancient Aztecs. As a final insult, the taco served to emasculate General Forey. The mextlapil on which he tired himself was a stone rolling pin, used to grind corn by hand for making tortillas (tlaxcalli), the most stereotypically feminine task in Mexican society and one that no self-respecting man would ever be seen undertaking. What may be the first recorded taco thus served as propaganda in the campaign to expel French invaders and restore the Mexican Republic. Yet Prieto was not celebrating the indigenous troops who had helped to defeat the French.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of several books including Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. He also edited the Oxford Handbook of Food History.

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The new television show Hannibal resurrects Thomas Harris’s famous serial killer and offers a few new surprises bound to shock both newcomers and longtime fans of Dr. Lecter. So while you’re catching up on the latest incarnation of the series, why not brush up on criminology facts or learn something new about cannibalism?

CRIMINAL PROFILING

How does Will Graham get inside the minds of serial killers?

Criminal Law: The Essentials
By Sue Titus Reid
This brief text will introduce you to the main issues and developments within the field.

Crime Profiles: The Anatomy of Dangerous Persons, Places, and Situations
By Terance D. Miethe, Richard C. McCorkle and Shelley J. Listwan
Learn more about the motivation and design of criminal acts.

Forensic Psychology: A Very Short Introduction
By David Canter
A thorough overview of the field of forensic psychology including a chapter dedicated to how to track down a criminal.

CRIMINAL LAW AND JUSTICE

Jack Crawford’s FBI team doesn’t have the best record for bringing in criminals alive, but what can they expect when brought to justice?

Criminal Law: The Essentials
By Sue Titus Reid
This brief text will introduce you to the main issues and developments within the field.

Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology
By Charles Patrick Ewing and Joseph T. McCann
A behind-the-scenes look into high profile cases with an emphasis on the testimonies of mental health professionals.

Criminal Law
By Sue Titus Reid
A broader overview of criminal law and justice through a modified case by case approach.

The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Criminal Justice
Edited by Michael Tonry
A guide to the American criminal justice system and essential to learn what happens next to the killers caught on the show.

Criminal Law
By Nicola Padfield
Review this concise volume on criminal law before the next big case.

PSYCHIATRY

Do you need to stay ahead of Dr. Lecter’s mind games with the latest developments in psychiatry?

Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction
By Tom Burns
Test your knowledge on this field and see if you can keep up with Dr. Lecter.

Psychiatry’s contract with society: Concepts, controversies, and consequences
Edited by Dinesh Bhugra, Amit Malik and George Ikkos
Read this to get a better handle on the complicated relationship between doctor and patient (luckily not as complicated as Graham and Lecter’s will be).

SERIAL KILLERS

Where did Thomas Harris get his inspiration from?

Gangsters, Swindlers, Killers, and Thieves: The Lives and Crimes of Fifty American Villains
Edited by Lawrence Block
Learn about the real villains that could have been the inspiration behind some of the characters on the show.

The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing
Edited by Rosemary Herbert
Review the entry on serial killers and mass murderers by Marion Swan to see how real life killers inspire our writers.

ANTHROPOPHAGY

How does human flesh taste?

The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy
By William Arens
No book list on Hannibal Lecter would be complete without a few reference books on cannibalism.

The Oxford Companion to the Body
Edited by Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett
The entry on cannibalism by W. Arens provides a historical perspective on the anthropophagic nature of ‘others’.

Now that you’re prepared, use your newfound knowledge to solve the next case before Will does!

Kimberly Hernandez is a social media intern at Oxford University Press.

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Image credit: All images from the Hannibal television series copyright NBC. Used for purposes of illustration.

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On 3 May 1913, Raja Harishchandra, the first Indian feature-length film, premiered. Since then, India’s film industry, mostly known as Bollywood but operating outside of Bollywood’s Mumbai base as well, has become the world’s most prolific film industry: 1,325 films were produced in 2008. Salman Rushdie recently said on The Daily Show with John Stewart, “I always thought it was unfair on the Bombay film industry to call it Bollywood. Because it’s actually much bigger than Hollywood. Hollywood should be called ‘Hombay’.”

For many, Indian cinema will call to mind elaborate melodramatic musicals and Shah Rukh Khan, but it is, like India, far more diverse. To celebrate the 100^th birthday of India’s remarkable cinematic world, take this quiz and test your knowledge!

All answers can be found in Oxford Reference, the home of Oxford’s reference publishing.

Alana Podolsky is a publicity assistant at Oxford University Press. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in South Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2011.

Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing, bringing together over 2 million entries, many of which are illustrated, into a single cross-searchable resource. With a fresh and modern look and feel, and specifically designed to meet the needs and expectations of reference users, Oxford Reference provides quality, up-to-date reference content at the click of a button. Made up of two main collections, both fully integrated and cross-searchable, Oxford Reference couples Oxford’s trusted A-Z reference material with an intuitive design to deliver a discoverable, up-to-date, and expanding reference resource.

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According to the Daily Mail, Oi! records were ‘evil’. According to the Socialist Worker, Oi! was a conduit for Nazism. According to the NME, Oi! was a means to inject ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes into popular music.

