Arts & Humanities

Jane Austen, professional writer

By Kathryn Sutherland
As a novelist, Jane Austen dealt in the little things that loom momentous in the everyday routines of an ordinary life: preparations for an outing, the choice of partners at a dance, the chance for intrigue in a game of cards. What we know of her life is drawn to the same miniature scale: small facts and slender insights hoarded, vetted, and handed down by a protective family who memorialized and effaced their famous aunt in equal measure.

Remembering Joe Muranyi

Joe Muranyi, the American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and singer — perhaps best known as the last clarinetist to perform with Louis Armstrong and his All Stars — passed away on April 20th at the age of 84. Muranyi was a working musician for over 60 years, from his time as a teenager playing in an Air Force band to his recordings with the Orient Dixieland Jazz Band in the 1990s and for years afterward. He toured with the All Stars in the heart of his career, from 1967 until 1971, the year of the eponymous bandleader’s death.

There’s no business like Irving Berlin’s business

By Jeffrey Magee and Benjamin Sears
On 11 May 1888, somewhere outside Mogilyov in Belarus, Irving Berlin was born. The son of a poor Jewish family who fled the pogroms to New York City, Berlin went on to pen some of the most memorable American classics from the patriotic “God Bless America” to wistful “White Christmas.” Without any formal training in music composition or even the ability to notate melodies on a musical staff, he took a knack for music and turned it into the most successful songwriting career in American history. Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater, and Benjamin Sears, editor of The Irving Berlin Reader, composed this quiz to celebrate the composer’s life and work.

A Child of the Jago, Freud, and youth crime today

By Peter Miles
As every schoolchild knows, never give more than one explanation: rather than uncertainty, it suggests a conscious or unconscious smokescreen. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Sigmund Freud demonstrated as much by reference to a “defence offered by a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.”

She danced like a lilac flame: the other Astaire

By Kathleen Riley

By Kathleen Riley
I am writing this on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23rd April, and it strikes me how apposite are Beatrice’s words in Much Ado to the birth, on 10th September 1896, of Adele Marie Austerlitz, later Adele Astaire, a personality and a performer of infinite, inextinguishable and irresistible mirth. In London in the 1920s, she was depicted as a misplaced Shakespearean sprite who ‘should be dancing by glow-worm light under entranced trees on a midsummer eve with a rout of elves, after drinking rose-dew.’

Atheist solidarity: Jason Rosenhouse rallys for reason

Jason Rosenhouse is Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University. His most recent book is Among The Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Lines. After years of emersion in creationist culture, Rosenhouse shares his feelings on what it was like to finally stand amongst his fellow non-believers at the Reason Rally.

Four myths about Zen Buddhism’s “Mu Koan”

By Steven Heine
The Mu Koan (or Wu Gongan in Chinese pronunciation), in which master Joshu says “Mu” (literally “No,” but implying Nothingness) to an anonymous monk’s question of whether a dog has the Buddha-nature, is surely the single most famous expression in Zen Buddhist literature and practice. By virtue of its simplicity and indirection, this expression becomes emblematic of East Asian spirituality and culture more generally. Entire books have been published on the topic on both sides of the Pacific.

Derrida and Europe beyond Eurocentrism and Anti-Eurocentrism

By Simon Glendinning
Two months before his death in October 2004, Jacques Derrida gave an interview to the French newspaper Le Monde which turned out to be his last. Although he refused to treat it as an occasion in which to give what he called “a health bulletin,” he acknowledged that he was seriously ill, and the discussion is overshadowed by that fact: there is a strong sense of someone taking stock, someone taking the chance to give a final word.

Miles Davis’s second classic quintet

By Keith Waters
The Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s — Davis’s “second classic quintet” — was groundbreaking and influential. Their approach to live performance allowed attractive new possibilities for group interaction, the use of harmonic and metric superimposition, and developing pathways for extended improvisation. Their studio recordings offered a host of fresh jazz compositions, innovative in their harmonic progressions, formal designs, and melodic structures.

Dear Alice… Can You Forgive Her?

Alice Vavasor is torn between a risky marriage with her ambitious cousin George and the safer prospect of a union with the formidably correct John Grey. Her indecision is reflected in the dilemmas of her friend Lady Glencora, confined in the proprieties of her life with Plantagenet Palliser but tempted to escape with her penniless lover Burgo Fitzgerald, and of her aunt, the irreverent widow Mrs Greenow, who must choose between a solid farmer and an untrustworthy soldier as her next husband. Each woman finds her choice bound up with the cold realities of money, and the tension between public expectation and private inclination in Anthony Trollope’s classic Can You Forgive Her?. Here is a letter from George to Alice.

Writing Disasters

By David Roberts
Natural disaster is an exciting but tricky subject. Risk to survival; extreme deprivation; families sundered and reunited; panoramic set pieces of waves crashing, meteors hurtling, or skyscrapers toppling – all the ingredients are there for a gripping narrative. But think of the technical and ethical challenges. How does a writer choose one focal point among so many? Who survives? If the subject is a real disaster, how does a novelist or screenwriter honour the memory of those who endured, and those who perished? And what about the nagging doubt that it is all an exercise in profiting from misery?

La Diada de Sant Jordi and celebrating books on April 23rd

By Alice Northover
April 23rd has a touch of madness for those in book publishing. It is cause for not just one celebration, but several. It is World Book Night, an annual exchange to spread the love of reading; World Book and Copyright Day as organized by UNESCO to promote both reading and the preservation of authors’ intellectual property (take note plagiarists and book thieves!); the Death day of both the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, and el manco de Lepanto, Miguel de Cervantes, in 1616; the probable Birthday of William Shakespeare in 1564 (his baptism was the 26th of April and baptisms were traditionally held three days after birth); International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, which celebrates the work of science fiction and fantasy authors and encourages the free availability of their great work online (by their own choice, not against their wishes); and finally La Diada de Sant Jordi.

Into Maple White Land of the Lost World

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day! Let’s celebrate the great science fiction and fantasy writers with an excerpt from one of the earliest fantasy novels — and an Oxford World Classic — The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. Professor Challenger’s claims of dinosaurs living in twentieth-century South America may seem outlandish, but even skeptics become believers in The Lost World…

Do you know Shakespeare’s American career?

By Alden T. Vaughan and Viriginia Mason Vaughan

Although England had colonies in Virginia and Bermuda before William Shakespeare died in 1616, he never came to America. But no Englishman ever had such a triumphant posthumous migration to America as did Shakespeare: in books (by him and about him), in performances of his dramas on virtually every stage from coast to coast, in school and college curricula from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, in Broadway musicals, in “blackface” minstrel shows, in summer festivals, in stuffed dolls, trinkets, key rings, and tea cups. Shakespeare in America is multifaceted and ubiquitous.

Girls and the Jump to Judge

By Jason Mittell
I’d decided not to write about the pilot of Girls, the new HBO show that has either been hailed as the channel’s great comedy hope, or a crime against humanity (or maybe some middleground somewhere too). But after reading a lot of the criticism and commentary, and getting into at least four lengthy conversations on Twitter about it, I figured I’d assemble some thoughts to join in the fray beyond 140 characters.

100 years ago today: the death of Bram Stoker

By Roger Luckhurst
Bram Stoker was always a man in the shadows, the back-room boy who for thirty-years had organised the life and finances of the greatest actor of his age, Sir Henry Irving. Stoker’s death one hundred years ago today, on the 20th April 1912, conformed to type: it was utterly eclipsed by a much larger catastrophe. He died quietly at home only five days after the R. M. S. Titanic hit an iceberg and sank with the loss of 1500 lives.