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I finished You Shall Know Our Velocity the other day, and while not as good as the other stuff I’ve read from Eggers, it was a fun roadtrip/buddy story. It also happened to be the first book I’ve read in months, as I’ve been busy with several projects and hadn’t picked one up in a while.
When I finished the book, I knew I just learned a new Life Lesson. I’ve got a handful of rules I’ve collected over my three decades on earth that I follow in order to maintain my sanity. The lesson learned from this is “Never allow yourself to get so busy that you don’t have time to read.” If you want insight into other rules I live my life by, “Never have a job that requires the daily use of an alarm clock” is something I learned during college and has held true throughout my life — every job I’ve ever had that required getting up very early in order to travel or to clock in sapped my happiness and wasn’t worth keeping.
My stack of books has grown pretty high during these past months, either from freebies sent by publishing companies, or bookstore trips to stock up on things I should have already read. Next up is Smart Mobs, then Lullaby by Palahniuk, Gonzo Marketing by Locke, Susan Orlean’s Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, Neal Pollack’s Anthology of American Literature, and the second halves of books I started but didn’t finish including Linked and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. |
The Perfumed Garden/Translator's Note
|←Prefatory Note||The Perfumed Garden by , translated by Richard Francis Burton
NOTES OF THE TRANSLATOR
The name of the Cheikh has become known to posterity as the author of this work, which is the only one attributed to him.
In spite of the subject-matter of the book and the manifold errors found in it, and caused by the negligence and ignorance of the copyists, it is manifest that this treatise comes from the pen of a man of great erudition, who had a better knowledge in general of literature and medicine than is commonly found with Arabs.
According to the historical notice contained in the first leaves of the manuscript, and notwithstanding the apparent error respecting the name of the Bey who was reigning in Tunis, it may be presumed that this work was written in the beginning of the sixth century, about the year 925 of the Hegira.
As regards the birthplace of the author, it may be taken for granted, considering that the Arabs habitually joined the name of their birthplace to their own, that he was born at Nefzaoua, a town situated in the district of that name on the shore of the lake Sebkha Melrir, in the south of the kingdom of Tunis.
The Cheikh himself records that he lived in Tunis, and it is probable the book was written there. According to tradition, a particular motive induced him to undertake a work at variance with his simple tastes and retired habits.
His knowledge of law and literature, as well as of medicine, having been reported to the Bey of Tunis, this ruler wished to invest him with the office of cadi, although he was unwilling to occupy himself with public functions.
As he, however, desired not to give the Bey cause for offence, whereby he might have incurred danger, he merely requested a short delay, in order to be able to finish a work which he had in hand.
This having been granted, he set himself to compose the treatise which was then occupying his mind, and which, becoming known, drew so much attention upon the author, that it became henceforth impossible to confide to him functions of the nature of those of a cadi.
But this version, which is not supported by any authenticated proof, and which represents the Cheikh Nefzaoui as a man of light morals, does not seem to be admissable. One need only glance at the book to be convinced that its author was animated by the most praiseworthy intentions, and that, far from being in fault, he deserves gratitude for the services he has rendered to humanity. Contrary to the habits of the Arabs, there exists no commentary on this book; the reason may, perhaps, be found in the nature of the subject of which it treats, and which may have frightened, unnecessarily, the serious and the studious. I say unnecessarily, because this book, more than any other, ought to have commentaries; grave questions are treated in it, and open out a large field for work and meditation.
What can be more important, in fact, than the study of the principles upon which rest the happiness of man and woman, by reason of their mutual relations; relations which are themselves dependent upon character, health, temperament and the constitution, all of which it is the duty of philosophers to study. I have endeavoured to rectify this omission by notes, which, incomplete as I know them to be, will still serve for guidance.
In doubtful and difficult cases, and where the ideas of the author did not seem to be clearly set out, I have not hesitated to look for enlightment to the savants of sundry confessions, and by their kind assistance many difficulties, which I believed insurmountable, were conquered. I am glad to render them here my thanks.
Amongst the authors who have treated of similar subjects, there is not one that can be entirely compared with the Cheikh; for his book reminds you, at the same time, of Aretin, of the book "Conjugal Love," and of Rabelais; the resemblance to this last is sometimes so striking that I could not resist the temptation to quote, in several places, analogous passages.
But what makes this treatise unique as a book of its kind, is the seriousness with which the most lascivious and obscene matters are presented. It is evident that the author is convinced of the importance of his subject, and that the desire to be of use to his fellow-men is the sole motive of his efforts.
With the view to give more weight to his recommendations, he does not hesitate to multiply his religious citations and in many cases invokes even the authority of the Koran, the most sacred book of the Mussulmans.
It may be assumed that this book, without being exactly a compilation, is not entirely due to the genius of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, and that several parts may have been borrowed from Arabian and Indian writers. For instance, all the record of Mocailama and of Chedja is taken from the work of Mohammed ben Djerir el Taberi; the description of the different positions for coition, as well as the movements applicable to them, are borrowed from Indian works; finally, the book of "Birds and Flowers," by Azeddine el Mocadecci, seems to have been consulted with respect to the interpretation of dreams. But an author certainly is to be commended for having surrounded himself with the lights of former savants, and it would be ingratitude not to acknowledge the benefit which his books have conferred upon people who were still in their infancy to the art of love.
It is only to be regretted that this work, so complete in many respects, is defective in so far as it makes no mention of a custom too common with the Arabs not to deserve particular attention. I speak of the taste so universal with the old Greeks and Romans, namely, the preference they give to a boy before a woman, or even to treat the latter as a boy.
There might have been given on this subject sound advice as well with regard to the pleasures mutually enjoyed by the women called tribades. The same silence has been preserved by the author respecting bestiality. Nevertheless the two stories which he relates, and which speak, one of the mutual caresses of two women, and the other of a woman provoking the caresses of an ass, show that he knew of such matters. It is, therefore, inexcusable that he should not have spoken more particularly on those points. It would certainly have been interesting to know which animals, by reason of their nature and conformation, are fittest to give pleasure either to man or woman, and what would be the result of such copulation.
Lastly, the Cheikh does not mention the pleasures which the mouth or the hand of a pretty woman can give, nor the cunnilinges.
What may have been the motive for these omissions? The author's silence cannot be attributed to ignorance, for in the course of his work he has given proofs of an erudition too extended and various to permit a suspicion of his knowledge.
Should we look for the cause of this gap to the contempt which the Mussulman in reality feels for woman, and owing to which he may think that it would be degrading to his dignity as a man to descend to caresses otherwise regulated than by the laws of nature? Or did the author, perhaps, avoid the mention of similar matters out of fear that he might be suspected of sharing tastes which many people look upon as depraved?
However this may be, the book contains much useful information and a large number of curious cases, and I have undertaken the translation because, as the Cheikh Nefzaoui says in his preamble: "I swear before God, certainly! the knowledge of this book is necessary. It will be only the shamefully ignorant, the enemy of all science, who does not read it, or who turns it into ridicule."
- Note in the autograph edition, 1876. — The reader will bear in mind in perusing this work that the remarks and notes by the eminent translator were written before 1850, when Algiers was but little known, and Kabylia in particular not at all. He will therefore not be surprised to find that some slight details are not on a level with the knowledge acquired since.
- The district of Nefzaoua contains many isolated villages, all on level ground, and surrounded by palm trees; with large reservoirs in their midst. The pilgrims believe that the land is called Nefzaoua, because there are in it thousand "zaoua" (a chapel in which a marabout is buried), and it is alleged that the name was first El Afoun Zaouia, later corrupted into Nefzaoua. But this Arabian etymology does not appear to be correct, as according to the Arabian historians the names of the localities are older than the establishment of Islamism. The town of Nefzaoua is surrounded by a wall built of stones and bricks; having six gateways, one mosque, baths, and a market; in the environs are many wells and gardens.
- It is not impossible that the book, written in these circumstances, was only an abridgement of the present one, an abridgement which he refers to in the first chapter of this book under the name of "Torch of the Universe."
- "We need not fear to compare the pleasures of the senses with the most intellectual pleasures; let us not fall into the delusion of believing that there are natural pleasures of two sorts, the one more ignoble than the other; the noblest pleasures are the greatest." — Essai de Philosophie Morale, par M. de Maupertius, Berlin, 1749.)
Paediconibus os olere dicis;
Hoc si, sicut ais, Fabulle, verum est,
Quid credis olere cunnilingis?
The mouths of paederasts, you say, smell badly;
If such be true, as you aver, Fabulus,
What about those, think you, that lick the vulva?
MARTIALIS, Book xii., Epig. 86. |
Private Mineral Project
This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Reviewed Teaching Collection
This activity has received positive reviews in a peer review process involving five review categories. The five categories included in the process are
- Scientific Accuracy
- Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
- Pedagogic Effectiveness
- Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
- Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page
For more information about the peer review process itself, please see http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/review.html.
This page first made public: Aug 7, 2006
Students begin to work on semester-long private mineral projects.
This exercise is designed for a mid/upper-level undergraduate geology course on the principles of mineralogy.
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
Students should have knowledge of basic chemistry and of minerals equivalent to what they would learn in an introductory geology class and be able to identify minerals based on their physical properties.
How the activity is situated in the course
This activity is the 6th of 36 mineralogy exercises. Students should begin this long exercise towards the beginning of the course.
Content/concepts goals for this activity
- Learn just about everything about one particular mineral.
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
- Synthesize many different sorts of information to create a complete picture.
Other skills goals for this activity
- Introduce working with graphics, digital images, and fundamental web page creation.
- Learn to prepare a formal manuscript for publication.
Description of the activity/assignment
In this semester-long private mineral project, students become experts on one mineral. They write a paper about their mineral and use key information about it to publish a web page. Information should include provenance, physical properties, composition, recent related literature, photos of samples, optical properties, x-ray pattern, crystallography, economic value, atomic structure, other closely related minerals, associated myths, and a complete list of references based on GSA format.
Determining whether students have met the goalsMore information about assessment tools and techniques.
Download teaching materials and tips
- Notes for instructors (Acrobat (PDF) 7kB Jul7 05) |
via press release:
NICOLE KIDMAN AND CLIVE OWEN STAR IN HBO FILMS’
HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN,
A FILM BY PHILIP KAUFMAN, DEBUTING MAY 28
DIRECTED BY PHILIP KAUFMAN FROM A SCRIPT BY
JERRY STAHL AND BARBARA TURNER
DAVID STRATHAIRN, RODRIGO SANTORO, MOLLY PARKER, PARKER POSEY,
SANTIAGO CABRERA, LARS ULRICH, SAVERIO GUERRA, PETER COYOTE,
JOAN CHEN AND TONY SHALHOUB ALSO STAR
Peter Kaufman, Trish Hofmann, James Gandolfini,
Alexandra Ryan And Barbara Turner Executive Produce
“We were good in war, and when there was no war, we made our own.”
– Martha Gellhorn
Academy Award® nominee andGolden Globe winner Clive Owen and Academy Award® and three-time Golden Globe winner Nicole Kidman star in the title roles of HBO Films’ HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN, under the direction of Academy Award® nominee Philip Kaufman. Kaufman directs from a script by Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner.
Debuting MONDAY, MAY 28 (9:00-11:40 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO, HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN recounts one of the greatest romances of the last century – the passionate love affair and tumultuous marriage of literary master Ernest Hemingway and trailblazing war correspondent Martha Gellhorn – as it follows the adventurous writers through the Spanish Civil War and beyond. The combined magnetism of Hemingway and Gellhorn ushered them into social circles that included the elite of Hollywood, the aristocracy of the literary world and the First Family of the United States. As witnesses to history, they covered all the great conflicts of their time, but the war they couldn’t survive was the war between themselves.
Other HBO playdates: May 29 (3:15 p.m.) and June 2 (1:15 p.m.), 7 (2:00 p.m., 12:30 a.m.), 10 (4:30 p.m.), 11 (9:00 p.m., 4:20 a.m.), 15 (10:00 a.m.) and 19 (11:30 p.m.)
HBO2 playdates: June 4 (3:30 p.m.), 6 (10:15 a.m., 9:45 p.m.), 12 (3:15 p.m., 2:10 a.m.), 17 (10:35 a.m., 10:00 p.m.), 21 (1:15 p.m., 12:05 a.m.), 25 (11:00 a.m.) and 30 (3:35 p.m., 3:20 a.m.)
HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN also stars Academy Award® nominee David Strathairn (“Goodnight, and Good Luck,” HBO’s “Temple Grandin”), Rodrigo Santoro (“I Love You Philip Morris,” “300”), SAG Award nomineeParker (“The Road,” HBO’s “Deadwood”), Golden Globe nominee Parker Posey (“Superman Returns,” “A Mighty Wind”), Santiago Cabrera (“Che: Part 1”), actor-musician Lars Ulrich (“Get Him to the ,” founding member of Metallica), Saverio Guerra (“Lucky You”), Emmy® nominee Peter Coyote (“Erin Brockovich,” “Law & Order: LA”), Joan Chen (“The Last Emperor”) and Emmy® and Golden Globe winner Tony Shalhoub (“Monk,” HBO’s “Too Big to Fail”).
An HBO Films presentation of a film by Philip Kaufman, HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN is executive produced by Peter Kaufman (“Quills,” “Henry and June”), Trish Hofmann (“Notorious,” “The New World”), Emmy® winner James Gandolfini (HBO’s “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq” and “Wartorn 1861-2010”), Emmy® nominee Alexandra Ryan (HBO’s “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq”) and Emmy® nominee Barbara Turner (“Petulia,” “Pollock”).
Nancy Sanders (“Huff”) and Mark Armstrong (“Holla If You Hear Me”) are co-executive producers. The production team includes three-time Academy Award®-winning editor Walter Murch (“The English Patient,” “Apocalypse Now”), director of photography Rogier Stoffers (“Quills,” “John Q”), Academy Award®-nominated production designer Geoffrey Kirkland (“The Right Stuff,” “Angela’s Ashes”) and Academy Award®-nominated costume designer Ruth Myers (“The Painted Veil,” “L.A. Confidential”).
1936: Ernest Hemingway [Clive Owen] falls under the spell of the beautiful novelist and assured magazine writer Martha Gellhorn [Nicole Kidman] when he first meets her in Sloppy Joe’s, a bar in Key West, Fla. They meet again in Spain, when she persuades a friend at Collier’s Weekly to give her credentials as a special correspondent, covering the Spanish Civil War and the attempt by Franco and the Fascists, with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini, to overthrow the democratically elected government. Hemingway has left behind his wife, Pauline [Parker], and their two sons in Key West and has come to Spain to help his friends Joris Ivens [Lars Ulrich], John Dos Passos [David Strathairn] and Robert Capa [Santiago Cabrera] shoot the documentary “The Spanish Earth,” about the struggle to defeat Fascism. Gellhorn joins them.
Hemingway watches over and tutors Gellhorn, as the fledgling reporter discovers her voice and learns from him the essence of the Hemingway code of behavior: honor, courage, bravery and endurance in a life of stress, misfortune and pain. In short, grace under pressure. To Hemingway, having these qualities makes a man become a man and proves his worth. Gellhorn comes to embody these principles, perhaps even outdoing Hemingway. In a crucial situation where Gellhorn evidences her heroism, Hemingway is prompted to say, “She is the bravest woman I ever saw.”
Back from the war, Hemingway and Gellhorn settle in Cuba, where she finds the run-down villa Finca Vigia. There they begin a new life together.
Hemingway writes “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which he dedicates to Gellhorn. When Collier’s offers her a job to cover the Russian invasion of Finland, Hemingway wants her to stay, but Gellhorn feels she must go and bear witness to the world’s upheaval. She later wrote, “I followed the war wherever I could reach it.”
Gellhorn longs to return to Hemingwayand in their passionate correspondences the two of them vow that they will never leave each other again. She arrives home to find her beloved Finca Vigia in total disarray, strewn with Hemingway’s hangers-on. But a surprise awaits her as Hemingway proudly displays signed divorce papers from Pauline. Gellhorn, who never asked to be married, consents to becoming his third wife.
As the Japanese invade China, Gellhorn is offered an assignment to do an interview with the most powerful political couple in the world: Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek [Larry Tse] and the “Empress of China,” Madame Chiang [Joan Chen]. After some cajoling by Gellhorn to look at it as a paid honeymoon, Hemingway reluctantly agrees to accompany her. While there, Hemingway and Gellhorn are taken blindfolded by boat to a secret meeting with Communist leader Chou En-lai [Anthony Brandon Wong], whom they find impressive and believe to be the wave of the future.
They report their findings to Gellhorn’s old friends, President Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the State Department swiftly brands Hemingway and Gellhorn “fellow travelers.” Hemingway is deeply stung by the charge of being unpatriotic and becomes increasingly agitated. Back in Cuba, Hemingway arms his boat, the Pilar, to patrol the Caribbean for Nazi U-boats, while carousing with his cronies. Gellhorn is restless, feeling isolated from the world-shaking events she longs to be a part of. They quarrel frequently. Hemingway wants a stay-at-home wife to share his bed, while she realizes that the greatest enemy of marriage is boredom. Gellhorn wants to cover the impending Allied invasion in Europe, but Hemingway selfishly compromises her assignment from Collier’s. Their marriage falls apart.
With no official press credential, the ever-resourceful Gellhorn manages to talk her way onto a hospital ship bound for Omaha Beach, becomes a stowaway and, disguised as a nurse, is among the first reporters on shore during the historic D-Day landing.
Meanwhile, in a London pub, Hemingwaymeets a woman named Mary Welsh [Parker Posey]. A drunken car accident lands him in the hospital and Gellhorn is called back from the front in France. She arrives to find a bandaged Hemingway entertaining his friends, with Welsh cozied up to him on his hospital bed. Hemingway asks Gellhorn sarcastically, “What are you doing here?” She responds, “I guess I just stopped by for a divorce.”
“I want to be myself and alone and free to breathe, live, look upon the world and find it however it is...I want my own name back, most violently, as if getting it back would give me some of myself...And do not worry and do not feel badly. We are, basically, two tough people and we were born to survive.”
– Martha Gellhorn
“If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.”
– Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s life rapidly accelerated into paranoia and depression. Prior to his suicide in 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following Hemingway’s death, history seemed to forget Gellhorn. She was relegated to being “the third Mrs. Hemingway,” a mere footnote in the great writer’s life. Undeterred, Gellhorn continued to cover all the major world conflicts, from the Dachau concentration camp, to the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the civil wars in Central America and, finally, at age 81, the U.S. invasion of Panama. She did not listen to “official drivel” and told the truth as she saw it. She was a pioneer. As the London Daily Telegraph wrote, Gellhorn was “one of the great war correspondents of the century; brave, fierce and wholly committed to the truth of the situation.”
Following Gellhorn’s death in 1998, noted writer and editor Bill Buford wrote, “Martha was passionate, glamorous and exciting. She was hugely entertaining. She was motivated by a deep-hearted, deep-seated concern for justice; she was a friend of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the neglected…Gellhorn was blonde and thin and sassy, a starlet of the highest order, a young Lauren Bacall…There was a glamour about Martha Gellhorn, the glamour of black-and-white movies. It was in her manner and her way with the ways of the world. She was a dame…and she was a good writer.”
Gellhorn’s remarkable contributions and pioneering efforts anticipated such reporters as Christiane Amanpour, Lara Logan and the late Marie Colvin, who died recently in war-torn Syria. Colvin, who has been called “the Martha Gellhorn of her time,” narrated the 2003 BBC documentary “Martha Gellhorn: On the Record.”
In addition to her war reporting, Gellhorn wrote numerous books, including “The Face of War” and “Travels with Myself and Another,” an account of her solo travels and her trip to China with Hemingway.
The year after her death, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established to award journalists “whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda.” In 2008, Gellhorn was honored by the United States Postal Service with a first-class postage stamp.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Director Philip Kaufman and executive producer Peter Kaufman became involved with HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN nine years ago. “I’m not really interested in making any film just for the sake of getting something made,” the director explains. “For me, it’s always been about having an adventure, falling in love, committing totally to something, for however many years.”
Executive producers Alex Ryan and Barbara Turner developed Turner’s script with the Kaufmans, ultimately bringing it to James Gandolfini, who became a producer and champion of the film, and brought it to HBO. Writer Jerry Stahl was then enlisted to further develop the screenplay.
Explains Ryan, “I was moved by the inextinguishable spirit of this woman who, despite her success, seemed to be relegated to live in Hemingway’s shadow, and I felt that many people could relate to Martha’s battles on and off the field.”
The passion with which Kaufman approached this story was due, in large part, to the passion within the story itself. “With Hemingway and Gellhorn, we have two strong, bright, sexy people who are filled with vigor and energy and competitiveness,” Kaufman says. “We have moments of heightened passion, of idealism, of beauty, of heroism and tragedy.”
To executive producer Peter Kaufman, the film is about “the passionate and turbulent love story between one of the world’s most famous novelists and one of the greatest war correspondents of the last century. It’s about the battle of the sexes, the battle with their inner demons, and the battle for freedom of the individual against the rise of Fascism all over the world at this time.”
“Martha Gellhorn is really the discovery of our film,” says director Kaufman. “Hemingway is legendary, but few people know of Gellhorn and the successful career she had after their marriage – being considered, by many, the greatest war correspondent of the 20th century.”
Adds executive producer Trish Hofmann, “I think this film is reminiscent of movies from the past with its romance and suspenseful drama, but the elements of the story are still very applicable today. Martha Gellhorn paved the way for modern women, showing that they can hold their own in a male-dominated arena, and are welcomed there, as well.”
Says Nicole Kidman, “Women like Martha Gellhorn were trailblazers who did things that weren’t the norm; who changed what professions women could aspire to; who changed the world. I think I’ll always seek out those women to play them, if given the chance.”
Faced with the challenge of portraying real people, both Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen came to the table prepared.
Kidman’s upbringing seems to have laid the groundwork for her portrayal of Martha Gellhorn. “I came from a strong, feminist mother who wanted her girls to go out into the world and take a bite out of it,” she explains. “I’m drawn to those women who do that, and Martha was definitely one of them. When you do a film that is based on a real person, it’s not a case of mimicking them or emulating them, it’s actually just trying to find their essence, their core and trying to bring some form of them through me to the screen.”
Owen had not read Hemingway extensively when the screenplay was presented to him. Instantly taken by the story and the role, he knew that considerable preparation and research would be necessary to portray such an iconic figure. “You can’t play somebody like Hemingway and treat it like you do every other film,” he says. “I just immersed myself for eight months with everything Hemingway – everything he wrote, everything that was written about him. I visited Madrid, Paris and Cuba. I saw all the places he went and lived.”
Discussing the role of Hemingway, Kaufman refers to one of his earlier films, observing, “ ‘The Right Stuff’ was about heroic men and grace under pressure, a concept originated by Hemingway. Clive Owen seemed to embody that quality.”
Kidman and Owen worked closely with world-renowned dialogue coach Tim Monich, perfecting the distinctive voices of their characters by listening to and watching hours of archival tapes of Hemingway and Gellhorn.
HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN was shot entirely on location in and around San Francisco, where various parts of the city and its surroundings – Oakland, Livermore and Marin County – were used to represent Key West, Spain, China, Cuba, Finland, New York, London and Germany.
Says director Kaufman, “I knew I wanted to make this film in San Francisco because, of all the cities in the world, San Francisco had the most variable kinds of locations that could be molded and transformed into what I was looking for. I know this city. And there’s so much talent here, so many wonderful locations. The crews, the extras, the atmosphere, the food and the city’s cooperation all make it a great place to film.”
In addition, Kaufman tapped San Francisco-based visual effects supervisor Chris Morley and Tippett Studios to help expand on the kinds of visual techniques used years before in his films “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Right Stuff.” Through the magic of Morley, Tippett, editor and sound designer Walter Murch and the entire production team, Kaufman was able to “nest” his characters into actual archival footage, using recently developed enhanced digital effects.
Murch, Kaufman’s long-time collaborator, notes, “This was a film with a huge number of moving parts, like a very complicated machine. It has all the scope and breadth and challenges that a feature film has, but done in less time on a smaller budget. Plus, there’s the artistic and technical challenge of using the archival footage and finding ways to get into that historic world and integrating our actors into it, going in and out of color and grained imagery, wanting those transitions to be both visceral and unnoticeable, to look and feel very natural.” |
The Encyclopedia features over 1,700 biographies, 300 thematic essays, and 1,400 photographs and illustrations on a wide range of Jewish women through the centuries -- from Gertrude Berg to Gertrude Stein; Hannah Greenebaum Solomon to Hannah Arendt; the Biblical Ruth to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Women of the Wall (WOW), a group of women who have asserted women’s right to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, have struggled against personal violence and public opprobrium since 1988.
The scene of Miriam with her chorus of women drummers and dancers is echoed in several other instances in which song, dance, and drums appear in connection with women musicians.
American ORT was founded as a males-only organization in 1922. Women’s American ORT (WAO) was founded October 12, 1927, to assist ORT in providing financial support to the ORT program serving Eastern European Jews.
One of the main effects of ghetto life on individuals was the deterioration in their health. The state of women’s health in the ghetto was dictated in most cases by the unusual circumstances under which every ghetto existed.
Women’s League for Conservative Judaism is the national organization of Conservative sisterhoods established by Mathilde Schechter in 1918 as the National Women’s League of the United Synagogue. Schechter continued the work begun by her husband, Solomon Schechter, who had called for women to assume a role in the newly established United Synagogue of America. As founding president (1918–1919), she envisioned an organization that would be the coordinating body of Conservative synagogue sisterhoods and inspired Women’s League to promote an agenda whose mission was the perpetuation of traditional Judaism in America through the home, synagogue, and community.
The history of Women’s Studies (WS) in Israel cannot be examined without considering the related history of the “New Women’s Liberation” movement which began at the University of Haifa in 1970 (Safir et al.). Women immigrants from the United States and other English-speaking countries, who had believed that Israel was an egalitarian country, discovered that their expectations clashed strongly with the reality of women’s situation. This dissonance resulted in their creation of, and participation in, consciousness-raising groups that were the impetus for the new movement.
Jewish women have played an impressive part in creating women’s studies as an academic discipline in the United States.
Helen Rosen Woodward is best known for her contribution to the world of advertising and is generally believed to be the first female account executive in the United States.
This article discusses the many types of education Jewish working women received, focusing on the 1910s through the 1930s, the height of the workers’ education movement in the United States.
Rose Wortis was an Eastern European immigrant needleworker who devoted her life to working-class organizing and the Left.
Spurred to publish, in the first instance, as a response to the concerted campaigning of Christian conversionists, women writers were the first Anglo-Jews to produce literature on Jewish themes in England.
Siddy Wronsky is among the pioneers of professional social work and one of the early social work educators. In spite of her remarkable accomplishments and contributions, particularly in the area of the developing social case work as one of the traditional practice methods, she has not received as much publicity as some others in similar roles. She began her career in Germany and was one of the founders of social work education in Palestine.
The documents of the Cairo Genizah rarely contain enough material on specific individuals for the scholar to build up a detailed portrait. One exception is Karima bat ‘Ammar (Amram) the banker, son of Ezra, from Alexandria. She is better known as “al-Wuhsha the Broker” (a name which could be translated as “Desirée” or “Untamed”), and she lived at the end of the eleventh century and into the twelfth. In a world where women were expected to be gainfully employed, Wuhsha is a prototype of the successful independent businesswoman, moving easily from the world of women into that of men.
Frieda Wunderlich, a prominent economist and politician in Germany, became the only woman faculty member of the New School for Social Research in New York when it was established in 1933 as a haven for academic refugees from Nazism. She achieved international recognition for her research and publications on labor and social policy, including women’s work.
Marjorie Wyler was a pioneer in the presentation of Judaism to the American public. Her involvement in religious broadcasting, coupled with decades of public relations work, has made her an advocate for the ethics of social justice inherent in Judaism.
Rosalind Wiener Wyman was, in her words, “born a Democrat.” She was the youngest person ever elected to the Los Angeles City Council and one of the youngest elected officials of a major United States city.
Gussie Edelman Wyner was an early leader of the Boston Jewish community and a national leader of Hadassah who is credited with creating the idea of life memberships in women’s organizations and with establishing the first chapter of Junior Hadassah.
From the 1960s, Yahil played a regular role in other aspects of Holocaust study. Several of her articles were groundbreaking and served as points of departure for the developing field of Holocaust studies and Holocaust instruction in universities, for example in the areas of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust; comparative studies between the Netherlands and Romania, and the Netherlands and Denmark; and Jews in concentration camps in Germany. She also offered a scathing criticism of the revisionist edition of Eichmann’s memoirs. In order to comprehend the broader picture, Yahil emphasized the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust and insisted on the importance of western Europe.
Miriam Yalan-Stekelis’s children’s poems have become an integral part of the cultural repertoire of kindergartens and schools in Israel, reflecting and shaping the everyday lives of children both past and present.
Rosalyn Yalow had two strikes against her in her effort to become a physicist: She was a Jew and a woman. She persevered, and not only earned a career in science and many awards—including a Nobel Prize—but changed the medical world with the introduction of radioimmunoassay.
Berta Yampolsky's story is the story of the Israel Ballet, which began from nothing in a country where modern dance ruled. She was the Ballet's founder and now serves as its artistic director.
One of the most prominent and influential artists of Mexico, Mariana Yampolsky was born on September 6, 1925 in Chicago. While her first art medium in Mexico was printmaking, in 1948 she turned from engraving to photography.
How to cite this page
Jewish Women's Archive. "Encyclopedia." (Viewed on November 26, 2014) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/toc/all>. |
I’ve recently read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a key text in contemporary feminist and queer theory. It is provocative, with many interesting (and perhaps even true) ideas. It also says a few things that are either trivial, though maybe they weren’t so trivial in 1990, or just plain misconceived. It has a reputation for dense unforgiving prose, but the best bits of it are no more difficult to understand than a detailed argument in analytic philosophy. Indeed, without the silly numbering and lettering that litter some analytic philosophy, the argument reads as much smoother prose.
The worst paragraphs follow a pattern of disconnected quotations from various French thinkers presented as opposed perspectives but without much explanation of their theories, ending with a few questions that fall somewhere between the speculative and the rhetorical: “X says ‘this’, Y says ‘that’ but if Y is right, what does it mean for X’s fundamental theory?” She often doesn’t explain in these exchanges why we should care about these theories. Butler’s discussion of psychoanalytic thought, in particular, sinks into this pattern. I suppose these references are unavoidable in academic discussion where the ability to cite a broad literature is a prerequisite for presenting a fresh view. However, Butler is much better when she commits to making and defending an argument of her own. In Gender Trouble, this is a broadly Foucauldian strike on multiple fronts against all forms of sex and gender naturalism and determinism.
The key idea is that there is no stable ground on which to found a universal normative idea of sex (let alone gender). There is no past or future utopia of a ‘true’ sexuality that remains hidden by existing power structures. One cannot scour the psyche for a pure sexual desire or practice that is divorced from social or political power, at least not in a straightforward way, since even repressed sexualities (like lesbianism) are formed as distinct identities using the same forces that oppress them. It is heterosexuality that creates the homosexuality one sees practiced and desired. In fact, ‘sex’ as an institution is generated by social practice, a set of acts that are grouped together using various ethical, medical and juridical discourses.
This ‘troubles’ some feminists as it means that their primary category of political representation (women) is constituted by the very forces of power and domination that their theories attempt to oppose or reform. But, of course, it should trouble anyone who cares about human freedom since according to Butler, sexuality and gender are in no sense natural facts, but unchosen arbitrary institutional impositions on individuals. In fact, they even generate our individual identities and create, police and punish transgressions against them. Quite a lot of her critique hits the mark but I am going to look briefly at two weaknesses. They point to how classical liberals might answer the charge that the free institutions we espouse rely unthinkingly on the domination constituted by the social practices of sex and gender.
Butler’s critique of biological naturalism
One of Butler’s key points of attack is the binary distinction between sex and gender, or the classic idea that one ‘is born female, but becomes a woman’. She attempts to demonstrate that it is not just gender that is the product of social forces, as theorists have traditionally maintained, but that sex itself is a product of discourse. We are undifferentiated beings until discourse groups together certain physical characteristics and inscribes a sex on a body (in fact, constituting the very notion of a ‘body’ by doing so). We are not born even biologically male or female, but have these identities thrust upon us.
Butler holds the discourse of the biological sciences to be a product of this binary and solidified notion of embodied sex and, in turn, a site where the construction of sexuality is hidden behind a façade of nature. How does she argue this? In an early chapter, Butler seems to imply without any argument whatsoever that biology is a site of strategic action, where scientists carefully reproduce ‘common sense’ sexual discourses in order to establish the legitimacy of existing social divisions. In a later chapter, she bolsters this point with reference to a single scientific article on genetics, where scientists discuss their search for a master gene that will explain why some people with XY chromosomes fail to display typically male traits, and some with XX chromosome fail to have fully fledged female traits. She criticises their use of the label XX-females and XY-males which she says introduces the very assumption that needs proving, that genes correspond to actual observed sex. But it is unclear whether she is taking issue with this one article, the hypothesis one group of scientists are trying (and apparently failing) to prove, or the entire field of biological science. Beyond the search to explain exceptions, the correspondence between XX/XY chromosomes and female/male is certainly sufficiently durable that to deny it is to rapidly descend into Python-esque levels of radical obscurantism.
More generally, Butler offers a fairly skewed and partial interpretation of what biologists and geneticists are doing. Scientists use the male/female labels in a variety of ways which seem far from reinforcing and policing common sense notions of sex. They are completely unperturbed with the idea that plants have both male and female parts on the same body. They aren’t troubled by the notion that some amphibians can spontaneously change sex according to social context. Indeed they are fascinated by this discovery. That some lizards can reproduce by making something akin to clones of themselves is, similarly, not making trouble for a biologist. So one cannot assume, as Butler seems to, that the use of sexed labels in biology implies any specific reinforcement of strictly binary sexuality that one sees propounded by some in the human sciences. Natural scientists would generally be fascinated rather than troubled by the discovery of a distinct third or fourth biological sex within humans.
In fact, it seems more likely that scientific discourse (when used properly) has played a role in breaking down essentialist notions of sex. We know through evolutionary biology that the existence of sexed bodies is not a stable fact of any obvious normative consequence or significance, but the result of contingent (often random) mutations over the course of millions of years that have impacted on the way humans reproduce. There is no intrinsic reason why reproductive functions couldn’t have been divided up in a different way to how they are; it just happens that a two-sex divide generally holds amongst humans, but only in the same way that we generally have two feet, two hands and two eyes. Of course, why people should have their body inscribed and defined by their reproductive functions is another matter and one much more in need of critique, but it isn’t scientific discourse that contributes especially to this process.
Targeting biology in this way is particularly ill advised, considering that even Martin Heidegger (who sits at the roots of much post-structuralist theory and had a major influence on Foucault) was, at least on some accounts, a realist with respect to the entities of natural science. Of course, once one introduces a human element to a practice, such as in medicine with its notion of wellness and illness, then you have lost the unique scientific perspective that Heidegger called de-worlding (the studied treatment and analysis of entities as divorced from the human world and its values), but to claim that biology falls into this category requires rather a lot more proving.
Gender as a ‘social formation’
Butler’s references to classical liberalism are quite basic, treating it essentially as adherence to consent and contract as a foundation of legitimate power. She does not discuss classical liberal social theory at all. This is unfortunate as elsewhere Butler seeks out a concept that breaks down the binaries of natural facts and social constructs, and free will and determinism. She notes that although always acting within or against a set of boundaries defined by social institutions, freedom can be found through elaboration on or even parodying of existing practices. Hence, she emphasises the role of queer sexuality in opening up new possibilities in human discourse. Such a concept, of a contingent social framework that structures individual will and identity, or something very close to it, can be found in Hayek’s social theory.
‘Social formations’, for Hayek, are emergent institutions that are the product of human action but not of human design. Like, for example, natural rock formations that are formed over millions of years, they look so elaborate that one assumes they are a product of intelligence. In fact, they are hewn over generations of human interaction, discourse and commerce, not according to a single plan or design. Institutions like language, law and property all fall under this category. So, for example, there is no author of the English language, but a designer trying to come up with an easy means of verbal communication could hardly have come up with a better system (Esperanto, a ‘rationally’ constructed language, never took off). It is unavoidable that people come to be defined and identified by many of these social formations, whether as English speakers or as subjects of common law, and this is prior to the deliberate decisions and designs of individuals or Governments, which have to contend with what a post-structuralist might call the ‘always already’ present aspect of these institutions.
Social change is characterised by the piecemeal adaptation of these institutions. What a liberal wants from these institutions is a framework through which people can form and pursue plans of action without being constantly interrupted and disrupted by the arbitrary powers of others (whether it is being arrested, attacked or having one’s property expropriated). In carrying out their plans, individuals have an imperceptible but eventually decisive role in shaping the future of their social world.
Gender and sexuality fit this notion of social formation quite well. They are institutional impositions that provide a durable set of norms, practices and mutual expectations within a social field. That heterosexuality developed and flourished as a norm when reproductive capacity was scarce and in demand is unsurprising. Now, however, heterosexual norms, enforced either legally or socially, operate like a trade union’s closed shop, restricting access to and legitimating only some kinds of sexual interaction and preventing possible innovations in human relations. Some people continue to benefit from this asymmetrical enforcement of sexual norms, while others find themselves excluded. In addition, the policing and prohibition of sexuality has led (as with most prohibitions) to unintended consequences that are both interesting and sometimes tragic, which is a parallel idea to Butler’s explanation that juridical prohibitions help to generate the very subversive sexual desires they avowedly attempt to snuff out.
Sex in a free society
It goes almost without saying that classical liberals believe that consensual sex should not be subject to any legal regulation, that medics should have no power to decide what kinds of sex are healthy (though they would remain able to offer advice to those willing to listen), and that marriage should not be instituted by the state at all. All these things, to some extent, arbitrarily exclude and punish individuals who are merely pursuing their own personal plans. But what would a classical liberal expect sexual relations to look like in the absence of these juridical and medical impositions? Could sex as a concept disappear to be replaced by more generalised notions of simply ‘adults at play’? Or would everyone have their own unique notion of sexuality?
My hunch is that most people would be satisfied with following a set of sex and gender norms in the same way that most people are happy to pick out a style of clothes that suits them (and in a sense comes to define them), rather than making their clothes from scratch. What you would see, as we already witness, is more choice. In other words, the question would not just be whether one is to identify as gay or straight, but a whole range of possible practices and lifestyles. In this context, ‘queer’ individuals would take the role of social entrepreneurs or pioneers, experimenting with new ways of living, with the more successful, interesting or aesthetically engaging lifestyles being imitated subsequently by others. Just as owning an IPhone has advantages because they are so popular and compatible with various other products, so most people will tend to define themselves along relatively popular lines just for ease of co-ordination and participation. The important thing is that popular identities are not protected and policed through violence or law, and that alternatives and elaborations on existing sexualities are allowed to flourish. And, of course, they should always be available for parody. This is one liberal response to gender trouble. |
Wells College News Archives 2011
Stories from the College's news archives.
Wells College Hosts Peachtown Native American Festival
Weeklong Education Events Will Lead to Festival at the College
Wells College will hold Peachtown Education Week from Monday, September 12 through Friday, September 16, with the Peachtown Native American Festival concluding the weeklong celebration on Friday. All events are located on the Wells College campus and are free to the public. The series of educational events features Finger Lakes area speakers and College professors. Topics to be discussed include the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, the Haudenosaunee's Confederacy Great Binding Law as an inspiration for the U.S. Constitution, the Iroquois White Corn Project, and a panel discussion on the Cayuga Lake Watershed.
