Arts & Humanities

Remembering Dogen’s death

By Steven Heine
As the founder of Soto Zen, one of the major Buddhist sects in Japan, the birth and death anniversaries of Dogen Zenji (1200-1253) are celebrated every fifty years. It was amply demonstrated at the beginning of the millennium through the outpouring of new publications and media productions, including a kabuki play and TV show as well as manga versions of his biography, that these events help to disseminate the master’s teachings to a worldwide audience yet also turn him into a commercial commodity that is somewhat misrepresented.

Oktoberfest

Today the tents will open at the most famous beer festival in the world: Oktoberfest. That’s right, it starts in September. For those of us who can’t make it to a Munich beer tent between now and the end of the festival on October 6th, here’s the Oktoberfest entry by Conrad Seidl in The Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Garrett Oliver.

Why are reference works still important?

Looking at the growing use of our online products, we know that many still choose to reach beyond first impressions on the web to delve further in a reference work from Oxford. Why is it still so important to do so?

Five things you should know about Grove

By Jessica Barbour
There is a reference work on the subject of music to which English-speaking music students are referred every day. It has been around, in various editions, for over 130 years, and in its current online form it includes more than 40,000 full articles. As a 1955 article in Time put it, “For three-quarters of a century, the sun never set on Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.”

Unravelling the life of Henry Cowell without unravelling the biographer

By Joel Sachs
As I began to go through papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, I was buffeted by competing forces: the exhilaration of unravelling the stunning reality of a man’s life, and the growing fear that, should I actually live to read all of the documents, I might never be able to digest them.

Theirs to reason why? Literature, philosophy, and war

By Cécile Fabre
On the eve of the battle of Borodino, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, one of the main characters in War and Peace and, in that scene at least, Tolstoy’s mouthpiece, describes war as follows: ‘But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare?…’

Karl Lagerfeld

By Emily Ardizzone
Karl Lagerfeld: a name synonymous with high fashion and discerning taste, a name that also sends shivers down the spines of those that fall victim to his quick wit and cutting criticism. In the midst of Fashion Week chaos, Lagerfeld celebrated his 79th birthday on September 10th. As he nears the end of his seventieth decade, 2013 will be a year to remember for one of the most iconic and important men in contemporary fashion.

Is America an empire?

By Timothy H. Parsons
The intense controversy that this question engenders is remarkable. On the left, critics of assertive American foreign, military, and economic policies depict these policies as aggressively immoral by branding them “imperial.” On the right, advocates for an even more forceful application of American “hard power,” such as Niall Ferguson and the other members of his self-described “neo-imperialist gang,” argue that the United States should use its immense wealth and military might to impose order and stability on an increasingly chaotic world.

New term / New season

By Anwen Greenaway

It’s September, which means back-to-school in the world of education, but for classical music it’s a different start, that of the 2012-13 opera season. In the old days opera was a grand affair; the first night of a production meant black tie and opera cloaks. These days its far more relaxed, and you won’t be frowned upon if you’re wearing jeans at the Royal Opera House.

Occupied by Images

By Carol Quirke
Media buzz about Occupy Wall Street’s first anniversary began by summer’s end. That colorful, disbursed social movement brought economic injustice to the center of public debate, raising questions about free-market assumptions undergirding Wall Street bravado and politicians’ pious incantations. Most watched from the sidelines, but polling had many cheering as citizens marched and camped against the corrosive consequences of an economically stacked deck.

Nouvelle Cuisine in Old Mexico

By Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Mexican cuisine has experienced a renaissance in the past few decades. In the United States, taco trucks and immigrant family restaurants have replaced Americanized taco shells and chili con carne with Oaxacan tamales and carne asada. Meanwhile, celebrity chefs have embraced Mexican food, transforming it from street food into fine dining.

Empathizing toward human unity

By Louis René Beres
According to ancient Jewish tradition traced back to the time of Isaiah, the world rests upon thirty-six just men — the Lamed-Vov. For these men who have been chosen and must remain unknown even to themselves, the spectacle of the world is insufferable beyond description. Eternally inconsolable at the extent of human pain and woe, so goes the Hasidic tale, they can never even expect a single moment of real tranquility.

Keeping movies alive

Film is considered by some to be the most dominant art form of the twentieth century. It is many things, but it has become above all a means of telling stories through images and sounds.

The Joy of Sets

By Jason Rosenhouse
In more than a decade of socializing with creationists and other religious fundamentalists, I frequently encountered blinkered arguments about mathematics. This attack on set theory, however, was new to me. I cannot even imagine why anyone would think set theory is relevant to discussions of whether it is man or God who creates math. Perhaps the problem is that set theorists often speak a bit casually about infinity, which some people think is tantamount to discussing God. Alas, this line of criticism is too blinkered to take seriously.

How much do you know about the piano?

By Alyssa Bender
In its three centuries of existence, the piano has become one of the most widely spread instruments in the world. In a quick poll of our music social media team here at Oxford University Press, nine out of eleven of us have had piano training. (Of course, we are the music social media team, so our results may be a bit skewed from other departments!)

Grandfather Erasmus Darwin: written out of history

By Patricia Fara
Darwin and evolution go together like Newton and gravity or Morse and code. The world, he wrote, resembles ‘one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice.’ Competitive natural selection in a nutshell? Yes – but that evocative image was coined not by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), but by his grandfather Erasmus (1731-1802). Although Charles Darwin is celebrated as the founding father of evolution, his neglected ancestor was writing about evolution long before he was even born.