The year is 1981, and on 3 July the Harmbrough Tavern is set ablaze in the London borough of Southall. Trapped inside the pub are three bands aligned to the Oi! movement initiated the previous year from within the pages of the Sounds music weekly. Therein, by contrast, Oi! is defined as a form of ‘working-class protest’, a ‘loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. Oi!, for most of those involved with it, was punk without the art school pretensions; a street-level music that sought to align working-class youth cults in the face of welfare cuts and growing unemployment. And there lay the rub. For Oi! comprised skinheads; and by 1981, skinheads were being recruited as foot-soldiers for the British far right, both the National Front and the British Movement. An Oi! gig in Southall, therefore, where a large Asian community had previously felt the brunt of cowardly racist attacks and witnessed the violent aftermath of an NF election rally in 1979, was a red-rag to a community fed up with being on the defensive and ready to respond. And respond the community most certainly did.

Covers of the first four Oi! compilations, released 1980–2. Source: “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” by Matthew Worley in Twentieth Century British History

The events of July 1981 have forever tainted Oi! Caught in the reductionist media snare, Oi! fell into an equation the broadly read: Oi! = skinheads = racism. In truth, however, Oi! was a rather more complex phenomenon. Though its lyrics and imagery tended to combine social resentment and patriotism in a way that provided a potential pathway to and from the far right, Oi! also contained a class awareness and a cultural heritage that suggested it was far more than a musical wing of the NF or BM. Indeed, many involved in Oi! actively (and literally) fought back against right-wing attempts to appropriate their music, a struggle that led eventually to the NF setting up its on ‘white power’ scene circa 1983. Rather, Oi!’s focus and lyrical preoccupations reflected tensions inherent within the socio-economic and political realities of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Like the punk culture from which it emerged, Oi! provided a contested site of critical engagement that allowed voices rarely heard in public debate to articulate a protest that cut across existing notions of ‘left’, ‘right’ and formal political organisation. More specifically, it revealed and articulated processes of political and socio-cultural realignment directly relevant to the advent of Thatcherism and collapse of the so-called ‘consensus’ that informed British politics from 1945.

As this suggests, an analysis of the bands, audience and ephemera associated with Oi! reveals much about class identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a snapshot of working-class youth in a period of significant socio-economic change. Notably, too, the debates that surrounded Oi! were informed by realignments on-going within British politics, both in terms of youthful disengagement from the political mainstream and the ‘cultural turn’ generated by a growing emphasis on ‘new’ spheres of struggle (race, gender, sexuality, youth, culture, language, consumption). Put bluntly, the politics of class were being overtaken by what some on the left called a ‘consciousness of oppression’ located in personal identity. This, in turn, shifted attention from the socio-economic to the cultural and, in the process, served to scramble some of the class and racial certainties that had once underpinned the politics of left and right. As the left became associated with students and ‘minority groups’ that made headway on questions of race and identity, so sections of the far right set out to ensure that the ‘grass-roots movement of workers and leadership of the working class does not rest with the communists and left but with the right’. In amidst all this, Oi! was caught in the crossfire: a medium for working-class protest interpreted as a recruiting ground for fascism.

Oi! then was not a vehicle for ‘evil’, Nazism or any other sort of ‘ism’. Its protest was made in primarily class terms, with its working-class origins serving as a common denominator across those associated with it. True, politics – along with youth cultural identities and, on occasion, football rivalries – provided points of tension. But the bands, poets, writers and audience associated with Oi! forged a class-conscious version of punk that sought for a political and cultural impact that looked beyond the rarefied confines of the students’ union, Daily Mail and NME.

Matthew Worley is a professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books and articles on British politics, and is currently writing a study of British youth culture and politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His article “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” is available free in Twentieth Century British History for a limited time.

Twentieth Century British History covers the variety of British history in the twentieth century in all its aspects. It links the many different and specialized branches of historical scholarship with work in political science and related disciplines. The journal seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to foster the study of patterns of change and continuity across the twentieth century.

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Annette Funicello

The MMC premiered on 3 October 1955 on the ABC television network to coincide with the opening of Disneyland. MMC was Disney’s second venture in network television, the first being an anthology series, the short-lived Disneyland that later became Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.

MMC was essentially a variety show for children, complete with a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial, musical numbers performed by the Mouseketeers, and talent and comedy segments. The show aired five days a week in the afternoons and each day of the week had a different theme:

• Monday: Fun with Music.
• Tuesday: Guest Star.
• Wednesday: Anything Can Happen.
• Thursday: Circus.
• Friday: Talent Round-up.

One unique feature of the show was the Mouseketeer Roll Call, in which many (but not all) of that day’s line-up of regular performers would introduce themselves rhythmically by name to the television audience. In the serials, teens faced challenges in everyday situations, often overcome by their common sense or through recourse to the advice of respected elders.

Cast

Originally, Disney wanted “ordinary” kids on the show, but his idea was abandoned as the audition process began for the show in March 1955. Thirty-nine children were hired to become “Mouseketeers,” with nine becoming the “Red Team” which consisted of Funicello, Tommy Cole, Darlene Gillespie, Bobby Burgess, Doreen Tracey, Cubby O’Brien, Karen Pendleton, Lonnie Burr, and Sharon Baird. Cheryl Holdridge joined the team during the second season.

MMC was hosted by Jimmie Dodd, a songwriter and the “Head Mouseketeer”, who provided leadership both on and off screen. In addition to his other contributions, he often provided short segments encouraging young viewers to make the right moral choices. These little homilies became known as “Doddisms”.

Dodd composed and performed much of the music for the show, including the “Mickey Mouse March” that opened the show, as well as the slow “alma mater” version that closed each episode.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Roy Williams, a staff artist at Disney, also appeared in the show as the “Big Mouseketeer”. It was Williams who suggested that all characters on the show wear the Mickey Mouse ears (“Mouseke-ears”), which he helped create.