The Peachtown Native American Festival celebrates Cayuga and Haudenosaunee culture each year, and features a traditional dance workshop, vendors, crafts, and storytelling with Birdie Hill. Hill is a Cayuga Heron Clan Mother and former representative of the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, who along with other clan mothers and council members will be talking about the Cayuga Nation and their roles and responsibilities in a clan. This year a peach tree will be planted on the College's campus to commemorate the event and celebration. The festival will conclude with a traditional Cayuga Nation social exhibiting singing and dancing along with a Native American dinner including corn soup. The community is invited to partake in the dances and singing and share in the culture that is Cayuga Nation.
The Peachtown Education Week schedule is as follows:
The Beginning of the End: The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, and How They Boomed the Guns
for Twelve Hours Straight
Monday, September 12, 7:30 p.m.
Hostetter Lecture Hall (Room 209), Stratton Hall
Mr. Allan Jamieson, Director of Neto Hatinawke Ongwehowe [Here-Lives-the-People in the Cayuga Language]
Challenges to the Cayuga Watershed: A Two-Row Wampum Approach
Tuesday, September 13, 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Hostetter Lecture Hall (Room 209), Stratton Hall
Ernie Olson, Professor of Anthropology and Religion at Wells College
Dan Hill, SHARE Farm Manager/Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force member/Musician/Cayuga Nation Council member
Hillary Lambert, Steward of Cayuga Lake Watershed Network
The Haudenosaunee and The Great Binding Law: An Inspiration for the U.S. Constitution
Wednesday, September 14, 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Zabriskie Lecture Hall (Room 102)
Susan Tabrizi, Professor of Political Science
The Creator's Game: Lacrosse (interactive presentation)
Thursday, September 15, 5-7 p.m.
Art Exhibit Room (AER), Macmillan Hall
Alf Jacques, Master Lacrosse Stick Maker (Onondaga, Turtle Clan)
The White Corn Project
Friday, September 16, 12:40-1:30 p.m.
Art Exhibit Room (AER), Macmillan Hall
Kevin White, Visiting Professor of Native American Studies at SUNY Oswego/ former scholar-in-residence at Wells College/ Akwesasne Mohawk
Peachtown Native American Festival
Friday, September 16
Sommer Center lawn/Sommer Center
Birdie Hill and Clan Mothers 2:30-3:30 p.m.
Traditional Dance Workshop & Peach Tree Planting 3:30-4:00 p.m.
Birdie Hill and Clan Mothers 4:00-5:00 p.m.
Dinner 5:00pm (Dining Hall)
Vendors selling jewelry, crafts, musical instruments and more will be available all afternoon.
Friday, September 16, 6:00 p.m.
A traditional Cayuga Nation social event, with singing, dancing and a special Native American menu including corn soup!
September 12, 2011
Peter Cohen to Speak at Wells College
Prolific producer and editor will discuss technologies in design and editing.
The Wells College Arts and Lecture Series welcomes editor and producer Peter Cohen to campus for a lecture titled "The Evolution of Electronic Editing from the Razor to the Edge." Cohen, an expert in digital media with years of notable professional experience, will discuss the changing technology and demonstrate some key media software. The discussion will be held at 7:30 p.m. September 14 in Phipps Auditorium of Macmillan Hall on the Wells College campus. The public is invited to attend.
Cohen's lecture will trace the technological developments of the post-production industry and the concepts that these technologies enhanced. He'll give an overview of how these concepts have evolved into today's media applications for video editing, graphic design, compositing and sound design among other things. The audience will be able to see some of this technology firsthand with software demos of Adobe Photoshop, Gimp GNU image manipulation, Apple's Motion templates and graphic tools, Sonicfire Pro audio editing, Compressor export and delivery, and Final Cut Pro editing software.
Cohen began his editing career with Lorne Michaels' post-production company Broadway Video, working as assistant editor for "Simon and Garfunkel: The Concert in Central Park" and preparing episodes of "Saturday Night Live" for syndication. In the time since, he has lent his talents to "The Twilight Zone," "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Pee Wee's Playhouse," and numerous other network specials, television series, and music videos. Cohen was in charge of post-production for the films "Nobody Knows Anything" (Stargazer, 1999) and "Love Lies Bleeding" (Village Roadshow, 1998), and has built up extensive knowledge of and experience with film, video and digital media. His work has been recognized by the MTV Video Music Awards, Hamptons International Film Festival and the Worldfest Charleston International Film Festival. Currently, Cohen produces interactive DVD games for the Los Angeles-based CDG Entertainment.
The Wells College Arts & Lecture Series brings a range of artists and intellectuals to campus annually to perform, to speak on relevant issues, and to represent the disciplines of theatre, music and dance. Groups and individuals are selected annually by a committee composed of Wells faculty, staff and students. This lecture is the series' first offering this academic year.
September 1, 2011
Alf Jacques to Hold Interactive Session at Wells College
This year's Juliana James Native American Scholar will discuss the history of lacrosse.
"When you talk about lacrosse, you talk about the lifeblood of the Six Nations. The game is ingrained into our culture our system and our lives." - Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, Jr
The Wells College Juliana James Native American Scholar Series is proud to welcome Alf Jacques (Onondaga, Turtle Clan) for an interactive session titled "The Creator's Game: Lacrosse." Jacques' discussion will take place at 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 15 in the Art Exhibit Room (AER) of Macmillan Hall. Refreshments will be provided, and the public is invited to attend. The discussion is part of Wells College's Peachtown Education Week.
The event will focus on the history and present state of lacrosse and its importance to the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous people of New York State. Jacques is a master lacrosse stick maker with over 45 years experience as a player, pro player, coach, and general manager of the Onondaga Redhawks. He has led the Redhawks to three championships and the President's Cup Championship in 2010, the year he retired.
Jacques has led workshops and given talks at many colleges and universities including Cornell, Ithaca College, Villanova, Yale, and Onondaga Community College. Recently, he and members of Onondaga Nation were invited to the White House to lead workshops on lacrosse with youngsters from the D.C. area as part of fostering well-being among Native youth.
Juliana James (1913-2000) was an artist who lived much of her life in New Mexico and was widely respected as an advocate for women's reproductive rights and social justice. Among her many contributions, she founded Santa Fe Woman's Services, which focuses on serving minority mothers, and was a fundraiser for the Women's Health Clinic. The Juliana James Native American Visiting Scholar residency, established in 2004, brings a scholar from the Six Nations or Haudenosaunee to campus. The resident may be an artist, musician, academic scholar, leader or teacher from the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee; depending on the areas of expertise, he or she may offer workshops, lectures, art exhibits, or performances. The scholar may also offer a course for a full-semester or for a shorter period.
The Department of Athletics is a proud sponsor of the Juliana James Native American Scholar program. With over one third of the student population participating on one of 16 varsity programs at Wells, providing diverse experiences for the student body is an essential core value of Wells Athletics and the NCAA Division III philosophy.
September 5, 2011
John Manning to Give Presentation on Geothermal Systems
Expert in the field will explain the technology and its potential for curbing gas emissions.
Wells College welcomes John D. Manning, president of Earth Sensitive Solutions, LLC, for a discussion of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and the potential of geothermal heating pumps in lowering these emissions. The discussion will take place Wednesday, September 7 at 12:40 p.m., in the Hostetter Lecture Hall (Room 209) of Stratton Hall on the Wells College campus. This presentation is a special event for the College's Science Colloquium series, and the public is invited to attend.
Geothermal heat pumps use underground systems and draw on the temperature of the earth to provide heat during the winter and cooling during summer months, resulting in economical, renewable temperature control. Manning's presentation will help the audience understand how heat pump technology works, the benefits of the process, and ways that it can be coupled with other renewable sources to create buildings that produce no greenhouse gases. The discussion will provide general information about heat pumps, drawing on examples of geothermal installations and Manning's personal experiences.
"I first heard about geothermal during [Wells College's] Activism Symposium a couple of years ago and have been learning about it since then," said Visiting Professor of Biology Mark Witmer, who is helping to coordinate the event. "Geothermal sure looks like an effective antidote to our carbon problem. I'm interested to see if that's true."
Manning has over 25 years of experience in mechanical engineering, with two decades of designing and installing geothermal systems. In 2003, he founded Earth Sensitive Solutions, an environmental engineering and consulting firm. With six patents in heat pump design, Manning has worked on hospitals, academic facilities, office buildings, military and low-income housing, and other projects as far-ranging as Port Augusta, Australia. He also helped with the Cambria, PA Department of Environmental Protection office, the first LEED 2.0 gold-rated facility.
September 1, 2011
Exhibition of Work by Jennifer Macklem at Wells College
"Peaceable Kingdom" features installation and video pieces.
The Wells College Visual Arts Department presents an exhibition of work by Ottawa artist Jennifer Macklem titled "Peaceable Kingdom." The exhibit will be on display in the String Room Gallery (SRG) of Main Building from August 31 to October 7. The gallery is free and the public is cordially invited to view the show. An opening reception on Wednesday, August 31 from 6 to 8 p.m. offers an opportunity to meet the artist; light refreshments will be served.
The exhibit will feature sculpture installations and video works by Macklem, associate professor of sculpture at the University of Ottawa and the director of the graduate program in the visual arts department. Macklem's work uses unusual materials within an inclusive process that bridges artistic forms. Her sculptural installations draw on themes of nature, narrative and hybridity to create intriguing experimental pieces. Some of her works invite viewer participation through the kinetic activities of touch and movement.
Macklem completed her undergraduate studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts and at the Parsons School of Design in Paris and later earned her MFA at UQAM in Montreal, Canada. She has exhibited her work widely in Europe, North America and Asia and has participated in various selected artists residencies, conferences, solo exhibitions and international exchanges. Her permanent, collaborative public art projects are installed in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick.
The String Room Gallery is a center for the exhibition of contemporary art in the Finger Lakes region of New York. It is located on the Wells College campus in the southwest corner of the first floor of Main Building. Hours are Tuesday through Friday from 12 to 5 pm; and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4 pm.
For more information, visit www. wells.edu/stringroomgallery/exhibitions.htm.
August 25, 2011
Wells College Ranked Among America's Top Colleges
Wells College Ranked 118th by Forbes
Wells College has earned high rankings among national colleges and universities in Forbes annual list of the nations' top 650 undergraduate colleges.
Wells College is ranked 118th among America's best colleges and universities by Forbes in its annual report, "America's Top Colleges."
Wells College has demonstrated considerable success in its commitment to an educational experience grounded in strong faculty-student relationships, interdisciplinary thinking, experiential learning, and actively engaging the world beyond the College's lakeside campus. Wells offers innovative, student-centered academic and co-curricular programming, including the Susan Wray Sullivan '51 and Pike H. Sullivan Center for Business and Entrepreneurship which provides a unique interdisciplinary approach to the study of business that is grounded in the liberal arts.
The listing by Forbes ranks the top 650 colleges and universities in the country. Fewer than 10% of all the accredited postsecondary institutions in the United States even qualify for inclusion on the list. The Forbes' rankings, according to the editors, are based on "educational outcomes, not reputations" and focus on "the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt." The rankings are undertaken by Forbes by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
August 5, 2011
Wells College Receives $5 Million Gift for New Center for Business and Entrepreneurship
Pike and Susan Wray Sullivan Support Innovative Business Program Rooted in the Liberal Arts.
Wells College President Lisa Marsh Ryerson announced on Friday, June 3 that the College has received a major gift from Pike and Susan Wray Sullivan to help establish its new business center. By endowing the Susan Wray Sullivan '51 and Pike H. Sullivan Center for Business and Entrepreneurship at Wells College, the loyal supporters are helping the College realize its vision of creating an undergraduate business program rooted in the liberal arts with an emphasis on innovation, experiential learning and entrepreneurship.
"As Wells College offered a transformational experience for Sue [Wray Sullivan], she and Pike have in turn made a course-altering commitment to Wells," said Ryerson during her speech at Wells' 2011 Reunion ceremony, where Mrs. Sullivan was celebrating her 60th reunion. "With the Sullivans' gift, the College will have the funding, in perpetuity, to assure that the Center for Business and Entrepreneurship develops and thrives."
The Susan Wray Sullivan '51 and Pike H. Sullivan Center for Business and Entrepreneurship marks an important strategic investment for the liberal arts college, which continually renews its curriculum to attract and serve students with an intensely personal education that boasts small classes, a tight-knit academic community, and a focus on experiential or "hands-on" learning. By integrating business fundamentals and distinctive course offerings with a core liberal arts curriculum, the business program at Wells aims to "prepare students not only with business acumen to help launch their careers, but also with the critical reasoning skills, communication skills, and well-rounded perspective essential for leadership," said Ryerson.
The new business program offers unique areas of interest for students to explore, including entrepreneurship, as well as an "innovation laboratory" and a "design thinking" course. Students will have the ability to tailor their course of study with these distinctive offerings and with coursework in business fundamentals including marketing, personal and organizational finance, economics, business strategy, accounting, human resources, business ethics and international business.
"The new Center for Business and Entrepreneurship will offer extraordinary opportunities for students at Wells, and I'm delighted that we can help make that possible," said Susan Wray Sullivan, Wells College Class of 1951. "Pike and I are thrilled to support Wells College, which long ago offered me the gift of a very special educational experience that made an enormous difference in my life. I remain deeply connected to my classmates and enthusiastic about Wells' future."
In addition to directing the undergraduate business program at Wells, the Center will host workshops and guest speakers on campus, as well as events such as the Wells "Entrepreneurship Week," which features a speaker series and business plan competition for students. The Center will also organize business-related clubs on campus and forge ties with businesses and not-for-profit organizations to provide internships and special educational opportunities for students.
Of the $5,000,000 given by the Sullivans, $4,500,000 will provide endowment for ongoing annual funding to support the staffing, operations, and programs of the Center. An additional $500,000 will provide start-up expenses for the Center for the first two years. The work of the Center began during the 2010-2011 academic year with the inaugural director, Robert J. Ellis, a graduate of the Harvard Business School who has extensive industry experience in financial services management, marketing, retail sales, and accounting.
"We're inspired by the Sullivans' generosity and by the promise that the Center holds for Wells College students," said Ryerson. "Sue and Pike Sullivan are wonderful representatives of our vibrant community of alumni and friends, who-in a multitude of ways-are making a difference in the world through visionary and humane leadership."
June 6, 2011
Wells College Announces New Victor Hammer Fellow
Katie Baldwin will join the College's Book Arts faculty this August.
The Wells College Book Arts Center is pleased to announce that Katie Baldwin will be the seventh Victor Hammer Fellow in the Book Arts. Ms. Baldwin, who will join the Book Arts faculty in late August, is currently teaching printmaking and book arts classes in Philadelphia. As the Victor Hammer Fellow, she will teach courses in introductory hand bookbinding as well as a variety of upper-level courses that may include binding, letterpress printing, box making, art on the press and printmaking. With the MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Ms. Baldwin brings both teaching experience and innovation to the program at Wells.
Ms. Baldwin has taught at Moore College of Art and Design, Tyler School of Art, The University of the Arts, Drexel University and The Evergreen State College. She has given workshops at the Fleischer Art Memorial in Philadelphia; the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY; The Center for Book Arts in New York City and The Experimental Print Institute in Mexico City.
A recipient of many grants and fellowships, Ms. Baldwin has shown her work in solo, two person and group exhibitions in the US, Canada, China, France, Japan, Korea and Poland. Among her residencies, she spent three months in Japan studying traditional moku hanga woodblock printing. Ms. Baldwin's work is included in public and private collections across the country. Says Nancy Gil, director of the Book Arts Center, "We are thrilled to have Katie join us. Her skills in binding and printing make her a perfect fit for the Book Arts Center, and her talents in print making will make her an asset in the Visual Arts major as well."
The fellowship is named for Victor Hammer, an Austrian printer, book designer, typographer and portrait artist, who fled Nazi Europe to come to Wells College in 1939. The Hammer Fellowship is a two-year book artist-in-residence program that was founded in 1998. By bringing young, emerging book artists to campus, the Wells Book Arts Center has made a name for itself in the book arts world; applicants in recent years have been not only from across the nation, but also from Mexico, Russia and Korea.
The Book Arts Center teaches introductory courses in letterpress printing, hand bookbinding, calligraphy and various upper-level courses in binding and printing. In addition to courses taught in the academic year, the Book Arts Center offers two week-long series of workshops in the book arts at the Wells Book Arts Summer Institute in July. Visit www.wells.edu/bookarts for more information.
May 5, 2011
Wells Choral Ensembles Offer Spring Concert
Singing groups and student soloists to present classical works and arrangements of folk songs and spirituals.
The Wells College Choral Ensembles will present their annual Spring Concert on Sunday afternoon, May 8 at 3:00 p.m. in Barler Recital Hall. This event will be the final performance of the college singers under the direction of their founder and conductor Crawford R. Thoburn, who will relinquish his duties as professor of music and director of choral activities at the end of this academic year. The three singing groups - Women's Ensemble, Men's Ensemble, and the mixed voice Concert Choir - will present a wide variety of choral works from the sixteenth century to the present. Admission to the concert is free, and the public is cordially invited to attend this festive event.
During the past fifty-one years, the Wells choral ensembles have performed widely throughout the Northeastern U.S., and in Europe, winning prizes in international competition, singing by invitation for national professional music organizations such as MENC and ACDA, and appearing on public television and radio in this country and abroad. These activities have established a reputation of choral excellence for the singers from Wells.
This year's Spring Concert will feature the Concert Choir of mixed voices singing sacred and secular works from composers such as Giovanni Palestrina, Thomas Tomkins, John Dowland, Henry Purcell, J.S. Bach, Giovanni Pergolesi, Franz Schubert, Charles Wood, James McCray and the Choir's conductor, Crawford R. Thoburn. Also on the program will be arrangements of folksongs and Afro-American Spirituals, and the Women's and Men's Ensembles will each present works from their own repertoires.
Student vocal soloists will include sopranos Marie Angus and Sarah Clark, and the ensembles will be accompanied by Pianist Russell Posegate, lecturer in music at Wells. Laura Campbell, also a lecturer in music at Wells, will provide a flute obligato in one of the selections.
Crawford R. Thoburn, the founder and conductor of the Wells Choral Ensembles, is professor of music, and chair of the division of the arts at the College. In addition to his work as a conductor and teacher, more than one hundred of his choral compositions, arrangements, and editions have been published, and choirs across the U.S. and throughout the world sing his music. Professional, church, and college groups record his works, which have been broadcast on National Public Radio and Public Radio International.
May 5, 2011
Wells College Announces Commencement Speaker
Laurie Munroe Abkemeier, Wells College Class of 1992, Will Deliver Commencement Address.
Wells College has announced that Laurie Munroe Abkemeier, Wells College class of 1992, will deliver this year's commencement address. Abkemeier is highly successful literary agent and a former book editor. The College's 143rd commencement will be held at 10 a.m. on May 27, 2011, lakeside at the Aurora Inn. The College expects 135 graduates.
Abkemeier is a literary agent with DeFiore and Company, where she represents more than fifty journalists, bloggers, poets, academics, and artists. She has also negotiated film and television deals on behalf of her authors, who include John Grogan (author of the multimillion-copy bestseller "Marley & Me," made into a movie starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston), and Kate Torgovnick (author of "Cheer!," which is the basis for "Hellcats," starring Ashley Tisdale and Aly Michalka, shown on The CW). Most recently she created and launched a publishing advice app, Agent Obvious, and has developed a network of online and social media to support her authors and promote the publishing industry. She is active on Tumblr, Twitter, and other social media outlets.
Abkemeier began her career as an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster in New York City, and after two years moved to Hyperion, where she was responsible for five New York Times bestsellers, including "Brain Droppings" by George Carlin, "Rock This!" by Chris Rock, "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem!" by Jeff Foxworthy, and "First Person Plural" by Cameron West, Ph.D.
Hailing from Eureka, California, Abkemeier graduated from Wells with a B.A. in communications, which she crafted as an individualized major. During her time at Wells she pursued her interest in journalism, as she worked in the public relations office, launched the Lakeside Press-the only campus newspaper at the time-and wrote her senior thesis on the women of television news. In addition, she spent a January internship writing and announcing the evening news for a radio station in her hometown, as well as taking advantage of the Washington semester at The American University, where she interned at ABC's "Nightline with Ted Koppel" during the Gulf War. She also worked for the Syracuse Post-Standard, and had a semester-long internship at the Ithaca Journal.
"Laurie's approach to lifelong learning and her entrepreneurial spirit embody the thoughtful criteria provided by the Class of 2011's class officers," said President Lisa Marsh Ryerson in an email announcement to the Wells community.
April 28, 2011
Wells College Senior Kassandra Stepniak Receives the SFS Distinguished Student Researcher Award
Stepniak's examination of wood density contributes to leading knowledge on global carbon cycles.
The School for Field Studies (SFS) presented its bi-annual Distinguished Student Researcher Award to Wells College senior Kassandra Stepniak, a biological sciences major from Montrose, Pa., in recognition of exceptional environmental research she conducted while studying abroad during the spring semester of 2010 at The SFS Center for Rainforest Studies in North Queensland, Australia.
Each year, The School for Field Studies honors exceptional students with Distinguished Student Researcher Awards for making important contributions in environmental research. SFS semester students engage in undergraduate research guided by SFS faculty on projects related to the Center's Five Year Research Plan (5YRP). Outcomes of these Directed Research (DR) projects provide information and recommendations to community members and other stakeholders on critical, local environmental issues. Students are nominated by SFS faculty based on their demonstrated sophistication in research design, field work, and reporting; their leadership skills and teamwork; and their contribution to the Center's 5YRP.
SFS President Bonnie Clendenning and Dean Dr. Robin Sears presented the Award this spring with nominations from Stepniak's DR advisor Dr. Timothy Curran, associate professor in forest management at the Center.
Stepniak's research project, entitled "Does wood density affect the rate of wood decay?", found that wood density as a trait could predict decay rates of certain plant species in a relatively short period of time-a process which usually takes several years to complete. Her research is particularly timely in further understanding the carbon cycle in the midst of global warming.
Dr. Curran says, "Kassandra's project shows how work at a local scale can contribute to solving global issues; hers is the vanguard of a suite of studies which aim to understand patterns of wood decay and hence global carbon cycles."
"At the School for Field Studies, students engage in research projects that serve the local communities and address local environmental issues," says Wells College Professor of Environmental Studies Niamh O' Leary. "Kassie's research was not just for a class, it's is a great contribution to ongoing research activities in the rainforests of Australia."
April 28, 2011
Poet Jerry Mirskin to Hold a Reading at Wells College
Ithaca College professor and writer will read from his latest collection.
Wells College welcomes Ithaca College professor and poet Jerry Mirskin for a reading of his work at 4:45 p.m. on Thursday, April 28, in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.
Mirskin is currently an associate professor in the writing program at Ithaca College, and he regularly teaches select courses at Cornell University. In 2002, Mammoth Books published Mirskin's first poetry collection, titled "Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate be the Sun." His new collection, "In Flagrante Delicto," was released in 2008. Mirskin has also been published in literary journals and anthologies including the Bloombury Review, the Madison Review, Mid-west Quarterly, "Roots & Flowers: Poets and Poems on Family" (anthology), "Contemporary Jewish American Writers" (anthology), and Sou'wester. He has presented his work and given workshops at universities, colleges, public libraries, art centers, and on television.
Mirskin earned his B.A. in psychology from SUNY Fredonia, his M.A. in English/creative writing from SUNY Binghamton, and his Ph.D. in English/composition theory from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was born in the Bronx, N.Y., and has lived in California, Wisconsin and Maine.
April 28, 2011
Wells College Announces Winners of First Entrepreneurship Contest
Contest gave students a chance to show innovation, teamwork through project development.
Wells College has announced the winners of its inaugural entrepreneurship contest. The contest was held as part of the College's first Entrepreneurship Week; Wells recently added business and entrepreneurship as a course of study.
In the not-for-profit category, Jessica Alicea, a first-year student from Salisbury Mills, N.Y., and Melissa Fortin, a first-year student from Alton, N.H., bested six other teams with their concept to fund the SPCA through pet sitting and pet rental for stress reduction at Wells College.
In the for-profit category, Kasia Jandura-Cessna, a first-year student from New Hartford, N.Y., and Alev Cakmak, a first-year student from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., beat five other teams with their development plan for a new training golf club.
Criteria for judging were a mix of qualitative and quantitative assessments. In the for-profit category, students were measured on their business plan, revenue generation, and likelihood of becoming an actual product. In the not-for-profit category, judging criteria included number of people helped, number of people potentially helped, scale of social ill, and likelihood of alleviating social ill. All students were also judged on the quality and passion of their presentations.
"Entrepreneurship Week is full of innovation, challenge and reward for all participants," says Kasia Jandura-Cessna, one of this year's winners. "Students were given the opportunity to present their unique ideas, along with their hard work, with a more professional approach than in the classroom. This was a great experience to have as an undergraduate, and I am motivated to work even harder next year."
"Clearly this first ever entrepreneurship contest at Wells contributed to students' creativity and oral communication skills, two aspects of a liberal arts education that the College emphasizes," says Provost and Dean of the College Leslie Miller-Bernal. "The teamwork also involved collaboration with other students, another helpful aspect of 'lifelong learning' to which Wells College is committed."
The contest elicited 45 participants in its first iteration. The winning teams in two categories, for-profit and not-for-profit, each received a $1000 prize. All participants received a small reward for presenting their creative ideas to an audience estimated at around 100.
Entrepreneurship Week has been made possible, in part, by a gift in memory of Louise Bingham Hatch, Wells College Class of '38, from her family.
April 14, 2011
Dr. Richard A. Kissel to Speak at Wells College
Paleontologist and educator will explore the effects of climate change over time.
Wells College proudly welcomes this year's Earth Day speaker, Dr. Richard Kissel of Ithaca's Paleontological Research Institution and Museum of the Earth. Dr. Kissel will give the discussion "Climate Change throughout Time" at 12:40 p.m. on Tuesday, April 19, in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall on the Wells College campus. This event is free and open to the public.
During the talk, Dr. Kissel will explain how the planet's changing climate has affected the course of life on Earth throughout the past four billion years. The discussion will explore the history and variety of life on Earth, from tiny trilobites to titanic dinosaurs, and the conditions under which these forms evolved.
Dr. Richard Kissel is a vertebrate paleontologist and the director of teacher programs at the Paleontological Research Institution and its Museum of the Earth in Ithaca. He has studied ancient amphibians, dinosaurs and other reptiles, and the ancient relatives of mammals. Dr. Kissel has authored popular articles and children's books on paleontology and the nature of science, and he was a featured scientist on NOVA's scienceNOW. From 2003-2008, Dr. Kissel worked at The Field Museum in Chicago as a developer and the primary scientific advisor for Evolving Planet, the Museum's 27,000-square-foot exhibition on the history of life on Earth.
Dr. Kissel holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology, an M.S. in geosciences, and a B.S. in geology. His interest in science education has led to his current role at PRI. He also currently teaches courses at Cornell University and Ithaca College.
The discussion is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Major and the Campus Greens club.
April 14, 2011
Human Rights Activist and Educator Victoria Sanford to Speak at Wells College
Subject of the discussion will be community engagement and human rights.
Wells College welcomes accomplished human rights activist and educator Victoria Sanford for a discussion titled "Sustained Engagement: Anthropology, Community Collaboration and Human Rights." The talk will be held at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, April 22 in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall. The event is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.
Sanford has spent many years studying, writing, and speaking about conflicts involving the Guatemalan government and indigenous Maya communities. Her talk will describe her work with a Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation's team in the 1990s; subsequent work with the country's Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission); getting a book published in Spanish about the Panzos massacre; and presenting this work in the town of Panzos last year, on the 32nd anniversary of the massacre.
Victoria Sanford has dedicated a great deal of her life to human rights activism. In 1986, she began assisting and representing Central American asylum-seekers through a nonprofit refugee legal services project that she founded and directed. In the time since, she has worked with Maya communities in Guatemala, Afro-Colombian and indigenous peace communities in Colombia, and Colombian refugee communities in Ecuador, and has done additional work and research in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, South Africa, and Mexico.
Victoria Sanford earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University, where she also received training in International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. Additionally, she received a certificate in Human Rights Law from the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Currently an associate professor of anthropology at Lehman College, Sanford is also a member of the doctoral faculty at City University of New York. She was elected to the American Anthropological Association's Committee for Human Rights, serves as a Research Associate at Columbia University's Center for International Conflict Resolution, and is an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University, among other notable appointments and positions. Sanford has also taught in the Department of Rural and Regional Development at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia.
In addition to working and teaching, Sanford has had a prolific writing career. She is the author of "Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala," as well as several other books on violence and genocide in Guatemala, and is co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation's report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the truth commission mentioned above). Sanford has published articles and chapters in numerous peer-reviewed journals and volumes and has contributed to internet publications, human rights reports, articles, and other sources.
In recognition of her work, Ms. Sanford received a Bunting Peace Fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, a United States Institute for Peace grant, a Fulbright Teaching/Research Award, a Rockefeller Fellowship for research on violence, a MacArthur Consortium Fellowship, and the Early Career Award of the Peace Society of the American Psychological Association, among others. She has served as a consultant and provided invited expert briefings on human rights to private foundations as well as to governmental, nongovernmental and United Nations entities. She has published and presented her work for conferences and associations in England, Spain, Denmark, Norway, South Africa, Ecuador, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Austria, Slovenia, and the United States.
April 13, 2011
Book Artist Sarah Bryant to Speak at Wells College
Victor Hammer Fellow will discuss the production of her latest book.
Wells College presents a discussion by book artist and Victor Hammer Fellow Sarah Bryant entitled "The Evolution of an Artist's Book." The talk, which is this year's Susan Garretson Swartzburg Lecture, will be held at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 21 in the Lecture Hall (Room 209) of Stratton Hall. This event is free and open to the public.
Bryant, the proprietor of Big Jump Press, will be discussing the design and production of her most recent book, a project entitled "Biography." The book is "an exploration of the chemical elements in the human body and the roles they play elsewhere in the world," according to the website of Big Jump Press. "Each spread is a diagram describing the elements as they exist on the periodic table, the earth's crust, a variety of man-made weapons, medicines and tools, sea water, etc.," and relating these to the elements within the human body. Bryant will also describe her current project, a letterpress treatment of a collection of poems by Wells Professor of English Bruce Bennett titled "The Bestial Floor."
Bryant founded Big Jump Press in 2005. In 2008, she earned her master's in book arts from the University of Alabama. From 2008 to 2011, she has served as the Victor Hammer Fellow at Wells College, teaching bookbinding and letterpress classes and designing and printing for the Wells College Press. Her artist's books have been featured in a variety of exhibitions and collections, and last year, she earned the Juror's Award for Artistic Excellence from the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair.
The Susan Garretson Swartzburg Lecture, sponsored by the Wells College Book Arts Center, is named for Susan Garretson Swartzburg, Wells College Class of 1960, who was one of the co-founders of the Book Arts Center. Swartzburg worked tirelessly to promote the fledgling Center until her unexpected death in 1996.
Bryant's talk will be preceded by a reading of "The Bestial Floor" by Wells Professor of English Bruce Bennett on Wednesday, April 20th at 7:00 p.m., in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall. This event is free and open to the public.
April 13, 2011
Wells Professor Bruce Bennett to Read at Wells College
Poet and professor will read from his upcoming publication of rhymed fables.
Wells College presents a reading of rhymed and prose fables by Wells Professor of English Bruce Bennett on Wednesday, April 20th at 7:00 p.m., in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall. The occasion of this reading is the publication by the Wells College Press of "The Bestial Floor," a boxed letterpress edition of fifteen of Professor Bennett's rhymed fables.
"The Bestial Floor" was designed and printed by Victor Hammer Fellow Sarah Bryant, with the assistance of students Alex Schloop '12 and Abagail Williams '11 at the Wells College Book Arts Center in an edition of seventy-five copies. The boxes were handmade in the Wells College Bindery.
According to Professor Bennett, he has been writing fables of various sorts since the 1970s. Several of his books, including "To Be A Heron" (1989), "Hey, Diddle Diddle" (2001), and "Funny Signals" (2003), feature rhymed and prose fables. The fables in "The Bestial Floor" were selected from "Animal Rites," an as-yet-unpublished manuscript consisting entirely of fables.
"Influences, at the beginning anyway, were Aesop, Thurber, and LaFontaine," commented Bennett, "but after a while writing fables took on a life of its own. I have always been interested in exploring the possibilities of writing in a variety of forms, and the opportunities offered by writing fables, which in a way are pure storytelling and can have any subject whatever, seem to be inexhaustible."
Professor Bennett has taught at Wells since 1973. He is Chair of English and directs the college's Creative Writing Program.
Sarah Bryant will offer a talk about the creation of the printed edition of "The Bestial Floor," entitled "The Evolution of an Artist's Book," at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 21, in the Lecture Hall (Room 209) of Stratton Hall on the Wells College campus. This event is free and open to the public.
April 13, 2011
Ithaca Author Bob Proehl to Read at Wells College
Fiction writer will read from his award-winning work.
Wells College welcomes Ithaca writer Bob Proehl for a reading of his work at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 13, in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall on the Wells College campus. This event is free and open to the public.
Bob Proehl will read "The Secret Origin of the Bethlehem Plant," which won the 2011 Allen and Nirelle Prize for Ficton from the Syracuse University journal Stone Canoe. A reception will follow the reading.
Bob Proehl was born near Buffalo, New York and went to college at SUNY Geneseo. He now makes his home in Ithaca, New York, where he works as outreach coordinator at Buffalo Street Books, and recently led the successful effort to preserve this independent bookstore as a cooperative. His first book, "The Gilded Palace of Sin," was published in 2008.
For more information, contact Cynthia Garrett, 315-364-3250, or e-mail firstname.lastname@example.org.
April 13, 2011
Reading of Stone Canoe, Arts and Literary Journal, at Wells College
Editors and contributors to the Syracuse University journal will present their work.
Wells College welcomes the return of editors and writers from this year's edition of Stone Canoe, Syracuse University's annual Journal of Arts, Literature, and Social Commentary, for a reading of selections from the journal. The reading will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 7th, in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall.
Editors and writers associated with the current issue of Stone Canoe will speak about the magazine and read from their work during their visit. Those participating include General Editor Robert Colley and Moving Images Editor Nancy Keefe Rhodes, as well as poets Philip Memmer and Michael Jennings, fiction writer Patrick Lawler, and nonfiction writer Sarah Averill. Wells Professor of English Bruce Bennett will also read, as well as comment briefly about poet Lucille Clifton, who died last year and to whom this issue is dedicated.
Stone Canoe showcases the work of emerging as well as established artists in a variety of fields who have connections to Upstate New York, with the aim of promoting "a greater awareness of the cultural and intellectual richness that characterizes life in the region." As one critic has commented, "Stone Canoe is beautifully done, and demonstrates that great things are happening Upstate." Another wrote: "Stone Canoe is an immensely impressive journal, adventurous, ambitious, and handsomely produced." Last year Wells hosted a similar event to mark the publication of Stone Canoe Number 4.
This year's issue, which was published in February, includes writing, artwork, and a new section that explores film and video. Further information about the current issue can be found online at www.stonecanoejournal.org/issues/2011/editorsnotes.html. For more information about the readings, contact Professor Bruce Bennett, 315.364.3228, or e-mail email@example.com.
April 4, 2011
Lac La Belle to Perform at Wells College
Detroit musicians combine rural American folk with modern styles.
Wells College presents a performance by acoustic duo Lac La Belle at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 9, in Wells Campus' Sommer Center. The performance is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.
Lac La Belle is a collaboration between Jennie Knaggs and Nick Schillace, both accomplished artists in the tradition of American Appalachian folk music. Their music uses accordion, mandolin, banjo, ukulele, and resonator guitar to create a snappy sound that blends their folk and country influences with modern sounds and conventions. Lac La Belle has completed four tours of the Midwest, South, and East Coast, appearing at the Detroit Folk Festival, The Chicago Calling Festival, and The Avant Fairfax Festival in Virginia.
The music of Lac La Belle has been described as "pitch-perfect originals in synch with the old-timey classics" by the Detroit Metro Times and "a startlingly authentic old-time country sound" by the Pittsburgh City Paper. Their first album, titled "Lac La Belle," was released in 2009, with another scheduled to be released later this year.
April 4, 2011
Gene Baur, Animal Protection Activist, to Speak at Wells College
President and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary will discuss animals and food.
Wells College presents a discussion by Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of America's leading farm animal protection organization, titled "Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food." The event will take place at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 14, in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall.
As the president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, Gene Baur campaigns to raise awareness about the consequences of industrialized factory farming and our food system. He has conducted hundreds of visits to farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses to document conditions, and his photos and videos exposing factory farming cruelty have been aired nationally and internationally. His book, "Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food," a national best-seller, is a thought-provoking investigation of the ethical questions involved in the production of beef, poultry, pork, milk, and eggs - and what each of us can do to promote compassion and help stop the systematic mistreatment of the 10 billion farm animals used for food in the U.S. every year.
Baur has addressed local, state and federal legislative bodies about these issues and has played a role in passing regulations related to abusive farming practices in several states. His work has been covered by publication such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as networks ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN.
The event is co-sponsored by the Office of Student Activities and Leadership and the Social and Economic Justice Minor. Books will be available for sale and signing by Baur. For more information, contact Nicole Pellegrino at 315-364-3428, e-mail firstname.lastname@example.org, or visit www.genebaur.org.
April 4, 2011
Burgeoning Filmmaker to Screen Tierras Libre at Wells College
Screening in Honor of International Day of Peasants' Struggle.
Filmmaker Edward Ellis will screen his work in progress, "Tierras Libre" (Free Land), at Wells College on Friday April 15, at 12:30 p.m. in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall. The documentary focuses on the plight of impoverished and landless farmers in Venezuela, where Ellis spent several years living and working.
The screening is offered in commemoration of the International Day of Peasants' Struggle.
The International Day of Peasants' Struggle is a day on which a wide variety of groups, communities and organizations engage in direct actions, cultural activities, conferences, film screenings, community debates and rallies to highlight the plight of peasants worldwide.
An aspiring filmmaker, Ellis' cinematic resume includes work as a production coordinator for Oliver Stone's documentary "South of the Border." His next project, "Miss," deals with Venezuela's multi-billion dollar beauty industry and the treatment (and mistreatment) of women in that country. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Buffalo State College.
April 4, 2011
Exhibition of Paintings by Michael Morrill at Wells College
"Pattern and Prayers" will display paintings by the Pittsburgh artist
The Wells College Visual Arts Department welcomes Pittsburgh artist Michael Morrill with the exhibition "Pattern and Prayers." Morrill's work will be on display in the String Room Gallery (SRG) from March 30 through May 11. The exhibit is free and the public is cordially invited to view the show. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, March 30 from 6 - 8 pm; light refreshments will be served.
The exhibit will feature serial oil and acrylic paintings by Morrill, an associate professor of studio arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Morrill's interest in abstract art-and its interactions with modern digital technology-show in his work, which has evolved as a style since he began focusing on painting in the 1980s. In his artist's statement, Morrill says, "My commitment to the language of abstraction stems from a belief that the expressive power of abstraction continues to hold potential for poetic visual experience."
Since 2007, he has been expanding two bodies of paintings, titled the Linea Terminale and ISIS series. The Linea Terminale paintings derive from Morrill's fascination with Galileo's 17th-century drawings of the patterns of light and shadow he observed on the surface of the moon. The Linea Terminale paintings are diptychs made from joining two 20 x 16 in. canvases. Painted in two phases of color and value, each panel of the diptych is divided into an area of light and dark along an imagined terminator line, suggesting a distant, abstracted topography.
