Arts & Humanities

The Oxford Companion to the London 2012 Opening Ceremony

By Alice Northover

Many questioned how the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games Opening Ceremony was going to make a mark after the spectacular Beijing Olympics only four years earlier. While Beijing presented the Chinese people moving as one body — dancing, marching, and presenting a united front to the world — the British answer was a chaotic and spirited ceremony, shifting from cricket matches to coordinated dance routines, Mr Bean’s comedic dream to a 100-foot Lord Voldemort.

African Americans at the Olympic Games

By Robert Repino
Though they were conceived for idealistic reasons and designed to celebrate universal human aspirations, the modern Olympic Games have served as a stage for the world’s political and social struggles. Virtually every political controversy — from wars to ideological conflicts to human rights struggles — have managed to find expression every four years in the athletic events and in the media campaigns that go with them. Perhaps no group has influenced the Games more — both as athletes and as human rights pioneers — than African Americans, whose very participation in the modern games has been one of many tiny steps forward in the progress toward a more just world.

Olympic Greatness

By David Potter
In a year when Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian of all time with 22 medals, and Usain Bolt became the first man to win the 200 meters twice, it’s worth asking: What does “great” mean in sports? We might gain perspective by considering how the Ancient Greeks determined greatness in athletes. Then and now, true greatness is as defined not by a single moment, but by the ability to build a record of extraordinary achievement.

Enid Blyton

Happy Birthday Enid Blyton! This giant of children’s literature was born on 11 August 1897. To celebrate, here is an edited extract from the Enid Blyton entry by David Rudd in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature edited by Jack Zipes (© Oxford University Press 2006).

Where are the ‘Isles of Wonder?’

By Anthony Bale
Danny Boyle’s spectacular opening ceremony at the London Olympics on 27 July 2012 was entitled Isles of Wonder. As many will have noticed, it was shot through with references to the medieval and early-modern past. Mike Oldfield’s performance of In Dulce Jubilo, a 1970s reworking of a late-medieval German-Latin carol, provided one of the most exuberant moments. In Stratford, dancing nurses accompanied it. There were many references to and quotations from Shakespeare as well.

The science behind drugs in sport

What is cheating? What drug compounds for performance enhancement are legal and why? Why do the sports drug classification systems change all the time? If all the chemical were legal, what effect would this have on sport? Biochemist and author Chris Cooper explores the biological, moral, political, and ethical issues involved in controlling drug use in sports.

Bob Chilcott and Charles Bennett on “The Angry Planet”

Composer Bob Chilcott and librettist Charles Bennett discuss their experiences of creating “The Angry Planet”, a large-scale cantata on the theme of the environment which was premiered at the 2012 Proms by the Bach Choir, the BBC Singers, the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, and London schoolchildren.

In memoriam: Robert Hughes

Oxford University Press is saddened to hear of the passing of Robert Hughes. Robert Hughes was born in Australia in 1938 and lived in Europe and the United States since 1964. He worked in New York as an art critic for Time Magazine for over three decades from 1970 onward. He twice received the Franklin Jeweer Mather Award for Distinguished Criticism from the College Art Association of America. He is the author of numerous books, including Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, which Oxford University Press published in 1993. Publishers Weekly called it a “a withering, salubrious jeremiad.” Robert Hughes is survived by his wife, two stepsons, brother, sister, and niece.

Excelling Under Pressure

By Gerald Klickstein
The Olympics are in full swing, and we’re bound to witness some athletes who triumph and others who choke under the stress of performing. What differentiates those two groups? I’ve been probing that question for decades from the perspective of a musician and educator. Through my research and experience, I’ve come to appreciate that, for athletes and musicians alike, the primary distinction between those who excel under pressure and those who crack lies in how they prepare to perform.

Funding and Favors at the Olympics

By David Potter
Public funding for sports events was a fact of life for the Greeks and Romans. So was private funding, and both the Greeks and the Romans knew what the benefits and what the pitfalls associated with either might be. Can we be certain that the organizers of the London Olympics are quite so clear about this? The widely advertised donation (amounting to thirty-one million dollars) by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) of testing facilities for 6,250 blood samples taken from athletes could raise that question.

Music and the Olympics: A Tale of Two Networks

By Ron Rodman

Television networks use music to connect audience and program through theme music and short video spots called “promos. Themes and promos carry what media musicologist Philip Tagg calls “appellative functions”, which summon viewers to the television screen. With an event as big as the Olympics, television networks need to attract as large an audience as possible to maximize commercial ad revenue.

Test Your Smarts on Dope

By Leslie Taylor
Why are certain substances used? How are they detected? Do they truly have an effect on the body? Cooper explains how drugs designed to improve physical ability — from anabolic steroids to human growth hormone and the blood booster EPO — work and the challenges of testing for them, putting in to context whether the ‘doping’ methods of choice are worth the risk or the effort. Showing the basic problems of human biochemistry, physiology, and anatomy, he looks at what stops us running faster, throwing longer, or jumping higher. Using these evidence-based arguments he shows what the body can, and cannot, do.

What Pericles would say about Obamacare

By Paul Woodruff
The mess in and around Obamacare is a good illustration of what’s wrong with democracy in the United States. Notice I do not say “what’s wrong with democracy.” Democracy in a truer form wouldn’t produce such monstrosities. Here we have a law designed to bring much needed benefits to ordinary citizens — which it will do, given a chance — while showering unnecessary riches on the insurance industry. The interests of a few have cruelly distorted a program for the many.

Music and the Olympic Opening Ceremony: Pageantry and Pastiche

By Ron Rodman
Film director Danny Boyle’s gargantuan presentation at the opening ceremonies of the 30th Olympiad in London had little to do with the actual games, but had everything to do with his vision of Britain. The show was full of pageantry, drawing upon the 17th century English masque, a sort of loosely structured play with dance, music, costumes, songs and speeches, and festive scenery, with allegorical references to royalty, who would sometimes participate in the show. All elements of the masque were present, including the participation of the Queen herself, who stepped into the narrative briefly.

James Bond at the London 2012 Opening Ceremony

By Jon Burlingame
When James Bond and Queen Elizabeth parachuted out of the helicopter (or appeared to) during Friday night’s opening ceremonies of the London Olympics, director Danny Boyle could think of only one piece of music to play: the “James Bond Theme.” And of all the dozens of recordings of 007′s signature music that have been made over the years, he chose the unmistakable original: John Barry’s recording of Monty Norman’s “James Bond Theme,” from the very first Bond adventure, Dr. No, which opened in British cinemas 50 years ago, in October 1962.

Moby Dick Lives!

By George Cotkin
Moby-Dick is alive and doing quite well. It serves as inspiration for cultural creation of all sorts. As much an adventure story as a metaphysical drama, the novel raises questions about the nature and existence of God, about the quest for knowledge, about madness and desire, about authority and submission, and much more. Its style, at once bold and impassioned, erratic and windy, somehow still manages to entrance and inspire readers a century and a half after its publication. It is, as critic Greil Marcus remarks, “the sea we swim in.”