Arts & Humanities

All hail goddess English?

By Dennis Baron
Global English may be about to go celestial. A political activist in India wants the country’s poorest caste to improve its status by worshipping the English language, and to start off he’s building a temple to Goddess English in the obscure village of Bankagaon, near Lakhimpur Khiri in Uttar Pradesh.

English started on the long path to deification back in the colonial age, and in many former British colonies English has become both an indispensable tool for survival in the modern world and a bitter reminder of the Raj. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay recommended to fellow members of the India Council that the British create a system of English-language schools in the colony to train an elite class of civil servants, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” who would help the British rule the subcontinent.

To canonize, or confine?

By Rosemary Herbert
Well may readers wonder how scholars decide which story/author to canonize and which to confine to the dustbin of literary history. This was an issue I dealt with in several books for Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, for which I served as editor in chief, and the anthologies that I edited with the late Tony Hillerman, The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and A New Omnibus of Crime. With the Companion, I had the privilege of drawing on the expertise of sixteen advisory editors. But final judgment on which stories to include in our two anthologies fell to just Tony and me. Fortunately, in Tony, I had a great resource and support in making decisions that we both took quite seriously, even while we indulged in some good laughs along the way.

Linked Up: Intern edition!!!

You know what the best thing about having interns is? You can get them to do your work for you have the privilege of teaching them what you know, and watching them grow professionally. This week, we bring you a special Linked Up, written by publicity interns extraordinaire, Alexandra McGinn and Hanna Oldsman. Be sure to check back next week for my (awesome/hilarious) Q & A with them.

The Who and “My Generation,” November 1965

Tweet By Gordon Thompson   Forty-five years ago, in the anarchic world of mid-sixties British rock—with every major British act releasing records and storming the world—a unique record bullied its way into British consciousness that turned the conventions of the pop disk end-for-end.  Pete Townsend had penned a song that cut to the core of […]

After Yemen, what now for al-Qaeda?

2010 Place of the Year

By Alia Brahimi
“The air freight bomb plot should be understood as part of al-Qaeda’s pervasive weakness rather than its strength. The intended targets, either a synagogue in Chicago and/or a UPS plane which would explode over a western city, were chosen as part of the attempt to re-focus al-Qaeda’s violence back towards western targets and pull the jihad away from the brink.”

Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound!

By A. David Moody
[Pound] was going back to his old master not so much to learn as to argue with him and assert his independence. He was taking Browning’s Sordello as a point of departure for his cantos, as ‘the thing to go on from’. He had to start there because he thought it ‘the best long poem in English since Chaucer’, and the only one with a ‘live form’. But that form was not right for what he had to do, and he would be finding his own in breaking free from Browning’s.

“Fiddlers” to Take a Bow

By Philip Lambert
They never had the marquee allure of Rodgers and Hammerstein. They didn’t enjoy the longevity of their contemporaries Kander and Ebb, who wrote songs for shows like Cabaret and Chicago for almost forty-two years. But they are one of Broadway’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful songwriting teams, and on November 1, 2010, composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick will be honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Dramatists Guild, at a ceremony in New York.

The Proposed New Copyright Crime of “Aiding and Abetting”

Tweet By Michael A. Carrier The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has caused concern for many reasons, such as secret negotiations and controversial provisions.  Today, more than 70 law professors sent a letter to President Obama asking that he “direct the [U.S. Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to […]

Witchcraft!

In 2004, workmen digging in Greenwich, near London, uncovered a sealed stone bottle that rattled and splashed when they shook it. It was sent to a laboratory where X-rays revealed metal objects wedged in the neck, suggesting that it had been buried upside down, and a scan showed it to be half filled with liquid. Chemical analysis confirmed this was human urine containing nicotine and brimstone. When the cork was removed, scientists discovered iron nails, brass pins, hair, fingernail parings, a pierced leather heart, and what they believed might be navel fluff.

Memo From Manhattan: On the Waterfront

By Sharon Zukin
The world’s biggest cities often spawn disaster scenarios—those end-of-the-world, escape-from-New-York exaggerations of urban dystopia. Once limited to printed texts and paintings, visions of urban apocalypse have become ever more accessible in newspaper photographs, movies and video games. They form a collective urban imaginary, shaping the dark side of local identity and civic pride.

New York is especially attractive as a site of imagined disaster. Maybe it’s payback for the city’s hubris and chutzpah, or perhaps there’s something in the American character that yearns for and fears creative destruction. If there is a general hunger for destruction stories, it is fed by the knowledge that the cities we build are vulnerable.

London Labour and the London Poor

By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
It was an ordinary enough London winter’s evening: chilly, damp, and churning with crowds. I’d arranged to meet a friend at the Curzon Mayfair cinema, and after my packed tube had been held up between stations – ten sweaty minutes during which my fellow passengers had fumed silently, tutted audibly, and in one or two cases struck up tentative conversations with the person whose shopping was digging into their shins – I was late.

What was it like to work with Tony Hillerman?

Like most authors, when Rosemary Herbert speaks at book events about the mystery fiction anthologies she edited with Tony Hillerman, A New Omnibus of Crime and The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and about her own new first novel, Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery, she always makes sure that she allows plenty of opportunity to for people to ask her questions. Lots of times authors become tired of the questions they are most frequently asked, but that it not true for Herbert, especially when the question is, “What was it like to work with Tony Hillerman?” Today – the second anniversary of Hillerman’s death – she reflects on this question.

NPR’s Firing of Juan Williams

By Elvin Lim
If NPR values public deliberation as the highest virtue of a democratic polity, it did its own ideals a disservice last week when it fired Juan Williams without offering a plausible justification why it did so. On October 20, Williams had uttered these fateful words on the O’ Reilly Factor:

“…when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Anxiety and worry make for poor public reasons. Quite often discomfort is a façade for prejudice – an emotion that knows no reasonable defense.

“Gatz” at the Public: A Great Gatsby or Just an Elitist One?

By Keith Gandal
Want a quick, but apparently reliable measure of how elitist you are? Go see the 7-hour production of Gatz, in which all 47,000 words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are, in the course of the play, enunciated on stage. (If you dare and can afford to.) If you love every minute of it and find time flying by, you’re probably, well, an arts snob; if you find your reaction mixed, your mind drifting in and out, and your body just plain giving out, well, you’re likely more of a populist.

Terriers are People Too: Dog Breeds as Metaphors

Tweet By Mark Peters My newest obsession is Terriers, an FX show created by Ted Griffin (who wrote Ocean’s Eleven) and Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield, the best TV show ever). This show has deliciously Seinfeldian dialogue, effortless and charming acting, plus plots that are unpredictable and fresh. It’s even heart-wrenching at times, and […]