Arts & Humanities

Seneca in Spring-Time

By Emily Wilson
April, says Eliot famously in the Wasteland, is the cruellest month, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead ground, mixing/ Memory and desire”. Spring, in this shocking reversal of common tropes, is bad for precisely the reasons we usually think it good: because it involves a rebirth of what had seemed dead. Eliot’s poem, which will itself enact the rebirth or zombie resuscitation of many greatest hits of western literary culture, begins with a recognition of how horrible, and how spooky, this process is. You try to bury the dead, but they won’t stay in the grave.

Questions about La Monte Young, music, and mysticism

La Monte Young remains an enigma within the music world, one of the most important and yet most elusive composers of the late twentieth century. A musician who lives in near-seclusion in a Tribeca loft while creating works that explore the furthest extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication, acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality, Young has had a profound influence on the development on minimalism, which is seen in a variety of music today. We sat down with music scholar Jeremy Grimshaw, author of Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young, to discuss the life, work, and the controversy surrounding La Monte Young.

The Love Songs of F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Kirk Curnutt
According to literary legend, the author of The Great Gatsby sold his soul. Perpetually cash-strapped, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent much of his twenty-year career cranking out popular fiction for the Saturday Evening Post and other high-paying “slicks.” While Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner racked up double digits in the novels column, Fitzgerald completed a paltry four and a half, with only one of them (Gatsby, of course) truly great. By contrast, he produced 160 short stories, earning a total of $241,453 off the genre – more than $3 million in today’s dollars.

Why is there a ban on advertising activity in and around the Olympic Games?

By Phillip Johnson
This summer the Olympics is coming to town. It will be a sporting spectacular – the best sportsmen and women on Earth competing for the ultimate sporting accolade. Yet the Olympics is no longer simply a festival of sport. National governments and brand owners alike have long wanted to be associated with excellence and sporting excellence in particular. The Olympic Games represents the pinnacle of that excellence and so makes it the most desirable sporting “property” in the World.

eResurrection?

By Reverend John Piderit, S.J.
In an age of video, TV, camcorders, and iPhones, adept users can capture important events in a digital medium that can be transmitted quickly to people around the world. What would a resurrection appearance of Jesus have looked like if an alert apostle had an iPhone and, assuming the apostle was not immediately told by Jesus to “put that iPhone away”, the apostle captured a minute of Jesus’s appearance with the iPhone video running? Of course, this is a hypothetical and no answer could possibly be definitive. But the question raises interesting issues.

The Feast of Passover

By Marc Brettler
Passover, as it is now celebrated, is a creation of the rabbis, and many of its rituals are a reaction to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. It has a long and complex history, and even in the biblical period, was celebrated in a variety of ways.

Questions about Easter, baptism, and the renewal of life

It’s Good Friday and a good time to discuss the reflection and renewal that many Christians seek on Easter Sunday. The day commemorating Jesus’s resurrection, Easter marks the end of Lent, a forty-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance. In the early church, baptism and Easter were strongly linked. We sat down with Garry Wills, author of the new book Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism, to discuss the role of baptism in the lives of two early Christian saints: Augustine and Ambrose.

First modern Olympic Games held in Athens

This Day in World History
An estimated 60,000 spectators witnessed the opening ceremonies of the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens, Greece, on April 6, 1896. The ceremonies took place in the Panathinaiko Stadium, originally built in 330 B.C. and rebuilt in gleaming marble for the occasion.

Eight fun Jazz tracks for new listeners

By Ted Gioia

Since 2001, April has been designated as Jazz Appreciation Month. This annual celebration was instigated by Dr. John Edward Hasse, Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and a lifelong jazz advocate. The event has gained momentum with each passing year, and has spurred jazz activities in all fifty states and forty countries.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated

On 4th April 1968, as he stood on a balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel of Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr., was struck in the neck by a sniper’s bullet. The bullet severed his spinal cord, killing him instantly. King’s death was followed by rioting in several of the nation’s cities.

The Dickensian mega-musical

By Marc Napolitano
Though music plays a significant role within Charles Dickens’s novels—as various characters’ personalities are defined by their fondness for song—music has also proven a central element of the larger legacy surrounding Dickens’s works. From the Victorian period onward, music has been used as a medium for the adaptation of Dickens’s texts.

When Father was away… The Railway Children

Happy International Children’s Book Day! When their father goes away unexpectedly, Roberta, Peter and Phyllis have to move with their mother from their London home to a cottage in the countryside. Thus begins E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children, the latest in our Oxford Children’s Classic series, which we’ve excerpted below.

An introduction to classic children’s literature

Many of our readers will have first acquainted themselves with an Oxford World’s Classic as a child. In these videos, Peter Hunt, who was responsible for setting up the first course in children’s literature in the UK, reintroduces us to The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, and Treasure Island.

Quiz on country music,
Level 3: Crazy

Think you know your country music? While “Crazy” was made famous by Patsy Cline, it was composed by Willie Nelson. And that brings us to Level 3: Crazy — the last stage in our three-part country music quiz, compiled by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Michael McCall, John Rumble, and Paul Kingsbury — authors of The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Tonight is the 47th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards. Are you ready?

Quiz on country music,
Level 2: Ring of fire

Let’s test your knowledge from honky tonk to hillbilly blues. Here’s the second of a three-part quiz on the twang of guitars and accents, compiled by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Michael McCall, John Rumble, and Paul Kingsbury — authors of The Encyclopedia of Country Music. You can still go back and take “Quiz on country media, Level 1: Walk the line.” All this is running up to the 47th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards is this Sunday, April 1st. Can you pass all three levels of our a country music knowledge challenge?

Quiz on country music,
Level 1: Walk the line

The 47th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards is this Sunday, April 1st, so we thought it was time to pull together a country music knowledge challenge. Compiled by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Michael McCall, John Rumble and Paul Kingsbury — authors of The Encyclopedia of Country Music — we begin the first of a three-part quiz on the twang of guitars and accents today. How much do you know about the music of “three chords and the truth”?