The ISIS series is a meditation on the presence and absence of light expressed through applications of black and white over color. The title ISIS was selected for the symmetry of text, which echoes patterns of black and white and the repetitive rhythms of the painting technique.
Morrill received his BFA from Alfred University's School of Art and Design and his MFA from Yale University's School of Art. His work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Bayer Collection of Contemporary Art.
The String Room Gallery is a center for the exhibition of contemporary art in the Finger Lakes region of New York. It is located on the Wells College campus in the southwest corner of the first floor of Main Building. Hours are Tuesday through Friday from 12-5 pm; and Saturday and Sunday from 1-4 pm.
For more information, visit www.wells.edu/stringroomgallery.
March 29, 2011
Wells College to Offer Screening of "Quest for Honor"
Sundance Selection Offers View into "Honor Killings" and the Movement to End Them
On Wednesday, March 30, Wells College will hold a screening of the documentary film "Quest for Honor," a 2009 Sundance Film Festival selection. Set in Iraqi Kurdistan, the film explores the recent rise in "honor killings" in Middle Eastern nations, as modern technology and international ideas increasingly collide with traditional values. The screening will be held in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall Wednesday, March 30 at 7:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
The film's executive producer Frances "Sissy" Tarlton Farenthold will be on campus to introduce the film and answer questions afterwards. Farenthold, a former president of Wells College and former member of the Texas House of Representatives, had traveled to Iraq three times on missions from women's groups, and came to be involved in the project from its inception.
The film follows, in particular, women activists combating the practice in Kurdistan, both by providing sanctuary to women at risk, and by working to change mentalities to prevent future killings. The aim of the film is to help educate the American populace about this complicated issue.
"Without proper analysis and knowledge," says the film's director, Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, "the West cannot appropriately support the women, lawmen, and governments who are fighting this plague without being seduced being believing negative cultural stereotypes and further victimizing these communities."
March 29, 2011
Wells College Students Present at National Conference on Undergraduate Research
Nine Wells Students Accepted into 25th Annual Conference
Wells College will send nine of its students to the 25th National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), to be held at Ithaca College March 31-April 2. This year some 2,000 students will present their research through posters, oral presentations, visual arts and performances, including the 9 students from Wells.
NCUR's annual conference is dedicated to promoting undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity in all fields of study. It welcomes presenters from all institutions of higher learning. A unique environment for the celebration and promotion of undergraduate student achievement, NCUR provides models of exemplary research and scholarship, and helps to improve the state of undergraduate education.
The students from Wells are as follows:
· Jaclyn Bubnell, Biological & Chemical Sciences, will present "Cellular Transport Of Odorant Receptor M71, A G-Protein Coupled Receptor In Vitro" (advised by Paul Feinstein)
· Sara Chiochetti, Biological & Chemical Sciences, will present "Mapping the Acetylation Site of Cdc25a by ARD1" (advised by Kristina Blake)
· Catherine Dingley, Visual Arts, will present "Exotic Bodies in Motion" (advised by William Ganis)
· Caroline Ham, Anthroplogy, will present "That Sly Devil: How Loki Benefits Viking Culture" (advised by Ernest Olson)
· Samantha Hessling, Biological & Chemical Sciences, will present "Effects of Caffeine on Embryonic Cardiovascular Development" (advised by Christina Wahl)
· Jennifer McDermott, Psychology, will present "After The Storm: Therapeutic Techniques Used in Treating Children With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Following Hurricane Katrina" (advised by Deborah Gagnon)
· Samuel Share, Post-Modern Studies, will present "The 'Name Of The Mother': John Gardner's Grendel and Lacanian Criticism" (advised by Catherine Burroughs)
· Kassandra Stepniak, Environmental Studies, will present "Does Wood Density Affect the Rate of Wood Decay?" (advised by Jaclyn Schnurr)
· Abagail Williams, Sociology, will present "Authenticity in a Rebellious Subculture: An Analysis of Punk And Hardcore Music Fans" (advised by Daniel Renfrow)
More information about NCUR is available at www.ithaca.edu/ncur2011. For more about the Wells students and their participation, contact Christopher Bailey, professor of chemistry and Mary Perley Wakeman '23 professor, at email@example.com, or by phone at 315-364-3286.
March 29, 2011
Wells College Presents the Annual Faculty Dance Concert
Four performances by students and faculty will be accompanied by live music
The Wells College Theatre and Dance Program is pleased to present their annual faculty and guest artist dance concert, on Friday and Saturday, April 8 and 9 at 7:30p.m., in Phipps Auditorium, Macmillan Hall. This year's concert will feature choreography by faculty member Jeanne Goddard and guest artist Elizabeth Wilmot Bishop, with live music by baritone Steven Stull and four-piece band.
This year's concert promises an eclectic mix of new dances performed by the Wells College Dance Ensemble of students and faculty. The four dances are entitled "Blizzard," "Surface," "Never Give Up" and "That's Amoré!" Focusing on the bonds among lovers, friends, community and strangers, this work brings out the complicated, yet often humorous and uplifting, moments in relationships through the use of narrative and reflection. On stage, dancers create juxtaposing images, playfully wrestling with pillows and stealing glances at each other over drinks in light-hearted romantic vignettes, while achingly dividing themselves from one another in pulsating narratives that speak of a darker, distant past. Musical accompaniment ranges from songs by Judy Collins and Yolanda Adams to classical/African fusion from the Kronos Quartet. Jazz, pop, music theatre tunes and Italian art song will be performed live by Steven Stull and an ensemble of professional and student musicians, with a chance for the audience to sing along. The performances are complimented by simple, yet aesthetically striking, set and lighting design by resident designer Joe Deforest.
Here's what the choreographers say about their work:
"Blizzard" evokes the turmoil of the human heart-an inner "storm" that needs to be quieted. We realize that our lives can sometimes feel as variable and uncertain as the weather, with periods of turmoil and periods of calm.
"Surface" is really about what goes on below the surface-the layers of life and meaning that maintain their own reality despite being hidden from the outside view. There are suggestions of past generations, the movement of time, cycles of life and loss, memory and constant change. The underlying energy is always ready to break through and spill into the present.
"Never Give Up" encourages us to believe in ourselves and your dreams. Trust what you have been given to do with your life and follow that path, whatever obstacles or stumbling blocks you may encounter along the way.
An old Dean Martin recording reminded me of the perennial appeal of the love song. "That's Amoré" celebrates love in all its crazy, confusing, confounding and exhilarating aspects, its various and changeable moods: excitement, sensuality, longing and entanglement. A live band with singers will heat up the theatre with such popular tunes as "Let Me Go, Lover," "Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On" and of course the title song, "That's Amoré," during which the audience will be invited to sing along.
The Wells College Dance Program seeks to offer diverse, vibrant concerts of both new and repertory works that communicate to a wide audience. Many of the performers are not dance majors but share a deep and abiding dedication to the art form of dance.
Ticket prices are $5 for students and $7 for adults, and can be purchased at the door or by calling the Phipps Auditorium Box Office at 315.364.3456. Children are admitted free. For information, contact Professor Jeanne Goddard, 315.364.3213, or email firstname.lastname@example.org
March 28, 2011
Wells College Hosts 10th Annual Activism Symposium
Conference Explores the Themes of Roots, Action and Activism in Social Justice Work
Wells College will host its 10th annual Activism Symposium March 10-11, 2011. The student-centered event is held with the aims of promoting civic engagement, encouraging critical thinking, and finding links between the academy and the world at large. To that end, symposium presentations and workshops are presented by local activists as well as Wells College faculty, staff and students. Sessions deal with a wide array of topics, ranging from the very local to the very global, although loosely bound by the annual theme. The theme of this year's symposium is "Reframing Our Roots: Manifesting Our Action(s)."
A statement from the Activism Symposium Student Group, the organizing body of the symposium, reads: "Our theme this year is a challenge to members of our local, regional and global community to identify the roots of themselves, their communities, and the global atmosphere. We aim to celebrate the intent of Activism Symposium by making it accessible to everyone, and hopefully encourage the utilization of what we are given to create, implement, and root activism in our lives."
"Embrace artistic/ scientific/ playful/ experimental/ researched/ conjectural/ personal/ cultural work that allows you to be true to yourself and your roots," the statement further encourages.
The Symposium features an impressive array of panels and discussions, totaling nearly 20 in all. Although the bulk of symposium events occur on Friday March 11, the event opens on the evening of the 10th with a 7:30 screening of the Academy Award-nominated film "Exit through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film," followed by dessert and discussion. The film, a widely-lauded documentary, follows the contemporary guerilla street art movement and Thierry Guetta, the would-be documentarian himself. The film has been described as provocative, subversive, weird, and raucously funny.
Friday's panels cover a multitude of subjects, encompassing such broad-ranging topics as positive psychology, conservative politics, social media, same-sex marriage, hydrofracking, the garden movement, and identity-based politics, among others. All events are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events, as well as more information about the symposium itself, can be found at http://symposium.wells.edu/
March 4, 2011
Wells College Opens Innovation Lab
Lab, Teaching Design Thinking, is Hallmark of New Business Program
Wells College has opened an Innovation Lab, offering a class in design thinking, under the auspices of its new Center for Business & Entrepreneurship in the Liberal Arts. Although still in its infancy, the Wells College Innovation Lab will attempt to solve real-world problems, locally, globally, and within the Wells community.
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving that is fast, cheap, and that yields breakthrough results. Its process depends upon ethnographic understanding, and the rapid building and testing of low-tech prototypes. Developed at the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, design thinking has already spawned a host of businesses, books and lectures. Yet, says the Innovation Lab's course instructor Tracy Brandenburg, undergraduates outside of Wells have a difficult time learning this problem-solving technique.
"To the best of our knowledge, Wells College is currently the only school in the nation where an undergraduate studies design thinking as part of their business curriculum," she says. Brandenburg trained at Stanford's famous "d.school."
When Wells announced plans for a Center for Business and Entrepreneurship in the Liberal Arts, Brandenburg-a visiting associate professor in Spanish-recognized the potential for an incubatory space like the Innovation Lab. She also says Wells is a perfect fit for design thinking, because the College emphasizes humane action and an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Design thinking relies upon collaboration by individuals with diverse skills and viewpoints, and has resulted in such developments as $25 premature infant incubators for use in Nepal.
Brandenburg hopes that individuals from Wells and the local community will suggest problems for students to tackle, yet stresses that the Wells College Innovation Lab, while attempting to solve problems, is primarily concerned with producing innovators. To that end, the innovation lab itself was designed to facilitate the creative process. It features numerous whiteboards to capture ideas, movable furniture to allow the space to be manipulated, and foam "sugar cubes" that have multiple purposes, ranging from seating to prototyping.
Additionally, Brandenburg stresses that the lab, while a requirement for business majors, is open to all students in any field. "We hope to teach Wells students how to successfully approach problems in any discipline," she explains. "Design thinking is great for business, but once it's learned, it can really be applied to produce fun and innovative solutions in any facet of work or life," says Brandenburg. "I'm really proud that Wells can offer this to students."
The development of Wells' innovation lab was made possible in part from a gift in memory Louise Bingham Hatch, Wells College Class of 1938, from her family.
February 24, 2011
Wells College Earns Support for Its Learning Commons
The Hagedorn Fund Offers Gift for Wells' Educational Support Center
Wells College has received a gift in excess of $34,000 from the Hagedorn Fund in support of its Learning Commons. The Learning Commons is a center providing academic support, encouraging student learning, and centralizing academic resources. It also promotes the Wells College library, where it is located, as a study space and point of access. The gift comes in addition to the Hagedorn Fund's continued and generous support of Wells College's annual fund.
The Commons currently houses the Dean of Academic Advising, the Director of Experiential Learning and Career Services, the Coordinator of Learning Support Services, and the Writing Center-a student-tutor writing support center overseen by a professor. Through the Learning Commons, students can hone their skills in inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communications, career preparedness, information literacy, teamwork and problem solving, and personal and social responsibility.
The Hagedorn Fund gift will allow spatial upgrades to better accommodate peer tutoring, with movable furniture, better lighting, and sound barriers. It will also help provide more computer terminals with "text to speech" software, which aids students with a wide array of disabilities.
Wells created its Learning Commons in 2007 from another Hagedorn Fund gift. Its stated vision is to facilitate learning and scholarship, and to foster collaboration, inventiveness, ingenuity, and intellectual responsibility, in order to better prepare students for 21st century challenges.
"We're proud of the longstanding partnership with the Hagedorn Fund and family, and their very generous support of Wells," says Michael McGreevey, vice president for advancement at the College.
The Hagedorn Fund was established by William Hagedorn in memory of his late wife, Tillie. William Hagedorn's daughter Ruth graduated from Wells College in 1930. When William Hagedorn appointed his daughter to assume philanthropic oversight of the Hagedorn Fund, Ruth began a history of annual gifts to Wells. Since her death, the trustees of the Hagedorn Fund have continued to recognize Ruth's commitment to Wells.
February 24, 2011
Wells College Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to Sponsor New Essay Contest
Area High School Juniors and Seniors Eligible for $300 First Prize
The Wells College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society for liberal arts and sciences graduates, has announced a new annual essay contest for high school juniors and seniors attending school in Auburn, Southern Cayuga, Union Springs, Port Byron, and Skaneateles. The winner of first prize will receive $300 and the runner-up will receive $200, donated by the Wells Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and by the Seneca Falls Savings Bank.
The contest's essay prompt is designed to encourage students to grapple with a question about school learning, explains Bryan Duff, faculty president of the Wells College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He adds that the prompt is "in keeping with Phi Beta Kappa's advocacy for persistent and joyful learning, and open exchange of well-founded ideas."
Specifically, the essay prompt asks students to consider, in an essay of 750 words or less, whether there's value in engaging with ideas, skills, and texts whose direct relevance or application outside the classroom is far from obvious.
Duff says that, while Phi Beta Kappa does advocate for the value of such learning, the essay question is not meant to elicit any particular response. He explains, "You might look at the essay question and think, 'Hold on. The question you're asking is loaded. Any students who answer that they disagree with the society's position are doomed to lose.' Not so. A well-defended argument that challenges the values of Phi Beta Kappa would, if I can be technical, totally rock."
The joint sponsorship by Seneca Falls Savings Bank evolved from a conversation between Duff and one of the bank's branch managers. "We were chatting about the value of solid writing skills for getting jobs, keeping jobs, thinking clearly, and making sure one's ideas get the best possible hearing," says Duff. "Encouraging and celebrating good writing through this contest is a sign of our shared commitment."
As measures of good writing, essays will be judged on the strength of reasons underlying authors' positions; their consideration of potential concerns about their reasons; voice and tone (whether elements of the writing style help the reader feel the author's perspective and interest in the topic); organization (within paragraphs and across the whole essay); and conventions (spelling, punctuation, and grammar).
Duff aims to assemble a judging panel comprised of both high school teachers and Wells College faculty, and hopes that the contest will foster a greater shared understanding of what makes a successful transition from high school to college level writing.
The deadline to enter will be 5 p.m. on April 1, 2011. Students interested in entering the contest can pick up a flier with details from their high school guidance counselor.
February 24, 2011
Wells College Students Advocate in Albany for Higher Ed
Join Students from Around the State in Support of Higher Education Funding
Six Wells College students and two members of the Wells College staff will participate in the New York Student Aid Alliance Advocacy Day in Albany, N.Y. The advocacy day takes place on February 8, 2011.
The students, who hail from around New York State, will have the opportunity to meet with the office of State Senator David J. Valesky. In their meeting, students will discuss the importance of state aid including such programs as TAP (the Tuition Assistance Program). They will also voice their support for the governor's proposed budget for higher ed.
"This is a great opportunity for our student leaders to experience our democratic process," says Isabelle M. Ramos, one of the staff members accompanying the students. Ramos is a Wells College alumna who went on to train as a lawyer.
More than 600 students from close to 40 campuses will attend the advocacy day, which carries the theme "student + aid = opportunity." Participants will rally at the capitol in the morning before meeting with legislators in the afternoon. In their sessions with elected officials, students will lobby officials on the importance of such programs as TAP, HEOP, C-STEP, and Liberty Partnerships. Students from Wells will focus their efforts on TAP.
Governor Cuomo's proposed budget maintains the current $5,000 TAP maximum award for students attending 4-year colleges and universities. Additionally, he proposes that funding continue at last year's levels for HEOP, C-STEP, and Liberty Partnerships. Students attending the advocacy day will voice their support for this aspect of the budget in advance of the legislature's vote. In particular, they will discuss the personal ways in which this funding supports their education.
All six of the student attendees are connected to the political science program at Wells. They are: Alex Schloop, Jacqueline Ross, Caitlin Titus, Rachel Snyder, Kathryn McNamara, and Zachary Kohn. They will be accompanied on their trip by Wells College admissions counselors Jaclyn Freeland and Isabelle M. Ramos, Esq. The Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities sponsors the one-day experiential learning opportunity. Additional learning opportunities for the students come before their arrival in Albany, with basic training in lobbying techniques in advance of their meetings.
October 14, 2010
Wells College Revamps Its Experiential Learning Program
Incorporates Career Services, Internships, Work Study
Wells College is expanding its experiential learning program in order to better bridge students' transitions from majors to careers. To facilitate the change, Wells is transforming its office of career development services into a center for the advising of "experiential learning"--learning that takes place through educational experiences that occur outside the conventional classroom, such as internships. The restructured office will guide students through required undergraduate experiential learning, and will also provide more traditional career services.
Additionally, in a move to more greatly align students' work study experiences with their academic pursuits, Wells has moved the supervision of work study assignments to the office of experiential learning and career services, where it will be supervised by the Director of Experiential Learning and Career Services, Mr. Eric Vaughn. Vaughn says the updated program will incorporate a more team-based approach to student work assignments. Additionally, says Vaughn, the program will offer professional development opportunities to student workers as well as staff.
Since joining the Wells community in September, Vaughn has committed to moving the resources of his office into databases and onto the Web, allowing students, alumnae/alumni, faculty, and employers to access information more quickly. He plans to hold workshops to better prepare students for graduate school and the work force, and would like to make contemporary their subjects, such as the uses and pitfalls of social media.
"I'm also looking to work more closely with alums of Wells College, to get them more involved in programs and events the office will host in the future," says Vaughn. "One of my favorite parts of the position is collaborating and working with students, faculty, alums and employers. I love seeing a student grow and learn. It also excites me to see the great opportunities that students have, and that they can put on their resumes."
Vaughn previously held the position of Director of Career Development at Doane College in Crete, Neb. He has also held positions at Saint Leo University in Fla., St. John Fisher College in Rochester, and SUNY Oswego. Vaughn earned his B.S. in elementary education from SUNY Oswego, and a M.Ed. in College Student Affairs from the University of South Florida. He can be reached on the phone at 315.364.3379, or by email at email@example.com.
Wells' office of experiential learning and career services is located in the Learning Commons, an academic area that also houses academic advising, learning support services, a writing center, a computer lab, and a library research desk. Future plans for the Commons include the addition of a peer tutoring center.
"By centralizing the location of services," explains Associate Provost for Academic and Student Life Cindy Speaker, "we're able to work together in a more holistic manner to help students meet their current academic needs, enrich their educational experiences, and be better prepared for their futures."
February 2, 2011 |
In Christopher Moores ingenious debut novel, we meet one of the most memorably mismatched pairs in the annals of literature. The good-looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and “roads” scholar Travis OHearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets. Behind the fake Tudor façade of Pine Cove, California, Catch sees a four-star buffet. Travis, on the other hand, thinks he sees a way of ridding himself of his toothy traveling companion. The winos, neo-pagans, and deadbeat Lotharios of Pine Cove, meanwhile, have other ideas. And none of them is quite prepared when all hell breaks loose.
Published by Perennial
paperback | $9.95US/$9.95CAN |
Table Of Contents
Release Notes for Cisco Aironet Workgroup Bridges Running Firmware Release 8.84
May 9, 2003
These release notes describe features and caveats contained in the firmware maintenance release 8.84 for Cisco Aironet Workgroup Bridges. These release notes also contain important information about the device.
These release notes describe the following topics:
Workgroup bridges are small, standalone units that provide wireless infrastructure connections for Ethernet-enabled devices. A device connected to a bridge communicates with a network infrastructure through Cisco Aironet Access Points.
The workgroup bridge connects to a hub through a standard Ethernet port using a 10BASE-T/RJ-45 (twisted pair) connector, and up to eight client devices can be connected to the hub. You can use an Internet browser or Telnet to configure the workgroup bridge.
You must have a Cisco Aironet 350 Series Workgroup Bridge to install firmware version 8.84.
Minimum Firmware Version Required on Access Points
Access points with which the workgroup bridge associates must contain firmware version 11.06 or later.
Upgrading to a New Firmware Release
Finding the Firmware Version
The firmware version number is in the upper-left corner of most management screens in the web-browser interface and at the top of the home (Summary Status) page in the command-line interface.
For instructions on installing access point and bridge firmware:
Step 1 Follow this link to the Software Center on Cisco.com and download firmware version 8.84:
Step 2 Select Option #1: Aironet Wireless Software Selector. The Aironet Wireless Software Selector window appears.
Step 3 Click the drop-down arrow to view the valid values for the Product Type field.
Step 4 Click Workgroup Bridge.
Step 5 Click Submit. The Step 2 of 3 page appears.
Step 6 Click the drop-down arrow to view the valid values in the Model Number field.
Step 7 Select the model number of your workgroup bridge.
Step 8 Click Submit. The Step 3 of 3 page appears.
Step 9 To download the current release, click the Current Release (Recommended) radio button.
Step 10 Click Submit. The software selector displays the categories you selected and lists the available download methods.
Step 11 Review your selections. If you want to change anything, use your browser's back button to return to the previous software selector page.
Step 12 When you are ready to download the firmware, go to the Standard Installation section and click Workgroup Bridge Bundle. The Aironet Software Selector encryption authorization form appears.
Step 13 Complete the required fields on the authorization form and check the boxes indicating agreement with the download agreement.
Step 14 Type your name exactly as you entered it in the First Name and Last Name fields.
Step 15 Click Submit. The Software Download Software License Agreement page appears.
Step 16 Review the license agreement and click Accept. The File Download window appears.
Step 17 Click Save and select a location on your system to download the file to.
This section describes new features in firmware version 8.84.
EAP Authentication Requires Matching 802.1X Protocol Drafts
Note This section applies to wireless networks set up to use LEAP. If you do not use LEAP on your wireless network, you can skip this section.
Wireless client devices use Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) to log onto a network and generate a dynamic, client-specific WEP key for the current logon session. If you use Network-EAP authentication on your wireless network, your client devices and access points must use the same 802.1X protocol draft. Version 8.84 requires the 802.1X-2001 draft.
Use the Authenticator Configuration page in the access point firmware to select the draft of the 802.1X protocol the access point radio should use.
Follow these steps to set the draft for your access point.
Step 1 Browse to the Authenticator Configuration page in the access point management system.
a. On the Summary Status page, click Setup.
b. On the Setup page, click Security.
c. On the Security Setup page, click Authentication Server.
Step 2 Use the 802.1X Protocol Version (for EAP authentication) drop-down menu to select the 802.1X-2001 draft
Step 3 Click Apply or OK to apply the setting. The access point reboots.
Verify Mounting Hole Measurement
If you make a photocopy of the mounting template (included in Mounting Instructions for the Cisco Aironet Access Points, Base Stations, and Workgroup Bridges with Plastic Cases), make sure that the distance between the holes is 4 3/4 in. (12.06 cm) before you drill the holes. Some photocopy machines do not make exact duplicates of the original.
Cisco Aironet Software Requires Completion of Encryption Authorization Form
In order to access Cisco Aironet software from the Software Center on Cisco.com, you must now fill out a form to receive authorization to download encrypted software. Registered Cisco.com users are required to fill out the form only once, while public users must do so once each session, each time software is downloaded. A form is automatically created for public users. The form for registered Cisco.com users is located at the following URL:
Bridge Loop May Occur with Incorrect Network Topology
If the workgroup bridge is connected to the wired LAN and is communicating with an access point on the same LAN, a network problem known as a bridge loop can occur. Avoid a bridge loop by disconnecting the workgroup bridge from the wired LAN immediately after you configure it. Figure 1 shows the network configuration in which the loop occurs.
Figure 1 Bridge Loop Caused by a Workgroup Bridge Connected to the Wired LAN
A bridge loop can also occur if two or more workgroup bridges are connected to the same remote hub. To prevent this bridge loop, always connect only one workgroup bridge to a remote hub. Figure 2 shows the network configuration in which the loop occurs.
Figure 2 Bridge Loop Caused by Two Workgroup Bridges on the Same Remote Hub
This section describes open and resolved caveats for firmware version 8.84.
Getting Bug Information on Cisco.com
If you are a Cisco.com registered user, you can use the Cisco TAC Software Bug Toolkit to identify existing bugs (or caveats) in Cisco software products. Access the TAC Software Bug Toolkit at:
The following caveats have not been resolved in version 8.84:
•CSCea59101—After a period of time, signal strength test does not display.
After having been in operation for approximately one day, the signal strength test does not display a signal level bar.
Workaround: If possible, perform a warm boot.
•CSCea64630—Workgroup bridge resets to factory defaults.
Condition may occur if workgroup bridge is removed from the network or after losing association with the access point.
There is no workaround for this caveat.
The following caveats were resolved in firmware version 8.84:
•CSCea24527—INET filter setting remains in workgroup bridge configuration when the unit is power cycled.
•CSCdy34205—Client no longer looses its connection every 5 minutes.
•CSCdz43801—Workgroup bridge association table now refreshes the MAC address correctly.
•CSCdz67727—Workgroup bridge no longer loses association to access point, eliminating the need for a reset.
For the most up-to-date, detailed troubleshooting information, refer to the Cisco TAC website at http://www.cisco.com/tac. Select Wireless LAN under Top Issues.
This section describes errors, omissions, and changes in user documentation for workgroup bridges.
Stale Out Time Setting
The workgroup bridge's management system includes a Wired LAN stale out time setting on the Configuration > Ethernet page. Use this setting to control the number of seconds the workgroup bridge continues to track a device in its association table when the device is inactive. Enter a value between 5 and 1000 seconds. (Five minutes equals 300 seconds; ten minutes equals 600 seconds.)
If the same devices are always connected to the workgroup bridge, enter 5 for the staleout time setting. If the devices connected to the workgroup bridge change frequently, enter 300 (equal to five minutes) for the staleout time setting. If you unplug the Ethernet cable from the workgroup bridge and plug it back in, the workgroup bridge removes all devices from its association table and re-learns them regardless of the stale out time setting.
Use the following documents with this document:
•Quick Start Guide: Cisco Aironet Workgroup Bridges
•Cisco Aironet Workgroup Bridge Hardware Installation Guide
•Cisco Aironet Workgroup Bridge Software Configuration Guide
Cisco provides several ways to obtain documentation, technical assistance, and other technical resources. These sections explain how to obtain technical information from Cisco Systems.
You can access the most current Cisco documentation on the World Wide Web at this URL:
You can access the Cisco website at this URL:
International Cisco websites can be accessed from this URL:
Cisco documentation and additional literature are available in a Cisco Documentation CD-ROM package, which may have shipped with your product. The Documentation CD-ROM is updated regularly and may be more current than printed documentation. The CD-ROM package is available as a single unit or through an annual or quarterly subscription.
Registered Cisco.com users can order a single Documentation CD-ROM (product number DOC-CONDOCCD=) through the Cisco Ordering tool:
All users can order monthly or quarterly subscriptions through the online Subscription Store:
You can find instructions for ordering documentation at this URL:
You can order Cisco documentation in these ways:
•Registered Cisco.com users (Cisco direct customers) can order Cisco product documentation from the Networking Products MarketPlace:
•Nonregistered Cisco.com users can order documentation through a local account representative by calling Cisco Systems Corporate Headquarters (California, U.S.A.) at 408 526-7208 or, elsewhere in North America, by calling 800 553-NETS (6387).
You can submit comments electronically on Cisco.com. On the Cisco Documentation home page, click Feedback at the top of the page.
You can e-mail your comments to email@example.com.
You can submit comments by using the response card (if present) behind the front cover of your document or by writing to the following address:
Attn: Customer Document Ordering
170 West Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134-9883
We appreciate your comments.
Obtaining Technical Assistance
Cisco provides Cisco.com, which includes the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) website, as a starting point for all technical assistance. Customers and partners can obtain online documentation, troubleshooting tips, and sample configurations from the Cisco TAC website. Cisco.com registered users have complete access to the technical support resources on the Cisco TAC website, including TAC tools and utilities.
Cisco.com offers a suite of interactive, networked services that let you access Cisco information, networking solutions, services, programs, and resources at any time, from anywhere in the world.
Cisco.com provides a broad range of features and services to help you with these tasks:
•Streamline business processes and improve productivity
•Resolve technical issues with online support
•Download and test software packages
•Order Cisco learning materials and merchandise
•Register for online skill assessment, training, and certification programs
To obtain customized information and service, you can self-register on Cisco.com at this URL:
Technical Assistance Center
The Cisco TAC is available to all customers who need technical assistance with a Cisco product, technology, or solution. Two types of support are available: the Cisco TAC website and the Cisco TAC Escalation Center. The type of support that you choose depends on the priority of the problem and the conditions stated in service contracts, when applicable.
We categorize Cisco TAC inquiries according to urgency:
•Priority level 4 (P4)—You need information or assistance concerning Cisco product capabilities, product installation, or basic product configuration. There is little or no impact to your business operations.
•Priority level 3 (P3)—Operational performance of the network is impaired, but most business operations remain functional. You and Cisco are willing to commit resources during normal business hours to restore service to satisfactory levels.
•Priority level 2 (P2)—Operation of an existing network is severely degraded, or significant aspects of your business operations are negatively impacted by inadequate performance of Cisco products. You and Cisco will commit full-time resources during normal business hours to resolve the situation.
•Priority level 1 (P1)—An existing network is "down," or there is a critical impact to your business operations. You and Cisco will commit all necessary resources around the clock to resolve the situation.
Cisco TAC Website
The Cisco TAC website provides online documents and tools to help troubleshoot and resolve technical issues with Cisco products and technologies. To access the Cisco TAC website, go to this URL:
All customers, partners, and resellers who have a valid Cisco service contract have complete access to the technical support resources on the Cisco TAC website. Some services on the Cisco TAC website require a Cisco.com login ID and password. If you have a valid service contract but do not have a login ID or password, go to this URL to register:
If you are a Cisco.com registered user, and you cannot resolve your technical issues by using the Cisco TAC website, you can open a case online at this URL:
If you have Internet access, we recommend that you open P3 and P4 cases online so that you can fully describe the situation and attach any necessary files.
Cisco TAC Escalation Center
The Cisco TAC Escalation Center addresses priority level 1 or priority level 2 issues. These classifications are assigned when severe network degradation significantly impacts business operations. When you contact the TAC Escalation Center with a P1 or P2 problem, a Cisco TAC engineer automatically opens a case.
To obtain a directory of toll-free Cisco TAC telephone numbers for your country, go to this URL:
Before calling, please check with your network operations center to determine the Cisco support services to which your company is entitled: for example, SMARTnet, SMARTnet Onsite, or Network Supported Accounts (NSA). When you call the center, please have available your service agreement number and your product serial number.
Obtaining Additional Publications and Information
Information about Cisco products, technologies, and network solutions is available from various online and printed sources.
•The Cisco Product Catalog describes the networking products offered by Cisco Systems, as well as ordering and customer support services. Access the Cisco Product Catalog at this URL:
•Cisco Press publishes a wide range of networking publications. Cisco suggests these titles for new and experienced users: Internetworking Terms and Acronyms Dictionary, Internetworking Technology Handbook, Internetworking Troubleshooting Guide, and the Internetworking Design Guide. For current Cisco Press titles and other information, go to Cisco Press online at this URL:
•Packet magazine is the Cisco quarterly publication that provides the latest networking trends, technology breakthroughs, and Cisco products and solutions to help industry professionals get the most from their networking investment. Included are networking deployment and troubleshooting tips, configuration examples, customer case studies, tutorials and training, certification information, and links to numerous in-depth online resources. You can access Packet magazine at this URL:
•iQ Magazine is the Cisco bimonthly publication that delivers the latest information about Internet business strategies for executives. You can access iQ Magazine at this URL:
•Internet Protocol Journal is a quarterly journal published by Cisco Systems for engineering professionals involved in designing, developing, and operating public and private internets and intranets. You can access the Internet Protocol Journal at this URL:
•Training—Cisco offers world-class networking training. Current offerings in network training are listed at this URL:
Copyright © 2003, Cisco Systems, Inc.
All rights reserved. |
A Summary of Form Criticism
The beginning of form criticism started between the years of 1914-1918 shortly after the War. The three main scholars in the field of form criticism were Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann. While these individuals were the ones whose work dominated the early field of form criticism, they based their methodology on the work of previous Bible critics that dates back to the Enlightenment. Form criticism is the translation of the German word Formgeschichte. The literal translation of this word is “history of form”. A traditionally accepted definition of form criticism is, “a method of study and investigation which deals with the pre-literary stage of the Gospel tradition, when the material was handed down orally”.1 As we can clearly see, the goal is to critically assess the form in which the information was preserved prior to being written down with the goal of identifying whether it was recorded reliably in order to test the historicity of the Biblical material that we have today. Form critics have used this practice to come up with a conclusion that is often unlike what Christians revere as history. A prominent form-critic by the name of G.E. Ladd explains,
“A close study of these forms led to the critical conclusion that in its earliest stages, the material in the Gospels was passed on orally as a series of disconnected units, anecdotes, stories, sayings, teachings, parables, and so on…This means that the indications in the Gospels of sequence, time, place, and the like are quite unhistorical and untrustworthy and must therefore be ignored by serious Gospel criticism”
After reading that quote, you may be wondering, “What do they believe?” That is an excellent question that is worth addressing. E.V. McKnight laid out a summary of the positions that were arrived at through the implementation of form criticism:
1. The “two document” hypothesis was accepted. Meaning, Mark and Q served as sources for Matthew and Luke.
2. Mark and Q, as well as Matthew and Luke, were influenced by the theological views of the early church.
3. Mark and Q contained not only early authentic materials but also materials of a later date
You may question why this was ever accepted as a valid theory. Donald Guthrie provides four reasons why there was a significant rise in the acceptance of form criticism:
1. The form critics were able to account for the amount of time from the Synoptic Gospel events to the writing of the events
2. The questioning of the historicity of the Gospel of Mark
3. The desire to update the gospels from the first century view to the world of the twentieth century.
4. To position the literary materials in their original setting2
To gather further insight in addition to Donald Guthrie, it would be beneficial to see what two of the most prominent form critics concluded after their implementation of the practices of form criticism. Given that form criticism sets out to account for the time between the events themselves and the time the document was actually written, their opinion on whether they think there is evidence that is capable of supporting or invalidating the stories of the Synoptic Gospels would be useful. The two form critics that will be looked at more closely are Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann.
Starting with Martin Dibelius, the author of Form Tradition to Gospel, A Fresh Approach to New Testament and Early Christian Literature, Gospel Criticism and Christology, Jesus, and numerous others, is known to be one of the first prominent form critics. Dibelius never believed that there was a “purely” historical witness to Jesus. Dibelius claimed that the first century expansion of the early Christian church wasn’t due to the historical reliability of the resurrection but because the people who accepted Christ were content with the story of salvation.
Rudolf Bultmann is a prominent New Testament scholar that is known for his work in form criticism and has written many books on form criticism that include The History of the Synoptic Tradition, Jesus and the World, Theology of the New Testament, and Jesus Christ and Mythology. He is known for being very skeptical of his assessment of the Synoptic Gospels and he concludes that “one can only emphasize the uncertainty of our knowledge of the person and work of the historical Jesus and likewise of the origin of Christianity” Bultmann is known to be more responsible for the field’s thoroughness and maturation than Dibelius or Schmidt because Bultmann developed form criticism to a more advanced level.2 Bulmann practiced form criticism with the presupposition that the canonical gospels were “pre-scientific” and he greatly desired to modernize them. Evolutionary dogma heavily influenced him in the formulation of his methods.2
It is clear that neither of these advocates of form criticism placed too much stock in the historical validity of the synoptic gospels during the practice of their form criticism. While so many Evangelical Christians place their entire faith in the reliability in the Synoptic Gospels, what information or mindset has led scholars of form criticism to completely reject the reliability of the Synoptic Gospels? It is important to highlight the unnecessary presuppositions that inspired their understanding of the form critical data in order to comprehend if they are in the objective mindset that is ideal for historical studies of this magnitude. If philosophic presuppositions were held at the time of assessing data from form critical research, what affect did this philosophic presupposition have on the interpretation of the data? What was the philosophic presupposition that the data was filtered through? Most importantly, was this presupposition ideal for conducting objective historical analysis or would it drastically skew the findings? Below, I’ll be closely assessing the most common and destructive critiques against form criticism.
Common Objections to Form Criticism
The most common objections relate to philosophically and scientifically related presuppositional foundations implemented in the interpretation of their findings, subjective theorizing about their data, and the categorization of highly subjective material reveals preconceived agendas. While these are few of the primary objections to form criticism, they will be enough to provide you with a foundational understanding of the negative consequences of form criticism and allow you the opportunity to see numerous reasons why these methods of form criticism have failed us in the past at uncovering the truth of the Biblical texts.
Philosophic and Scientific Presuppositions
The claim that form critics have used philosophic or scientific presuppositions when assessing data is not uncommon. In fact, it is likely the strongest argument against form criticism. I’ll begin with a quote from Donald Guthrie concerning how Rudolf Bultmann’s presuppositions negatively impacted his historical work:
“Bultmann’s disillusionment led him to seek an approach to the Gospels which would emancipate him from the need for historical demonstration. Only so could the simplest, in his opinion, ever come to faith. He was further prompted to his non-historical approach by his commitment to existential philosophy”8
It is believed that form criticism is the product of historical skepticism derived from source criticism, which was ultimately laid out by the philosophical foundation of the Enlightenment.2 It has been deemed that much of the findings of form criticism are found while maintaining philosophical presuppositions. Eta Linnemann remarks on the difficulty of having “prejudgments” made prior to performing form criticism:
“A more intensive investigation would show that underlying the historical-critical approach is a series of prejudgments which are not themselves the result of scientific investigation. They are rather dogmatic premises, statements of faith, whose foundation is the absolutizing of human reason as a controlling apparatus”
From a historian’s point of view, it would be unwise to enter into an investigation of history with presuppositions that would alter the findings in a search for truth. For example, if I was a historian on a search for truth about the lives of the founding fathers of America and I went into this search with the presupposition that all of these individuals were the products of fiction, I would have to compromise the truth value of my historical findings in order to manipulate the evidence to make it appear as though the evidence we have isn’t reliable enough to place our trust in. Clearly, this is an extreme example but one that illustrates the point that what these form critics have done over the last century with the New Testament Synoptic Gospels is comparably absurd.