Annette Funicello

The “Mouseketeers” performed in a variety of musical and dance numbers on the show as well as some informational segments, but it was Annette Funicello who was Walt Disney’s favorite. Born on 22 October 1942 in Utica, New York, the family had moved to California when she was still young. Disney himself saw her performing the lead role in “Swan Lake” at her ballet school’s year-end recital in Burbank and decided to have her audition along with two hundred other children. Annette became the last Mouseketeer of the twenty-four that was picked.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Annette was the only Mouseketeer that Disney kept under exclusive contract. He personally managed aspects of her career, and created one of the show’s serials especially for her, a serial called “Annette.” Disney had plans for a film career for her and fashioned the serial to see if she was ready for film. The other popular serials on MMC, such as “The Adventures of Spin and Marty,” “Adventure in Dairyland,” and the “Hardy Boys Mysteries,” gave way to “Annette” which aired during the third season of the MMC and was the last serial broadcast on the show.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through Disney’s supervision, Annette appeared on other TV shows, notably, Danny Thomas’ Make Room for Daddy in 1958. Disney also featured her in several of his own productions like the TV series Zorro, and the films The Shaggy Dog and Babes in Toyland.

In the 1960s, Funicello went on to co-star with Frankie Avalon in many Bikini Beach movies through the American International studios. Disney gave his permission for her to appear in these movies as long as she wore a bathing suit that didn’t show her navel. She also made some popular records, notably the hit “Tall Paul” in 1959.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the 1980s, she became the celebrity spokesperson for Skippy Peanut Butter, appearing on many TV commercials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A MMC “Reunion Special” aired on NBC in 1980:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The original MMC aired from 1955 until it was cancelled in 1959. Other versions of the show aired later, like The New Mickey Mouse Club (1977-79), The All New Mickey Mouse Club (1989-1996) and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006 and current).

Dodd died in 1964 of cancer in Hawaii. Funicello died on 8 April 2013 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.

Now it’s time to say goodbye….
Why? Because we LIKE YOU!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

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There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Vikings who raided and then settled in England. The main documentary source for the period, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, simply tells us that Viking armies raided Britain’s coastline from the late eighth century. Raiding was followed by settlement, and by the 870s, the Vikings had established a territory in the north and east of the country which later became known as the ‘Danelaw’. Here, the Chronicle famously records, Scandinavian armies ‘shared out the land… and proceeded to plough and to support themselves’.

Despite over 50 years of research, many fundamental questions about the Scandinavian settlements remain unanswered: which areas of England saw the greatest settlement? How many settlers were there? Did they get on with the locals? Were they all men? Until recently, there was little in the physical record to provide answers. Archaeological traces of Scandinavian settlement were notably few: just a handful of Scandinavian-style burials and rural settlements have been found in England, for instance, while the Scandinavian contribution to urban development and certain strands of material culture, such as stone sculpture, remains elusive.

Within the last 20-25 years, this picture has changed dramatically. Thanks largely to metal-detecting, there has been an explosion of new finds of Viking-Age metalwork recovered from areas of known Scandinavian settlement. Surprisingly prominent within the new finds is female jewellery in Scandinavian styles: brooches and pendants worn by women in everyday dress. To date, over 500 such items have been found, scattered across large swathes of rural England.

The date of the jewellery chimes exactly with written accounts of the settlement (c. 870-950). Its careful study reveals that while some items were made locally after a Scandinavian fashion, others are likely to have been imported from the Scandinavian homelands, probably on the clothing of female settlers. Although Anglo-Saxon women also wore brooches, they were of a very different style to those favoured by Scandinavian women, so it’s clear that the new jewellery finds represent a distinctly ‘foreign’ dress element. The jewellery being unearthed in England is strikingly similar to that found in Scandinavia, particularly its southern regions: there are disc, trefoil, lozenge, oval, and bird shaped brooches decorated with animals and plants from the Scandinavian art styles of Borre, Jellinge, Mammen and Urnes. Encountering women on a walk around tenth-century Norfolk, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in Denmark.

Viking-Age Scandinavian-style brooches from England

The discovery of such artefacts is unexpected, not only because such jewellery was unknown in England a generation ago, but also because it helps to elucidate a population group with has, until now, been largely invisible. Faced with a dearth of both archaeological and written evidence for Scandinavian women in England, historians have tended to assume that settlement was carried out entirely by men, who took wives among the local population. The jewellery offers the first tangible archaeological evidence for a significant female Scandinavian population in Viking-Age England, potentially numbering in the thousands. In this way, it is revealing the presence of women we never expected to see.

Women were not merely participants in the settlement process; they were active agents in negotiating relationships with the existing, Anglo-Saxon population. Their jewellery became a platform for the expression of cultural values, usually in a way that maintained Scandinavian traditions. One observable trend is that female dress in the Danelaw preserved Scandinavian preferences for particular brooches long after they had fallen out of fashion in the homelands. This deliberately archaising suggests that articulating historical ties via jewellery was important in a new settlement context, when cultural memories were likely to be challenged. The fact that it was done through women’s dress highlights a role for women as bearers of cultural tradition in Danelaw society.

The jewellery also provides a fresh perspective on one of the most elusive of topics regarding the Viking settlements, namely, their location. We tend to think of Yorkshire and the north-east Midlands as Viking hotspots, due in part to the areas’ Scandinavian-style place-names and stone-sculpture (as well as the success of the Jorvik Viking centre). Yet female jewellery here is rare, being concentrated instead in rural Norfolk and Lincolnshire. These areas are not commonly associated with Viking activity, but it is clear that they were exposed to strong Scandinavian cultural influence, at least in terms of female dress. Of course, the distribution pattern has to be interpreted with care: jewellery is eminently portable, and levels of metal-detecting can vary from county to county. Nonetheless, it does seem that East Anglia and Lincolnshire were vibrant centres of Scandinavian culture in ninth- and tenth-century England, to an extent not previously recognised. Once again, the jewellery shines new light on this historically dark period of British history, revealing the presence of peoples in areas we never knew were there.

