Arts & Humanities

Carroll’s first Alice

On a summer’s day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding Camera, recently purchased in London. In The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the resulting image as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of literature. In the short excerpt from the book, below, Winchester writes about the pictures of children he took in the years before he photographed Alice Liddell.

Taco Tuesday

If you’re anything like me, then when a friend asks, “Hey, do you wanna go to Taco Tuesday at that new place over by–” you interrupt with, “Whoa whoa whoa. You had me at taco.” I was flipping through one of my favorite Oxford volumes, The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink edited by renowned food historian Andrew F. Smith, and came across

Congratulations, Zhou Long!

Please join us in congratulating composer Zhou Long, as he has been awarded with the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Madame White Snake. The opera (written by Cerise Lim Jacobs) premiered on February 26, 2010 at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. Drawing on a Chinese folk tale, this opera blends musical traditions from the East and the West to tell the story of a powerful white snake demon who longs to become human so she can experience love – but she meets with deceit, doubt and distrust.

We heart Matty G – Episode 15 – The Oxford Comment

How do you write a smash first novel? Author (and OUP Law Editor) Matthew Gallaway comes to Oxford book club to discuss his book The Metropolis Case (Crown Publishers). Topics include: Pittsburgh, advice for writers…and what’s up with the incest scene?

Sestina (today’s poetry challenge)

My favorite poetry form is the sestina. I like them, I think, because they are incredibly difficult to compose and require a fair bit of calculation. This being National Poetry Month, I thought I’d challenge you all to write one.

Not sure what a sestina is?

In Memoriam: Director Sidney Lumet

By Stanley Corkin

Sidney Lumet never won an academy award and was rarely placed in the company of the elite Hollywood directors, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola. Yet, his body of work suggests the need for a re-evaluation. I have long appreciated Lumet’s mastery of his craft and particularly his ability to use New York’s urban landscape as a character in his films. But it was while working on

A drinking bout in several parts (Part 5: Toast)

By Anatoly Liberman

Toasting, a noble art, deserves the attention of all those (etymologists included) who drink for joy, rather than for getting drunk. The origin of the verb to toast “parch,” which has been with us since the end of the 14^th century, poses no problems. Old French had toster “roast, grill,” and Italian tostare seems to be an unaltered continuation of the Romance protoform. Tost- is the root of the past participle of Latin torrere (the second conjugation) “parch.” English has the same root in torrid and less obviously

Horace and free speech in the age of WikiLeaks

By Robert Cowan
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” So wrote Salman Rushdie and he should know. Certainly free speech is routinely held up, often unreflectively, as an unambiguous, uncontroversial good – one of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the right for which Voltaire would famously die, even if he disapproved of what was being said. In the age of WikiLeaks, the freedom to disseminate information and its corollary, the freedom to know what those in power have said or done in secret, have found ever more vigorous proponents, but also those who ask whether it has its limits.

To have been a muppet in that nightclub…

By Michelle Rafferty

What made Louis Armstrong embarrassed? Why was Cab Calloway on Sesame Street? To learn a little more about these two legends check out the podcast below with BBC Producer Alyn Shipton and the talented interviewer Annie Shipton (yes that would be Alyn’s daughter).

Linked Up: Best of the Blogs

In the name of giving credit where it’s due, I’d like to do something a little different today and highlight some quality content on other university press blogs. Long live academic publishing!

“I dressed like a farmer.”

By Justyna Zajac and Michelle Rafferty

This week we went to the Berg Fashion Library launch event at the New York Public Library where the talented Ada Calhoun spoke about using Berg for her own fashion research. She co-authored Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making it Work and is now working on another book with Tim Gunn, the forthcoming Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible.

“The Start of a Solo Career”: Paul McCartney, 10 April 1970

By Gordon Thompson

Even in the storm’s dawning, both fans and defamers alike recognized magic in the Beatles’ ability to collaborate and to adapt in pursuit of a shared vision, and at the heart of this quest lay the desire to make great recordings. In the beginning of their career with EMI, their willingness to subvert their individual identities to a common cause (and the joy with which they did so) contributed to their success. In the

Five lessons from Japan

By Anthony Scioli

Recently Japan’s 77 year old Emperor Akihito implored his people “not to abandon hope”. This may have struck some Westerners as odd since Japan is an Eastern country largely dominated by Buddhism and Shinto, faith traditions that many associate with mindfulness, acceptance and renunciation rather than hope for the future, transformation, or worldly pursuits. In fact, it is not uncommon to find Westerners who believe that “hope” does not even exist in the East. For many American intellectuals, particularly

Why is Darwin still controversial?

By George Levine
How could Darwin still be controversial? We do not worry a lot about Isaac Newton, nor even about Albert Einstein, whose ideas have been among the powerful shapers of modern Western culture. Yet for many people, undisturbed by the law of gravity or by the theories of relativity that, I would venture, 99% of us don’t really understand, Darwin remains darkly threatening. One of the great figures in the history of Western thought, he was respectable and revered enough even in his own time to be buried in Westminster Abbey, of all places. He supported his local church; he was a Justice of the Peace; and he never was photographed as a working scientist, only as a gentleman and a family man. Yet a significant proportion of people in the English-speaking world vociferously do not “believe” in him.

“Tomorrow Never Knows”: The Beatles sample the future, April 1966

By Gordon Thompson

Forty-five years ago, at the beginning of April 1966, on the almost anniversary of a London dentist surreptitiously spiking his and George Harrison’s coffees with Lysergic acid diethylamide, John Lennon visited Barry Miles’ Indica Books and picked up a copy of Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In its pseudo-mystical prose, Lennon found partial inspiration for one of the most audacious recordings the Beatles would ever attempt.

A drinking bout in several parts (Part 4: Booze)

By Anatoly Liberman

Booze is an enigmatic word, but not the way ale, beer and mead are. Those emerged centuries ago, and it does not come as a surprise that we have doubts about their ultimate origin. The noun booze is different: it does not seem to predate the beginning or the 18^th century, with the verb booze “to tipple, guzzle” making its way into a written text as early as 1300 (which means that it turned up in everyday speech some time earlier). The riddles connected with booze are two.