Form criticism is also rooted with the assumption that evolution is the process of progression from the simple to the complex.2 Kebler describes Bultmann’s form-critical analysis in the following:
“It [Bultmann’s concept of the development of the synoptic tradition] was a process as natural as that of biological evolution: simplicity grew into complexity…, an effortless evolutionary transition from the pre-gospel stream of tradition to the written gospel”
The form critics, similar to evolutionary biologists, posit the concept of gradual change over time. In this case, they felt that the synoptic text were compiled by the early church and were not the testimony of eyewitness accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus. The form critics assume that the early church did this to suit their own purposes and not for historically accounting for the life of Jesus Christ.2
During the period of time that oral tradition preserved the information contained in the Synoptic Gospels, which is roughly 30-40 years, the form critics would be merely speculating as to how this information was somehow transformed into a legendary or mythological tale. It is noted by Guthrie that, “The very fact that our historical data for the first thirty years of Christian history are so limited means that form critics inevitably had to draw a good deal of imagination, although none of them were conscious of doing so”.8 Essentially, these conclusions drawn by the form critics aren’t historical at all. When you take into account that the presuppositions traditionally accepted by the form critics do not allow for the possibility of an objective historical conclusion, it would be unreasonable to say that the findings of these form criticisms were the result of honest historical research.
I.J. Peritz discusses the subjectivity of conducting form criticism:
Form criticism thus brings face to face with the obligation either to acquiesce in its faculty method and conclusions or to combat them. What is involved, however, is not the alternative between an uncritical attitude and criticism, but between criticism and hyper-criticalism. A critical view of the Gospels does not claim strict objectivity. It is hard to tell sometimes where poetry ends and history begins. It is highly probable that there is no underlying strictly chronological or topographical scheme; and that they are not biography in “our sense.” But this is far from admitting that we have no reliable testimony from eyewitnesses: that the Church from its Christ of faith created the Jesus of history, instead of from the Jesus of history its Christ of faith”
When we view this observation, we can see that the form critics aren’t being entirely forthcoming in their presentation of their subjective interpretation. Form critics attempt to turn the story on its head by saying that the Christ of faith came after the Jesus of history. It seems as though that the form critics are a little too “hypercritical” of the historical evidence we do have and hence make the whole process of withdrawing information from the Synoptic Gospels impotent. Robert Mounce makes a valid assessment on the subjectivity on form criticism by analyzing the inconsistencies found across the board in the field of form criticism:
“Form Criticism sounds like a scientific method. If it were, you would find consistency of interpretation. But the interpretations of a single saying vary widely. Not only are interpretations widespread but form critics often can’t agree whether a pericopae is a miracle story or a pronouncement story – the two can be woven together. One would expect consistency in historical reconstruction if Form Criticism were a true science”
While many form critics parade form criticism around like a sophisticated method of retrieving historical knowledge, by pealing back the layers of subjective analysis and speculative guesses we can confidently conclude that form criticism is largely unscientific. While they all undeniable agree that Jesus’s disciples were too ignorant and uneducated to effectively document the life of Jesus, we can all identify their method of criticism is founded on their imaginative analysis filtered through numerous presuppositions of historically subjective information.2
Preconceived Agenda when Interpreting
Based on the above philosophical and scientific presuppositions of the form critics when entering into their historical analysis of the Synoptic Gospels, we can say with confidence that they are likely interpreting the collected data with a preconceived agenda.2 Form criticism is distinct from many other methods of historical analysis in that it can be largely considered to promote subjectivity in its findings. By comparison, grammatico-historical methods of interpretation are much more objective in its findings as they accept the findings of the Bible without prejudice. The reason for this distinction is that form criticism is largely based on the presuppositions of the form critic. In addition, the large amount of information that is still unknown about the oral period gives the form critic the freedom to wildly speculate.2
This is evidently clear when it comes to the acceptance of miracles. We see that Dibelius and Baltmann weren’t open to the possibility of miracles within the Synoptic Gospels. From the beginning, we see that they are entering into the analysis of the Synoptic Gospels with the presupposition that the literature is false. Gutrie notes that, “Both Dibelius and Bultmann reject the miraculous and therefore the historicity of the gospel accounts of miracles. This is not so much the basis of ‘form’ as on philosophical and theological grounds”.8 Their philosophical and theological presuppositions weren’t allowing their mind to be open to where the evidence took them so they had to find another way to make sense of the evidence.
Bultmann wanted to “demythogize” the New Testament in order to make it relatable to modern people. However, there appears to be a strong antisupernatural bias by taking this position. It limits what you are allowed to accept as historically true. Given that Bultmann used this presupposition when practicing form criticism, he immediately chalked up Jesus’ baptism, temptation, transfiguration, miracles, and resurrection as legendary.2 Bultmann described these narratives as “instead of being historical in character are religious and edifying”.
Both Dibelius and Bultmann held that these miracles accounts are unhistorical and can be classified as myths. However, are there grounds for making that type of claim solely by using form criticism? Given the nature of form criticism, it would be impossible to make an objectively historical case for mythological Hellenistic concepts to have influenced the Synoptic Gospels without relying upon presuppositions already predetermined to those findings. Unless they were already convinced that the Synoptic Gospels were influenced by Hellenistic concepts, form criticism wouldn’t have been the vehicle to lead them to that conclusion.
Ironically, Bultmann himself doesn’t find the miracles in the Synoptic Gospels to be comparable to the ones found in Hellenistic traditions, “In general, however, the New Testament miracle stories are extremely reserved in this respect [in describing cures], since they hesitate to attribute to the person of Jesus the magical traits which were often characteristic of the Hellenistic miracle worker”. Given that Bultmann concedes that the Hellenistic mythological miracle workers were largely different from the miracle working found by Jesus, what would inspire such a loyalty to the theory that Jesus had been plagiarized by Hellenistic sources? It appears that their loyalty to theories that easily explain away large amounts of genuine information with little evidence requires the person doing the dismissing to have a strong bias in the opposite direction if he is going to knowingly dismiss information without good objective reason.
On the surface, form criticism may appear to be a genuine practice of Biblical evaluation with the intention of gathering deeper insight into the Biblical text. I would caution you from placing stock into the findings of form criticism. Form criticism is not oriented towards objectively seeking truth from the Biblical text. Form critics enter the practice of performing their form criticism with philosophical and scientific presuppositions. Their conclusions cannot be genuinely historical because they will inevitably reflect their bias presuppositions of the Biblical text.2
It is perfectly reasonable to assume that objectivity is possible when analyzing the Synoptic Gospels. The grammatico-historical method has done so by safeguarding hermeneutics by highlighting the need for objectivity.2 It is done in other methods of historical study but it doesn’t seem to be relied upon in form criticism. Positing conspiracy theories of the early church formulation of these stories and/or how the Jesus story evolved from Hellenistic sources fall tremendously short when evidence is weighed and viewed objectively without negative presuppositions.
E. Basil Redlich. Form Criticism (Edinburgh: Nelson & Sons)
Thomas L. Thomas & F. David Farnell, The Jesus Crisis (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications) Chapter 5
Josh McDowell. Evidence for Christianity (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc) Chapter 15
George E. Ladd. The New Testament and Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans)
Edgar McKnight. What is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress)
Martin Dibelius, Form Tradition to Gospel (New York: Scribner’s Sons)
Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Kundsin, Form Criticism (
Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press)
Eta Linnemann, Historical Criticism of the Bible, Methodology or Ideology? (Grand Rapids: Baker)
Werner Kelber, “The Oral and the Written Gospel” (Philadelphia: Fortress)
Ismar J. Peritz, “Form Criticism as an Experiment.” Religion in Life 10 (spring 1941)
Robert Mounce. Personal interview conducted by Josh McDowell, July 2, 1974
David Atkinson and David Field, New Dictionary of Christian Ethics & Pastoral Theology (England: Inter-Varsity Press)
Rudolf Bultmann, History of Synoptic Tradition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson)
Rudolf Bultmann, “The Study of the Synoptic Gospels” in Form Critcism (Cleveland, OH:World) |
The Complete Guide to PamCat
The "New Arrivals" link is located to the right of the "My Account" link on the menu bar. New Arrivals lists the most recent items that have been added to our collection in real time. You can see what is added to our collection each day, whether it's the newest novel, picture book, DVD or talking (audio) book. You can see earlier pages of new additions by clicking the page links at the bottom of the page.
A menu box of subjects, called "You Found Titles in Categories:" is included on the "New Arrivals" page. When you click on a category link ("Children's Literature," for example), you will be taken to the most recent items added in that area, with the newest items listed first. Click on "MORE" to see an expanded list of all the subject headings included in the New Arrivals feature.
The link for Explore Subjects is located to the right of "Search/Home" on the menu bar, this feature allows you to browse some of our most popular subjects, such as "Animals," "Food," and "History," using icons for each subject heading.
When you click on the icon or the text beneath you see categories that are part of that subject. When you click "History," you will see choices like Explorers, Flags & Heraldry, Great Depression, Historic Sites, and History of the United States.
If you click on one of these icons or text links, you will go to a list of titles for all media and age levels. For example, "Explorers" gives you a detailed list of items on exploration. Page through these titles using the "Next" link, or by using the page numbers above and below the search results list. Click "Previous" or "Go Back" link to return to previous pages.
Click on one of the subject listings in the "You Found Titles in Categories:" to narrow your search. For example, clicking the category "Africa" returns a more specific list of items related to exploration of Africa and Africans.
"Explore Subjects" is a fun way to see an overview of special interest areas in our catalog, but it includes only a sample of our collection.
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Things to do…
Dawes Arboretum - Ohio 13, three miles north of I-70.
Preschool Storybook Science - Mystery Vine - Thursday, October 24, 10 am and 1 pm. Explore quality children’s literature in a natural setting. Each 45-minute session includes songs, games, crafts, creative movement, outdoor exploration and hands-on science suitable for ages three to five and their special caregiver. Discovery Center -Free, donations welcome.
Polymer Clay Bluebird Ornament - Sunday, November 3, 1 - 4:30 p.m. Miss seeing the birds flying around outside? Make your own to get you through the winter! Learn how to sculpt clay into the perfect small hanging bird ornament. This class focuses on teaching how to construct a bluebird from polymer clay. The use of different tools will enable you to create texture and fine details. This unique clay can then be placed in the oven to harden. While the clay bakes and cools, learn various painting techniques to make your feathered friend look just like a bluebird. Attach a small piece of ribbon and your bird can hang from any window or branch! Visitors Center, $40/$30 members.
Home School Investigations: Soil Investigation - Tuesday, November 5, 10 - 11:30 a.m. Why do certain plants grow in some places and not in others? Learn about soil, the foundation of life on Earth. Join other home school students in exploration of our natural world. Each 90-minute session includes a hands-on science study correlated with the Ohio Academic Content Standards for Science. Sessions are for ages six to ten. Discovery Center, $5 per student
Preschool Storybook Science - Turkey for Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 14, 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Explore quality children’s literature in a natural setting. Each 45-minute session includes songs, games, crafts, creative movement, outdoor exploration and hands-on science suitable for ages three to five and their special caregiver. Discovery Center, Free, donations welcome.
Night Hike - The Squirrels Are Nuts! - Friday, November 15, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. Although it is still autumn, it looks more like winter! In spite of the barren landscape and apparent quietness, the fields and woods are full of activity. During November, squirrels, as well as chipmunks, sense the impending bad weather right around the corner and frantically spring into action storing more food. Learn the differences in Ohio’s squirrel species in this program by how their nuts are eaten and storing techniques. Visitors Center, Outdoors, $5/members free.
Division of Wildlife Hunter Education Course - Saturday, November 16, noon - 4 p.m. The Dawes Arboretum hosts an Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife home-study hunter education course. For more details and to register please go to www.dnr.state.oh.us and click on hunter education. Visitors Center, Free.
Botanical Feast - Sat- urday, November 16, 2013 ,10:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. Sample and learn about common and exotic foodstuffs from around the global pantry. Discover the fascinating and little-known botanical relationships of fruits and vegetables, their surprising geographic origin and the folklore surrounding them. Enjoy recipes prepared by local Culinary Arts Instructor Jess Karr and C-Tec Culinary Arts students offering an in-house smorgasbord. Visitors Center, $40 (No Member Discount or Vouchers).
The Visitors Center is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and from 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays and holidays. For more information visit www.dawes arb.org
Granville Farmers Market - Granville. The indoor market begins this Saturday from 9:30 to noon at the Granville Elementary School. All kinds of good things to eat and drink.
Last weekend for Halloween Fun - Hebron. Devine Farms is open for weekend fun. Activities and rides. Pumpkins available daily. Visit devinefarms.com for more information.
Community Document Shred Event - Hebron. Here’s your chance to safely destroy confidential documents. The Village of Hebron and the Hebron Lions Club are co-sponsoring the free event from 9 - 11 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26, at the Hebron Municipal Complex, 934 W. Main St.
RxCollect - Hebron. Licking County residents can dispose of unwanted and expired prescription and over-the-counter medications from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Hebron Police Department, 934 W. Main St. Drive-up service is available. Sharps such as needles, syringes and lancets will not be accepted. Participants should remove or black out personal information and leave the medications in its original container or packaging.
Family Fall Festival - Buckeye Lake Library. Stop by the Buckeye Lake Library from noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26 for the Family Fall Festival. Enjoy free hot dogs and refreshments, pumpkin painting, fall themed crafts and a magic show presented by Rory Rennick. FREE and open to everyone.
Pre-School Storytime - Hebron Library. Preschoolers and their caregivers are invited to join us every Tuesday at 11 a.m. for stories, songs and a craft. Fall storytime themes include kitchen fun, pets, and things that go zoom!
Preschool Story Time- Buckeye Lake Library. Preschoolers and their caregivers are invited to join us on Wednesdays at 11 a.m for a storytime, craft, and snack. Fall story time runs through Nov. 13.
Civil War Lecture - New Lexington. The Phil Sheridan Society has announced the sec- ond in its series of free Civil War lectures beginning at noon on Saturday, October 26, at the Perry County Library, 117 Jackson St, New Lexington. This month’s lecture on the Blazer’s Scouts, will be presented by noted author and Civil War historian, Darl L. Stephenson. The Blazer Scouts, aptly named for Capt. Richard Blazer of the 91st Ohio, were an elite group of specialized soldiers that engaged in non-traditional warfare during the second half of the Civil War from 1863-1865. This highly trained, sophisticated unit of scouts and sharpshooters proved such a success that famed Ohio Civil War General Phil H. Sheridan also employed the use of a similar unit which was modeled after Blazer’s scouts. This sort of specialized military unit was the predecessor of what we know today as Special Forces.
12th Annual Craft & Antique Show - Baltimore. Christ United Methodist Church, 700 South Main Street (Ohio 158) hosts their 12th Annual Craft and Antique Show Saturday, October 26, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Items for sale include: Christmas and fall decorations, antiques of many kinds, and various unique hand crafted items. In addition, there will be a bake sale and lunch items of soup, sandwiches, and homemade pie will be served in the fellowship hall. The $1 admission fee is a ticket for door prizes donated by the vendors. Door prizes will be given away all day. Children under 12 are FREE. Proceeds benefit Sending Love Over There – A weekly mailing of packages of food and personal care items to local servicemen and women stationed in the war zones. Over 4,000 packages have been mailed since 2007.
Trunk or Treat - Buckeye Lake. Children are invited to the annual event at the Buckeye Lake Youth Association from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 31. Pickup treats from area businesses and organizations. Visit the haunted house and enjoy, hot chocolate and donuts. |
M.A: Reading in Practice at University of Liverpool: Applications for 2013/2014 open
Interested in investigating the role of literature in Bibliotherapy and health? But don’t want to be suffocated by the confinements of a conventional academic course?
Then you might be interested in the M.A. degree course: Reading in Practice, run by the Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems (CRILS) at The University of Liverpool. The first Masters degree of its kind is preoccupied with the wider and deeper ways in which serious creative literature ‘finds’ people, emotionally and imaginatively, by offering living models and visions of human troubles and human possibilities.
Accompanied by a reading list which includes brilliant works of all kinds, from novels to essays on philosophy, you will be helped to develop the ability to use all literature as a form of personal time-travel and meditation. You will also learn how, in turn, you may re-create this process for others, through the formation of equivalent reading-groups based on The Reader Organisation’s ‘Get Into Reading’ model.
This course is perfect for those who don’t want to have to read loads of secondary criticism but want to use reading to enable them to think their thoughts better and find new ones. A first degree in literature is not required: you just have to be a lively, seriously committed reader!
Here’s what some of the past students have to say about their time on the M.A:
“The course often felt very hard and it should continue to do so. I feel bereft having finished, and wish I could do it over again”
“It’s such a personal course, where you have to bring so much of yourself”
“I feel that through my reading and writing on the MA I have consolidated some of the thoughts and feelings that have been floating in my head for years, finding the words to understand them.”
If any of this sounds interesting and you would like to find out a little more about the course details, the application process and who to contact, please read the M.A. document below, in which you will find out more, or visit the CRILS page of the University of Liverpool website. |
Mohammad Taufiqul Islam; Azimul Hoque MEE08:44 , pp. 86. TEK/avd. för telekommunikationssystem, 2008.
Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is a service on the Internet where digital TV signal data is delivered to the participants using the Internet Protocol (IP). IPTV promises to provide many TV channels with lower price for operators, lower price for consumers and it is also distributed more efficiently than using the nowadays prevalent coaxial cable distribution. As it is assumed that broadband connection of households will grow at a brisk pace, IPTV will play more and more important role in the incoming years in our lives. The plenty of TV channels requires large bandwidth for high clear TV programs in IPTV service which is a contradictory issue to the limitation of user access line bandwidth and aggregation network bandwidth. Multicast as a mature one-to-many packet data delivery technology, the use of multicast for IPTV service is considered necessary to resolve such contradiction. But which multicast or what level multicast will be best suited for this emerging technology is still a burning question. In this thesis we identify the appropriate multicast solution for IPTV. To accomplish our goal, we have done literature survey in gathering information to analyse different AL multicast protocol and IP multicast protocols. We have tried to find out different problems related to this protocol to deployment. Finally we have identified the best suited solution to carry multicast traffic for IPTV service. |
Yep, the gift of Seminary. Personally, and don’t tell my wife I said this, but I am thinking that the only real reason that I am in Seminary is because it helps with blogging. Shhhhhh……
It is my position that the use of the Temple story has been contextualized by different authors during Israel’s history, and most notably by the authors/translators of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. While it may not always be safe to call a translator an author, the fact remains that the Old Greek differs greatly in place from the Hebrew vorlage so much so that we may place upon the translators the title of author, or at least a reauthor of sorts. In 2nd Samuel 7.1-17 in the Septuagint, we find a contextualization of the passage to allow for the imminent ‘Great David’s greater Son’ (Mark 12.35-37; Luke 1.32) as well as the negatively to be placed not on the intended Saul but perhaps all of Israelite royal history. In doing so, the Greek translators allowed, as they did for Isaiah 7.14, for continued recontextualization of the passage to be made by New Testament authors and later writers. In his essay on this passage which was delivered to the 2008 annual meeting of the SBL, Omer Sergi argues that the Hebrew passage underwent at least three different redactions according to the worldview of the authors. Along this same vein, the Greek translators are, according to their own worldview, reauthoring this passage.
Second Samuel 7.4-17 has long been used in connection to Messianic Expectation in connection with Jesus Christ, rather, the periscope of verse 14-16 which speaks specifically to the future King. Ideally, however, the passage (both the Temple and the Dynastic Promise) should be taken as a whole given that promises once made to David by YHWH are now being removed from him and given to another, namely to that of Solomon. To blindly allow the passage to speak only in regards to Christ would be violently destructive to the text itself, to the intentions of the original author, and to the original application. No doubt that the original author(s) was writing in hope of something while attempting to misalign David as the ideal king, but it is doubtful that a future event some five centuries later was expected. While the text is prophetic, note that it is given from God to the Prophet Nathan and then to David in response to David’s prayer, prophecy was not about some long expected future event, but about the almost immediate present, although in this case, it would have been some decades later before Solomon was given the promises fully.
Two things are taken from David on this night, namely his goal of centralizing the cult via his service to God in building the Temple and the fact that his son’s throne will be the established Throne, or restored throne as the LXX has it. What is interesting is that in 2nd Samuel, God refuses David’s offer of building the House of the Lord while in 1st Chronicles 22.9, David recounts a prophecy which as part of his punishment, God has removed from David the right to build the Temple while promising that in the future, Solomon would be given the honor and duty. Added to this is Solomon’s words in 1st Kings 8.14-21 which has God praising David’s desire to build the house, couching the refusal into a prophetic statement that Jerusalem, named by Solomon, would be chosen and that Solomon would build the Temple. I note the differences as well in where, and perhaps when, the son of David will come from, as given in the various statements mentioned above. In 2nd Samuel, the son comes from the belly (7.12, LXX), in 1st Kings 8.19, the son comes from the King’s side, while only in 1st Chronicles 22.9 is the son said to be born unto the King. While the language may all mean the same thing, I find it difficult to see it as such, especially given the translation, and oftentimes interpretation via translation, of the Septuagint. The Hebrew, at least preliminary, seems to all contain the same thought, that the son of David which will have the established throne will be an immediate descendent of David.
The Actors in 2nd Samuel 7.1-17
God is absent as David’s genesis of though in building the Temple, only to intervene later after God’s prophet had given what should have been divine permission for the construction of the Temple. What is of note here is that the God in this passage, at first a passive actor, does not live up to the God of Ezekiel 14.6-11, in which a prophet who speaks without divine permission and the inquirer will be punished and ‘annihilated’ (Eze 14.9 NETS). The Deuteronomist was equally clear in Deuteronomy 18.20 when YHWH says that ‘the prophet who acts impiously by speaking a word in my name that I have not ordered to speak…that prophet shall die (NETS).’ Here, God allows David to inquire of Nathan and Nathan simply gives David the answer, speaking, as Prophets were known to do, for God but without permission. God, at least in v1-3 is a passive actor who goes on to never admonish either David or Nathan for their wrong speech.
Both David and Nathan, however, are almost not existent in this scene, besides the initial dialogue. David, however, in the rest of the chapter, issues a Psalm in response to God’s new covenant with his house. The prompting of the request, however, is important. 7.1 tells us that David had been given a gift by YHWH. In the Hebrew, the word is nuach while the Greek, κατεκληρονόμησεν, means inheritance. The meaning is different in that with the Hebrew, I believe that it points to the immediacy of the situation. David was given rest from his enemies, although at the start of chapter 8 David can hardly to be said to be at rest, and wanted then to give God a place of rest. The Greek speaks to the inheritance, perhaps the future dynastic house which the Greek translators saw in the passage. Further, we see that David was at ease in his own house, and only after that, began to think about the things of God. Nathan, otherwise only hinted at being heard (v17), makes only one statement in this passage, and that of speaking for YHWH without authorization, which as I discussed earlier, should have been both David and his death sentence.
Perhaps the only remaining actor to discuss is the one which is not mentioned but implied by later interpreters, the Son of David. This son, mentioned in v12-16, is the once future king. For David, it was Solomon, but for the Greek translators, it would have been the expected Messiah, the Greater Son. In the Hebrew, a son is called for after the death of David and will be given the throne of David while in the Greek, a seed (cf Romans 1.3) which is planted will be the new king. The future aspect of the Kingdom is found when God is said to ‘ἀνορθώσω his throne forever (v13, cf v16, LXX).’ Further, in the Hebrew, God says that he will become a father, while the Greek seems to imply a pre-existing parental relationship. Further, what is telling is in the Greek, the Son of David is the one given the dynasty unlike the Hebrew which explicitly states that it will be David’s dynasty which is made permanent (NET).
As I have mentioned earlier, the Greek translators were almost reauthoring this passage from the Hebrew vorlage. Further, I have briefly mentioned some of the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek. As is evident with the Temple Scroll and Deuteronomy, communities during this time were not above taking the Sacred Text and contextualizing it to fit their current needs, even rewriting sections to make it address their present needs. In this next section, I will explore more of those differences and what they might mean to the newly minted section of 2 Samuel 7.1-17. What comes about is not the soon-to-inaugurated Solomon as we see in the Hebrew, but an expectation of a restored Kingdom ripe for the Messianic contender.
In 7.5, God is asking a rhetorical question, where the Greek has YHWH firmly stating that David will not be the builder of God’s house. The idea of ‘house’ is here meaning the Temple, but as we will see, comes to mean the dynasty of David. In verse 6, the Greek Translators, showing that their Sitz im Leben is far removed from that of the original Hebrew authors, implied that the Wilderness Tabernacle was only supposed to be temporary. This is contrary to the Hebrew which has imagined a more permanent perspective. This may be a result of the time period in which the Greek translators were writing in that they had had time for theological reflection.
7.9-11 seems to imply that YHWH is speaking before Israel entering the Promised Land, with a future tense being applied to a future security in a future place. The Greek verse 9 solidifies the tenses. Whereas in the Hebrew, YHWY tells David that He has been with him in battle already and that He will make David a great name, in the Greek, David already has the great name, again, implying the date of the LXX translation. The tenth verse may, in fact, be the lead in understanding the ability of the Greek Translators to force of a future tense upon the text. This verse, rife with Deuteronomic thought, places this ideal relationship between Israel and God in the future. If this is so, then the Greek Translators, noting that a place of security (Israel) had already been established when 2 Samuel was written may have seen this as an indication of a ‘now, but not yet’ futuristic view of this passage, which further allowed them to see the passage as speaking of a Son of David beyond that of Solomon. 7.11 (Gr) implies that there is hope for David making a house for God, whereas the Hebrew in the NASB has YHWH making a house (dynasty) God and the NRSV turns this a bit with YHWH making David into a dynasty. What is further interesting in verse 11 is that here, in both the Hebrew and the Greek, YHWH promises ‘rest’ to Israel. The Hebrew in verse 1 and verse 11 is unchanged, but the Greek in verse 11 (ἀναπαύσω) reflects the idea of rest, whereas the first verse speaks to an inheritance.
7.12 (Gr) has the future son coming from David’s belly (NETS; womb, my translation) whereas the Hebrew notes that the future son will come from David’s body. It may be that the Greek is looking forward to a yet unfulfilled expectation or is relying upon Psalm 131 (132 Eng) in which, having been written on David’s behalf, attempts to remind God of the promise made to David while the author sits in exile of some sort. Further, the same Greek word is used in 2nd Samuel 16.11 in which David laments after Absalom, the ‘son who came out of my belly’ (NETS) in what may an author’s trick and getting the audience to think that Absalom was the future son from chapter 7.
7.13-16 (Gr) has YHWH promising to ‘restore’ the throne of the future son, or perhaps restore the throne for the future son whereas the Hebrew have God establishing the throne for the future son, as I have briefly detailed earlier. In the Hebrew, Saul’s name is expressly mentioned in verse 15, whereas in the Greek, the singular becomes the plural, again revealing the Translator’s place in life. It may be that the Translator has in mind not only the kinds which God has removed (Saul, Ahab, Manassah) but also the exile of Israel. In 2nd Kings 23.27, we read,
The LORD said, “I will remove Judah also from My sight, as I have removed Israel. And I will cast off Jerusalem, this city which I have chosen, and the temple of which I said, ‘My name shall be there.'” (2Ki 23:27 NAU)
This passage calls to mind 2 Samuel 7.13 and verse 15, both with the mention of the Temple being for the name of YHWH and the remembrance of all those who God had removed. For the writer of the Kings, however, both Israel and Judah were removed as well. This is followed in verse 16 which again has YHWH promising to restore (build in the Hebrew) the House and the Throne of the Greater Son, whereas in the Hebrew, it is the David’s House.
Regardless of the text used, Hebrew or Greek, the passage has played a part in the development of the Davidic theology present not just in the Jewish Canon, but so too the Christian canon. Sergi notes (Sergi, 2010, 262) that the Davidic monarchy occupies a ‘major role in biblical historiography’, but even beyond canonical sources, such as the Psalms of Solomon, we find the idea that the promised Throne and House which is to last forever provides a hope for Jewish believers, regardless of their sect. It is this Covenant which many sought to see restored as they were weighted down under the boot of the Greeks and, later, the Romans (See 1st and 2nd Maccabees and the above mentioned work) and was the covenant which allowed the Messianic Expectation which Christians believe was fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. The Greek Translators were able to urge this suggestion along with their reauthoring of the text to reflect their present day hope of the soon coming King, the Greater Son of the Great David.
For the Greek translators, and thus readers, what was already once fulfilled may have just been a shadow of things to come. The Jews in Palestine were technically in exile, with no government of their own, the Temple was less than the first one, and the Land itself wasn’t secure. The ‘permanent’ dynasty was simply no more, and yet, the translators were able to show a ‘not yet, but soon’ mentality in their translation. While we have no evidence of the passage being used at Qumran, there is plenty of evidence of it being used in the Messianic Community which surrounded the followers of Jesus. It gave them verification of their own understanding of who Jesus was.
Sergi Omer, “The Composition of Nathan’s Oracle to David (2 Samuel 7.1-17) as a Reflection of Royal Judahite Ideology,” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010): 261-279.
Although, the connection is rather weak in the New Testament. Paul uses it in 2nd Corinthians 6.18, not for Christ in particular, but for the Church corporately.
I will be using the NETS: Pietersma, Albert, & Wright, Benjamin G. (2007). A New English Translation of the Septuagint. Oxford University Press, USA.
I note Matthews, et al, who writes, ‘Here it is indicated that God has given David rest from his enemies, and throughout the Old Testament the Lord speaks of giving rest to his people. This is especially significant in this context where David wants to build a temple, because in the ancient Near East the temple of the deity was supposed to offer rest to the deity. Some of the temple names even suggest that as a primary function of the temple. This divine rest then often results in rest for the people in their land. In contrast the Bible says little about divine rest, and it is never the prerequisite for human rest except for the Sabbath. (Victor Harold Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas and John H. Walton, The IVP Bible Background Commentary : Old Testament, electronic ed., 2 Sa 7:1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000).)
P. Kyle McCarter II Samuel (Garden City, 1984), 202-3 argues that the future tense refers to the Temple, although latter scholars note flaws in his argument.
D.F. Murray (Vestus Testamentum XL, 3), in his 1990 essay, however, argues against this future as temple, and instead turns the meaning of the ‘place’ as land. I understand it to mean place, in regards to land, following David Qimhi’s lead. See David Vanderhoot (JBL 118.4 (1999( 625-633) for further discussion of Temple v. Land.
Sergi notes that ‘setting the royal dynasty and the temple at the heart of royal ideaology was common practice in the ancient Near Eastern Kingdoms.’ |
Of hundreds of articles I’ve written for the San Diego Union-Tribune, this one is my all-time favorite. Above: A wild poinsettia. (Photo by Bruce Leander, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.)
It was a Quasimodo of a plant.
Even so, Franz Fruehwirth was intrigued by the gangly poinsettia he saw growing in a sunny corner of the Paul Ecke Ranch in Encinitas, CA. The year was 1962 and, for 40 years, the Ecke family had dominated the poinsettia market nationwide. True, customers preferred traditional-looking plants, but that didn’t mean tastes wouldn’t change, given an appealing alternative.
The oddity had a grand name, Ecke’s Flaming Sphere, but its ball-like red topknot and tightly curled leaves suggested not a comet so much as a tarantula. It had been discovered in the mid-’50s, as a mutant shoot of a normal pointy-leaved plant.
Maybe, Fruehwirth mused as he went about his routine work of mating poinsettias, Flaming Sphere could light the flower market on fire.
Sure, there were problems. Floppy, skinny stems. Small, widely spaced leaves. And Flaming Sphere flatly refused to grow indoors.
“It’s a stripper,” Fruehwirth says. The term describes poinsettias that drop their leaves when deprived sunlight — a problem with those sold as recently as two decades ago. This tendency for poinsettias to disgrace themselves indoors is a trait Fruehwirth has bred out of the world’s most popular potted plant during his more than three decades with Ecke.
Worse yet, Flaming Sphere was, to put it politely, sexually challenged. Its reproductive organs were almost nonexistent. Fruehwirth could propagate the plant asexually; that is, he could take cuttings and root them, creating clones. Indeed, if he had wanted to, Fruehwirth could have populated all 120 acres of the Ecke ranch with floppy Flaming Spheres.
But without a well-formed flower, without ripe and lusty ovaries at the core of its ruby petals or bracts, there was scant hope of crossbreeding Flaming Sphere with Ecke’s more civilized — and commercial — poinsettias.
Yet Fruehwirth persevered. Tackling the impossible had become routine for him. But it would be 36 years — this holiday season, to be exact — before customers worldwide could evaluate his success.
When Fruehwirth was 13, World War II tore him and his parents from their home in Hungary.
“We could carry only 70 pounds of clothing with us,” he reminisced on a dazzling December day at Ecke’s seaside flower farm. Seasoned with a European accent, Fruehwirth’s voice underscores his Hungarian heritage.
Immediately after the war, the family immigrated to a wounded country with an alien language: Germany. Fruehwirth learned German and his father’s trade of tailoring.
At age 27, Fruehwirth, his German wife, Lilo, and their 5-year-old daughter came to America, a land gold-paved for those who spoke English. They didn’t.
While Fruehwirth wrestled irregular verbs and capricious English phrases, he labored at a tiny tailor shop in Oceanside. As luck would have it, customer Paul Ecke Jr. needed a housekeeper/nanny. He hired Lilo and offered her husband a job as well. They could live on the ranch, in a cottage next to the Ecke family’s tree-shaded two-story home.
Fruehwirth, though unfamiliar with Euphorbia pulcherrima , a winter-blooming native of Mexico, was eager to be useful. And, in 1962, what the Ecke family needed most was help making a major change: Instead of growing poinsettia plants in fields, they wanted to concentrate on greenhouse floriculture — thus opening exciting possibilities in controlled plant genetics.
In other words, potted poinsettias might be crossbred for lusher foliage, brighter bracts, a longer shelf life, and a refusal to perform like Gypsy Rose Lee. Field-grown plants with intriguing genes, like those of curly leaved Flaming Sphere, might spawn appealing descendants.
Under the Eckes’ tutelage, Fruehwirth developed a knack for selecting perfect parent plants and evaluating their offspring. He combined a scientist’s precision with an artist’s eye for color and form. Best of all, he never lost sight of what was likely to sell.
Today, the Ecke ranch incorporates 40 acres of greenhouses. Within those glowing gymnasium-size structures originate 80 percent of the world’s flowering poinsettias.
Thanks to Fruehwirth, new cultivars debut annually, like fashion models strutting down a runway. Yet these beauties are plump and hide their limbs beneath thick leaves.
Tightly packed atop greenhouse tables are row after row of plants with brilliant bracts that appear illuminated from within. Hues that redefine “red” range from vermilion to pale pink. Plants are splotched as though paint had been thrown on them, or had been airbrushed with red flecks over creamy pink, or flash a lemon yellow good enough to eat.
And all are aristocrats, with pedigrees worthy of race horses. In fact, Fruehwirth compares his job to that of a horse breeder.
“Want to see our stud farm?” he asked, with a twinkle in his eye.
With walls of translucent Fiberglas and black plastic curtains ready to roll into place, the greenhouse that holds Ecke’s genetic treasures seemed forbidden territory, like a laboratory in a James Bond movie.
It was humid as a womb. Silent, save for the drip of water. And everywhere was the color green, an intense, vivid green pulsing with photosynthesis.
Thousands of potted poinsettias sat atop tables, and all looked pretty much alike. Each group of a dozen or so was separated from the next by what appeared to be white bed headboards. A sort of filing system, Fruehwirth explained, pointing to numbers on each.
Tips of plants had been snipped above leaf axials, and the cuttings, Fruehwirth said, had been rooted to produce this year’s crop of clones.
But when creating new cultivars, he allows parent plants to flower. Using a paintbrush, he takes pollen from one plant, perhaps number T43, and dabs it onto the pistil of, say, number K48. If T43 has pink bracts and K48’s are yellow-cream, fertilized seeds may produce a peach poinsettia. Or perhaps not.
As Fruehwirth slipped through narrow aisles to a door that led to another greenhouse, he moved gracefully, his body following his enthusiasm.
Christmas comes early for him, he said. November is filled with anticipation because the results of his breeding begin to flower.
“We start watching to see which cross performs how we hoped.”
Ecke’s seedling greenhouse encompassed half a football field. Each aspiring starlet was numbered, and yes, Fruehwirth uses a computer to keep track. As plants mature, he evaluates bract color, leaf shape, size and density of foliage, stem thickness and strength, branching ability, whether the color glows or fizzles under fluorescent lights (important for the office market) and — for each plant that makes the final cut — how well it performs in the Ecke “torture chamber.”
This is a trailer that simulates an indoor environment, Fruehwirth explained. Plants previously coddled in greenhouses are subjected to low humidity, too much light or too little, overwatering and drought, cigarette smoke and small children. (Poinsettias, by the way, don’t bite back; according to Ecke literature, they’re not poisonous.)
As Fruehwirth picked up plant after plant, he commented on seedlings’ qualities — or lack of them. Of a pretty plant with variegated cream-and-green leaves, he said, “A blessing and a curse, OK? Variegated means a lack of chlorophyll, so light areas sunburn easily. A very sensitive plant. But interesting. A novelty.”
How many will make it to market? Fruehwirth waved an arm at the vast array of plants. “We’re going to keep maybe 700.” Of those, one or two are destined to be “year 2000 introductions.”
Among this year’s champions is one Fruehwirth has referred to affectionately, over the past 36 years, as “Curly.”
Fruehwirth’s tanned face creased with a V-shaped smile as he darted into another Fiberglas structure. Aligned along its concrete floor were pots of poinsettias whose upright stems reached no higher than his waist. Flowering bracts were large and rounded, as though each velvet petal’s spine was a thread someone had pulled to shorten it.
Fruehwirth lifted a plant to present it, then set it down and patted one of its curled crimson flowers. Lush leaves resembled a loose head of lettuce, and sounded like one, too.
“Veenter Rose, we call it,” Fruehwirth said, his Hungarian accent evident. Sure enough, it looked like a cross between a poinsettia and an old-fashioned rose.
Unlike Flaming Sphere, its spindly ancestor, Winter Rose’s dark green leaves were broad and thickly spaced along rigid stems the diameter of Fruehwirth’s forefinger.
Using a pocketknife, he sliced a 2-foot stem and stripped its lower leaves. Cut areas appeared to ooze white glue, a characteristic common to plants of the genus Euphorbia. He dunked the stem into a bucket of water, removed it, and squeegeed it between thumb and forefinger. “That’s all you need to do to seal it,” he said.
As a cut flower, Winter Rose will last three weeks, and on the plant, three months. And like all poinsettias, it will grow in frost-free gardens. But bracts won’t change from green to red without 14 hours uninterrupted nighttime darkness (no porch lights, no headlights — not even briefly) beginning October 1.
At each flower’s center was a cache of cabochon emeralds dusted with gold.
Pollen. Sexual reproduction. How had Fruehwirth managed to breed Winter Rose’s umpteenth-great-grandparent, Flaming Sphere?
One day, three decades ago, the oddity produced a tiny bit of pollen. “It wasn’t much,” Fruehwirth said. “But it was enough.”
This article ran in Dec. ’99. Franz Fruehwirth retired in 2000, after 38 years with Ecke. In 2003, at age 69, he traveled with Lilo to Washington DC to receive the American Horticultural Society’s prestigious Luther Burbank award. Incidentally, Fruehwirth also hybridized the iconic red poinsettia that continues to outsell all others. But few know its name or the special meaning it has for him: Freedom. |
If you go through life being called “Jananice” or “Janet” or “Which one are you?” (I do not have a twin, for the record) you contemplate changing your name. When my sister and I played we often took on new personas. Most often I chose Angie from that TV show (don’t pretend you don’t remember).
When it wasn’t Angie, we fought over who would be Ashley. I don’t know why. And that was when we weren’t reenacting episodes of “Solid Gold”.
The very talented, Leanne Shirtliffe, recently penned a children’s book The Change Your Name Store and I knew I had to have it. I thoroughly enjoyed her first book, Don’t Lick the Minivan and was anxious to see her handiwork with children’s literature. We were not disappointed.