Jane Kershaw is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at University College London. Jane Kershaw is the author of Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (OUP, 2013).

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Image credit: Both images © Norfolk County Council; do not reproduce without permission.

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One of Mozart’s most enduringly popular operas, The Magic Flute has captivated audiences since its premiere in Vienna in 1791. Centered on the struggles of the heroic Prince Tamino, his beloved Pamina, and the wise Sarastro (with help and comic relief from the birdcatcher Papageno) against the Queen of the Night, we know The Magic Flute as a classic tale of the battle between good and evil, or perhaps between enlightenment and ignorance.

Mozart’s Autograph Manuscript of The Magic Flute

But it hasn’t always been that way. Depending on who we ask, and when we ask them, The Magic Flute might be a very different work. In might not involve the same characters, or it might be about a clichéd love triangle. Some of the music might be taken from other Mozart operas, or some of it might not even be by Mozart at all. We tend to assume that audiences in the past saw the “classic” operas just as we see them today, but for many years that was the exception rather than the rule. So how did we get from there to where we are now?

Schikanader in the role of Papageno. This image is from the front page of the original published libretto for the opera.

At that time, it was common to heavily adapt theatrical works to conform to their own dramatic standards, remaking older works into forms that audiences would easily understand and appreciate. As hard to imagine as it might be today, in an age when most theaters go out of their way to be as faithful as possible to the music and text of “classical” works, that tendency extended to Mozart’s works, including The Magic Flute. In fact, it actually wasn’t until the early 20th century, over a century after it was written, that The Magic Flute appeared in anything like its original version in Paris.

The first attempt to bring this work to Parisian audiences was in 1801, a decade after it was composed. Appreciation for Mozart’s music, and for Viennese classicism in general, was on the rise in France, and it seemed an opportune moment to begin exposing French audiences to his theatrical music. The many memorable tunes of The Magic Flute made it an ideal choice, but the plot, by Emanuel Schikaneder—who also owned the theater and played the first Papageno—was a bit more esoteric than the standard fare.

And so Les Mystères d’Isis (“The Mysteries of Isis”) was born. The original text was scrapped, although the new story did borrow a few characters and general concepts. Musically the adapters applied a lighter pen to the work; the point was bringing Mozart’s music to Paris, after all. Still, some music was cut, and some from Mozart’s other operas—still unknown in France at the time—was added in. Even odder, the work also contains some music by Haydn, another master of the Viennese classical tradition.

Title page of Les Mystères d’Isis.

Les Mystères was a modest hit, if not quite a blockbuster, and it was occasionally repeated until 1827. Over the next few decades the French mostly lost interest in The Magic Flute, preferring instead to hear adapted French (and occasionally Italian) versions of Mozart’s other operas, especially Don Giovanni, which was a Parisian favorite for most of the nineteenth century.

It wasn’t until 1865 that The Magic Flute reappeared (now called La Flûte enchantée), in a new version commissioned by the director Léon Carvalho, who was renowned as a “faithful and devoted restorer” of eighteenth-century operas, in one critic’s words. And, true enough, Mozart’s music was treated with obvious respect here—the composer was just too famous by the 1860s for any director to do otherwise. The extra music found in Les Mystères disappeared and the cuts to the score were restored.

Title page of the 1865 French version of The Magic Flute (piano/vocal score). Note that the name of the original librettist (Emanuel Schikaneder) is never mentioned, but the French translators are.

Yet the opera’s text was another matter entirely. Schikaneder’s name was nowhere to be found on the published title page (above), and the plot still had much more in common with nineteenth-century French operas than with his original text. The central drama was a love triangle between Tamino, now a humble fisherman/musician; Pamina, recast as the beautiful and chaste girl next door; and the seductive and magical Queen of the Night. (Echoes of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser are almost certainly intentional…)

Critics and audiences were wowed by this new translation. People unfamiliar with Schikaneder’s text assumed it was “authentic,” and those in the know claimed this “translation” was much better than the original, anyway. This version appeared again in 1875 again to great acclaim, but a third production in 1893 prompted more questions than cheers.

By the 1890s, a number of critics—including many of the most famous composers of the day, like Fauré, Dukas, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy—were calling loudly for more historically informed versions of earlier operas, including Mozart’s. Eventually they found a theater director who was clever or crazy enough to follow their suggestions: Albert Carré.

A front-page picture of Edmond Clément as Tamino in the 1909 Magic Flute production, taken from the French magazine Musica.

In 1909 Carré commissioned a new and highly publicized French translation of The Magic Flute that would bring the work as close as possible to the German original. And he more or less got what he asked for, which was both good and bad for his production. While those in favor of historically informed performances were thrilled, others were much less so. Some of the latter group were genuinely fond of the older version, and others found the original plot to be either ridiculous or simply unintelligible.

But as skeptical as some critics and listeners were about the “faithful” 1909 version, they mostly realized that historically informed performances of Mozart’s operas would soon become the new standard. In just over a century, audiences approached “classic” operas in a totally different way. Before, they had adapted older operas to their tastes; now they had learned to adapt themselves to these older works.