This story follows the adventures of Wilma Lee Wu who decides to change her name. She finds the Change Your Name store where one can try on different names to find the right fit. The catch is that when you try one, you are transported to the country of origin. Love this.
As a parent of all boys, I appreciate that the main character is a spunky girl who does not fall into some of the stereotypes of young female heroines. As a teacher, I value the multiculturalism celebrated in this story along with the underlying theme of liking who you are. The rhyming narrative flows naturally and engages young and old.
The illustrations by Tina Kugler are fun and inviting. They capture the feel of the story and the characters just right. Our boys enjoy finding all the little details on each page. Wilma’s pet dog is an excellent addition and ALMOST makes me want to get a pet.
When asked what he liked best about the story, our seven-year-old replied, “that you get to visit the country when you try a name.” I agree. When asked what I should changed my name to, without hesitation he answered, “Babette”. Not bad, and definitely better than what they wanted to call their youngest brother (Boomer). I wonder what country Boomer comes from?
This book should be on your shelf. |
Alice Fahs. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Xi + 410 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-2581-5.
Reviewed by Lisa A. Long (Department of English, North Central College)
Published on H-CivWar (September, 2002)
Seeing Anew Civil War Popular Literature
Seeing Anew Civil War Popular Literature
The success of Alice Fahs in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865 rests in her ability to see anew what has always been right in front us: the vast number of novels, short stories, news reports, poems, songs, histories, children's fictions, and other print ephemera the Civil War inspired. Fahs refuses to fall prey to the dire pronouncements of earlier critics such as Daniel Aaron and Edmund Wilson, who encouraged us to see Civil War literature as naïve, partisan, crude, hasty-in short, as just plain bad and thus implicitly unworthy of extended scholarly study. Though Fahs' method is firmly historical, she follows in the tradition of literary scholars such as Jane Tompkins in her refusal to pass judgment on popular literature; rather, she attends to the crucial "cultural work" accomplished by the war's print culture. In conveying her fascination with and respect for this literature, Fahs has created an important intervention in Civil War history.
Given, as Fahs herself notes, the tremendous "outpouring" of popular literature across genre and region during the Civil War, it is clear from the outset that she has set herself an enormously ambitious task. Fahs heroically tackles the complex relationship between northern and southern literary culture; explores the many forms of popular print culture ranging from histories to stationery; examines both the symbolic and the commercial registers of literary production; and looks at how popular culture informed race, gender, and national identities. In her introduction she claims that popular war literature "participated in a cultural conversation concerning the evolving relationships between diverse individuals and the nation in wartime" (p. 2). In her efforts to examine the Civil War's popular literature in its totality-and to consider genre, region, economics, and identity politics in each of her chapters-Fahs can only paint that "cultural conversation" in broad strokes. In this regard I find Fahs' title something of a misnomer: one might be led to believe that the nature and complexity of "imagining" would be at the core of this study; rather it remains implicit. While I applaud Fahs for her focus on the popular, I am not clear as to how cartoons and history books, for example, are imagined similarly, or whether or not they imagine in the same ways.
However, the breadth of Fahs' research is distinctive. For example, Fahs' first chapter powerfully examines how the material circumstances of publication and distribution of literature during war-time affected its content. It is clear here and throughout the text that Fahs is thoroughly familiar with the many periodical publications of the war era. For example, in her discussion of the South's lack of publishing resources and reliance on northern literary culture Fahs weaves together quotes from the Magnolia Weekly, the Southern Literary Messenger, and the Southern Field and Fireside, introducing the thick layering of diverse primary sources that she employs throughout. At the same time, she mines the private correspondence of key actors such as southern writer Paul Hamilton Hayne in order to elucidate how pecuniary matters influenced writers (p. 34). The chapter similarly ranges to descriptions of sheet music, stationery, souvenir cards, games, etc. One of Fahs' most original observations here is that the war became "visual" in the North in a way that it could not in the resource-poor South (p. 47).
In her next chapter on the war's popular verse, Fahs helps her readers to see distinctions among a seemingly homogeneous and unimaginative group of poems. Indeed, Fahs cites a war-era poem that itself satirizes the seeming "banality and even absurdity" of war-era poetry (p. 75). Rather than attending to the metaphoric language and imagery of the verse, Fahs nevertheless helpfully divides poems into sub-categories in this chapter (battle calls, flag poems, hymns, images of Christian soldiers, etc.). Her text emerges as a useful taxonomic tool in this and similar chapters.
In writing a history book about literature and literary culture, Fahs has entered a disciplinary interstice that invites reviewers to assess her familiarity with nineteenth-century literary criticism. Her lack of in-depth engagement with that criticism is most evident to this literary critic in her chapters on poetry, the sentimentalized soldier, and the feminized war. Recent literary scholarship has questioned the coherence and utility of traditional categories such as "sentimental" and "feminized"-categories that seem to be a priori concepts in Fahs' text. In the "The Sentimentalized Soldier" Fahs argues, paradoxically, that the "highly conventionalized and typologized" sentimental soldier registered the public's insistence on "individual, personal meanings" of the war (p. 94). Again, she marshals a dazzling variety of sources to make her case, notably a speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Poetry of the War," that asserts that literature forged links between the home front and battle front (p. 101). Yet many scholars, such as Phillip Fisher and Karen Sanchez-Eppler, have complicated the apparent meaning of the sentimental witness Fahs argues is central to renderings of hospital suffering.
Similarly, Fahs' chapter on women's literature seems not to take into account fully the ways in which recent work such as Elizabeth Young's Disarming the Nation complicates simple dualisms between masculine and feminine, public and private realms, home front and battle front concerns. Indeed the title of Fahs' chapter, "The Feminized War," reaffirms old notions that war is inherently masculine and, then, that when women writers take it on it is transformed. Issues of gender transgression are taken up more aggressively in Fahs' chapter on "The Sensational War," where she explores the way that the instabilities of war were often expressed as a sexual threat against vulnerable women who, as often, used the instabilities of the time to transcend their circumscribed roles. In this latter chapter, Fahs also reinvigorates her discussion of the economics of popular literature, showing how the war facilitated the development and sale of "cheap novels."
Fahs's later chapters on depictions of African Americans, children's fiction, and war-era humor are original and effective work. In particular, Fahs offers a sophisticated consideration of the way that popular war-era representations of African American men registered the ambivalence of white northerners towards black military service and emancipation, and the desire of white southerners to reinscribe antebellum stereotypes. What is most effective here and in her subsequent reading of Civil War humor is Fahs' weaving of textual and visual primary sources; for example, she uses the famous Harper's Weekly illustration, "A Typical Negro," to argue that the transformation of African Americans from property to citizen was incomplete (p. 171). Fahs continues in this vein in her chapter on war humor, where she shows how political and publication pressures informed the humorous verse and cartoons of the era. Though her claim that humor allowed for repressed dissent is conventional, Fahs sheds light on an extended and often brutal culture of war humor that is so often eschewed in favor of more sentimental war literature.
In her final chapters Fahs explores how popular literature made material links between the war and post-war periods. In her chapter on juvenile fiction, Fahs contends that the proliferation of boys' war fiction made an "important link to a postwar juvenile culture that stressed adventure and excitement" (p. 258). While Oliver Optic, Horatio Alger, and the other authors of boys' fiction Fahs examines might be more familiar to readers, her reclamation of the little-known girls' book, Dora Darling, the Daughter of the Regiment, is notable (p. 275). And in "The Market Value of Memory," Fahs once again encourages us to look afresh at what has always surrounded Civil War scholars-those ubiquitous tomes of Civil War-era histories. This chapter offers a useful catalogue of those texts and includes some wonderful material on subscription practices during the war and in the immediate post-bellum era. Most interesting are the implications of this chapter for historigraphy: Fahs implies that the (il)legitimacy of war histories became the battleground over what constituted valid history writing. Given how much war-era material she has taken on, Fahs' "Epilogue" can only gesture towards the legacy of the war's popular literature in the post-bellum period
What I like best about this impressive book is that Fahs refuses to offer easy answers, looking for "imagined differences" (p. 9) as often as she notes rhetorical similarities between northern and southern literary culture, sensation and sentiment, antebellum and war-era literary productions. etc. As she concludes, the war "invited a diverse spectrum of ordinary people to imagine themselves as part of the conflict" (p. 311). Fahs has produced a study that is itself diverse and suggestive, a well-written book that highlights crucial and previously overlooked texts.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Lisa A. Long. Review of Fahs, Alice, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865.
H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews.
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Last Friday’s first foray into an open forum elicited considerable comment. Mr. Grattan’s question — understood or misunderstood — initiated a lively exchange. What’s your homeland security (or Homeland Security) related question, concern, or comment?
March 29, 2013
March 28, 2013
In my religious tradition today is Maundy Thursday. This is when many Christian churches remember the celebration of Passover by Jesus and his disciples.
I “do” catastrophe preparedness, this has become my principal role in homeland security. In this context the Maundy Thursday narrative has some resonance.
The perennial story begins with a long celebratory dinner recalling liberation and forty years in the wilderness. After dinner, recognizing he is on the edge of an agonizing choice, Jesus asks his best friends to help him. But they keep falling asleep. Later that evening he is betrayed by a long-time friend. As a very dark night unfolds religious hypocrisy and political expediency conspire toward profound injustice. Trusted followers flee and deny any relationship with their one-time hero. Expectations are shattered. Hopes are dashed. The most cynical outcomes are — with wonderful exceptions — confirmed.
Friday is even worse.
The consequences are catastrophic. At least in the Euro-American context, this death and what happened next was until recently (still, in some quarters) widely understood as precipitating a fundamental shift in ultimate reality.
My own strategy for “managing” catastrophe involves individual, family, neighborhood, organizational, regional, and national resilience. I’m all in favor of prevention (up to a point, at some point many efforts at prevention become as bad or worse than the threat). But prevention will fail. There will be another seriously successful terrorist attack on the United States. I don’t know when or where, but it will come. Much worse than any terrorist attack will be when earthquake or pandemic or epic flooding or you name it de-link a major urban area’s supply chains for several weeks.
Mitigation, response, and recovery are, for me, all important components of resilience. But resilience starts, I increasingly perceive, with the stories we tell each other over meals together. Such as Passover when the story is told again and again of courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal, victory and defeat.
There’s a new book out called “The Secrets of Happy Families.” It’s another example of delving into social science research to reclaim common sense that was widely accepted until distracted by earlier versions of social science research. According to the author:
Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative… and those narratives take one of three shapes.
First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. …”
Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”
“The most healthful narrative… is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”
Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves.
For the last sixty years or so the Ascending narrative has dominated the American imagination. In the last six or seven years the Descending narrative has exerted amazing power. But as with most families, our national narrative is more complicated.
Reality oscillates. Catastrophes come. Seventy-two hours later or 40 days-and-nights (or years) later, even 1900 years later reality may take another turn. There are no guarantees of “success”. There are resilient and non-resilient choices.
March 27, 2013
The following is the current lead in The Telegraph (London). For the record, I am online, have been online all day (it’s now 1705 Eastern), and have not noticed a problem. I’ve checked a couple of US-based tech sites and a quick scan shows nothing or only a minor mention. The New York Times is, however, giving major attention. Perhaps this is — so far — mostly a European phenomenon?
A Dutch web-hosting company caused disruption and the global slowdown of the internet, according to a not-for-profit anti-spam organization.
The interruptions came after Spamhaus, a spam-fighting group based in Geneva, temporarily added the Dutch firm, CyberBunker, to a blacklist that is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam.
Cyberbunker is housed in a five-story former NATO bunker and famously offers its services to any website “except child porn and anything related to terrorism”. As such it has often been linked to behaviour that anti-spam blacklist compilers have condemned.
Users of Cyberbunker retaliated with a huge ‘denial of service attack’. These work by trying to make a network unavailable to its intended users,overloading a server with coordinated requests to access it. At one point, 300 billion bits per second were being sent by a network of computers, making this the biggest attack ever.
Two morning after reports:
Sounds like it was much more a Eurasian event this time.
March 26, 2013
This post was written by Charles Eaneff. Among his other accomplishments, Chuck is the former Acting Executive Director DHS Office of State and Local Law Enforcement and a Naval Postgraduate School alumnus.
From Defining Homeland Security: Analysis and Congressional Considerations, CRS, Washington, DC, 2013,
Homeland security as a concept suggested a different approach to security, and differed from homeland defense… “Homeland defense is primarily a Department of Defense (DOD) activity and is defined as “… the protection of US sovereignty, territory, domestic population, and critical defense infrastructure against external threats and aggression, or other threats as directed by the President.” Homeland security, regardless of the definition or strategic document, is a combination of law enforcement, disaster, immigration, and terrorism issues. It is primarily the responsibility of civilian agencies at all levels. It is a coordination of efforts at all levels of government. The differences between homeland security and homeland defense, however, are not completely distinct. An international terrorist organization attack on and within the United States would result in a combined homeland security and homeland defense response, such as on 9/11 when civilian agencies were responding to the attacks while the U.S. military established a combat air patrol over New York and Washington, DC. This distinction between homeland security and homeland defense, and the evolution of homeland security as a concept, was reflected in the strategic documents developed and issued following 9/11.
After 9/11 the Bush Administration, by creating DHS and reprioritizing government functions, began the transformation of Treasury Agents and Department of Transportation regulators into Security agents. At the same time, the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) was created within the Naval Postgraduate School reflecting the CRS observation that “The differences between homeland security and homeland defense, however, are not completely distinct.” The CHDS program, in admitting civilian and DoD employees from all levels of government, clearly represents the CRS contention that homeland security is a coordination of efforts at all levels of government. In 2009, the Obama Administration continued the merger of national security and homeland security, integrating the White House Homeland Security Council into the National Security Council.
A recent survey of over 1,000 homeland security professionals by the CHDS Futures Advisory Committee noted that the merging of national security and homeland security was one of the critical (existing or anticipated) trends within the Homeland Security Enterprise:
As domestic and foreign threats run together, it is not clear whether it makes sense to view these as separate issues. Also, increasing numbers of National Security issues (such as global trade, migration/travel, climate change, pandemic threats, access to natural resources, etc.) relate directly to Homeland Security issues. Geography will become less viable as a concept (in terms of threats, attacks, etc.). American tourists and diplomats may be threatened overseas.
As homeland security has matured since 9/11, the insights in the CHDS survey that the wall between national security and homeland security is coming down is undoubtedly accurate. A foundational challenge of the next decades is that those bricks between national and homeland security are being tossed aside and building a functional wall between justice and security. Whether or not we would collectively agree with the insights of former Shin Bet leadership expressed in the “Gatekeepers” movie, two major themes reinforced by their edited observations were that security and justice are inexorably intertwined, and that leadership all too often reflects “all tactics, no strategy” in pursuit of short term security. If the diverse community of homeland security practitioners does not heed lessons about the importance of legitimacy learned by the police segment of the homeland security enterprise, we risk achieving neither homeland, nor national, security.
Consistent with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Sir Robert Peele’s “The police are the public and the public are the police,” our historic security strategy has been justice supplemented by police (“the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”) combined with strong external defense capability. Domestically, justice has not been just a desired outcome, but a strategy to achieve an outcome of security. The separation of justice and security is cementing itself as more than different missions of two Federal Departments.
Justice driven discretion in the application of law increasingly exists side by side, and often at odds, with national security driven rules in the application of control.
The recent TSA decision to permit some knives on passenger aircraft makes this point quite clear. CNN reported that former Bush Administration head of TSA Kip Hawley concurs with this Obama Administration decision,
“In retrospect, I should have done the same thing,” Hawley said of the rule, which allows passengers to board aircraft with certain small knives, as well as sports equipment such as ice hockey and lacrosse sticks.
“They ought to let everything on that is sharp and pointy. Battle axes, machetes … bring anything you want that is pointy and sharp because while you may be able to commit an act of violence, you will not be able to take over the plane. It is as simple as that,” he said.
“So my position would be bravo on the 2.6 inch knife. But why not take it all the way and then really clean up the checkpoint where officers are focusing on bombs and toxins, which are things that can destroy an airplane. And it would smooth the process, cost less money, and be better security.”
Asked if he was using hyperbole in suggesting that battle axes be allowed on planes, Hawley said he was not.
How is it possible that across two Administrations, in the largest law enforcement agency in the United States (DHS has more law enforcement officers than any other department, Federal, State or local), with a law enforcement professional of impeccable credentials at the helm of TSA, that foundational principles of public safety and the well documented relationship between enforcement legitimacy and public compliance are ignored?
Might it be possible because the CHDS Futures Committee was correct, and we are well on the road to “Merging of Homeland Security with National Security”, but we are doing it at the expense of public security and legitimacy?
The most significant partners in establishing and maintaining security in the operation of passenger airlines has to be the flight crews and the flying public. A flight attendant’s primary duty is the safety of passengers. Flight Attendant Union outrage over this knife decision appears to reflect an understanding that if they ever believed that the government was a partner in their efforts to protect themselves and their passengers, that this is no longer the case. National Security is threatened if an aircraft is destroyed; the loss of cabin crew or passengers does not threaten national security.
TSA focus on national security in this “knife fight” comes at some loss of DHS/TSA legitimacy as a public safety provider.
However, as “homeland security” regulatory and enforcement continues to merge with and resemble “national security” rather than the public’s security, there are bright spots in the integration of justice, legitimacy, and security.
Department of Defense literature on counterinsurgency, including the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, reflects a deep understanding of legitimacy and the role it plays in security. When Craig Fugate of FEMA extols his approach to “whole community,” what I hear is “FEMA, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that emergency managers are the public and the public are emergency managers; FEMA employees being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
In this version of Alice in Wonderland Homeland Security, the Marines and Emergency Managers are driving toward Peelian principles of trust and accountability, paying close attention to their legitimacy, and DHS enforcement is driving toward national security at the expense of public safety.
Evolving security, both national and homeland, ensured by State control has a complex relationship with our historic strategy of security ensured by the public perception of justice supported by law enforcement’s use of discretion and the law. It is a relationship worthy of the same examination as the relationship between security and defense.
Going forward, academic examination of the relationship between defense and security without including justice as an “equal” is increasingly an examination of a two legged stool.
According to the data bots behind the Homeland Security Watch curtain, this is the 3,000th post.
Here is the first post on this blog — 7 years, 3 months, and 25 days ago (my comments added):
December 2, 2005
One of the reasons that I decided to start HLS Watch was the paucity of good blogs on the subject of homeland security. However, there are a few that are worth reading, which I list below:
1. W. David Stephenson. A thoughtful and frequently updated blog focused on the idea of ‘smart mobs for homeland security.’
[David's blog has evolved and is now presented as "stephenson blogs on Internet of Things, data, et al.musings on the Internet of Things, data liberation, and miscellany."]
2. Bruce Schneier. A well-trafficked blog by a solid expert on homeland security, focused mainly on the intersections between privacy and security.
[Bruce continues to write about the intersections, but as his most recent posts declares (Arnold noted this a few days ago), Bruce thinks privacy lost:
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. ... This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.]
3. Counterterrorism Blog. This group blog covers a wide range of opinion, and is the first place to go for rapid-reaction expert analysis on terrorist attacks.
[This blog stopped publishing about 2 years ago. Last time I checked, the original url was being used to sell air hockey tables, boots, baskets, awnings and gout treatment.]
4. Secondary Screening. A blog focused largely on TSA issues and now and then focusing on other aspects of homeland security.
[This blog's url now resolves to a place holder for Ryan Singel's Singel-Minded]
5. Early Warning (on the Washington Post site). Has a lot of very inside-the-Beltway on DOD and intelligence activities related to the broader war on terrorism. Occasionally touches on issues of homeland security.
[This blog stopped publishing in 2008. But the author, William Arkin, is the co-author of Top Secret America -- the most readable description I know of about the post 9/11 growth of the security state.]
6. Open Society Paradox. A good blog on privacy and security issues – but on hiatus right now.
[Apparently this blog remains on hiatus; the most current post describes "Yoga’s Breathtaking Effects."]
I’ve been looking for homeland security blogs for the last two years, and these are the only bookmark-worthy ones that I’ve found so far. It’s a short list. If you have any more to add to it, please suggest in comments. At some point soon I’ll start a HLS Watch blogroll.
Thanks to Christian Beckner for starting this blog. And thanks to all the people who have written for it, both above and below the comment line.
March 25, 2013
Last month the Department of Defense released a new “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Defense of Civil Authorities.”
Like most DOD policy documents, this ain’t short.
Okay, I have to admit I haven’t read it yet and if you plan to, you might want to consider pouring yourself a glass of whatever you prefer, get a bag of snacks, and pick a comfortable chair.
Okay…it’s only 25 pages. But a dense, jargon filled 25 pages. Maybe I’m just getting lazy.
But here are a few interesting points from the sections I’ve read. It is only a coincidence that the first has to do with the blending of national and homeland security:
We are now moving beyond traditional distinctions between homeland and national security.National security draws on the strength and resilience of our citizens, communities, and economy. This includes a determination to prevent terrorist attacks against the American people by fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home. It must also include a commitment to building a more secure and resilient nation, while maintaining open flows of goods and people. We will continue to develop the capacity to address the threats and hazards that confront us, while redeveloping our infrastructure to secure our people and work cooperatively with other nations.
National Security Strategy May 2010
Phil should be at least intrigued by the following section:
Vulnerabilities: Contemporary threats and hazards are magnified by the vulnerabilities created by the increasingly interconnected nature of information systems, critical infrastructure, and supply chains. The information networks and industrial control systems owned by DoD, and those maintained by commercial service providers and infrastructure operators, are subjected to increasingly sophisticated cyber intrusions and are vulnerable to physical attack and natural and manmade disasters. A targeted cyber or kinetic attack on the nation’s commercial electrical infrastructure would not only degrade DoD mission essential functions but also impact DoD sustainment operations that depend on commercial electricity for fuel distribution, communications, and transportation. In the context of this increasingly interconnected security environment, seemingly isolated or remote incidents cancause substantial physical effects, degrade Defense systems, and quickly be transformed into significant or catastrophic events.
The oft-stated concern that citizens are too reliant on government help after a disaster has seeped into DOD strategies:
Public expectations for a decisive, fast, and effective Federal response to disasters have grown in the past decade, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Although DoD is always in a support role to civilian authorities (primarily the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA) for disaster response, the capacity, capabilities, training, and professionalism of the Armed Forces mean that DoD is often expected to play a prominent supporting role in response efforts. The prevailing “go big, go early, go fast, be smart” approach to saving lives and protecting property in the homeland – evident during the preparations for and response to Hurricane Irene in August 2011 and particularly Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 – requires DoD to rapidly and effectively harness resources to quickly respond to civil support requests in the homeland.
The full document can be found here: http://www.defense.gov/news/Homelanddefensestrategy.pdf
Now, in this year’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, issued last week by the office of the director of national intelligence, a new risk has been highlighted, marking a historic shift in how we think about our enemies: the weather — more specifically climate change. And the fact that America’s entire national security apparatus has embraced it as a threat is, in the end, good news for local communities.
The United States now concedes that the security of nations is “being affected by weather conditions outside of historical norms, including more frequent and extreme floods, droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, coastal high water, and heat waves.”
And we are not the only ones:
The American Security Project, a bipartisan think tank, analyzed military assessments worldwide. From China to Rwanda, Belarus to Brazil, over 70 percent of nations view climate change as a top threat to their national security.
Yet this isn’t a challenge for what is currently understood as our national security apparatus.
Unlike responses to most other national security threats, those that guard against climate change are local in nature.
And we still must become a more resilient society, one whose basic building blocks cannot be knocked out by threats that are utterly predictable.
So she talks about weather, critical infrastructure, resilience, and local action. Sounds like a lot of topics that come up in conversations about homeland security definitions and education. But the phrase “homeland security” appears nowhere in the piece. I’m certain that is not out of ignorance of the topic or an aversion to the field–she is a former Massachusetts homeland security adviser and DHS Assistant Secretary.
Instead she frames the topics of climate change, natural disaster, critical infrastructure, and resilience as “national security” issues. On one hand, this can be interpreted as weakening the notion of a distinct field of homeland security, as well as the need to precisely define it. On the other, it represents an opportunity to focus attention on those areas that have been considered as not directly related to traditional national security.
Since 9/11 and the resulting evolution of the general field of homeland security, there has existed a tension between the security side and (for the lack of a better term) the rest. Terrorism, border security, and other activities carried out by law enforcement personnel has existed in a not always smooth relationship with emergency management, non-police first responders, and the broad array of disciplines interested in building resilience. Immediately after the Katrina’s and Sandy’s much hang wringing is accomplished concerning our preparedness for natural disasters. However, the security side of the house (across departments and levels of government), with its connection to the military and intelligence worlds, always seems to retain cachet and policy priority. Protecting us from the bad person rather than the bad weather is more exciting. For example, there has been more ink spilled concerning the TSA’s decision to allow some sharp objects to be carried on planes versus the opportunities to build resilience in those communities impacted by Superstorm Sandy.
Protecting us from terrorism at home has always been considered a part of both homeland and national security. Protecting us from natural disasters and pandemics, building resilience, etc. was often left to those without security clearances. Instead of proposing definitions that only build walls between disciplines, might it be better to expand the idea of what we consider important to security and future of our country?
March 22, 2013
When Christian began HLSWatch, Bill Cumming emerged from primordial Logos fully formed. When Jonah invited me here, Bill Cumming welcomed me to what was much more his home than mine. While writers on the front page come and go, Bill persists with questions, analysis, and (sometimes trenchant) commentary. When the cosmos is recumbent in quiet, Bill will eventually speak. He is the Higgs Boson of this parallel universe.
So… when Bill has the good idea of using Friday for an open thread, I am happy to begin the sewing…
March 21, 2013
This afternoon I’m giving a presentation to the Virginia Emergency Management Association. My topic is the strategic capacity of supply chains in potentially catastrophic events. A Virginian heard me give a similar presentation on the West coast and asked for an update.
In mid-December I was pushed onto a stage in front of a bunch of scientists. From the (lack of ) questions and the open-mouth stares encountered, I must have lapsed into glossolalia… their reaction perhaps being similar to your reaction to my use of glossolalia. In any case, they were paying attention, but I failed to make a relevant connection.
I prefer open-mouth stares to dropped-dead heads working on their texts. This is my principal recollection of a session with “senior leadership” of an important organization. The only person actually making eye-contact with me was the Big Guy. Later he and I had an interesting conversation. When I sought out the executive responsible for the core of my presentation she mostly wanted to talk about the weather.
Dead-heads are increasingly common, despite a colleague’s description of my presentation style as being “as much dancing as talking.” The senior guy who put me on the agenda was sure the audience was listening. “We’re expert multi-taskers,” he explained. Maybe. I perceived a strong intellectual force-field seeking to exclude anything that might pierce the current consensus. I left plenty of time for questions, there were none.
This afternoon I’ve been given 60 minutes. I intend to present some supply chain findings specific to Virginia. In rehearsal I’ve been able to do this in 17 to 20 minutes. I think there are some provocative findings. Then I plan to give the rest of the time to questions and answers. I would prefer to focus on issues that are relevant to the audience.
Related to relevance: I hope a conversation might begin. Supply chain is not — yet — a typical EM issue. I would like to hear some local supply chain stories and respond with stories of my own. I would like to hear some catastrophe stories and ask some questions of the audience. I would like to hear some questions I have not previously considered. Conversation is derived from root words meaning “to turn”. In a conversation we are turning a topic upside-down, right-side-up, and every which way, thinking together about all the different angles. Questions are the keys to the kingdom of new knowledge and potential wisdom.
There is too much information (at least too much for me). There is an amazing amount of knowledge (information-in-context). There is too little wisdom (ability to apply knowledge), which I perceive is one of the outcomes of too little conversation.
We gather information, analyze, report, present, argue. We defend hypotheses and theories. We marshal arguments and propose solutions. There are times and places for all these.
But without a parallel process of conversation — including the casual give-and-take of uncertainties and unknowns — the analytical process leaves us with little more than separate pieces and divided lives.
Conversation is, I perceive (argue?), especially important to homeland security. If there is any value-added to homeland security it is as an integrative, questioning, creative influence on disciplines related to the field. Disciplines seem naturally — and rather helpfully — inclined to reductionism. What works? What’s the best formula for success? Define, train, exercise, and deploy it. In other words, be disciplined.
And even in the most hard-core disciplines, conversations are a regular part of life in the firehouse, police precinct, and at other grass-roots. But these are usually discipline-specific (or community-specific) conversations. The homeland security conversation, if it happens at all, is mostly the outcome of inter-disciplinary conferences; where we have often adopted an anti-conversational approach.
About two-thirds of the presentations I have heard over the last 120 days might accurately be entitled: “Let me introduce myself/my workplace/work assignment/tribe/INSERT”. Even when their work clearly had merit, the presentations often communicated navel-gazing self-absorption (and defensiveness). In several cases I know the presenters were specifically invited to present on topics other than their organization, were coached through mini-presentations to emphasize the other purposes, but once they were given the stage they defaulted to the cult of self-aggrandizement. Not a very effective conversation-starter.
After one recent conference a female colleague commented, “None of these guys seem to know the way to get attention is to pay attention to what the other person considers important.” I had a sense she might have been making a broader critique.
At one recent multi-disciplinary conference there were no breaks scheduled, so as not to interfere with the “transfer of information.” Stop with the inert and self-referential information! Give me an opportunity to engage, question, and play with your knowledge. Schedule more coffee-breaks, not fewer. Have more small groups and fewer keynote speeches. TED talks have their place. But I would rather talk with Ted.
Mark Twain offered, “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.”
I’ll let you know how it goes this afternoon.
March 20, 2013
Here are a few bookmarks that caught my attention today:
Sun Storm Forecast (Tuesday New York Times): “Scientists say it is impossible to predict when the next monster solar storm will erupt — and equally important, whether Earth will lie in its path. What they do know is that with more sunspots come more storms, and this fall the Sun is set to reach the crest of its 11-year sunspot cycle.”
US Earns a D+ on Infrastructure (American Society of Civil Engineers): “The 2013 Report Card grades are in, and America’s cumulative GPA for infrastructure rose slightly to a D+. The grades in 2013 ranged from a high of B- for solid waste to a low of D- for inland waterways and levees. Solid waste, drinking water, wastewater, roads, and bridges all saw incremental improvements, and rail jumped from a C- to a C+. No categories saw a decline in grade this year.”
Terrorism is an Expression of Middle Class Frustration (Sultan Mehmood writing in DAWN): “The simple positive relationship between poverty and (material) crime could not be extrapolated… Not a single study could make a cogent case that terrorism had economic roots. This lack of evidence culminated in a recent review of the literature by Martin Gassebner and Simon Luechinger of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute. The authors estimated 13.4 million different equations, drew on 43 different studies and 65 correlates of terrorism to conclude that higher levels of poverty and illiteracy are not associated with greater terrorism. In fact, only the lack of civil liberties and high population growth could predict high terrorism levels accurately… It is not that most terrorists have nothing to live for. Far from it, they are the high-ability and educated political people who so vehemently believe in a cause that they are willing to die for it. The solution to terrorism is not more growth but more freedom.”
More Boko Haram Bombings in Nigeria (AFP): “A series of blasts targeting buses full of passengers in Kano, Nigeria has killed at least 20 people and sources say the toll is expected to rise. Initial reports indicated that two suicide bombers drove a car packed with explosives into a bus at the New Road station in Sabon Gari, a predominantly Christian neighbourhood in the majority Muslim city. Several explosions were heard following the initial blast, sparking panic as bloodied bystanders including some with serious injuries fled the scene as soldiers arrived to cordon off the area. Kano, the largest city in Nigeria’s north, was repeatedly targeted by Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, blamed for killing hundreds in the region since 2009. (See related stories in sidebar.)
Pyongyang Pushes Buttons: Last week several Washington D.C. (aka as “Hollywood for ugly people”) luminaries took time out for the premiere of Olympus Has Fallen, a film featuring a North Korean terrorist attack on the US capital. This week the real North Koreans (apparently, but not yet confirmed) launched a cyber attack on South Korea and a YouTube attack on Washington. Frankly, I preferred last month’s North Korean YouTube attack on New York… especially the musical soundtrack.
March 19, 2013
Homeland Security Watch welcomes Terry O’Sullivan to our group of occasional authors. Terry is Associate Director, Center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security Policy Research, at the University of Akron
Many scholars cite the infamous 1633 trial of Galileo Galilei as the end of the Italian Renaissance. As is commonly known, Galileo was tried by the Catholic Inquisition for challenging the Church’s centuries-old, Earth-centric view of the solar system/universe with the alternative sun-centric, Copernican model, which had been first proposed in 1543.
In part, Galileo was led to this challenge because of the 1609 invention of the telescope, a new technology he believed would change the minds of educated Florentian society, given the overwhelming, meticulous celestial scientific evidence he had gathered over the ensuing 20-plus years.
But, of course, Galileo was almost dead wrong.
His new evidence actually worsened, not improved, the counter-reaction to what had previously been only an abstract Copernican challenge. The Pope saw his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems book as a direct affront to Church power and authority. Galileo was tried before the Inquisition, and forced to renounce Copernicanism, saying “I affirm, therefore, on my conscience, that I do not now hold the condemned opinion and have not held it since the decision of authorities… I am here in your hands–do with me what you please.” His book was banned, and he died a broken man less than ten years later.
Nearly 400 years after Galileo’s trial by Inquisition, modern society would generally prefer to believe that we would not so blithely reject scientific evidence, merely because it challenged the convention wisdom.
But scientific “apostasy” continues to be punished, hounded, and denounced, as numerous politicians and climate scientists have discovered to their dismay in recent years. Some of the challenges have to do with sincere but misguided doubts about the science, some with politically and economically cynical and self-interested positions by the fossil fuels industry and its allies.
But much also has to do with the way people handle cognitive dissonance, and other ways new information is individually, societally, and politically processed.
I Think, Therefore I Sort
Cognitive dissonance is the often intense, emotional and intellectual discomfort caused by simultaneously holding two or more conflicting ideas, beliefs, values, or information. As the psychology literature has repeatedly shown, cognitive dissonance can lead to “irrational” thinking; people’s emotional response to conflicting information or ideas motivates them to reduce conflict/dissonance by rejecting disconfirming thoughts or ideas that don’t fit their position or even world view, or adding new ones to create a consistent belief system.
Two other classic identified human cognitive frailties appear to combine with cognitive dissonance and contribute to our inability to process the enormity and complexity of problems such as climate change: the difficulty of seeing connections across boundaries of time and space, and an inability to see the full impacts of our actions due to delays in the system. When you push the first domino, you may not understand where, what, or when the result will be.
These are common human traits, and we all experience them to some extent in our personal and professional lives, no matter how intellectually honest and analytically rigorous we may be. The power of conflicting human emotions and intellect is vast – particularly as that influences current and historic political and science discourse, and as it pertains intensely – even painfully – to what may yet turn out to be the gravest “slow disaster” security issue in human history.
Extreme weather-related natural disasters, increasing ocean-level rise, food and water supply disruptions, and other results of changing climate are national security, and homeland security issues.
Far from being fabricated or exaggerated, as some critics maintain, the rapidly accumulating evidence – reflected in dozens of high-level scientific and security institutions’ reports, including the U.S. DoD Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), and various Intelligence Community-commissioned analyses – shows increasingly that the worst-case climate change scenarios of only a few years ago are now becoming seen as the most probable outcomes, absent concerted efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate Change is Security
Commander of U.S. Pacific Forces (PACCOM) Admiral Samuel Locklear met recently with academic national security experts in Boston. Afterwards, in response to a reporter who wondered what the top security threat was in the Pacific Command, instead of citing North Korean nuclear saber rattling or Chinese muscle-flexing, Locklear insisted that geopolitical disruption related to climate change “…is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.” “People are surprised sometimes…” that he emphasizes this, he said, but global warming-related destabilization will occur in part because so much of the world’s population lives near coasts: “The ice is melting and sea is getting higher… I’m into the consequence management side of it,” the Admiral said.
These climate stresses will create a worsening interplay of social, economic, and political disruption, and contribute, ultimately, to more weak and failed governments, and potential political violence – including terrorism. Climate change is already having an economic impact worldwide – costing, by one estimate, $1.2 trillion dollars annually, equal to 1.6% of global GDP.
These human disasters are all potential futures – but may already be having an impact. For instance, some observers believe the Arab spring/Arab-awakening may have been triggered in part by climate-related crop failures and food price spikes that led to Tunisian protests. The rest is ongoing history – leading all the way through Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria – so far.
There is no legitimate scientific debate about the two pivotal facts of global warming: First, the planet has been warming since the beginning of the industrial revolution; and second, this has primarily been caused by the human burning of fossil fuels and the atmospheric release of massive amounts of greenhouse gases – especially carbon dioxide.
This is a scientific consensus supported by 98% or more of climate scientists, and over 120 years of increasingly vast and sophisticated evidence. Thus, the current “debate” is mostly a political, not a scientific one.
Disasters like Superstorm Sandy, the ongoing southwestern American drought and wildfire cycle, and new projections of rising sea levels (now projected to likely rise three feet by 2100 if global trends remain unchanged) all must be a wakeup call for Americans. The science is growing more robust and conclusive every year, and the news is bad. The famous so-called temperature “hockey stick” graph is becoming a climate scythe, as recent evidence indicates the world had been cooling over the last several thousand years, before temperatures shot up with the Industrial Revolution’s burning of fossil fuels.
Yet climate change skepticism and denial remains a powerful force in the American political debate. Despite the fact that both 2008 presidential candidates, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, affirmed the existence of global warming and the need for American policy response to mitigate it, resistance has grown in the years since then.
While no one is being literally burned at the stake, some have been politically and metaphorically burned – which has served to strike fear into those who might otherwise step forward in support of the basic facts, and of effective solutions.
The basic scientific facts are settled, even if there are many details still uncertain. But the fact is that as trillions of dollars have been spent on pursuing international terrorism, other things critical to the long-term security and resilience of the United States and the world are being neglected – falling prey, in part, to societal cognitive dissonance and failures of imagination.
Climate change is likely the biggest homeland and national security issue of our lifetimes. Yet it confronts powerful forces, including human cognitive dissonance, and the tendency to miss time-and-space connections and “slow disaster” situations where the results are not seen until much later. Sadly, some of the results are already here.
We deny and dither at our growing peril.
Explanation of Climate Change Sea Level Rise [15 minutes]:
March 14, 2013
From James Clapper’s Tuesday testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:
We are in a major transformation because our critical infrastructures, economy, personal lives, and even basic understanding of—and interaction with—the world are becoming more intertwined with digital technologies and the Internet. In some cases, the world is applying digital technologies faster than our ability to understand the security implications and mitigate potential risks.
State and nonstate actors increasingly exploit the Internet to achieve strategic objectives, while many governments—shaken by the role the Internet has played in political instability and regime change—seek to increase their control over content in cyberspace. The growing use of cyber capabilities to achieve strategic goals is also outpacing the development of a shared understanding of norms of behavior, increasing the chances for miscalculations and misunderstandings that could lead to unintended escalation.
Compounding these developments are uncertainty and doubt as we face new and unpredictable cyber threats. In response to the trends and events that happen in cyberspace, the choices we and other actors make in coming years will shape cyberspace for decades to come, with potentially profound implications for US economic and national security.
A major hospital system has delayed deploying an extensive (expensive) digital patient record system. Everyone agrees the new system will produce significant financial and clinical benefits. But no one has figured out how to ensure an effective non-digital capability persists. This was not a design specification.
There are multiple digital redundancies. But what if electric power is lost beyond the capacity of back-up generators? How can patient records and status be accessed and updated if the digital system is dead for days?
This is more than a technical problem. Many of the efficiencies generated by the ready-to-go system depend on collecting digital signals from various diagnostic tools and displaying integrated clinical outcomes. Today the sub-systems feeding these displays — and their strengths and weaknesses — are understood by clinical staff. Today it is not uncommon for an experienced nurse or lab tech to recognize that a specific data source can be “screwy” and should be rechecked. The new system will sufficiently obscure data sources to make this nearly impossible.
One hospital administrator comments, “As long as we have clinical staff who remember how to use pre-digital systems, we can probably recover capabilities.” But given staff turn-over this sort of human redundancy is expected to disappear within seven years.
My auto mechanic recently said, “When computer diagnostics first came out it was a big help, but I could still do most of my work without it, just not as quick. Now if the computer is on the fritz I can’t do anything.” He suggests younger mechanics are just “playing electronic games with your car,” and don’t understand any of the underlying systems. The hospital is trying to avoid this outcome.
I was talking to the manager of a large municipal water system. ”Actually I feel pretty good about our resilience,” he said. “We’re a collection of several largely separate legacy systems built over the last century-plus: lots of innate redundancy, mostly gravity fed, almost all of it requires a human to turn a valve somewhere. Not nearly as efficient as the newest systems, but take out one piece and the rest just keeps on flowing. Bad planning has had some unintentionally good results.”
Meanwhile without digital scanning and communications most retail, wholesale, and shipping would suddenly stop. This includes food and pharmaceuticals. When the March 11, 2011 earthquake-and-tsunami hit Northeastern Japan the digital voices of those inside the impact zone went silent. The voice of hoarders hundreds of miles away became a shout. The supply chain responded to expressed want, not silent need.
The digital world has become the frame and filter on which many of us depend to engage the real world. Humans have long depended on frames and filters to simplify what would otherwise be too complex. Mathematics, religion, law and more are all tool-sets for framing and filtering.
There is often a temptation to mistake form for function. Framing reality has always included the risk of warping reality. We have experienced the consequences of these risks. (I seem to experience them daily.)
But never before has access to water, food, and other essentials for such large populations been so dependent on the quality and survivability of our frames.
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
March 13, 2013
I am a little late this year advertising this opportunity, as the deadline for applications is March 15. Nonetheless, if you know someone eligible it sounds like a great opportunity for individuals in the New York City area who want to serve their community. I cannot come up with a better description of the history behind this fund than what I wrote last year:
John Solomon was a man who cared deeply about citizen preparedness. Though he held a job that had nothing to do with homeland security, he volunteered on a New York City CERT team and spent free time interviewing government officials and non-governmental leaders. He learned about threats to the United States, both natural and man-made, and endeavored to match them with actions every citizen could take to become more resilient. John blogged about it all on his site, “In Case of Emergency, Read Blog – A Citizen’s Eye View of Public Preparedness,” wrote op-eds, and worked on a book.
Tragically, John passed away on November 1, 2010. He was only 47. To honor his memory and passion for citizen preparedness, a fund to support the next generation of citizen-leaders in homeland security has been established in New York City. It was set up by John’s family and friends in cooperation with the Fund for the City of New York. This program aims to pair graduate students from New York City schools with various city agencies.
So if you are or know someone who is eligible and interested, it would honor the memory of a great homeland security leader to apply.
A website contains all the relevant information and describes the fund:
The John D. Solomon Fellowship for Public Service is the first student fellowship in New York City government devoted specifically to emergency management. This program provides the opportunity for up to seven graduate students in New York City-area universities to have a nine-month paid fellowship (approximately 20 hours per week) in an agency of New York City government, including OEM, that is charged with helping the City be prepared for all types of emergencies. Each fellow will receive a $4,000 stipend, will be assigned an agency mentor, and will participate in special programs with other fellows.
Sponsored by OEM, the John D. Solomon Fellowship Program was established by the family and friends of the late John D. Solomon, who was an accomplished journalist on homeland security and other public policy issues and who was devoted to public service. An active member of his local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and a passionate advocate of emergency preparedness and resiliency, John originated “In Case of Emergency, Read Blog — A Citizen’s Eye View of Preparedness.” In recognition of his many contributions, in 2011, OEM created the John D. Solomon CERT Award for Exemplary Service in Emergency Preparedness Education and in 2012, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) established the national John D. Solomon Preparedness Award.
- The NYC Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is the main New York City agency charged with preparing and educating New Yorkers about emergencies and helping City, state and federal agencies coordinate their responses.
- The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, one of the largest public health agencies in the world, has critical responsibilities in any emergency that threatens the health of New Yorkers from bioterrorism to viral epidemics.
- The NYC Department for the Aging, responsible for protecting the health and safety of the City’s 1.3 million older adults, is on the front lines in reaching low-income and the vulnerable elderly during times of emergency.
- NYC Service was created by Mayor Bloomberg in 2009 to drive volunteer activity to where New York City’s needs are greatest. In the areas of emergency preparedness its goal is to nurture volunteer activities to increase business, individual and household “readiness.”
- The NYC Digital Project-NYC Digital, launched in 2011 by Mayor Bloomberg, provides opportunities for New Yorkers to engage with City government digitally and for City government to engage with New Yorkers through Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr and Twitter, which are key channels during emergencies.
- The NYC Department of Youth & Community Development, which is joining as a participating agency for 2013, was established in 1996 to provide the City of New York with high-quality youth and family programming.
- The NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, which is joining as a participating agency for 2013, promotes the well-being of immigrant communities by recommending policies and programs that facilitate successful integration of immigrant New Yorkers into the civic, economic, and cultural life of the City.
Eligibility & Selection Criteria
Graduate students who will be entering their first or second year in fall 2013 and who are specializing in the following fields:
- Public Health
- Public Safety
- Emergency Management
- Social Work
- Community Organizing
Fellows will work on projects that involve collaborating with many individuals in their own agencies, in other City agencies, with community organizations and New Yorkers. Therefore, in addition to academic achievement and prior work experience, the selection process will take the following into consideration:
- Fluency in using major social media platforms, especially for marketing and communications;
- First-hand knowledge of New York City’s neighborhoods and its community based organizations;
- Experience writing for a wide audience;
- Experience in working collaboratively and communicating clearly;
- Commitment to New York City and serving the public;
- The ability to speak at least one foreign language (is desirable).
Please note that New York City residency is not required for this fellowship. Additionally, students enrolled at universities within the New York City metropolitan area, including Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, may apply for this fellowship.
The application period for the 2013-14 academic year has begun. The deadline to apply is March 15. Click here to apply
At the same website you can read thumbnail sketches of the impressive first batch of fellows and read about their experiences on a blog.
A friend sent me a link to the info graphic below: A Day In the Life of Homeland Security. [Thanks, jr]
I think it has the wrong title. I believe the image more accurately describe an average day for DHS elements, not homeland security.
Homeland security is much more than what DHS does.
An arresting graphic, nonetheless — even without mention of anything having to do with buying 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition (4.4 million rounds a day, if you’re doing the math).
Another friend said the picture could provoke a conversation about input, output and outcome measures. [Thanks, lsf]
March 12, 2013
Three weeks ago a fire destroyed a lot of things my family and I used to own.
Life goes on, fortunately.
We are now in the recovery phase of managing our personal disaster.
When I’ve talked with colleagues about work related issues during the past three weeks the conversation frequently turns to the fire — usually at the end of whatever we’re talking about.
“How are you doing?” I’m asked.
I am unable to express how engulfingly supportive people have been to me and my family. But when I am asked how I’m doing, I really don’t know the answer.
My unthinking analytical default is to parse the sentence and ask, “How am I doing what?”
But that would be a jerk response. I know the question is meant in a socially sincere context. It deserves an equally sincere response.
“I’m fine, thanks,” doesn’t cut it because it is untrue.
“I’m devestated,” also doesn’t work, for the same reason.
I’m left with selecting something from the broad middle between stiff upper lip and what my son calls a pity party response.
I’ve discovered, however, that at least with homeland security folks, I can say, “Thanks for asking. I’m being resilient.”
I’m not sure what I mean when I say that, but it feels like an authentic response.
I think I first came across the word resilient (as I’m latching on to it) in Steve Flynn’s 2007 book The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation. Since then, oceans of words have been poured into explaining what resilience is, how to do it, how to be it, and how to measure it. Individuals can be resilient, and so can communities and nations and economies. There are very simple definitions of resilience in the literature and tortuously complicated definitions. But I am increasingly aware of the chasm between the language of resilience and the experience of it.
I’ve started asking first responders I know what their experience of resilience has been. Not their experience of the concept, but their experience of the experience of resilience.
I had a work-related conversation a few days ago with a police official I know, Pat Walsh. After the work part was finished, we started talking about resilience.
Here’s a note Pat sent me on Monday. I like what he wrote. I had not seen it expressed quite like this in the resilience literature. It resonated with my current experience. I have his permission to share it.
I thought about the resiliency question after I hung up and I still had a mile or so to go [on my walk] so I started to think. My out of breath thoughts are sometimes the best, or so I think.
I have seen people lose everything in fires, accidents or to violence. I am always amazed at how calm the women in the situation are once they have their head wrapped around the situation. But then the things that make or break those affected is always interesting to me.
Some can handle the actual incident, but the aftermath, insurance claim, rebuilding, restarting is the last straw and is what actually breaks them.
Other people are a wreck with the event, but healing for them is the process of rebuilding.
I do not have the answer to why this is, but I have a hypothesis.
I think the people who handle trauma are the ones who are surrounded by family and friends (or kind strangers). We are all self reliant and stubbornly hang on to the idea that we can do it without the help of others (or we think we need too).
I wish I had a dime for every time someone said, “Why did this happen? What is the point?”
Well if you believe in God I would say the point is so you learn this is a fleeting life, and so that others can be tested to step up and help their fellow man.
If you are not a believer, I would say, the point is so others may learn what it is like to stop thinking about themselves and help another in need. It is in helping others that we are most fulfilled.
We can teach resilience all day long, but at the end of the day it is how one reacts to the incident and how others come to the aid. Both benefit, some more than others.
[A firefighter friend] did a video for [a course]…. It is worth watching. In his video he expresses disgust with himself for turning away a homeless man who wanted water. It haunts him to this day. I have those demons as well, and I would say we all do.
So in short, resilience is the act of coming to the aid of those in need.
Pat wrote about individual resilience. I want to believe the idea can be expanded to communities and to a nation.
Maybe it already is.
March 11, 2013
Our life in this world –
to what shall I compare it?
Its like an echo
resounding through the mountains
and off into the empty sky.
Original by Ryokan, translated by Steven D. Carter |
Sony Online Entertainment: Trolls and Tribulations
Director of global community relations Linda Carlson on the ambiguous power of the online audience
The customer is always right. This familiar maxim is one of the founding stones for providing good service, a day-one business lesson for anybody serving as a contact point for the public. It is also completely misleading, forsaking all nuance to preserve its own neat, quotable form. Nobody, on either side of a transaction, is always right. There is always a line.
This is more true in video games than any other entertainment industry. Gamers are more than just passive consumers. They are active participants, engaging with the product in a way that literature, television, film and music cannot possibly replicate. The act of playing a game is, by its very nature, a dialogue, and as the industry pushes further and further towards a service structure for the bulk of its products, understanding and marshalling that dialogue will be as essential as good design.
For Linda Carlson, director of global community relations at Sony online Entertainment (SOE), the evolution of that process is more than just customer service - it is "an area of study." The regular users of games like EverQuest, PlanetSide and DC Universe Online are more than just players; they are inhabitants, residents of virtual societies they have jointly helped to create. That sort of dedication can be inspiring, but the sense of entitlement it engenders can also manifest in unpleasant ways - in the trolls and bullies that blight online communities - and the industry is only now beginning to understand its potency.
“You can never win an argument on the internet. Someone is always willing to go further than you will”
Carlson's talk at this year's GDC Europe was one of the more enlightening hours in a two-day schedule crammed with them - a pragmatic, unflinching guide to the demands posed by the increasingly populous and vociferous world of online gamers. Carlson is careful to emphasise the generosity and commitment displayed by these communities - and she should know, having met her husband while playing EverQuest - but the prevention and punishment of bad behaviour remains one of the key responsibilities in a job that grows more challenging all the time.
"When I first started playing in 1999, it was the most extraordinarily, overtly sexist environment ever," she says when we meet after her talk. "That's one of the reasons I started playing as a male dwarf. I made a female wood-elf, and it was, 'Hey baby, nice rack!' So I made a female human - not as attractive - and it was still just people wanting to cyber. I finally went for a male dwarf, because nobody wants to touch that.
"I'd been a strong supporting member of the community... I was one of those veterans that liked to help out, though I typically avoided forums as much as I could. They were really a cesspool at that time, and I didn't feel comfortable posting there - they're moderated much more carefully now."
And Carlson is at the head of a team dedicated to ensuring that happens. Not all of them were plucked directly from the SOE community, as Carlson was, but they are all lifelong gamers - a vital quality that affords insight into the values and motivations of those they monitor, encourage and protect. Indeed, in terms of relevant work experience, community relations may be one of the most accessible fields in the games industry. Among Carlson's most skilled and intuitive employees are former teachers and bartenders; both jobs that demand no small amount of patience, and the ability to empathise with superficially unreasonable points-of-view.
“When I first started playing in 1999, it was the most overtly sexist environment ever. That's one of the reasons I started playing as a male dwarf”
"You could implement a small change that maybe only affects a few thousand people, but for them it's huge," she says. "They can't believe that you've just done this, and that you've done it to them personally. Because you hate them, and you don't want their money, and you don't value the five years they spent playing your game.
"It's all a matter of perspective. The size of the problem changes depending on who you are, so you have to take all of these views seriously, even if you can't change something [back]."
According to Carlson, taking the needs and opinions of the entire audience seriously is perhaps the single most important aspect of her role, and it can pay off in a number of ways. The most dangerous assumption one can make about the community is that the disruptive, bellicose minority are representative of the whole. They aren't, and one shouldn't underestimate just how much of a minority problematic figures really are. "99.5 per cent plus of the player base are tremendous individuals," Carlson says. "They provide a working social world that they have helped to create on their own."
Rather than simply being players and payers, the most engaged figures in any given community can also be a tremendous asset to the studio. They can serve as a rapid, accurate reference tool for a game's lore and social history, or provide expert insights on new design ideas that even long-standing members of the development team would struggle to provide. No matter what aspect of the game, no matter how niche, it is never wise to underestimate the wisdom of the player-base. There will always be someone who has been there longer, and who cares more than anybody. According to Carlson, the proliferation of this more open philosophy has been one of the key changes in SOE in her five years with the company.
"Players want recognition, respect and response," she says. "The best players, the ones that provide the most thoughtful feedback and useful information, are rewarded constantly because they get direct interaction from the dev team or the community team. It makes them feel valued, and it shows other people how to act."
And it attracts more people to the game. Community management is typically viewed as a way of retaining players, but the spread of accessible, instant communication through social media has also made it a vital sales tool. Good news travels faster than ever before, and positive opinions are an increasingly valuable currency when promoting games. "We are absolutely a service industry," Carlson says, "and you're only as good as your last contact with the customer."
“If we know who you are and you're abusing somebody on Twitter, we will ban your game account and we won't accept you as a customer ever again”
But if good news travels fast, bad news will always be several steps ahead, and when players are so deeply involved passions frequently run high. Ultimately, while the vast majority are well-intentioned and productive, that disruptive 0.05 per cent can have a profound impact on the community, and unravel months of good work with a few malicious words or actions. Carlson believes that each game should have individually tailored standards: shooters are inherently competitive, for example, and therefore shouldn't demand the same behaviour from their players as more collaborative genres. But there should always be standards: clearly stated and rigorously enforced from the outset, both within the game and outside of its confines, regardless of a player's status or popularity.
"Not only will we ban your forum account, but if it's serious enough we'll call up customer service and have you banned from all of our games. We do not need those individuals as customers," Carlson says of the most offensive and anti-social players. "A very influential player, high up in a huge guild - we'll still ban them... In our games, if you are an exploiter we don't care who you are, how big your guild is, how many people you threaten to take with you when you go.
"We can control anybody who's playing our games...[but] if we know who you are and you're abusing somebody on Twitter, we will ban your game account and we will not accept you as a customer ever again. It's not always possible to identify people [in that way], but we take that seriously."
For the most part, Carlson says, those who transgress to such a severe degree - death threats, sustained abuse, bullying, etc. - tend to have an escalating history of similar behaviour. Indeed, SOE's grievance procedures and punitive measures are designed with this in mind. It is extremely rare, if not entirely unheard of, for a player to move from one extreme to another in an isolated event.
One complicating factor Carlson mentions is the way individuals change in groups; this is often a positive force - online games are defined by the contributions of guilds and clans - but the echo-chamber effect of group dynamics can just as easily reinforce and justify negative behaviour. Witnessing this on a regular basis - as anyone working with the community must - can be difficult to process, but it exposes an uncomfortable truth about human nature that, if embraced, makes the difficulty of the task that much easier to bear.
“I think developers need to understand human nature. They need to understand that this is normal. It's not just you - it's everybody”
And the examples of people who have found the intensity of abuse in online communities too difficult are not hard to find. For a recent but by no means isolated example, one need only look to the abrupt retirement of Phil Fish, the outspoken developer of Fez. Research around the impact of social media and instantaneous mass communication on behaviour is still in its infancy, but the studies that do exist tend towards the negative. Shielded by the anonymity of the internet, influenced by the unprecedented access to the opinions of others, sociological principles like Availability Cascade and Bandwagon Effect have become a common feature of our interactions online. To some extent, we are all different, more direct people online.
Fish didn't quit because of a single, admittedly unprofessional rant, but due to a sustained period of what he saw as unwarranted criticism - most likely from people who would never state their opinions so boldly in the world of face-to-face conversation. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger; the reach these platforms give independent developers offer a tantalising glimpse into a self-sufficient future, but it also brings them face-to-face with what Carlson sees as human nature.
"I don't believe anybody needs to put up with that stuff," she says. "You cannot deal with it online because there are no repercussions for that sort of bad behaviour.
"I think what developers do need to do is understand human nature. They need to understand that this is normal. You may not like it, but knowing that is normal will help you deal with it. It's not just you - it's everybody, and, yes, they are jerks, but that's normal.
"I don't necessarily like humanity, or the fact that human nature so often trends towards the negative - just because that's how we're wired - but understanding that makes this whole field of study very fascinating to me, and I do consider community management to be a field of study. It's constantly changing, because our online communities are changing." |
22 November 2009
The trip package price includes seven nights at the Salt Lake City Plaza Hotel, located next door to the Library. The Plaza is ideally located with access to the library, shopping malls and restaurants. Also included in the price are an informal reception on Sunday evening, pizza on Wednesday, and a last night dinner. Other meals are at your own expense, and airfare and personal expenses are not included. Click here to read complete details.
21 November 2009
Whether you have been researching your family history for a number of years or you are just beginning, membership in the National Genealogical Society has something for you, including publications, educational courses, and an annual conference. View the video online at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org at the Publications and Videos tab to learn about the benefits of membership. By discovering your family history you learn about the struggles and accomplishments of your ancestors that molded your family values and influenced who you are today.
Paths to Your Past was produced by award-winning cinematographer Allen Moore at the NGS Family History Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in May 2009 and on location at the National Archives, the Alexandria (Virginia) Library, the Maryland Historical Society, and other research sites.
The National Genealogical Society also offers a companion publication, Paths to Your Past, which provides an overview of how to begin your family research or, for intermediate-level genealogists, a review of sources and methodology. The fifty-page soft cover book or a downloadable PDF version can be purchased online at the NGS Store (http://www.ngsgenealogy.org).
The National Genealogical Society was founded in 1903 and is the largest national organization for all family researchers, including beginner, intermediate, and professional genealogists, interested in expanding their research skills and preserving their family history for future generations.
18 November 2009
To see details and the discount codes for these offers, go to http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/cs/discounts.
16 November 2009
Follow Your Ancestral Trail
Where did your ancestors come from? Whether they came from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, or Central or South America, there’s something for you at the National Genealogical Society’s 32nd Family History Conference, “Follow Your Ancestral Trail.” This year’s conference will be held at the Salt Palace Convention Center nestled in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, from 28 April–1 May 2010. The convention center is steps from the Family History Library, the largest genealogy library in the world.
The major focus of this year’s conference will be increasing research skills in foreign countries. Featured at the conference are several International Workshops that will combine lecture and hands-on research planning and problem solving. The Hispanic Workshop will look at the establishment of settlements in La Nueva España (what we now know as Mexico), some areas of the southern United States, and parts of Central America. Learn about migration routes of immigrants to Latin America as well as the importance and availability of Catholic Church records. The Eastern Europe Workshop will include a presentation of the changing borders of Eastern Europe. Participants will learn record keeping fundamentals in Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Prussia, what records are available, and how to build pedigrees using church records and civil registration. The Norway/Denmark Workshop will discuss the latest Norwegian and Danish genealogical collections available and explore record types from parish records to seldom used and lesser-known collections. The Italy Workshop will discuss how to find Italian records and how to read Italian civil and church records. The Swedish Workshop will be a great launching point whether you are just starting out or have been working on Swedish research for some time. The workshop will use a case study approach followed by hand-on activities.
Each International Workshop also includes prearranged lab time at the Family History Library. There is no additional fee for the workshops beyond the conference registration; however, pre-registration is required. Seating is limited, so be sure to register early.
In addition to the workshops, the international lecture track will offer talks about Irish, Italian, German, French, Polish, Swedish, Finnish, and Canadian research. Learn to research in the archives of Spain and Latin America, to solve research problems using probate records in England and Wales, or learn about Austrian Catholic church records.
Registration for the conference is now open. Registration details and the conference program can be found online at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/cs/attendee_registration.
14 November 2009
WESTMINSTER, Colo., November 13 – Laura G. Prescott of Brookline, New Hampshire, has been elected president of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), the world’s leading professional organization of family history and related professionals. Prescott is genealogist for the Nickerson Family Association and a consultant for Footnote.com. She will succeed Jake Gehring of Salt Lake City, Utah.
Prescott, reflecting on her upcoming tenure, said “I’m very excited about the next two years. We have a diverse and enthusiastic group of people on the board. This enthusiasm, coupled with the momentum from the current administration, will surely bring benefits to our members. Chapters will continue to play a vital role in reaching members and genealogists on a local level, while we try innovative ways, nationally and internationally, to educate and inform the membership, as well as aspiring genealogists. As professionals, we have a responsibility to set an example and support each other in making positive contributions to the entire genealogical community and to the profession.”
APG members also elected three members of the board’s executive committee to two-year terms, eleven of its nineteen regional directors, and two members to one-year terms on the nominating committee.
Kenyatta D. Berry of Santa Monica, California, a genealogist, entrepreneur, and lawyer with more than 12 years of experience in genealogy research and writing was elected vice president of the nearly 2,000 member organization. Andrew M. “Drew” Smith, MLS, of Odessa, Florida, president of the Florida Genealogical Society of Tampa, and co-host of the Genealogy Guys Podcast was elected secretary. Current APG treasurer, Gordon Gray of Colorado Springs, Colorado, was re-elected. He owns GrayLine Group, a genealogical/family history research business and is the president of the International Society for British Genealogy & Family History.
Eleven regional director positions will be filled by:
West Region: Suzanne Russo Adams, AG, of Utah, specialist in Italian research and employee of Ancestry.com. James Ison, AG, CG, of Utah, president of the APG Salt Lake Chapter and manager of Strategy and Planning for the Family History Library.
Midwest Region: Mary Clement Douglass, Salina, Kansas, former museum curator and co-founder of the APG Heartland Chapter. Jay Fonkert, CG, St. Paul, Minnesota, genealogical educator and writer, and president of the Minnesota Genealogical Society.
Southeast Region: Alvie L. Davidson, CG, a Florida-based Private Investigator and Circuit Court qualified expert. Craig Roberts Scott, CG, President and CEO of Heritage Books, Inc. Melanie D. Holtz, of North Carolina, specialist in Italian research.
Northeast Region: Debra Braverman, New York, national speaker and forensic genealogist who regularly testifies as an expert witness. Pamela S. Eagleson, CG, Maine, researcher, writer, and teacher focusing on New England, the mid-Atlantic, and Midwest.
International Regions: Michael Goldstein of Israel, traces roots worldwide, specializing in family reunification, heir searches, and holocaust research. Carole Riley, a professional genealogist based in Sydney, Australia with a background in computer applications.
David McDonald, CG, of Wisconsin, currently serving as a trustee of the Board for Certification of Genealogists and a director of the National Genealogical Society; and Donna M. Moughty, Florida, speaker and writer were elected to one-year terms on the nominations committee.
The Association of Professional Genealogists (http://www.apgen.org), established in 1979, represents nearly 2,000 genealogists, librarians, writers, editors, historians, instructors, booksellers, publishers, and others involved in genealogy-related businesses. APG encourages genealogical excellence, ethical practice, mentoring, and education. The organization also supports the preservation and accessibility of records useful to the fields of genealogy, local, and social history. Its members represent all fifty states, Canada, and thirty other countries.
11 November 2009
Do you have a great story about your family? Any stories of struggles, immigration, or “black sheep”? That story may be a winner. Why not share it in 2500 words or less. The Oklahoma Genealogical Society’s (OGS) Family History Writing Contest provides the opportunity for researchers to share special family stories with fellow genealogists. The stories may be historically or ethnically important, humorous, or just plain interesting. Writing a family history story will preserve that precious memory and history for descendants.
There is no entry fee for the contest, and membership in OGS is not required although dues are a low $20 per calendar year for an individual or $25 for family memberships at the same address. Meetings are held the first Monday of each month at the Oklahoma History Center, with a speaker on some area of interest to genealogists. Members receive the OGS Quarterly and are invited to submit free queries as well as receiving a discount on workshops, seminars and other events.
Here are some helpful hints for both beginners and the experienced writer.
- Focus on one event. Write your story from beginning to end without stopping to edit or re-write. Then when you have told the story, go back and clean up the grammar and cut unnecessary words if the story is too long.
- Even very short stories must have a beginning, middle and an ending. Your family history story should, too.
- Start with the action – grab your reader by the throat and don’t let go. You need to catch your reader’s interest in the opening sentence.
- Give the reader a sense of place from the beginning of your story. Where and when is this event happening? What else was going on in the rest of the world that may have influenced your family’s actions?
- In your editing phase, spell out abbreviations, use complete sentences, watch your grammar and avoid hyphenation. Break the story into paragraphs to make it easier to read. You might ask someone who is good in English to proofread your story before submitting it.
- Sources are important. Collect any resources you can find to document the story facts such as family Bible, census record, land record, birth and death certificates, photographs, etc. Enter the sources as footnotes or endnotes and attach copies (not originals) of the documentation.
- Be sure the entry form is attached to your entry and includes: Title of manuscript, whether entering the adult or student category, estimated word count, author’s name and complete mailing address. You should also include your phone number and email address in case the contest chair needs to contact you about a problem with your entry. The entry form is removed before your manuscript is delivered to the judges.
- Entering the contest acknowledges you give permission for your story to be published, and that information and photos concerning the winners may be published in local media.
All family historians and genealogists, except OGS Board members, are invited to submit their favorite story for the contest. There is no entry fee and membership in OGS is not required.
There will be two divisions: Adult and Student. If enough entries are received, the student category will be divided into elementary and high school divisions.
For full details and a downloadable entry form, visit the Oklahoma Genealogical Society’s web site at http://www.okgensoc.org/.
10 November 2009
The Digital Library of Georgia is pleased to announce the free online availability of three historic Georgia newspapers: the Macon Telegraph Archive, the Columbus Enquirer Archive, and the Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive. Each extensive archive provides historic newspaper page images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date. Zooming and printing capabilities are provided for each page image (via a DjVu browser plug-in).
The Macon Telegraph Archive (http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/telegraph) offers online access to weekly, daily, and semi-weekly issues under various titles spanning the years 1826 through 1908, and includes over 51,000 page images.
The Columbus Enquirer Archive (http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/enquirer) provides online access to weekly, daily and tri-weekly issues under various titles spanning the years 1828 through 1890. The archive includes more than 32,000 page images.
The Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive (http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/milledgeville) offers online access to eleven historic newspaper titles spanning the years 1808 through 1920 (including the Civil War years when Milledgeville was the state capitol). The archive includes over 49,000 page images.
Additional newspaper digitization projects are currently underway and will be announced as they become available online at the Digital Library of Georgia. Based at the University of Georgia Libraries, the Digital Library of Georgia is an initiative of GALILEO, the state's virtual library.
The Columbus Enquirer Archive, Columbus Enquirer Archive, and Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive are projects of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of the Georgia HomePLACE initiative. The projects are supported with federal LSTA funds administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.
For more information, please contact us at http://www.galileo.usg.edu/contact/.
If so, the National Genealogical Society would like to hear from you. NGS is seeking nominations from the entire genealogical community for persons whose achievements or contributions have made an impact on the field. This educational program increases appreciation of the high standards advocated and achieved by committed genealogists whose work paved the way for researchers today.
Since 1986 when Donald Lines Jacobus became the first genealogist elected to the National Genealogy Hall of Fame, twenty-four outstanding genealogists have been recognized for their contributions. The 2010 honoree will join this select group of distinguished members. This year’s selection, and the society that honored the nominee, will be feted at the 2010 NGS Conference in the States to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, 28 April -1 May 2010.
Nominations for election to the Hall of Fame are made by genealogical societies and historical societies throughout the United States.
Guidelines for nominations:
- A nominee must have been actively engaged in genealogy in the United States for at least ten years, must have been deceased for at least five years at the time of nomination, and must have made contributions to the field of genealogy judged to be of lasting significance in ways that were unique, pioneering, or exemplary.
- The National Genealogy Hall of Fame is an educational project in which the entire genealogical community is invited to participate. Affiliation with the National Genealogical Society is not required.
- The National Genealogy Hall of Fame Committee elects one person to the Hall of Fame annually. Those elected are permanently commemorated in the Hall of Fame at Society headquarters, Arlington, Virginia.
- Nominations for election to the Hall of Fame are due by 31 January each year. Official nomination forms are available from our website, www.ngsgenealogy.org, Awards & Competitions, or by contacting the National Genealogical Society, 3108 Columbia Pike, Suite 300, Arlington, VA 22204-4304; phone 1-800-473-0060.
- 1986 Donald Lines Jacobus (1887-1970)
- 1987 Walter Goodwin Davis (1885-1966)
- 1988 Gilbert Cope (1840-1928)
- 1989 John Farmer (1789-1838)
- 1990 George A. Moriarty Jr. (1883-1968)
- 1991 Lucy Mary Kellogg (1899-1973)
- 1992 Meredith B. Colket Jr. (1912-1985)
- 1993 Henry Fitz Gilbert Waters (1833-1913)
- 1994 Archibald Fowler Bennett (1896-1965)
- 1995 Joseph Lemuel Chester (1821-1882)
- 1996 George Ernest Bowman (1860-1941)
- 1997 John Insley Coddington (1902-1991)
- 1998 Jean Stephenson (1892-1979)
- 1999 James Dent Walker (1928-1993)
- 2000 Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern (1915-1994)
- 2001 Richard Stephen Lackey (1941-1983)
- 2002 Hannah Benner Roach (1907-1976)
- 2003 Milton Rubincam (1909-1997)
- 2004 Herbert Furman Seversmith (1904-1967)
- 2005 Mary Lovering Holman (1868-1947)
- 2006 Dr. Kenn Stryker-Rodda (1903-1990)
- 2007 Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. (1911-2000)
- 2008 Lowell M. Volkel (1936-1992)
- 2009 Willard Heiss (1921-1988)
09 November 2009
Washington, DC…The National Archives has signed on to Twitter! Check for all the latest Archives news and upcoming events ((http://twitter.com/archivesnews/). New tweets will alert the public to exciting programs taking place at the National Archives in the Washington, DC, headquarters building and around the country at the 13 presidential libraries and 14 regional facilities. Learn about the National Archives connection to Elvis Presley's military hair cut and his famous visit to meet President Nixon. Be reminded of anniversaries of famous treaties, documents, and national events. Find out news about major projects happening at the Archives by following our tweets.
Visit the National Archives other social media sites. Check out our three Facebook pages for news and events, research, and the Federal Register at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nationwide/US-National-Archives/128463482993, our YouTube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/USNationalArchives, and our Flickr photostream at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives. For more information about the National Archives, visit our web site (http://www.archives.gov/).
08 November 2009
David Ferriero Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 10th Archivist of the United States
Washington, DC. . . Today, the United States Senate voted to confirm David Ferriero as the 10th Archivist of the United States. Mr. Ferriero was the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries and is a leader in the field of library science. Mr. Ferriero, who was nominated by President Obama on July 28, 2009, will succeed Professor Allen Weinstein who resigned as Archivist in December 2008 for health reasons. Deputy Archivist Adrienne Thomas is serving as the Acting Archivist until Mr. Ferriero assumes his duties.
As the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries (NYPL), Mr. Ferriero was part of the leadership team responsible for integrating the four research libraries and 87 branch libraries into one seamless service for users, creating the largest public library system
in the United States and one of the largest research libraries in the world. Mr. Ferriero was in charge of collection strategy; conservation; digital experience; reference and research services; and education, programming, and exhibitions.
Among his responsibilities at the NYPL was the development of the library's digital strategy, which currently encompasses partnerships with Google and Microsoft, a web site that reaches more than 25 million unique users annually, and a digital library of more than 750,000 images
that may be accessed free of charge by any user around the world.
Before joining the NYPL in 2004, Mr. Ferriero served in top positions at two of the nation's major academic libraries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and Duke University in Durham, NC. In those positions, he led major initiatives including the
expansion of facilities, the adoption of digital technologies, and a reengineering of printing and publications.
Mr. Ferriero earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature from Northeastern University in Boston and a master's degree from the Simmons College of Library and Information Science, also in Boston. After serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War, he started in the humanities library at MIT, where he worked for 31 years, rising to associate director for public services and acting co-director of libraries.
In 1996, Mr. Ferriero moved to Duke University, where he served as University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs until 2004. At Duke, he raised more than $50 million to expand and renovate the university's library and was responsible for instructional technology initiatives, including overseeing Duke's Center for Instructional Technology.
As Archivist of the United States, Mr. Ferriero will oversee the National Archives and Records Administration, an independent Federal agency created by statute in 1934. The National Archives safeguards and preserves the records of the U.S. Government, ensuring that the people
can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage. The National Archives ensures continuing access to records that document the rights of American citizens, the actions of federal officials, and the national experience.
Its 44 facilities include the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, the National Archives at College Park, 13 Presidential libraries, and 14 regional archives nationwide. The National Archives also publishes the Federal Register, administers the Information Security Oversight Office, the Office of Government Information Services, makes grants of historical documentation through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Among the National Archives' approximately 9 billion pages of materials that are open to the public for research nationwide are millions of photographs, maps, and documents, thousands of motion pictures and audio recordings, and millions of electronic records. Every subject relating
to American history is covered in the records of the National Archives: Revolutionary War pension files, landmark Supreme Court cases, international treaties, legislative records, executive orders, public laws, records relating to all U.S. Presidents and the papers of Presidents Hoover through George W. Bush.
02 November 2009
Mark your Calendar for the 2010 Family History Conference, “Follow Your Ancestral Trail”, which will be held 28 April—1 May 2010, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Whether your family helped settle the nation, migrated across the country, stayed in the same place, or recently arrived in America, this conference has much to offer. A few examples of the Family History Conference’s diverse program offerings include the International Workshops which will focus on researching the cultural records of other countries through lectures, research, and problem solving; the Evening Celebration of Family History, which will incorporate a multimedia tribute to family history, a special guest speaker, and a mini-concert by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; and Ask An Expert, where the Utah Genealogical Association will sponsor twenty minute family history consultations to registered attendees.
Registration for the 2010 NGS Family History Conference to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, is now open. View the online conference program at http://members.ngsgenealogy.org/Conferences/2010Program.cfm or download a PDF version. For more information visit http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/cs/conference_info
REGISTER TODAY If you have trouble logging on or registering, please e-mail Erin Wood at email@example.com or call her at (703) 525-0050 ext. 112.
To receive a conference brochure, please email Erin Wood.
Questions? Call (703) 525-0050 ext 221, or email Gayathri Kher |
12. Important Resources
Faculty of Education
12. Important Resources
A host of facilities and services are available to graduate students. For a complete listing please refer to the Graduate Calendar.
12.1 Faculty of Education Contacts
Mary-Louise Vanderlee, Department Chair, Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in Education (firstname.lastname@example.org or ext. 4366) is available to meet with students to hear their comments about the program and to address their concerns.
Wanda Burger, Administrative Assistant, MEd Program (email@example.com or ext. 5496) is responsible for maintenance of the student database, independent studies and educational internships and graduate record cards.
Betty Chambers, Administrative Assistant, Undergraduate Program (firstname.lastname@example.org or ext. 3082) is the contact for all student contracts within the Department (Teaching Assistantships) and financial expenses.
Janet Pollock, Part-Time Graduate Assistant (Janet.Pollock@brocku.ca or ext. 5353) is the MRP/Thesis/Dissertation Coordinator. She reviews final documents and coordinates MEd defences, PhD portfolio defences and dissertations.
12.2 Faculty of Graduate Studies Contacts
Joanne Kremble, Graduate Officer, Faculty of Graduate Studies (email@example.com) or ext. 4390) addresses inquiries regarding scholarships, fellowships, and bursaries.
Lorraine Sciamonte, Graduate Assistant, Faculty of Graduate Studies (Lorraine.Sciamonte@brocku.ca) or ext. 3239) addresses inquiries regarding student records and finances.
12.3 Faculty of Education Funding Opportunities
Faculty of Education Fellowships
A maximum of three graduate fellowships are awarded each year to new and continuing full-time students in the Master of Education program who have achieved high academic standing. Prospective candidates for fellowships will be considered on application for admission to the Master of Education program. Continuing students will be considered after successful completion of their first year of study. In order to qualify, students must be registered as full-time students.
Faculty of Education Graduate Bursary
A number of graduate bursaries are awarded each year to continuing full-time students in the Master of Education Program who are experiencing financial difficulties. If funds are available, students may apply for and receive the bursary twice during their program of study. Please refer to www.brocku.ca/webfm_send/22788 for application details and deadlines. Applicants must provide evidence of on-going participation in the department, a statement outlining financial need and a reference letter from a full-time faculty member describing the student's academic progress.
Jack Noble Book Prize
The book prize is awarded every year at both the Spring and Fall convocations to a Master of Education student who achieves the highest academic standing in the MEd program. The prize is awarded in the name of Jack Noble on the recommendation of the Faculty of Education.
There are two types of assistantships: Research and Teaching.
Research Assistantships consist of graduate students completing various tasks for specific faculty members. Duties may include literature searches, data collection and/or data entry, interviewing participants, transcribing interviews. Any data collected by students for a faculty member may be used by students and incorporated into their project or thesis work.
Teaching Assistantships consist of students becoming seminar leaders and/or assisting a specific faculty member with any other teaching requirements such as marking essays and exams.
TAs are now members of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) and their normal workload for a one-term contract is 48 hours per half-credit course.
Whatever the task, students should be clear on what is expected of them. Expectations should be clearly stated in writing on the contract. This protects both the student and the Faculty member.
The number of hours required for the assistantship determines the amount. Normally a Research Assistant contract is for 10 hours per week per term for a total of 80 hours over a 10 week period.
Contracts run for one full term only. It is up to the individuals whether or not to renew the contract for subsequent terms. This requirement protects both the faculty and the students from being contractually bound in an unsuitable circumstance for extended periods of time.