William Gibbons is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Texas Christian University. This blog post is derived from his recent Opera Quarterly article, “(De)Translating Mozart: The Magic Flute in 1909 Paris.” His book on this general topic, Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in Fin-de-siècle Paris, is forthcoming in June 2013.

Since its inception in 1983, The Opera Quarterly has earned the enthusiastic praise of opera lovers and scholars alike for its engagement within the field of opera studies. In 2005, David J. Levin, a dramaturg at various opera houses and critical theorist at the University of Chicago, assumed the executive editorship of The Opera Quarterly, with the goal of extending the journal’s reputation as a rigorous forum for all aspects of opera and operatic production.

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Image credit: all images courtesy of William Gibbons.

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Answers can be found by using a combination of the following resources:
(1) The Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) “10 interesting facts about Shakespeare” post
(2) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Shakespeare – free to view until 20 May 2013

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press. The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne, opening up exciting new possibilities for research and comparison. The collection is set to grow into a massive virtual library, ultimately including the entirety of Oxford’s distinguished list of authoritative scholarly editions.

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Journalists want to report the news not be the news. But in the case of Ann Curry, the former Today show co-host who was pushed into stepping down from the co-anchor slot last June, she has become the news. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s recent feature article about morning television and the toxic culture at NBC’s Today show provides more than enough information to conclude that Ann Curry was a target of workplace mobbing.

Whatever your personal opinions of Curry and her work, she was clearly mobbed out of her Today show job. Workplace mobbing is a process of humiliation and degradation of a targeted worker with the purpose of removing that worker from the workplace or at least from a particular unit of it. It is a dark side of organizational life, involves co-workers ganging up on the target, and includes management’s involvement through active participation in the mobbing or through failure to stop it once it becomes known to them. Mobbing in the workplace includes a characteristic course of events that were first described by Heinz Leymann, the psychiatrist who conceptualized the problem in the 1980s. Let’s look at what Stelter reports as having happened to Ann Curry through the framework of this pattern of events representative of workplace mobbing.

• Today was losing market share, critics were saying the show was stale and that there was no chemistry between the co-hosts Ann Curry and Matt Lauer. Understandably, management was concerned. Their solution, however, is a classic error of logical type. Blame an individual — in this case, Ann Curry — for what was obviously a much more systemic problem. (Precipitating event or situation)
• Once “the problem,” had been identified as Ann Curry, management’s next step, according to Stelter, was to mount a campaign to get rid of her and they even had a name for it, “Operation Bambi.” (Targeting of a worker for elimination and involvement of management or administration)
• Curry was subjected to a series of hostile, negative acts that by most people’s standards would be humiliating and hurtful. Stelter reports the making of a blooper reel that showed Curry’s worst on-air moments and blunders, the gathering of staff to watch a particular on-air gaffe and presumably to talk about it, the collection of boxes of Curry’s belongings in a closet as if she had already left, control room staff making fun of Curry’s clothing choices and “generally messing with her,” and the comparison of a yellow dress that she wore to Big Bird and photo shopping her head on to Big Bird’s image and then asking staff to vote on which one wore the yellow outfit best. (Unethical communication about the target and series of negative acts)
• Such negative acts, tailored to the particular work environment, are characteristic of workplace mobbing and serve several functions. They separate and exclude the target from the rest of the workplace, telegraph to other workers that the target is “damaged goods,” and encourage a general ganging up on the target. Once the target in a workplace mobbing has been cast as “other,” and as “less than” it’s much easier to further objectify that person and treat him or her callously. The negative acts can go on for months, as seems to be the case for Ann Curry, or even years as has been the case for others who have been mobbed in the workplace. It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate the human toll of psychological and physical suffering that such ongoing hostility and abuse causes. (Isolation and exclusion of the target, more ganging up, and resulting escalation of mobbing)
• On 28 June 2012, Ann Curry emotionally announced her departure from the Today show. It was clear to anyone watching her announcement that she was in pain and that she was not happy about leaving. The mobbing of Ann Curry was entirely successful. She was now gone from the Today show. Stelter notes that the executive producer led a group of Curry’s co-workers in a toast to her departure at a nearby restaurant only hours after her announcement that she was stepping down. Such cheering and celebrating after a successful workplace mobbing is common and fairly predictable. (Elimination from the workplace)

For most people who are victims of workplace mobbing, an unfortunate and common workplace event, the aftermath is difficult at best and disabling at worst. Income is lost, health and retirement benefits can be lost, reputation is damaged, professional identity is compromised as is the victim’s career trajectory, family and friendship relationships are strained, and the lingering traumatic effects of the interpersonal abuse and social exclusion at the heart of workplace mobbing can persist for a very long time. It is no surprise at all that Stelter reports Ann Curry as having described her experience as “professional torture.” Heinz Leymann called workplace mobbing “psychological terrorism.”

Ann Curry’s multi-million dollar salary may make the financial side of being a victim of workplace mobbing a lot easier for her than it is for most victims. I would assume, though, that her salary doesn’t ease the psychological and emotional pain she has had to endure and that is most likely her legacy from having been mobbed. While Ann Curry may not like the position of being the news, the story of how she was a victim of workplace mobbing is important. The stories of many others who have been victims of workplace mobbing but who are not public figures might more fully be understood through hers.

Maureen Duffy is a family therapist, educator, and consultant about workplace and school issues, including mobbing and bullying, and is the co-author of Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions and the forthcoming book, Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying. Read her previous blog posts “Seven ways schools and parents can mishandle reports of bullying” and “Excluded, suspended, required to withdraw.”