Full-time students completing a research-based program of study are limited to 10 hours per week of contractual employment at Brock University. The hours may be extended if, and only if, the work is directly related to the student's area of research. For the most part, assistantships are normally offered to the full-time students.
Other Brock University Funding Opportunities
Ralph D. Morris Graduate Student Award
Value: to be determined
An annual award to a student in the first or second year of graduate studies at Brock who has been involved in university activities which reflect well on graduate students or extracurricular activities which enhance the University's role in the community. The successful candidate will be selected on the strength of responses to areas that reflect these qualities.
Donor: Graduate Student Association
Edgar and Irmgard Penner Scholarship
Value: to be determined
To be awarded annually to an international student in any field, in the first or subsequent year of a graduate program, who has achieved high academic standing and does not receive financial support from his/her country.
Donor: Irmgard Penner
The Governor General's Gold Medal
The Governor General's Gold Medal is awarded at Spring convocation to a graduate student who achieves the highest academic standing in a graduate degree program. Graduands from both the Spring and the previous Fall convocation are eligible. The medal will be awarded on the recommendation of the Senate Committee on Graduate Studies.
The Commonwealth scholarship plan provides opportunities for Commonwealth students to pursue advanced studies in other commonwealth countries. The scholarships are awarded to graduates of recognized universities for a period of two academic years and will cover the holder's travel, living and study expenses during the period of tenure. Commonwealth scholarships tenable at Canadian universities are open to commonwealth citizens other than residents of Canada. Citizens of commonwealth countries should make application in their own country for commonwealth scholarships tenable at Canadian universities. Information and application forms may be obtained from the Graduate Office, Office of the Registrar or from the Association of Universities and Colleges, 151 Slater Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 5N1.
Deadline dates: October 31 (Australia), December 31 (New Zealand).
The Social Sciences of Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
Canada Graduate Scholarships Program Master's Scholarships
Value: $17,500 per annum
If you are a citizen or permanent resident of Canada and have completed a bachelor's degree, you may be eligible to apply for a Master's Scholarship.
Canada Graduate Scholarships Program Doctoral Awards
Value: CGS Doctoral Scholarships: $35,000 per annum for 3 years
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships: $19,000 per annum for 6 to 48 months
If you are a citizen or permanent resident of Canada, have completed or are about to complete a master's degree in the humanities or social sciences or are already pursuing a PhD or equivalent, you may be eligible to apply for a Doctoral Fellowship.
Application forms and further details may be obtained from the website: http://www.sshrc.ca/
Ontario Graduate Scholarships
Value: $5,000 per academic term
The Province of Ontario offers scholarships (in conjunction with Brock University) to students in or entering graduate programs. The Scholarships are tenable at the Ontario university of the student's choice. The awards are tenable in all disciplines and the applicant must have high academic achievement and meet certain citizenship requirements.
For further information and application forms, contact the Faculty of Graduate Studies or check the web at http://osap.gov.on.ca/
Other External Scholarships and Awards
To provide graduate students with funding and research resources, Brock University is a member of the Community of Science (COS). COS provides access to the world's most comprehensive funding resource, with more than 23,000 records representing nearly 400,000 funding opportunities and assists students to:
Identify Collaborators and Competitors
COS also provides tools and services that include: COS Expertise®, the database of detailed, first person profiles of more then 500,000 R & D professionals; and COS Funding Opportunities, the largest source of grant information on the Web. For more information see the Community of Science website at: http://www.cos.com/
Government Student Loans
Ontario Student Assistance Program and Canada Student Loan Program
All students who are residents of Ontario, Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada and who satisfy the admission requirements of a Canadian university or an eligible post-secondary institution in Ontario may apply for a loan under this program. To receive a loan a student must establish financial need for assistance and enrol in an eligible institution in the year of the loan. An award under this program will be made to the extent of financial need subject to established maximums.
12.4 Graduate Student Association (GSA)
At Brock University, the Graduate Student Association (GSA) represents the interest of graduate students. The purpose of the association is to promote the interest of graduate students in academic and social matters, to facilitate interaction among graduate students from all departments, and to enhance the profile of graduate students internal and external to the university community. All graduate students are members of the GSA and are automatically charged a membership fee at registration.
Each year, the Ralph Morris Graduate Student Award, established by the GSA in 1995, is presented to a graduate student who has exhibited exemplary activity that contributes to the GSA membership. Applications for this award are available from the Faculty of Graduate Studies.
The GSA makes yearly donations to the James A. Gibson Library in an effort to ensure journals required by the graduate students remain on the shelf. Along with this, a portion of the GSA membership fees are proportionately distributed to the various graduate departments to help offset travel and conference expenses incurred by students. This money is made available in addition to what is provided by individual departments. Graduate students are required to fill out application forms for financial assistance to cover conference/travelling expenses. These forms can be obtained by contacting the department representatives. The amount of money received depends on the number of graduate students applying for financial assistance and the amount of money reserved to cover such costs.
A list of the Executive members of the GSA along with the department representatives and their e-mail addresses are posted on the Graduate Student Bulletin Board which is located in the Faculty of Education on the main floor (outside room WH127). Anyone having questions or concerns pertaining to graduate life are encouraged to contact the department representative for education or the GSA president
The GSA is active in gaining representation for graduate students at the various levels of administration at Brock. Elections for GSA executive positions typically occurs in early spring. Master of Education students currently have the following representation:
a voting member at the Graduate/Undergraduate Department level
a non-voting member at the Faculty Board level
a voting member on the Brock Education journal committee
a voting member on the Computer and Media Resources Committee
a voting member on the Library Advisory Committee;
two voting members on the Graduate Orientation/Conference Committee
a voting member on the Research Advisory Committee
There are ample opportunities for graduate students to become involved with the Brock community beyond the classroom. However, it is only through continued involvement with the GSA that our representation at the various levels of administration can be sustained. Without this type of representation, decisions at these various levels can be made which may have a direct impact on the experiences of the students enrolled in the Master programs at Brock. Master of Education students are encouraged to make use of the graduate student offices located in the James A Gibson Library, 6th floor. Lock boxes are now available in MCD419. Please contact the Administrative Coordinator if you are interested in obtaining one.
12.5 Access to Resources
Students have access to academic resources and material through Brock library service as well as services in all other Ontario Libraries and their local school boards. Appendix Q provides detailed information.
12.6 Computer Services
All Brock Students, including MEd students are required to enable their Badger accounts. All electronic communication with the students will occur through this account. It will be the responsibility of the students to manage their accounts.
In addition however, the Master of Education students are eligible for computer access in the Research and Development lab (WH76), computer lab (WH64), as well as the Master of Graduate Student workroom (WH309) and TA office (WH61).
The access to the computers in these rooms is based on first come, first served basis.
The computers in the R&D laboratory offer access to the Internet, word processing, spreadsheet, statistical software, and scanning facilities.
The R&D Lab is open to valid users via a card-swipe security access system. Students must apply for card-swipe access: www.brocku.ca/webfm_send/23098. Once students have the card-swipe access, they may use the laboratory at times which are convenient to them. No technical assistance is available during weekends and after hours.
Laser printing is available on a charge-per-page basis. Laser printing accounts can be purchased at the IRC Supply Desk with a minimum $10.00 deposit. An accounting mechanism is installed to charge 10 cents/page. |
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Inspired by the conviction of deep Christian faith and beliefs, author Dr. Raymond DuRussel examines the concepts of free will and predestination. "Are the events in our lives, the people we meet, the path we have taken, and the things that occur in the world around us beyond a matter of coincidence and pure chance? Does everything undfold within an elaborate scheme of destiny?" Replete with Biblical quotes and instruction, RELAX, YOUR LIFE IS PREDESTINED supports the view that our lives are predetermined by the Higher Power of God. Dr. DuRussel believes that all of our decisions and actions are based upon the wisdom of an all-knowing entity. Therefore, we can rest in the comfort that even our mistakes have purpose. All circumstances that occur in our lives, as well as all the events in the world, are as they should be - a manifestation of the destiny that God has given us. If you have ever struggled with stress, anxiety, and the uncertianty of life, this book is ! for you.
The book summary and image may be of a different edition or binding of the same title.
Book reviews are added by registered customers. They need not necessarily buy book.
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2nd FIA ROADMAPPING OPEN WORKSHOP
Monday, June 25, 2012 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM (CEST)
Future Internet Assembly
Research Roadmap for Horizon 2020
2nd FIA ROADMAPPING OPEN WORKSHOP
Looking to the Horizon
Date: 25th June, 10.00am to 4.00pm
Location: European Commission, Beaulieu 25, room 0/S1, Brussels
Directions: see link http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/information_society/practical/find_us/index_en.htm
(note: please ensure you bring identification with you to access the event location)
The Future Internet Assembly Working Group on Research Roadmapping is organising a workshop to review and extend the current FIA Research Roadmap as a core input to the next EU Framework Programme (“Horizon 2020”). The workshop will be an opportunity to present new major research themes that addressing the Future Internet and to comment on those described in the current roadmap document. The workshop will comprise a mix of short presentations and interactive debate, building the results of the first workshop held in 2011. The current version of the roadmap has been released to the public domain and is available for download at:
The content of the research roadmap has been contributed from the FIA Research Roadmap Working group and by members of the FIA community, edited byMarkus Fiedler [Blekinge Institute of Technology], Anastasius Gavras [EURESCOM], Nick Papanikolaou [HP Labs], Hans Schaffers [ESoCE-Net], and Nick Wainwright [HP Labs].
We are soliciting additional contributions and comments on the content of the roadmap, with the aim ofdescribing a clear vision and understanding of technology changes, challenges and solutions for the Future Internet. The roadmap is expected to help policymakers shape research and funding priorities for Future Internet research.
In particular, we invite short papers reviewing the content of the roadmap (Notes or Commentaries, maximum 2 pages) and short papers identifying research topics that are missing from the roadmap, which members of the community feel are important (Problem Area Papers, maximum 3 papers including references). For papers presenting topics that are missing from the roadmap, authors should make sure to include 3-5 bibliographical references to the literature. Authors can submit more than one Problem Area paper, and all are encouraged to submit both a Note/Commentary and a Problem Area Paper. All papers should be formatted using the LNCS Word Template (link below).
The proceedings of the workshop will be published as part of the FIA Research Roadmap and authors of contributions will be acknowledged explicitly in the final report, to be made available on the FIA Research Roadmap Portal. Papers will be selected by the FIA Research Roadmapping Working Group for presentation at the workshop.
Paper template – LNCS Proceedings Word 2007/2010 Template available from http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0
(Download the file splnproc1110.zip, enable macros to achieve consistent formatting)
SUBMISSION DEADLINE : 15 June 2012 12:00PM GMT (strict deadline) (for both Notes/Commentaries (2 pages) and Problem Area Papers (3 pages))
SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Authors are to email their papers in DOCX or PDF format to firstname.lastname@example.org by the deadline.
We look forward to receiving your contributions, and meeting you at the workshop!!
Nick Wainwright and Nick Papanikolaou
HP Labs Europe
When & Where
FIA Research Roadmapping
FIA Research Roadmapping activity lead by Effectsplus http://www.effectsplus.eu/ |
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by Glenn Greenwald (Guardian)
One of the major governmental abuses denounced by the 1976 final report of the Church Committee was the FBI’s domestic counter intelligence programs (COINTELPRO). Under that program, the FBI targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous – including civil rights activists (such as the NAACP and Martin Luther King), black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters, and various right-wing groups – and infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them. This program was exposed only because a left-wing group, the so-called “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI”, broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania, stole the files relating to the program, and sent them to various newspapers.
What made the program so controversial was that the FBI was attempting to create and encourage crimes rather than find actual criminals – all in order to punish those whose constitutionally protected political activism the US government found threatening. As Noam Chomsky wrote in a comprehensive 1999 article on the program: “During these years, FBI provocateurs repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruption of meetings and demonstrations on and off university campuses, attacks on police, bombings, and so on.” Once the program was exposed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover insisted that there was no centralized authority for it and that it had ended, while the Church Committee’s final report made clear just how illegal and threatening it was:
. . .
. . . .
. . . .
Please re-read those last two highlighted sentences, as this is exactly what is happening again now: systematically and without much notice. Over the past decade, US Muslims have been routinely targeted with precisely this same tactic of preemptive or anticipatory prosecution. It’s all designed to take people engaged in political and religious advocacy which the US government dislikes – usually very young and impressionable Muslims with zero criminal history, though increasingly non-Muslims engaged in other forms of dissent – and use paid informants to trick them into saying just enough to turn them into criminals who are then prosecuted and imprisoned for decades.
The same pattern repeats itself over and over. The FBI ensnares some random Muslim in a garden-variety criminal investigation involving financial fraud or drugs. Rather than prosecute him, the FBI puts the Muslim criminal suspect on its payroll, sending him into Muslim communities and mosques in order not only to spy on American Muslims, but to befriend them and then actively manipulate them into saying just enough to make their prosecution possible. At times, the FBI’s informants have been so unstable and aggressive in trying to recruit members to join Terrorist plots that the targeted mosque members themselves have reported the informant to the FBI. Time and again, at the direction of these paid provocateurs who know that their ongoing payments depend upon enabling prosecutions, young Muslims in their late teens or early twenties end up saying something hostile about the US and/or statements that are otherwise politically offensive.
The DOJ takes those inflammatory political statements and combines them with evidence of commitment to Islam to depict the target as a dangerous jihadist. They use the same small set of government-loyal “terrorism experts” who earn an ample living testifying for the government and telling juries that unremarkable indicia of Islam are “typical” of Terrorists. Federal judges, notorious for subservience to the government in cases involving Muslims and Terrorism, go out of their way to allow even the most dubious government evidence while excluding the huge bulk of the defendant’s.
Federal prosecutors use this combination to convince a jury of Americans – inculcated with more than a decade of intense Islamophobic propaganda – to convict the defendants under “material support for terrorism” statutes even though they have harmed nobody and have taken no real steps toward doing so. The case is based overwhelmingly on the political and religious beliefs of the defendants, which are enough to convince Americans jurors that they are Bad People. These convictions not only result in decades of prison, but incarceration in special facilities reserved mostly for Muslims that, in most respects, are as restrictive and oppressive as those found at Guantanamo.
There have been several excellent articles reporting on how pervasive this FBI tactic has become, including this Mother Jones article by Trevor Aaronson and this Nation story by Petra Bartosiewicz. Both the Guardian and the Washington Post have reported on some of the worst abuses. I’ve written about various cases on several occasions. And one truly great organization, the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, has devoted itself to chronicling and battling against this assault. As Bartosiewicz reported:
“Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.”
Like most abusive post-9/11 trends, this tactic is now stronger than ever: “there have been 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001, and more than a third of those have occurred in the past three years.”
As common as this tactic has become, it’s vital to look at particularly egregious cases to see what is really at play. This week, a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-1 decision, affirmed the 2005 “material support” conviction of US-born Hamid Hayat, and it’s one of the worst yet most illustrative cases yet (that’s US justice: he was convicted 8 years ago, and his appeal is only now decided). Hayat was convicted for allegedly having attended “a terrorist training camp” when he was 19 years old. In the Sacramento Bee this week, Stanford Law Professor Shirin Sinnar wrote: “Even among anticipatory prosecutions, this case stands out for the fragility of the government’s case and the rank taint of prejudice, raising the haunting prospect that a man who had done nothing was convicted for a violent state of mind.”
Notably, the dissenting judge was A. Wallace Tashima, the first Japanese-American appointed to the federal bench; he was imprisoned during World War II in an internment camp in Arizona. As Professor Sinnar observed: “Perhaps as a Japanese American who was interned as a child, he remembered well the danger of preventative security measures founded on group-based judgments.” In dissent, Judge Tashima wrote: “This case is a stark demonstration of the unsettling and untoward consequences of the government’s use of anticipatory prosecution as a weapon in the ‘war on terrorism.'” He then described anticipatory prosecutions and explained why they are so dangerous:
. . .
The evidence that Hayat attended a “terrorist training camp” came from a government informant, Nassem Kahn, who was originally arrested by the FBI as part of money laundering scheme. But rather then prosecute Kahn, he was paid between $3,000 and $4,000 per month – as the dissent said, “more than $200,000 by the FBI” total – to infiltrate a local mosque in Lodi, California. That is how he befriended the then-19-year-old Hayat and began trying to induce him into criminal conduct. Desperate to maintain his payments, Kahn outright fabricated stories in order to show his value, including claims – which even the FBI acknowledged were false – that he had on several occasions seen al-Qaida’s then-second-highest official, Ayman al Zawahiri, at the Lodi mosque.
Over the course of hundreds of hours of recorded conversations, Kahn actively encouraged Hayat to attend a terrorist camp in Pakistan. At one point, he even mocked the youth for failing to do so, and on another, told Hayat that he had spoken to Hayat’s father who wanted him to go to the camp:
“Hayat traveled with his family to Pakistan in April 2003. Two of the recorded conversations took place when he was there. Like the earlier conversations, they covered a wide range of topics. On one occasion, Khan scolded Hayat for being lazy and not going to a training camp. In response, Hayat protested that the camp was closed during hot weather and that had the camp been open, he ‘would have been there.’ On another occasion, Khan relayed to Hayat a conversation in which Hayat’s father explained that ‘[Hayat wi]ll enter the Madrassah, and, God Willing, he [will] go for training!’ Hayat responded to Khan: ‘Um-hmm. . . . No problem, absolutely.’ (Underlined portion spoken in English).”
Remarkably, the judge allowed Kahn to testify that Hayat told him that he attended a camp, but then refused to allow Hayat’s lawyers to ask Kahn about the fact that Hayat eventually told him that he never intended to go to a camp and was simply lying out of bravado. That is one major factor that caused Judge Tashima to insist that the conviction must be reversed:
“The prosecution was allowed to introduce inculpatory out-of-court statements Hayat made to Khan, but the defense was prevented from eliciting testimony regarding Hayat’s exculpatory out-of-court statements made in the same conversation. . . . . The district court’s exclusion of a crucial exculpatory statement made under identical conditions and contemporaneously with the inculpatory statement was grossly unfair. . . . This seriously calls into question the fairness and integrity of the proceedings.”
Worse, the prosecution was allowed to introduce “expert testimony” telling the jury that “a particular kind of person would carry” a “supplication” prayer written in Arabic that was found in Hayat’s wallet: namely, “a person who perceives him or herself as being engaged in war for God against an enemy”. As bad as it was to allow such blanket “expert testimony” about his likely state of mind based on a prayer in his wallet, the judge then excluded Hayat’s own expert witness who would have testified that such a prayer is common among perfectly peaceful Muslims and has all sorts of possible meanings. As Judge Tashima pointed out, Hayat was merely carrying “a written prayer, whose meaning to any particular faithful likely is obscure. This is particularly so in this case because Hayat did not speak or read Arabic, the language in which the prayer was written.” To decide that someone is a Terrorist deserving of decades in prison because of that is a travesty beyond belief.
The only other evidence presented was a videotape in which Hayat, after many hours of being badgered in FBI custody, finally said that he had been present a camp at which terrorists were “possibly” or “probably” present. But even an FBI agent, citing how vague and coerced the statement was, himself deemed it the “sorriest confession [he had] ever seen.” Judge Tashima derided it as “a meandering and almost nonsensical confession to the FBI”. He added that the “confession” was extracted only “after hours of questioning, beginning around 11:00 a.m., and lasting into the early morning hours of the following day, [when] he finally agreed with FBI interrogators, who repeatedly insisted, despite his continuing denials, that Hayat had in fact attended such a
training camp.” The trial judge refused to allow expert testimony about how and why it was clear that this statement had been coerced.
But worst of all – and most revealing – the jury foreperson, Joseph Cote, made all sorts of post-trial statements demonstrating clear Islamophobic bias. Cote excused the FBI informant’s fabrications that he had seen al-Zawhiri at the Lodi moseque by saying: “they all look the same when wearing a costume”. Other jurors swore in affidavits that “[t]hroughout the deliberation process, Mr. Cote made other inappropriate racial comments.” In an interview with the Atlantic, Cote, noting the 2005 London subway bombings, said that he could not let Hayat go free “on the basis of what we know of how people of his background have acted in the past.”
That is as bigoted a statement as it gets: that Hayat should be subjected to heightened suspicion because he is Muslim. That’s exactly the mindset that has led the US to create what New York Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal has called “essentially a separate justice system for Muslims.” Indeed, Cote specifically endorsed the government’s post-9/11 tactic of preemptively prosecuting Muslims. As the Atlantic article by Amy Waldman explained, the US government’s treatment of Muslims is a direct repudiation of what had long been the core precept of US justice:
“Testifying before Congress in 2004, Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation paraphrased a well-known maxim, saying, ‘It is better that ten guilty go free than that one innocent be mistakenly punished.’ September 11 changed the paradigm, he argued, and now, ‘we simply cannot afford a rule that ‘Better ten terrorists go undetected than that the conduct of one innocent be mistakenly examined.'”
The Atlantic article then quoted Cote, again citing the danger from Muslims, as wholeheartedly concurring with this mindset:
“This preventive approach, Cote said, means that ‘just as there are people in prison who never committed the crime, this may also happen . . . .He argued that it was ‘absolutely’ better to run the risk of convicting an innocent man than to let a guilty one go. ‘Too many lives are changed’ by terrorism, he said. ‘So shall one man pay to save fifty? It’s not a debatable question.”
Despite all these comments, the two judges voting to affirm Hayat’s conviction contorted themselves into pretzels to find non-bigoted interpretations of these comments and to conclude, ultimately, that even if ugly, these sentiments are not enough to compel a new trial.
After the jury found him guilty, Hayat was sentenced to 288 months – 24 years – in federal prison. That included the maximum 15-year sentence for “materially supporting” terrorism. Convicted at the age of 23 and now 30 years old, Hayat will not be free until he’s 47 years old – even though there was zero evidence that he had taken any steps to harm anyone.
That’s why I say that this case, though extreme, is incredibly illustrative. It’s how these cases against young Muslims – and, increasingly, non-Muslim activists in the US – typically function. The FBI, using a paid informant, spent years trying to turn him into a criminal. Even with all those efforts, they obtained virtually nothing, but were able to play on the anti-Muslim prejudices of American jurors who equate Muslim religiosity with evidence of Terrorism.
But what makes the case so pernicious, what makes the tactic so dangerous, is exactly what the Church Committee cited when denouncing COINTELPRO: namely, it is the US government targeting citizens for their political beliefs, and then turning them into criminals by exploiting their unpopular political views. Here is the summary of the “evidence” against Hayat from the Atlantic’s Waldman:
“To prove intent, then, the government had to turn to the rubble of Hayat’s life—an accretion of circumstantial but ugly evidence that prosecutors said proved ‘a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind.’ There were Hayat’s words, taped by an informant, in which he praised the murder and mutilation of the journalist Daniel Pearl: ‘They killed him—I’m so pleased about that. They cut him into pieces and sent him back … That was a good job they did—now they can’t send one Jewish person to Pakistan.’ There was what the prosecution called Hayat’s ‘frequently expressed hatred toward the United States'; his comment that his heart ‘belongs to Pakistan'; his description of President Bush as ‘the worm.’ There was, at his house, literature by a virulent Pakistani militant and a scrapbook of clippings celebrating both the Taliban and sectarian violence.”
It’s incredibly common for young people of that age to dabble in extremist thought. But whatever one thinks of those opinions, they are clearly constitutionally protected as free speech. Yet throwing these opinions in the face of the jury, combined with evidence of one’s belief in Islam, is more than enough to persuade all too many Americans that the person is guilty of Terrorism, that he has “a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind”. And that’s what makes these “preemptive” and “anticipatory” prosecutions so menacing: by criminalizing free speech and turning dissidents into felons, they achieve exactly that which the First Amendment, above all else, was designed to prohibit. That these practices created such an intense backlash when exposed 40 years ago by the Church Committee, yet are accepted with such indifference now, speaks volumes about the state of US political culture. |
|The Library of Congress > American Memory|
USING THE GENERAL COLLECTIONS
GENERAL COLLECTIONS EXTERNAL SITES
|Library of Congress Subject Headings
If you search the Library's online catalog for the keywords “battered women,” you find more than one hundred entries and may be perfectly satisfied. But by not identifying the Library's correct subject headings, “Abused women,” “Abused wives,” and “Wife abuse,” you may miss the best materials for your topic. A search combining these three terms yields more than one thousand records.
The current headings can be found in the multivolume Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) (Washington: Library of Congress, annual; Z695.Z8 L524a), known familiarly as the “Red Books.” The Red Books also provide call number ranges that can be searched. The “Sample LCSH” given throughout this discussion of the General Collections and the examples listed below are the tiniest fraction of authoritative headings for women and women's issues. It cannot be reiterated strongly enough: Explore the Library of Congress subject headings.
The construction of Library of Congress subject headings is precise and complicated, with many rules on order and punctuation that need not be explained here. The next few paragraphs provide only the most basic guidelines on how subject headings for women's history are formed.
1. The heading “Women” can be followed by subdivisions, which can be geographical, topical, chronological, or by form. For the full list of the more than three thousand authorized subdivisions, see Free-floating Subdivisions: An Alphabetical Index (Washington: Library of Congress, annual; Z663.72.F74; in most reading rooms).
Examples of subdivisions are: United States, Nebraska, Folklore, History, 19th century, Bibliography, Biography, or Periodicals.
These can be strung together in a fixed order: Women—United States—Bibliography or Women—Massachusetts—History—Indexes.
Several subdivisions that are particularly useful for locating primary sources are: Sources, Diaries, Narratives, Correspondence, Interviews, Quotations, or Collections.
2. The heading “Women” can be followed by an occupation, as in Women poets; Women social reformers; or Women surgeons.
3. The phrase “Women in” can be followed by terms such as Women in literature; Women in missionary work; Women in television broadcasting; or Women in the professions.
4. In keeping with the Library's cataloging policy of applying the most specific terms appropriate to an item, many words can be added to the word “Women” to narrow a search; for instance: African American women; Hispanic American women; Korean American women; Aged women; Divorced women; Homeless women; Poor women; Rural women; Single women; Baptist women; Jewish women; or Women immigrants.
Each of these terms may have subdivisions: Homeless women—United States—Biography; Single women—Conduct of life; or Women immigrants—Employment—Texas.
5. To give one longer example: the subject heading “Women artists” is related to many narrower terms and cross references, among them: Women artists in literature; Lesbian artists; Indian women artists; Minority women artists; Women painters; and Women engravers.
Each of these narrower terms may in turn have subdivisions: Women artists—United States—Exhibitions—Periodicals; or African American women artists—Biography—History and criticism.
The permutations are many and are governed by firm rules.
New subject headings are created when catalogers feel there is a sufficient mass of material to need increased specificity, and not before there is a physical item in hand to catalog. Some women's terms are of surprisingly recent creation; for example, “Lesbianism” and “Motherhood” (and “Fatherhood”) are rarely found before the middle of the twentieth century. When searching for older materials, especially before 1975, be aware that current subject terms may not have been used. When a new term is created, it is not always added to the records of all previously cataloged titles. To use the online catalog effectively, you must also search those terms marked “Former heading” in the Library of Congress Subject Headings as well as by call numbers and keywords. Some noncurrent Library subject headings are given in this site's “Sample LCSH” because they appear in the online catalog. See the discussion of the Main Card Catalog for another way to overcome the difficulty of superseded subject headings.[Top]
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Food journalist and savvy chef Katherine Sacks lives life devoted to cooking, food and culinary adventure. Spend some time exploring food bites, culinary literature discussions, restaurant reviews, and recipe ideas with her. With emphasis on market fresh, seasonal ingredients and simple but engaging recipes and content, this is the perfect site for anyone looking for an escape into the kitchen.
Sugar level is definitely a key indicator of desirable flavor, but other elements like aroma as well as acidity matter. Depending on the variety, a great peach can balance all three. When shopping for peaches, especially at a farmers market or for organic fruit, color is a good measure of ripeness.
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As the KYD YA Championship continues, YA expert Agnes Nieuwenhuizen argues her case for the influential teen text with heart, Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi.
One highlight of the upcoming 2012 Melbourne Writers Festival will be author Melina Marchetta introducing the movie of her novel Looking for Alibrandi. Given the increasingly brief shelf life of books, it is remarkable that a debut novel published in 1992 and its 2000 movie version are still being read, watched and celebrated – but above all, loved.
The first print run of Alibrandi, all those years ago, sold out in two months. It has been published in sixteen countries and translated into a dozen languages. It won the 1993 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) award for Older Readers. Of course, the film-of-the-book has only added to the novel’s life and popularity. The film won five AFI awards, and Marchetta won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the IF award for Best Screenplay, plus the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award. However, it is the novel’s enduring appeal that is most remarkable.
That Melina Marchetta, at the time a 28-year-old teacher who had originally left school at 15, delighted so many readers with a first novel is a feat. Let’s not forget, though, that while many authors and books benefit from editorial advice and close editing, few would receive the three years of nurturing offered to Marchetta by the then publisher at Penguin, Julie Watts, and her skilled, attentive – and patient – editor, Erica Wagner (now at Allen & Unwin). Clearly both saw Looking for Alibrandi’s great potential. How many Alibrandis might we now lose because of a lack of time or resources in today’s tough world of publishing?
So what is Looking for Alibrandi’s secret? ‘Melannie’, a US teenage reviewer, wrote: ‘It’s a breath of fresh air to read about important stuff and not only about the boy on the football team or the hot guy next door.’ At the heart of many successful YA works that absorb teenagers are characters they can identify with; notions of change and transformation; the realisation that authors seem to ‘know’ how readers think and feel, and know what matters to them (the ‘important stuff’). Great YA authors also always take their readers seriously and never patronise them.
Josephine Alibrandi is a sassy final-year student somewhat out of place at her privileged Catholic girls’ school. Her life has been unusual and she has much to grapple with. She observes in her usual wry, sharp tone: ‘It’s an embarrassing contradiction when your mother gets pregnant out of wedlock because her Catholic upbringing prohibits contraception.’ She is very aware of her outsider status, being illegitimate and brought up by a single mother. Outsiders are another hallmark of YA works; remember S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, another stayer?
Alibrandi is a school story, a love story, a story of reconnecting with family (Josie meets her father sixteen years on), a story of intense and fraught friendships – with one encompassing a tragedy. It was – and remains – significant for its vivid portrayal of living within and between Australian and Italian cultures. The book sweeps readers along because of this rich content, but above all because of its fine, vibrant, direct storytelling and Josephine’s strong, engaging voice. What more could we want?
Few books survive the carnage of classroom dissection. Few readers remember with affection (or at all) a book they have had to ‘study’ and chew over for weeks or even months. Yet many students emerge from this experience still loving Alibrandi (To Kill a Mockingbird also seems to survive the classroom – so it’s in good company!). They walk away from this book talking and arguing about the characters as if they really knew them. Even more amazing is that their mothers, and even their fathers and other adults, devour the book too, which is why Penguin cleverly republished it showing the same cover girl in more sombre colours. Now new generations embrace and share the book. If you haven’t read it – do!
Agnes Nieuwenhuizen is a noted champion of books and reading for teenagers. After many years as a teacher, she founded the Youth Literature Program which metamorphosed into the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria. Her last book, Right Book, Right Time (Allen & Unwin), contains over 500 lively recommendations for every taste and mood. Now officially retired, Agnes continues to review books for adults and teenagers and contribute to various publications.
If you want Looking for Alibrandi to win the KYD YA Championship, you can cast your vote for it here! Vote now and you can also go into the draw to win some amazing prizes. |
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LINGUIST List 24.2454|
Mon Jun 17 2013
Calls: Semantics, Syntax, Morphology/Belgium
Editor for this issue: Alison Zaharee
From: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck <jeroen.vancraenenbroeckhubrussel.be>
Subject: GLOW Semantics Workshop: Understanding Possession
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Full Title: GLOW Semantics Workshop: Understanding Possession
Date: 05-Apr-2014 - 05-Apr-2014
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Contact Person: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Web Site: http://www.glow37.org/semantics
Linguistic Field(s): Morphology; Semantics; Syntax
Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2013
The 37th annual meeting of GLOW will be hosted by CRISSP, a research center of KU Leuven HUBrussel. The GLOW Semantics workshop will take place in Brussels (Belgium) on Saturday April 5, 2014. Its theme is ‘Understanding Possession’.
Chris Barker (New York University)
Kilu von Prince (ZAS Berlin)
Call for Papers:
Possessive relations are expressed in the world’s languages by a myriad of dedicated grammatical means. In recent years, possession has received notable attention from semanticists as well as (morpho)syntacticians (see Barker 2011 and Börjars & Denison 2013 for recent overviews). Despite these efforts, many important aspects of how possession is encoded in human language remain poorly understood.
The aim of the workshop is to bring semanticists and (morpho)syntacticians together to enhance our understanding of possession.
The expression of possession typically involves a possessee, a possessor and an element that marks the existence of a possessive relation. The semantic and syntactic properties of these three interact with pragmatics as well as with the morphosyntactic and semantic context. At each of these levels important questions arise.
With respect to the possessee, Partee (1983/1997), Löbner (1985), De Bruin & Scha (1988), Barker (1995) and many others propose that a distinction must be made between relational and non-relational - or sortal - nouns. Relational nouns semantically function as two-place predicates, while non-relational nouns behave as one-place predicates. This distinction between relational and sortal nouns raises several important questions:
- What is the connection between semantic and syntactic arguments (see e.g. Von Prince 2012)?
- Is a two-place lexical entry the only way to arrive at relational interpretations (see e.g. Partee & Borschev 2003 and Le Bruyn, de Swart & Zwarts 2013)?
- Are some possessive constructions limited either to relational or sortal nouns, as proposed by Barker (1995)?
- Can the relational vs. sortal distinction derive the split between alienable and inalienable possession (see e.g. Vergnaud & Zubizeretta 2003, Chappell & McGregor 1996, Aikhenvald & Dixon 2013 for discussion) or is a further semantic decomposition of possessed nouns needed to do so?
Some possessive constructions impose semantic and syntactic restrictions on the possessor. For example: (i) The Dutch possessive –s suffix can only occur on proper names, (ii) Possessors that co-occur with linking morphemes in the Austronesian language Daakaka must be animate (Von Prince 2012). Such restrictions raise the follow questions:
- In which module of the grammar do these restrictions arise? Semantics, the lexicon, morphology or syntax? Or are they the result of interplay between these modules?
- What is the range of cross-linguistic variation with respect to these restrictions and how can we account for (the restrictions on) this variation?
- In some languages, non-pronominal possessors can be doubled by a possessive pronoun (e.g. Dutch Jan zijn boek (Jan his book)):
- What are the morphosyntactic properties of such possessor doubling (see e.g. Grohmann & Haegeman 2003, Corver & Van Koppen 2010, Salzmann & Georgi 2011, Schoorlemmer 2012)?
- How is possessor doubling interpreted by the semantics?
The world’s languages display an impressive array of variation with respect to the morphosyntactic means to signal possession (see e.g. Aikhenvald & Dixon 2013; Börjars & Denison 2013; Nichols & Bickel 2005; Dryer 2005). It can be signaled by genitive case, prepositions, dedicated possessive markers, construct state, etc. The relation between this morphosyntactic variation and the semantics of possession remains largely unexplored in the literature.
- Do different markers of possession invoke different semantics (see e.g. Partee & Borschev 2003 for discussion)?
- Does the marker itself introduce a relational semantics or does it merely reflect that another element does so?
- Is there a limit on the morphosyntactic variation in possession marking and how can we account for (the restrictions on) this variation?
Semantic Composition, Syntactic Structure, Context and Pragmatics:
Finally, the role of semantic composition, syntactic structure, context and pragmatics in possession is still poorly understood.
- Which semantic compositional processes play a role in possession?
- What is the syntactic structure of possessive constructions (see e.g. Szabolcsi 1983, Kayne 1994, Den Dikken 1998, Corver 2003, Coene & d’Hulst 2003)? How does this syntactic structure relate to semantic composition?
- Can the syntax and semantics of possession be reduced to that of locative constructions (see e.g. Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, Belvin & Den Dikken 1997)?
- Is there any competition between possession markers, and if so, are there any meaning effects associated with this competition (see e.g. Le Bruyn & Alexandropoulou 2013 for a recent discussion on French inalienable possession)?
- How much of relational interpretations can be derived from context or pragmatic reasoning (see e.g. Vikner & Jensen 2002 for discussion)?
We invite abstracts for 35 minute talks (25 talk, 10 discussion) that enhance our understanding of possession by either directly or indirectly addressing one or more of the above questions. Possible formats include but are not limited to:
- New theoretical insights in the semantics or (morpho)syntax of possession.
- Theoretical (semantic, (morpho)syntactic or pragmatic) explorations of possession that aim to derive (part of) the variation we find cross-linguistically.
- Studies - synchronic or diachronic - of (part of) a language specific possession paradigm, both from well-studied and lesser-studied languages, that show us what the relevant semantic or (morpho)syntactic building blocks of possession patterns are.
- Micro- or macro-comparative studies of (parts of) possession paradigms, that show us what the relevant semantic or (morpho)syntactic parameters underlying the variation in possession patterns are.
- Studies working out the semantics of previously explored syntactic/morphological analyses, investigating how syntax/morphology maps to semantics.
Abstract Submission Guidelines:
- Abstracts must not exceed two A4 pages in length (including data and references), have one inch (2.5 cm) margins on all sides, and be set in Times New Roman with a font size no smaller than 12pt and single line spacing.
- Examples must be integrated into the text of the abstract, rather than collected at the end.
- Nothing in the abstract, the title, or the name of the document should identify the author(s).
- At most two submissions per author, at most one of which can be single-authored. The same abstract may not be submitted to both the main colloquium and a workshop.
- Only submissions in pdf-format will be accepted.
- Abstracts are submitted via the GLOW 37 EasyChair page: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=glow37.
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A Brilliant Civilization
Before the small village of Rome became “Rome” with a capital R (to paraphrase D.H. Lawrence), a brilliant civilization once controlled almost the entire peninsula we now call Italy. This was the Etruscan civilization, a vanished culture whose achievements set the stage not only for the development of ancient Roman art and culture but for the Italian Renaissance as well.
Though you may not have heard of them, the Etruscans were the first ‘superpower’ of the Western Mediterranean who, alongside the Greeks, developed the earliest true cities in Europe. They were so successful, in fact, that the most important cities in modern Tuscany (Florence, Pisa, and Siena to name a few) were first established by the Etruscans and have been continuously inhabited since then.
Yet the labels ‘mysterious’ or ‘enigmatic’ are often attached to the Etruscans since none of their own histories or literature survives. This is particularly ironic as it was the Etruscans who were responsible for teaching the Romans the alphabet and for spreading literacy throughout the Italian peninsula.
The Influence on Ancient Rome
Etruscan influence on ancient Roman culture was profound and it was from the Etruscans that the Romans inherited many of their own cultural and artistic traditions, from the spectacle of gladiatorial combat, to hydraulic engineering, temple design, and religious ritual, among many other things. In fact, hundreds of years after the Etruscans had been conquered by the Romans and absorbed into their empire, the Romans still maintained an Etruscan priesthood in Rome (which they thought necessary to consult when under attack from invading ‘barbarians’).
We even derive our very common word ‘person’ from the Etruscan mythological figure ‘Phersu’-- the frightful, masked figure you see in this Early Etruscan tomb painting who would engage his victims in a dreadful ‘game’ of blood letting in order to appease the soul of the deceased (the original gladiatorial games, according to the Romans!).