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The twenty-third of April 1564, or a day or two earlier, saw the birth of William Shakespeare, and on that same day fifty-two years later, also in Stratford, he died. This congruence of dates lends some credibility to the account given by the local vicar many years later of the way the playwright spent his final hours:

Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.

These fellow poet-playwrights were close members of Shakespeare’s social circle. Drayton is recorded receiving treatment in the medical diaries of Shakespeare’s son in law, Dr. Hall, and it was Ben Jonson who composed the leading epitaph on the ‘sweet swan of Avon’ for the complete edition of his plays. There is good reason, then, to imagine this company toasting Shakespeare’s fifty-second birthday on or around 23 April 1616.

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by John Faed

Pure talent will only take us so far as an explanation for this special position. Jonson was a great poet, but grumbled that ‘of all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds’. Professional writers of the age, popular or otherwise, suffered continually from a lack of money. Almost all had acute financial troubles and even successful playwrights such as Drayton or Jonson left no substantial wealth at the time of their death. The reason that Shakespeare would have been able to celebrate his fifty-second birthday in style (and leave a very substantial inheritance afterwards) can be traced to a decision that he had made twenty-four years earlier.

Unlike any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare had invested in London’s public theatre. In an age before copyright, this was arguably the smartest financial decision that an artist had ever made. In the summer of 1594 (already established as a famous poet) he had bought a one-eighth share in a company of actors, becoming a Fellow in the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He became a joint decision maker at their meetings and a joint owner of their costumes, performance properties, and plays. Before this time Shakespeare (like Drayton or Jonson) had pitched his plays to multiple acting companies, getting a fixed fee when he made a sale. Afterwards, as a shareholder, he had a continuing income from the performance receipts of his plays and those of others. No literary playwright had ever been in this position. Though Shakespeare must have laid down the equivalent of around a year’s income to make this investment (probably through borrowing), it very quickly made him very rich.

Prior to 1594 there are indications that Shakespeare’s family were suffering from financial problems; there are certainly no signs of growing wealth. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, however, proved a successful venture, growing with speed into the nation’s dominant acting company. The profits from gate receipts and court payments were distributed among the eight sharers, performers who employed hired actors and hired playwrights at fixed rates. All of the founding sharers became wealthy and the great house at which the playwright died in 1616 was one early reward of the decision that Shakespeare made. This mansion (with ten fireplaces, the second largest house in Stratford) was bought for cash in 1597. Shakespeare carried out substantial renovations and had resources enough to extend the garden, buying extra land and demolishing a cottage to get this done. The year after he still had spare money for other investments, including a stock of malt. From 1594 onwards there is a steady record of Shakespeare’s ever-growing prosperity.  Indeed, within two years of becoming a sharer, he had begun the expensive business of procuring a gentleman’s coat of arms.

The contrast between Shakespeare’s wealth and that of those who might have joined him for his birthday party remains oddly under-reported. In 1600—as Shakespeare continued to acquire land, tithes, and additional property (including a 10% stake in the Globe)—Jonson was imprisoned for debt. Debtor’s jail was a common abode for the playwrighting profession: Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton, to name but some, suffered the same fate. While it’s tempting to conclude that Shakespeare’s financial pre-eminence is simply justice (reflecting his superior talent) there is case for thinking of matters the other way round. His position as a shareholder also brought special artistic privileges. After 1594 (unlike his contemporaries) Shakespeare wrote for one company and without immediate financial pressure; he could specify the actors who would perform the roles he created; and he had a long-term stake in the life of his plays on the stage.

If Shakespeare did toast his birthday with Jonson and Drayton on 23 April 1616 he did so from a privileged position. Above all else, he had the year 1594 to thank for that. He could look out over what was now known as ‘the Great Garden’ of New Place, the owner of other property, including a residence in the exclusive Blackfriars district of London. Reason enough to hold a ‘merry meeting’ and ‘drink deep’.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, John Faed [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Every year, around mid-April, music lovers await the news that the BBC proms schedule has been announced. We look forward to the old favourites, the new commissions, the excited atmosphere, and some of the best performers in the world. When summer arrives, scores of people—young and old alike—travel to London to visit the Royal Albert Hall and be part of this great British tradition.

Since 1895 the Proms have been running once a year with around 70 concerts per season. One of the great aspects of the Proms is the perfect juxtaposition of old and new repertoire; you could go to a baroque vocal recital, followed by a Wagner opera, and then end with some jazz. This is the magic of the Proms; it is this variety that keeps a loyal audience returning year after year.

As always, a selection of Oxford University Press titles will be performed, and the pieces selected are a microcosm of the Proms calendar as a whole. Prom 16 will include William Walton’s Death of Falstaff and Touch her soft lips, and part from his Henry V suite while excerpts from his Battle of Britain suite will be performed at Prom 65, the ‘Film Music Prom’.

By contrast, there is Gerald Barry’s No other people in the late night Prom 50. Originally performed in 2009 in Dublin, this will be its UK premiere, a contemporary work for a twenty-first century audience.

At this quintessentially British festival, Vaughan Williams is always a popular choice. Prom 71 includes the premiere of a new arrangement by Anthony Payne of Vaughan Williams’ Four Last Songs, a BBC commission, breathing new life into already established repertoire. The Last Night of the Proms, one of the most exciting evenings in classical music, will feature Nigel Kennedy playing the sublime Lark Ascending, arguably one of the most loved pieces of repertoire in Britain.

To get you in the mood, here’s a playlist of some of the pieces that we’re looking forward to hearing:

Lucy Allen is the Print and Web Marketing Assistant in Sheet Music at Oxford University Press.

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15 April 2013 marked the fifth Jackie Robinson Day, commemorating the 66th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, an event which broke baseball’s racial barrier. In each game that is now played on 15 April, all players wear Jackie Robinson’s iconic #42 (also the title of a new film on Robinson). Thirty years ago, historian and ardent baseball fan Jules Tygiel proposed the first scholarly study of integration in baseball, shepherded by esteemed Oxford editor, Sheldon Meyer. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy was first published in 1983, and its 25th Anniversary was celebrated with a new edition in 2008. Though Dr. Tygiel passed away in 2008, this extract from his Afterword demonstrates our ongoing captivation with the Jackie Robinson story.

One of the more surprising elements of the recent lionization of Jackie Robinson has been the relative diminution of Branch Rickey in the saga. In the early retellings of the story, Rickey, not Robinson, played the dominant role. The flamboyant and publicity-savvy Dodger president, after all, had set the project in motion, bucking not just history but a hostile group of fellow owners. Rickey had scouted the Negro Leagues and Caribbean baseball, discovered and selected Robinson, and meticulously planned the strategies necessary to make his “great experiment” a success. Rickey had also, in many respects, shaped the prevailing master narrative of the path to integration: his dramatic 1945 meeting with Robinson; the restrictions placed on Robinson’s behavior; the suppression of the 1947 player revolt; and the 1949 liberation of Robinson allowing him to strike back at his tormentors. Although commentators constantly debated and questioned Rickey’s true motivations, in many accounts Robinson appeared as a puppet, with Rickey pulling the strings.

The image of a white, paternalistic Rickey masterminding the integration process and in Lincolnesque fashion emancipating black ballplayers fit well with the postwar liberal ethos. The rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1950s and 1960s, however, called for a Robinson who was less a martyr to a cause and more an active agent of change. I attempted to present the two more as partners in the endeavor, but as the story unfolded, it was Robinson, the dynamic, compelling man on the field who seized center stage, while Rickey, who left the Dodgers after the 1950 season, faded into the background.

Jackie Robinson swinging a bat in Dodgers uniform, 1954. Photo by Bob Sandberg. Published in LOOK, v. 19, no. 4, 1955 Feb. 22, p. 78.United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division.

Current literature reveals a similar trend. While studies of Robinson proliferate, volumes on Rickey, who even without the Robinson story would still be the most significant baseball executive of the twentieth century, have been rare. Murray Polner’s Branch Rickey: A Biography appeared at about the same time as Baseball’s Great Experiment. Not until 2007, when Lee Lowenfish’s authoritative Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman was published, did another Rickey biography appear. Lowenfish reminds us of the strong religious underpinnings for Rickey’s actions. He criticizes those who question Rickey’s motives as guilty of “erroneous simplification,” arguing that “by ridiculing Rickey’s pontificating style, the impatient ideologues have ignored his moral substance and the genuine paternal relationship he built with Robinson the athlete and family man.” But Lowenfish does not substantially revise the standard long-accepted storyline presented in Baseball’s Great Experiment and other works.

Several historians, however, have contributed a handful of additional insights into Rickey’s thinking that alter my original portrayal. John Thorn discovered a cache of photographs of Robinson taken by a Look photographer in 1945. This led John and me to revisit several documents in the Arthur Mann Papers and to conclude that Rickey’s original idea was not to announce the signing of just Robinson in October 1945 but several Negro League players at once. Political pressures forced Rickey to abandon this strategy and focused attention on Robinson alone as the standard-bearer of the campaign. Neil Lanctot has also shattered the longstanding myth that the United States League (USL), a new Negro League that took the field in 1945, was created largely as a smokescreen for Rickey’s integration initiative. Rickey, he shows, played a minimal role in the conception or operations of the USL. In a review of Baseball’s Great Experiment, Ron Story suggested that my analysis of Rickey’s actions had underplayed his lifelong pursuit of cheap labor, as embodied in his creation of the farm system, in analyzing his decision to sign black players. Following this lead, I addressed this aspect of Rickey’s career in a chapter in Past Time: Baseball As History, published in 2000.

If Rickey, however, has inspired relatively little new research, Robinson remains a popular subject. Thanks to several biographical studies, most notably, Arnold Rampersad’s magisterial Jackie Robinson: A Life, we have a more fully developed portrait of Robinson’s upbringing and his often controversial postbaseball experiences as businessman, civil rights leader, and political activist. Family memoirs by his wife, Rachel, and daughter, Sharon, have, along with Rampersad’s book, also offered a deeper perspective into Robinson’s personal life. In the quest for fresh things to say about Robinson’s baseball career, historians and journalists have begun to deconstruct it in minute detail. Thus we now have books focusing on Robinson’s first spring training in Florida in 1946 and his 1947 rookie season. Can studies of his 1949 Most Valuable Player year or his personal role in the 1951 heartbreak (both of which could actually be wonderful reads) be far behind?

Jules Tygiel, a native of Brooklyn, was Professor of History at San Francisco State University and founder of the Pacific Ghost League. He is the author of Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy and The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties. In this gripping account of one of the most important steps in the history of American desegregation, Jules Tygiel tells the story of Jackie Robinson’s crossing of baseball’s color line. Examining the social and historical context of Robinson’s introduction into white organized baseball, both on and off the field, Tygiel also tells the often neglected stories of other African-American players–such as Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron–who helped transform our national pastime into an integrated game.

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Pull on your lycra, tie up your shoelaces, pin your number on your vest, and join us as we run the Virgin London Marathon in blog form. While police and security have been stepping up after Boston, we have been trawling Oxford University Press’s online resources in order to bring you 26 miles and 375 yards of marathon goodness. Get ready to take your place on the starting line.

The reason that you’re about to run a heart-bursting 26 miles is the Greek legend of Phidippides, a soldier and messenger who ran from the Battle of Marathon to relay news of the Athenian triumph over the more numerous and powerful Persians. After he had passed on the message, Phidippides collapsed and died of exhaustion. In order to avoid the same sticky demise as Phidippides, it’s best that you do some running in preparation for your big day.

It’s not just about physical preparation though. You may have done exercises that grouped together would rival Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, but you need to be mentally strong too. Segmenting is a technique athletes use in order to make a long event less overwhelming. They might break a marathon up into mile-long segments, or set a goal for a certain part of the course, rather than think of the marathon in its entirety. This might have been useful for Jo Brand who said in 2005: “I’ve set myself a target. I’m going for less than eleven-and-a-half days.”

Eat healthy

Are carbs your best friend? No? Well it’s best to get acquainted and fast! Carbohydrate loading is a procedure followed by some athletes to raise the glycogen content of skeletal muscle artificially by following a special diet, usually combined with a special exercise regime. For a marathon runner, the procedure starts seven days before a race when the athlete depletes the muscle of glycogen by running a long distance, usually about 32 km (20 miles). For the next three days, the athlete eats a high protein, low carbohydrate diet, and continues exercising to ensure glycogen depletion and sensitization of the physiological processes that manufacture and store glycogen. For the final three days before the race, the athlete eats a high carbohydrate diet, and takes little or no exercise.

On the starting line

It is thanks to Christopher Brasher and John Disley that there is a starting line at all, as the pair organised the first London marathon in 1981 after running the New York marathon together in 1979. As Chris Brasher’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography explains:

“He was impressed with the scale of the race, and with the fact that it welcomed runners of all abilities, ages, and backgrounds, thus diluting the marathon’s élite sporting reputation and making it a civic, multicultural occasion. Returning to London, he wondered in his column in The Observer ‘whether London could stage such a festival.’”

London certainly could stage such a festival, and in 1981 thousands of people lined London’s streets to watch 6,255 runners finish the race. Since then the marathon has grown dramatically, with hundreds of thousands of people expected to watch over 35,000 runners take part in the race this year.

Now it’s your turn. You’re on the line and your knees are shaking. It’s time to channel the past greats of Marathon running to gain some much needed inspiration. Violet Piercy was a symbol of strength between 1926 and 1938 as the first British female long-distance runner. She ran long distances “to prove that a woman’s stamina can be just as remarkable as a man’s,” (South London Press, 2 April 1935), and is often credited as the inspirational figure behind modern female long-distance runners.

Or maybe it’s the modern greats of running that you need to draw inspiration from to stop your shaking legs? Almost as if they are acting on their own accord, your hands rise above your head and form a tea-pot-esque symbol. People are giving you strange looks but you don’t care, you’re doing the “Mo-bot” as you try to draw strength from British Olympic hero Mo Farah.

Running the marathon

London is a beautiful place to run and the many historical landmarks around the city punctuate your brave endeavour, providing some respite to that painful burning sensation in your legs. It’s akin to a touristy bus tour of London — without the bus — and you pass buildings such as Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as 10 Downing Street — home of Prime Minister David Cameron — and 30 St Mary’s Axe (also commonly referred to as the ‘Gherkin’), designed by the architect Norman Foster.

It’s not just the buildings that you should be paying attention to as you run. If you’re really fast, then you’ll be jostling for position with Paula Radcliffe, winner of the Women’s London Marathon in 2002, or Baroness Grey-Thompson, winner of the Women’s Paralympic London Marathon in 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2002. However, it’s more likely you’ll be rubbing shoulders with a number of the ‘Mass Start’ celebrities who frequently run the London Marathon such as the former Lord Mayor of London Nicholas Anstee, the cricket legend Sir Ian Botham, and the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

Nearing the end

But you’re not finished yet! You’ve heard rumours but didn’t believe it could be true; the mythical beast known only as ‘the wall’. It normally affects runners around the 20 mile mark but when Jade Goody ran the Virgin London Marathon in 2006, it hit her around the 10 mile mark, and she subsequently dropped out. But it’s not just ‘the wall’ that affects marathon runners. You need to take on water as you go around the course but did you know you can actually drink too much water? A condition known as hyponatremia affects runners who lose salt through sweat but drink too much water to counteract this. Assuming you’ve drunk the right amount of water, you turn the corner past Buckingham palace, you lift a weary hand to wave at the Queen, and take the last few steps to the finish line…

After the race

You’ve done it! You’ve completed the London Marathon and finished in first place. Now you can kick off those running shoes and relax. But wait! A man in a white coat and a clipboard is approaching you. You don’t have the option of running away as muscles that you didn’t even know existed are cramping up. He takes you into a separate room and conducts a doping test. Apparently, setting a world record when you’re a ‘Mass Starter’ is a little bit odd. Don’t worry, you weren’t to know. After serious interrogation, you’re found not-guilty of doping and are free to pick up your medal. Looks like you won’t be appearing in Chris Cooper’s Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat after all.

You can find more about the online resources mentioned in this article with these links: Oxford Reference, Oxford Index, ODNB, Who’s Who, Oxford Dictionaries Online, and Oxford Medicine Online.

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Image credits: (1) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Photo by Martin Addison. Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons (2) Mo Farah – Victory Parade. Photo by Bill. Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons (3) Wilson Kipsang 2012 London Marathon. Photo by Tom Page. Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons

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