Etruscan Art and the Afterlife
Early on the Etruscans developed a vibrant artistic and architectural culture, one that was often in dialogue with other Mediterranean civilizations. Trading of the many natural mineral resources found in Tuscany, the center of ancient Etruria, caused them to bump up against Greeks, Phoenicians and Egyptians in the Mediterranean. With these other Mediterranean cultures, they exchanged goods, ideas and, often, a shared artistic vocabulary.
Unlike with the Greeks, however, the majority of our knowledge about Etruscan art comes largely from their burials. (Since most Etruscan cities are still inhabited, they hide their Etruscan art and architecture under Roman, Medieval and Renaissance layers). Fortunately, though, the Etruscans cared very much about equipping their dead with everything necessary for the afterlife—from lively tomb paintings to sculpture to pottery that they could use in the next world.
From their extensive cemeteries, we can look at the "world of the dead" and begin to understand some about the "world of the living." During the early phases of Etruscan civilization, they conceived of the afterlife in terms of life as they knew it. When someone died, he or she would be cremated and provided with another ‘home’ for the afterlife.
This type of hut urn, made of an unrefined clay known as impasto, would be used to house the cremated remains of the deceased. Not coincidentally, it shows us in miniature form what a typical Etruscan house would have looked like in Iron Age Etruria (900-750 B.C.E.)—oval with a timber roof and a smoke hole for an internal hearth.
More Opulent Tombs
Later on, houses for the dead became much more elaborate. During the Orientalizing period (750-575 BCE), when the Etruscans began to trade their natural resources with other Mediterranean cultures and became staggeringly wealthy as a result, their tombs became more and more opulent.
The well-known Regolini-Galassi tomb from the city of Cerveteri shows how this new wealth transformed the modest hut to an extravagant house for the dead. Built for a woman clearly of high rank, the massive stone tomb contains a long corridor with lateral, oval rooms leading to a main chamber.
A stroll through the Etruscan rooms in the Vatican museum where the tomb artifacts are now housed presents a mind boggling view of the enormous wealth of the period.
Found near the woman were objects of various precious materials intended for personal adornment in the afterlife—a gold pectoral, gold bracelets, a gold brooch of outsized proportions, among other objects—as well as silver and bronze vessels and numerous other grave goods and furniture.
A Bronze Bed for the Afterlife
Of course, this important woman might also need her four-wheeled bronze-sheathed carriage in the afterlife as well as an incense burner, jewelry of amber and ivory, and, touchingly, her bronze bed around which thirty-three figurines, all in various gestures of mourning, were arranged.
Though later periods in Etruscan history are not characterized by such wealth, the Etruscans were, nevertheless, extremely powerful and influential and left a lasting imprint on the city of Rome and other parts of Italy.
Text by Dr. Laurel Taylor |
Anne Inez McCaffrey (1 April 1926 – 21 November 2011) was an American-born Irish writer, best known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. Early in McCaffrey’s 46-year career as a writer, she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction and the first to win a Nebula Award. Her 1978 novel The White Dragon became one of the first science-fiction books to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.
In 2005 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named McCaffrey its 22nd Grand Master, an annual award to living writers of fantasy and science fiction. She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on 17 June 2006.
Anne Inez McCaffrey was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second of three children. Her father had Irish and English ancestry, and her mother was of Irish descent. She attended Stuart Hall (a girls’ boarding school in Staunton, Virginia), and graduated from Montclair High School in New Jersey. In 1947 she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College with a degree in Slavonic Languages and Literature.
In 1950 she married Horace Wright Johnson (died 2009), who shared her interests in music, opera and ballet. They had three children. Except for a short time in Düsseldorf, the family lived for most of a decade in Wilmington, Delaware. They moved to Sea Cliff, Long Island in 1965, and McCaffrey became a full-time writer.
McCaffrey served a term as secretary-treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1968 to 1970. In addition to handcrafting the Nebula Award trophies, her responsibilities included production of two monthly newsletters and their distribution by mail to the membership.
McCaffrey emigrated to Ireland with her two younger children in 1970, weeks after filing for divorce. Ireland had recently exempted resident artists from income taxes, an opportunity that fellow science-fiction author Harry Harrison had promptly taken and helped to promote. McCaffrey’s mother soon joined the family in Dublin. The following spring, McCaffrey was guest of honor at her first British science-fiction convention.
McCaffrey made a fast start in Ireland, completing for 1971 publication Dragonquest and two Gothic novels for Dell, The Mark of Merlin and The Ring of Fear. With a contract for The White Dragon (which would complete the “original trilogy” with Ballantine), her writing stalled. During the next few years the family moved several times in the Dublin area and struggled to make ends meet, supported largely by child-care payments and meager royalties.
Some time after their move to Long Island, Todd McCaffrey recalls, his mother asked him what he thought of dragons. She was brainstorming about their “bad press all these years”. The result was a “technologically regressed survival planet” whose people were united against a threat from space (in contrast to an America divided by the Vietnam War). “The dragons became the biologically renewable air force, and their riders ‘the few’ who, like the RAF pilots in World War Two, fought against incredible odds day in, day out—and won.”
The first Pern story, “Weyr Search”, was published in 1967 by John W. Campbell in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It won the 1968 Hugo Award for best novella, voted by participants in the annual World Science Fiction Convention. The second Pern story, “Dragonrider”, won the 1969 Nebula Award for best novella, voted annually by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Thus she was the first woman to win a Hugo for fiction and the first to win a Nebula.
The White Dragon was released with new editions of the first two Pern books, with cover art illustrated by Michael Whelan. It was the first science-fiction book by a woman on the New York Times bestseller list, and the cover painting is still in print from Whelan. The artists share credit for their career breakthroughs.
McCaffrey died at age 85 on 21 November 2011 at her home in Ireland, following a stroke. |
‘The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,’ J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards,
is that the frontiers of ‘Europe’ towards the east are everywhere open and indeterminate. ‘Europe’, it can now be seen, is not a continent – as in the ancient geographers’ dream – but a subcontinent: a peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, like India in being inhabited by a highly distinctive chain of interacting cultures, but unlike it in lacking a clearly marked geophysical frontier. Instead of Afghanistan and the Himalayas, there are vast level areas through which conventional ‘Europe’ shades into conventional ‘Asia’, and few would recognise the Ural mountains if they ever reached them.
But, he went on, empires – of which in its fashion the European Union must be accounted one – had always needed to determine the space in which they exercised their power, fixing the borders of fear or attraction around them.
A decade and a half later, the matter has assumed a more tangible shape. After the absorption of all the former Comecon states, there remain the untidy odds and ends of the once independent Communisms of Yugoslavia and Albania – the seven small states of the ‘West Balkans’ – yet to be integrated in the EU. But no one doubts that, a pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due course. The great issue facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip of water separates one world from another. No one has ever missed the Bosphorus. ‘Every schoolchild knows that Asia Minor does not form part of Europe,’ Sarkozy told voters en route to the Elysée, promising to keep it so: a pledge to be taken in the spirit of the conjugal reunion on offer in the same campaign. Turkey will not be dealt with in that way. Within the EU the official consensus that it should become a member-state in full standing has for some time now been overwhelming. Such agreement does not exclude arrière-pensées in this or that government – Germany, France and Austria have all at different points entertained them – but against any passage of these to action lies the formidable barrier of a unanimity of media opinion more complete, and more committed to Turkish entry, than that of the Council or Commission itself. There is also the simple fact that no country that has been accepted as a candidate for accession to the EU has ever, once negotiations were opened, been rejected by it.
The expansion of the EU to the lands of the Warsaw Pact did not require much political defence or illustration. The countries concerned were all indisputably European, however the term was defined, and all had famously suffered under Communism. To bring them into the Union was not just to heal an ancient division of the continent, anchoring them in a common liberal-democratic capitalism, but to compensate the East for its misfortunes after 1945, relieving the West of a bad conscience at the difference in fates between them. They would also, of course, constitute a strategic glacis against any resurgence of Russia, and offer a nearby pool of cheap labour, although this received less public emphasis. The uncontentious logic here is not, on face of it, immediately transferable to Turkey. The country has long been a market economy, held parliamentary elections, constituted a pillar of Nato, and is now situated further from Russia than ever in the past. It would look as if only the last of the motives in Eastern Europe, the economic objective, applies – not unimportant, certainly, but incapable of explaining the priority Turkey’s entry into the EU has acquired in Brussels.
Yet a kind of symmetry with the case for Eastern Europe can be discerned in the principal reasons advanced for Turkish membership in Western capitals. The fall of the Soviet Union may have removed the menace of Communism, but there is now – it is widely believed – a successor danger in Islamism. Rampant in the authoritarian societies of the Middle East, it threatens to stretch into immigrant communities within Western Europe itself. What better prophylactic against it than to embrace a staunch Muslim democracy within the EU, functioning as both beacon of a liberal order to a region in desperate need of a more enlightened political model and sentinel against every kind of terrorism and extremism? This line of thought originated in the US, with its wider range of global responsibilities than the EU, and continues to be uppermost in American pressure for Turkish entry into the Union. Much as Washington set the pace for Brussels during expansion into Eastern Europe, laying down Nato lights on the runway for subsequent descent by the EU, so it championed the cause of Turkey well before Council or Commission came round to it.
But although the strategic argument, for a geopolitical bulwark against the wrong kinds of Islam, is now standard in European columns and editorials, it does not occupy quite the same position as in America. In part, this is because the prospect of sharing a border with Iraq and Iran is not altogether welcome to many within the EU, however vigilant the Turkish Army might prove. Americans, at a greater distance, find it easier to see the bigger picture. But such reservations are not the only reason why this theme, central though it remains, does not dominate discussion in the EU as completely as in the US. For another argument has more intimate weight. Current European ideology holds the Union to offer the highest moral and institutional order in the world, combining – with all due imperfections – economic prosperity, political liberty and social solidarity in a way no rival can match. But is there not some danger of cultural closure in the very success of this unique creation? Amid all its achievements, might not Europe risk falling – the very word a reproof – into Eurocentrism: too homogeneous and inward-looking an identity, when the advance guard of civilised life is necessarily ever more multicultural?
Turkey’s incorporation into the EU, so the case goes, would lay such fears to rest. The greatest single burden, for present generations, of a narrowly traditional conception of Europe is its identification with Christianity, as a historic marker of the continent. The greatest challenge to this heritage long came from Islam. What then could be a more triumphant demonstration of a modern multiculturalism than the peaceful intertwining of the two faiths, at state level and within civil society, in a super-European system stretching, like the Roman Empire, to the Euphrates? That Turkey’s government is for the first time professedly Muslim should not be viewed as a handicap, but as a recommendation for entry, promising just that transvaluation into a multicultural form of life the Union needs for the next step in its constitutional progress. For its part, just as the new-found or restored democracies of the post-Communist East have benefited from the steadying hand of the Commission in their journey to normalcy, so Turkish democracy will be sheltered and strengthened within the Union. If enlargement to Eastern Europe repaired a moral debt to those who lived through Communism, inclusion of Turkey can redeem the moral damage done by a complacent – or arrogant – parochialism. In such dual atonement, Europe has the capacity to become a better place.
In this self-critical mode, a historical contrast is often drawn. Christian Europe was for centuries disfigured by savage religious intolerance, by every kind of persecution, inquisition, expulsion, pogrom resorted to in the attempt to stamp out other communities of faith, Jewish or Muslim, not to speak of heretics within the faith itself. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, tolerated Christians and Jews, without repression or forcible conversion, allowing different communities to live peaceably together under Muslim rule, in a premodern multicultural harmony. Not only was this Islamic order more enlightened than its Christian counterparts, but far from being an external Other of Europe, for centuries it formed an integral part of the European system of powers itself. Turkey is in that sense no newcomer to Europe. Rather its entry into the Union would restore a continuity, of mixtures and contacts, from which we still have much to learn.
Such, roughly speaking, is the discourse of Turkish entry into the EU that can be heard in chancelleries and chat rooms, learned journals and leading articles, on platforms and talk shows across Europe. One of its great strengths is the absence to date of any non-xenophobic alternative to it. Its weakness lies in the series of images d’Epinal out of which much of it is woven, obscuring the actual stakes in Turkey’s suit to join the Union. Certainly, any consideration of these must begin with the Ottoman Empire. For the first, and most fundamental difference between the Turkish candidature and all those from Eastern Europe is that in this case the Union is dealing with the descendant of an imperial state, for long a far greater power than any kingdom of the West. A prerequisite of grasping that descent is a realistic understanding of the originating form of that empire.
The Osmanli Sultanate, as it expanded into Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries, was indeed more tolerant – however anachronistic the term – than any Christian realm of the period. It is enough to compare the fate of the Muslims in Catholic Spain with that of the Orthodox in the Balkans under Ottoman rule. Christians and Jews were neither forced to convert nor expelled by the sultanate, but allowed to worship as they wished, in the House of Islam. This was not toleration in a modern sense, nor specifically Ottoman, but a traditional system of Islamic rule dating to the Umayyad Caliphate of the eighth century. Infidels were subject peoples, legally inferior to the ruling people. Semiotically and practically, they were separate communities. Taxed more heavily than believers, they could not bear arms, hold processions, wear certain clothes, have houses over a certain height. Muslims could take infidel wives; infidels could not marry Muslim women.
The Ottoman state that inherited this system arose in 14th-century Anatolia as one Turkic chieftainry competing with others, expanding to the east and south at the expense of local Muslim rivals and to the west and north at the expense of the remains of Byzantine power. For two hundred years, as its armies conquered most of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, the empire it built retained this bidirectionality. But there was never any doubt where its strategic centre of gravity, and primary momentum, lay. From the beginning, Osmanli rulers had drawn their legitimacy from holy war – gaza – on the frontiers of Christendom. The subjugated regions of Europe formed the richest, most populous and politically prized zones of the empire, and the theatre of the overwhelming majority of its military campaigns, as successive sultans set out for the House of War to enlarge the House of Islam. The Ottoman state was founded, as its most recent historian Caroline Finkel writes, on ‘the ideal of continuous warfare’. Recognising no peers, and respecting no pieties of peaceful coexistence, it was designed for the battlefield, without territorial fixture or definition.
But it was also pragmatic. From the outset, ideological warfare against infidels was combined with instrumental use of them for pursuit of it. From the perspective of the absolutist monarchies that arose in Western Europe somewhat later, each claiming dynastic authority and enforcing religious conformity within its realm, the peculiarity of the empire of Mehmed II and his successors lay in its combination of aims and means. On the one hand, the Ottomans waged unlimited holy war against Christendom. On the other hand, by the 15th century the state relied on a levy – the devshirme – of formerly Christian youths, picked from subject populations in the Balkans themselves not obliged to become Muslims, to compose its military and administrative elite: the kapi kullari or ‘slaves of the sultan’.
For upwards of two hundred years, the dynamism of this formidable engine of conquest, its range eventually stretching from Aden to Belgrade and the Crimea to the Rif, held Europe in awe. But by the end of the 17th century, after the last siege of Vienna, its momentum had run out. The ‘ruling institution’ of the empire ceased to be recruited from the offspring of unbelievers, reverting to native-born Muslims, and the balance of arms gradually turned against the Porte. After the late 18th century, when Russia inflicted successive crushing defeats on it north of the Black Sea, and revolutionary France took Egypt in a trice, the Ott0man state never won a major war again. In the 19th century its survival depended on the mutual jealousies of the predator powers of Europe more than any inner strength of its own. Time and again, it was rescued from further amputation or destruction only by the intervention of rival foreign capitals – London, Paris, Vienna, in one memorable crisis even St Petersburg – at the expense of each other.
But though external pressures, ever more ominous as the technological gap between Ottoman and European empires widened, might in principle have continued to neutralise each other long enough to allow for an effective overhaul of state and society to meet the challenge from the West – the example of the Porte’s rebel satrap in Egypt, Mehmet Ali, showed what could be done – the rise of nationalism among the subject Christian peoples of the Balkans undermined any diplomatic equilibrium. Greek independence, reluctantly seconded by Britain and France from fear that Russia would otherwise become its exclusive patron, shocked the sultanate into its first serious efforts at internal reform. In the Tanzimat period (1839-76), modernisation became more systematic. The palace was sidelined by the bureaucracy. Administration was centralised; legal equality of all subjects and security of property were proclaimed; education and science promoted; ideas and mores imported from the West. Under successive pro-British viziers, the Ottoman order took its place within the European state system.
But the reformers of the time, however secular-minded, could not transform the religious foundations of Ottoman rule. Three inequalities were codified by tradition: between believers and unbelievers, masters and slaves, men and women. Relations between the sexes altered little, though by the end of the century preference for boys had become less frequent among the elite, and slavery was – very gradually – phased out. Politically, the crucial relationship was the first. Ostensibly, discrimination against unbelievers was abolished by the reforms. But disavowed in principle, it persisted in practice, as non-Muslims continued to be subject to a poll tax, now disguised as payment for draft exclusion, from which Muslims were exempt. The army continued to be reserved for believers, and all significant civilian offices in the state remained a monopoly of the faithful. Such protection of the supremacy of Islam was, however, insufficient to appease popular hostility to reforms perceived as a surrender to European pressures and fashions, incompatible with piety or the proper position of believers in the empire. Quite apart from unseemly displays of Western ways of life in the cities, unpopular rural taxes were extended to Muslims, while Christian merchants, not to speak of foreign interests, flourished under the free trade regime conceded by the reformers to the Western powers.
Neither consistently modern nor robustly traditional, the Tanzimat regimes were also fiscal failures. Tax-farming, officially disavowed, lingered on; rather than increasing, public revenues declined; capitulations – extra-territorial privileges granted to foreigners – persisted. Foreign borrowing ballooned, before finally bursting into state bankruptcy in 1875. Two years later, Ottoman armies were once again thrashed by Russia, and in 1878 – after a brief constitutional episode had fizzled – the empire was forced to accept the independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and the autonomy of most of Bulgaria. For the next thirty years, power swung back from the bureaucracy to the palace, in the person of Sultan Abdulhamid II, who combined technological and administrative modernisation – railways, post offices, warships – with religious restoration and police repression. With the loss of most of the Balkans, the population of the empire had become more than 70 per cent Muslim. To cement loyalty to his regime, the sultan refurbished the long neglected title of caliph, broadcasting pan-Islamic appeals, and topping up the ranks of his administration with Arabs. But no amount of ideological bluster, or fabrication of tradition in the approved Victorian style, could alter the continued dependence of the empire on a public debt administration run by foreigners, and a European balance of power incapable of damping down the fires of nationalism in the Balkans.
A broad swathe of Ottoman rule still extended to the Adriatic, in which various insurgent bands – most prominently, the Macedonian secret organisation IMRO – roamed the hills, and the cream of the army was stationed in garrison towns to hold what was left of Rumelia, the rich original core of the empire, its ‘Roman’ part. Here opposition to the sultan’s tyranny had become widespread by the turn of the century among the young of all ethnic groups, not least Turks themselves. In 1908 rumours of an impending Russo-British carve-up of the region triggered a military rising in Monastir and Salonika. The revolt spread rapidly, and within a couple of weeks had become irresistible. Abdulhamid was forced to call elections, in which the organisation behind the uprising, newly revealed to the world as the Committee of Union and Progress, won a resounding majority across the empire. The Young Turks had taken power.
The Revolution of 1908 was a strange, amphibious affair. In many ways it was premonitory of the upheavals in Persia and China that followed three years later, but with features that set it apart from all subsequent such risings in the 20th century. On the one hand, it was a genuine constitutional movement, arousing popular enthusiasm right across the different nationalities of the empire, and electing an impressively interethnic parliament on a wide suffrage: an authentic expression of the still liberal zeitgeist of the period. On the other hand, it was a military coup mounted by a secret organisation of junior officers and conspirators, which can claim to be the first in a long line of such episodes in the Third World. The two were not disjoined, since the architects of the coup, a small group of plotters, gained empire-wide support virtually overnight in the name of constitutional rule – their party numbering hundreds of thousands within a year. Nor, formally speaking, were the objectives of each distinct: in the vocabulary of the time, the ‘liberty, equality, fraternity and justice’ proclaimed by the first were conceived as conditions of securing the integrity of the empire sought by the second, in a common citizenship shared by all its peoples.
But that synthesis was not – could never be – stable. The prime mover in the revolution was the core group of officers in the CUP. Their overriding aim was the preservation of the empire, at whatever cost. Constitutional or other niceties were functional or futile to it, as the occasion might be – means, not ends in themselves. They weren’t liberals but nor were they in any sense anti-colonial, in the fashion of later military patriots in the Third World, often authoritarian enough, but resolute enemies of Western imperialism – the Free Officers in Egypt, the Lodges in Argentina, the Thirty Comrades in Burma. The threats to the Ottoman Empire came, as they had long done, from European powers or their regional allies, but the Young Turks did not reject the West culturally or politically: rather, they wanted to enter the ring of its Machtpolitik on equal terms, as one contestant among others. For that, a transformation of the Ottoman state was required, to give it a modern mass base of the kind that had become such a strength of its rivals.
But here they faced an acute dilemma. What ideological appeal could hold the motley populations – divided by language, religion and ethnic origin – of the Ottoman Empire together? Some unifying patriotism was essential, but the typical contemporary ingredients for one were missing. The nearest equivalent to the Ottoman order was the Habsburg Empire, but even it was considerably more compact, overwhelmingly of one basic faith, and in possession of a still respected traditional ruler. The Young Turks, in charge of lands stretching from the Yemen to the Danube, and peoples long segregated and stratified in a hierarchy of incompatible confessions, had no such advantages. What could it mean to be a citizen of this state, other than simply the contingent subject of a dynasty that the Young Turks themselves treated with scant reverence, unceremoniously ousting Abdulhamid within a year of taking power? The new regime could not escape an underlying legitimacy deficit. An awareness of the fragility of its ideological position was visible from the start. For the Young Turks retained the discredited monarchy against which it had rebelled, installing a feeble brother of Abdulhamid as a figurehead successor in the sultanate, and even trooping out, in farcical piety, behind the bier of Abdulhamid when the old brute, a King Bomba of the Bosphorus, finally expired.
Such shreds of a faded continuity were naturally not enough to clothe the new collective emperor. The CUP needed the full dress of a modern nationalism. But how was this to be defined? A two-track solution was the answer. For public consumption, it proclaimed a ‘civic’ nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no matter what their creed or descent: a doctrine with broad appeal, greeted with a tremendous initial outburst of hope and energy among even the hitherto most disaffected groups in the empire, including Armenians. In secret conclave, on the other hand, it prepared for a more confessional or ethnic nationalism, restricted to Muslims or Turks. This was a duality that in its way reflected the peculiar structure of the CUP itself. As a party, it had won a large parliamentary majority in the first free elections the empire had known, and with a brief intermission in 1912-13, directed the policies of the state. But its leadership shunned the front of the stage, taking neither cabinet posts nor top military commands, leaving these to an older generation of soldiers and bureaucrats. Behind a façade of constitutional propriety and deference to seniority, however, actual power was wielded by the party’s Central Committee, a group of 50 zealots controlling a political organisation modelled on the Macedonian and Armenian undergrounds. The term Young Turks was not a misnomer. When it took over, the key leaders of the CUP were in their thirties or late twenties. Numerically, army captains and majors predominated, but civilians also figured at the highest level. The trio who eventually occupied the limelight would be Enver and Cemal, from the officer corps, and Talat, a former functionary in the post office. Behind them, publicly less visible, but hidden drivers of the organisation, were two military doctors, Selânikli Nazim and Bahaettin Sakir. All five top leaders came from the ‘European’ sector of the Empire: the coxcomb Enver from a wealthy family in Istanbul, the mastiff Talat and the clinical Sakir from today’s Bulgaria, Nazim from Salonika, the slightly older Cemal from Mytilene.
The CUP was soon put to the test of defending the empire it had been set up to defend. In 1911 Italy seized Libya, the last Ottoman province in North Africa, Enver vainly attempting to organise desert resistance. A year later, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria combined to launch a joint attack on the Ottoman armies in the Balkans, which within a matter of weeks had all but swept them out of Europe. The CUP, which had been briefly dislodged from power in the summer of 1912, escaped the odium of this massive defeat, and when its enemies fell out with each other, was able to regain at least the province of Edirne. But the scale of the imperial catastrophe was traumatic. Rumelia had long been the most advanced region of the empire, the prime recruiting ground of Ottoman elites from the time of the devshirme to the Young Turks themselves, who kept their Central Committee in Salonika, not Istanbul, down to 1912. Its final loss, not even at the hands of a great power, reducing Ottoman domains in Europe to a mere foothold, and expelling some 400,000 Turks from their homes, was the greatest disaster and humiliation in the history of the empire.
The effect on the CUP was twofold. The empire was now 85 per cent Muslim, lowering any incentive for political appeals to the remaining quotient of unbelievers, and increasing the attraction of playing the Islamic card to rally support for its regime. But though the leaders of the committee, determined to keep hold of the Arab provinces, made ample use of this, they had before them the bitter lesson taught by the Albanians, who had seized the opportunity offered by the Balkan Wars to gain their independence – a defection by fellow Muslims that suggested a common religion might not be enough to prevent a further disintegration of the state they had inherited. The result was to tilt the ideological axis of the CUP, especially its inner circle, in an increasingly ethnic – Turkish, as distinct from Muslim – direction. The shift involved no cost in outlook: virtually to a man, the Young Turks were positivists whose view of matters sacred was thoroughly instrumental.
Nor were they disposed to accept a diminished station for the empire. Expulsion from Rumelia did not inspire a defensive posture, but an active will to avenge defeats in the Balkans, and recoup imperial losses. ‘Our anger is strengthening: revenge, revenge, revenge; there is no other word,’ Enver wrote to his wife. In a speech he exclaimed:
How could a person forget the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to Anatolia? This was beyond a person’s endurance. I am prepared gladly to sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Montenegrins.
The lesson the CUP drew from 1912 was that Ottoman power could be upheld only by alliance with at least one of Europe’s Great Powers, who had stood aside as it was rolled up. The Young Turks had no particular preference as to which, trying in turn Britain, Austria-Hungary, Russia and France, only to be rebuffed by each, before finally succeeding with Germany on 2 August 1914, two days before the outbreak of the First World War. By now the CUP occupied the foreground: Enver was minister of war, Talat of the interior, Cemal of the navy. The treaty as such did not commit the empire to declare war on the Entente, and the Young Turks thought to profit from it without much risk. They banked on Germany routing France in short order, whereupon Ottoman armies could join up safely with the Central Powers to knock out Russia, and garner the fruits of victory – regaining a suitable belt of Thrace, the Aegean islands, Cyprus, Libya, all of Arabia, territory ceded to Russia in the Caucasus, and lands stretching to Azerbaijan and Turkestan beyond.
But when France did not collapse in the west, while Germany pressed for rapid Ottoman entry into the war to weaken Russia in the east, much of the cabinet got cold feet. It was only after weeks of disagreement and indecision that Enver, the most bellicose member of the junta now in control, succeeded in bouncing the government into war in late October 1914, with an unprovoked naval bombardment of Russian coastal positions in the Black Sea. However, the Ottoman navy, even manned by German crews, was in no position to effect landings in the Ukraine. Where then was Young Turk mettle to be displayed? Symbolic forces were eventually sent north to buff out Austro-German lines in Galicia, and half-hearted expeditions dispatched, at the prompting of Berlin, against British lines in Egypt. But these were sideshows. The crack troops of the army, led by Enver in person, were flung across the Russian border in the Caucasus. There, waiting to be recovered, lay the three provinces of Batum, Ardahan and Kars, subtracted from the empire at the Conference of Berlin in 1878. In the snowbound depths of the winter of January 1915, few returned. The Ottoman attack was shattered more completely than any comparable offensive in the Great War – fewer than one out of seven survived the campaign. As they straggled back, frost-bitten and demoralised, their rearguard was left exposed.
In Istanbul, the CUP reacted swiftly. This was no ordinary retreat into the kind of rear where another Battle of the Marne might be fought. The whole swathe of territory extending across both sides of the frontier was home to Armenians. What place could they have in the conflict that had now been unleashed? Historically the oldest inhabitants of the region, indeed of Anatolia at large, they were Christians whose Church – dating from the third century – could claim priority over that of Rome itself. But by the 19th century, unlike Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks or Albanians, they comprised no compact national majority anywhere in their lands of habitation. In 1914, about a quarter were subjects of the Russian, three-quarters of the Ottoman Empire. Under the tsars, they enjoyed no political rights, but as fellow Christians were not persecuted for their religion, and could rise within the imperial administration. Under the sultans, they had been excluded from the devshirme from the start, but could operate as merchants and acquire land, if not offices; and in the course of the 19th century they generated a significant intellectual stratum – the first Ottoman novels were written by Armenians.
Inevitably, like their Balkan counterparts, and inspired by them, this intelligentsia developed a nationalist movement. But it was set apart from them in two ways: it was dispersed across a wide and discontinuous expanse of territory, throughout which it was a minority, and it was divided between two rival empires, one of which posed as its protector, while the other figured as its persecutor. Most Armenians were peasants in the three easternmost Ottoman provinces, where they numbered perhaps a quarter of the population. But there were also significant concentrations in Cilicia, bordering on today’s Syria, and vigorous communities in Istanbul and other big cities. State suspicion of a minority with links across a contested border, latent popular hostility to unbelievers, and economic jealousy of alien commercial wealth made a combustible atmosphere around their presence in Anatolia. Abdulhamid’s personal animus had ensured they would suffer under his rule, which saw repeated pogroms against them. In 1894-96, anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000 died in massacres at the hands of special Kurdish regiments he created for ethnic repressions in the east. The ensuing international outcry, leading eventually to the theoretical appointment – it came to nothing – of foreign inspectors to ensure Armenian safety in the worst affected zones, confirmed belief in the disloyalty of the community.
The CUP’s immediate fear, as it surveyed the rout of its armies in the Caucasus, was that the local Armenian population might rally to the enemy. On 25 February, it ordered that all Armenian conscripts in its forces be disarmed. The telegrams went out on the day Anglo-French forces began to bombard the Dardanelles, threatening Istanbul itself. Towards the end of March, amid great tension in the capital, the Central Committee – Talat was the prime mover – voted that the entire Armenian population in Anatolia be deported to the deserts of Syria, to secure the Ottoman rear. The operation was to be carried out by the Teskilât-i Mahsusa, the ‘Special Organisation’ created for secret tasks by the party in 1913, now some 30,000 strong under the command of Bahaettin Sakir.
Ethnic cleansing on a massive scale was no novelty in the region. Wholesale expulsion of communities from their homes, typically as refugees from conquering armies, was a fate hundreds of thousands of Turks and Circassians had suffered, as Russia consolidated its grip in the northern Caucasus in the 1860s, and Balkan nations won their independence from Ottoman rule in the next half century. Anatolia was full of such mujahir, with bitter memories of their treatment by Christians. Widespread slaughter was no stranger to the region either: the Armenian massacres of the 1890s had many precedents, on all sides, in the history of the Eastern Question, as elsewhere. Nor was forcible relocation on security grounds confined to one side in the First World War itself: in Russia, at least half a million Jews were rounded up and deported from Poland and the Pale by the tsarist regime.
The enterprise on which the CUP embarked in the spring of 1915 was, however, new. For ostensible deportation, brutal enough in itself, was to be the cover for extermination – systematic, state-organised murder of an entire community. The killings began in March, still somewhat haphazardly, as Russian forces began to penetrate into Anatolia. On 20 April, in a climate of increasing fear, there was an Armenian uprising in the city of Van. Five days later, Anglo-French forces staged full-scale landings on the Dardanelles, and contingency plans were laid for transferring the government to the interior, should the capital fall to the Entente. In this emergency, the CUP wasted no time. By early June, centrally directed and co-ordinated destruction of the Armenian population was in full swing. As the leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann, writes, ‘the escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred within three months, a much more rapid escalation than Hitler’s later attack on the Jews.’ Sakir – probably more than any other conspirator, the original designer of the CUP – toured the target zones, shadowy and deadly, supervising the slaughter. Without even pretexts of security, Armenians in Western Anatolia were wiped out hundreds of miles from the front.
No reliable figures exist for the number of those who died, or the different ways – with or without bullet or knife; on the spot or marched to death – in which they perished. Mann, who thinks a reasonable guess is 1.2 to 1.4 million, reckons that ‘perhaps two-thirds of the Armenians died’ – ‘the most successful murderous cleansing achieved in the 20th century’, exceeding in its proportions the Shoah. A catastrophe of this order could not be hidden. Germans, present in Anatolia as Ottoman allies in many capacities – consular, military and pastoral among others – witnessed it and reported home, many in horror or anguish. Confronted by the American ambassador, Talat scarcely bothered even to deny it. For its part the Entente, unlike the Allies who kept silent at the Judeocide in the Second World War, denounced the extermination without delay, issuing a solemn declaration on 24 May 1915, promising to punish as criminals those who had organised it.
Victory in the Dardanelles saved the CUP regime. But this was the only real success, a defensive one, in its war effort. Elsewhere, in Arabia, in Palestine, in Iraq, on the Black Sea, the armies of a still basically agricultural society were beaten by its more industrialised adversaries, with great civilian suffering and huge military casualties, exceeded as a proportion of the population only by Serbia. With the collapse of Bulgaria, the Ottoman lifeline to the Central Powers, at the end of September 1918, the writing was on the wall for the CUP. Talat, passing back through Sofia from a trip to Berlin, saw the game was up, and within a fortnight had resigned as grand vizier. A new cabinet, under ostensibly less compromised leaders, was formed two weeks later, and on 31 October the Porte signed an armistice with the Entente, three days before Austria on 3 November and two weeks before Germany on 11 November. It looked as if dominoes were falling in a row, from weakest to strongest.
The impression was misleading. In Vienna, the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated overnight. In Berlin, soldiers’ and workers’ councils sprang up as the last Hohenzollern fled into exile. In Sofia, Stamboliski’s Peasant Party, which had staged a rising even before the end of the war, came to power. In each case defeat was incontestable, the old order was utterly discredited by it, and revolutionary forces emerged amid its ruins. In Istanbul there was no such scenario. The Ottoman Empire had entered the war with a gratuitous decision unlike that of any other power, and its exit was unlike that of any other too. For the CUP leaders did not accept that they were beaten. Their handover of the cabinet was a reculer pour mieux sauter. In the fortnight between their resignation from the government and the signature of an armistice, they prepared for resistance against an impending occupation, and a second round in the struggle to assert Turkish might. Enver invoked the Balkan disasters of 1912-13, when redemption had been snatched with his recovery of Edirne, as inspiration for the future. Talat set up a paramilitary underground, Karakol, headed by close associates – they included Enver’s uncle – and equipped with arms caches and funds from the Special Organisation, which was itself hastily dissolved, and the Unionist Party renamed. Archives were removed and incriminating files methodically destroyed.
When surrender was signed off the island of Lemnos on 31 October, but Allied forces had not yet entered the Straits, the CUP leaders made their final move. Dispositions were now complete, and there was no panic. During the night of 1-2 November, eight top leaders of the regime secretly boarded a German torpedo-boat, the former Schastlivyi captured from the Russians, which sped them to Sebastopol. Germany, still at war with the Entente, controlled the Ukraine. The party included Enver, Talat, Sakir, Nazim and Cemal. From the Crimea, Enver made in the direction of the Caucasus, while the rest of the party were taken by stages in disguise to Berlin, which they reached in January 1919. There they were granted protection under Ebert, the new Social Democratic president of the republic. Unionism was not Nazism, but if an analogy were wanted, it was as if in 1945 Hitler, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Goebbels and Goering, after laying careful preparations for Werewolf actions in Germany, had coolly escaped together to Finland, to continue the struggle.
Ten days later, the Allies entered Istanbul. At the war’s end, the Habsburg Empire had spontaneously disintegrated; the Hohenzollern gave way to a republic that had to yield up Alsace-Lorraine and suffer occupation of the Rhineland, but no real loss of German territorial integrity. The Ottoman Empire was another matter, its fate far more completely at the mercy of the victors. In late 1918, four powers – Britain, France, Italy and Greece – shared the spoils, the first two dividing its Arab provinces between them, the latter competing for gains in south-west Anatolia. It would be another two years before any formal agreement was reached between them on how the empire was finally to be dismembered. Meanwhile, they exercised joint supervision in Istanbul, initially quite loose, over an apparently accommodating cabinet under a new sultan, known for disliking the CUP.
The postwar misery of a defeated society was much worse than in Germany or Austria, but its resources for resisting any potentially Carthaginian peace were greater. In the capital, Karakol was soon funnelling a flow of agents and arms into the interior, where plans had already been laid during the war to move the centre of power, and there was little foreign presence to monitor what was going on. And, crucially, the October Revolution, by removing Russia from the ranks of the Allies, not only ensured that Eastern Anatolia remained beyond the range of any occupation. It left the Ottoman Ninth Army, which Enver had sent to seize the Caucasus, intact under its Unionist commander, once the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk cleared the path for it to advance all the way to Baku.
In the spring of 1919, another Unionist officer stepped on stage. Kemal, who also came from Rumelia, was an early member of the CUP, who had risen to prominence in the defence of the Dardanelles, before spending the bulk of the war in Syria. Uneasy relations with Enver had excluded him from the inner core of the party, absolving him from involvement with its Special Organisation. Returning from Damascus in pursuit of a ministry in the postwar cabinet, he was offered instead a military inspectorate in the east. The proposal probably came out of discussions with Karakol, with whom he made contact on getting back. Once arrived on the Black Sea coast, he moved inland and began immediately to co-ordinate political and military resistance – at first covert, soon overt – to Allied controls over Turkey. In what would in time become the War of Independence, he was assisted by four favourable factors.
The first was simply the degree of preparation for resistance left behind by the CUP leaders, which included not only extensive arms dumps and intelligence agents underground, but also a countrywide network of Societies for the Rights of National Defence as a quasi political party above ground; plus – more by fortune than forethought – a fully equipped regular army, out of Allied reach. The second was the solidarity extended by Russia, where Lenin’s regime, facing multiple Entente interventions to overthrow it in the Civil War, supported Turkish resistance to the common enemy with arms and funds. The third lay in divisions of the Entente itself. Britain was the principal power in Istanbul. But it was unwilling to match its political weight with military force, preferring to rely on Greece as its regional proxy. But the Greek card – this was the fourth essential element in the situation – was a particularly weak one for the victors to play.
Greece was not only resented as an inferior rival by Italy, and suspected as a British pawn by France. In Turkish eyes a jackal scavenging behind great powers, who were worthy adversaries of the empire, it had made virtually no contribution to the defeat of Ottoman arms, and yet was awarded the largest occupied zones, where substantial numbers of Greeks had already been expelled by the Special Organisation before the war, and ethnic tensions ran high. On top of all this, Greece was a small, internally divided state, of scant significance as a military power. A better target for a campaign of national liberation would have been difficult to imagine. Four days before Kemal arrived on the Black Sea, Greek troops landed in Smyrna and took over the surrounding region, igniting anger across the country, and creating perfect conditions for an enterprise that still looked risky to many Turks.
Within a year, Kemal had set up a National Assembly in Ankara, in open defiance of the government in Istanbul, and assembled forces capable of checking Greek advances, which had occupied more and more of western Anatolia. Another Greek push was blocked, after initial gains, in the autumn of 1921, and a year later the aggressor, still stationed on the same lines, was routed. Within ten days, Kemal’s army entered Smyrna and burned it to the ground, driving the remaining Greek population into the sea in the most spectacular of the savageries committed on both sides. In Britain, the debacle of his protégé brought the rule of Lloyd George to an end. Philhellene to the last, when he threatened to take the country to war over Turkish successes in October 1922, he was ousted by a revolt in the Carlton Club.
The following summer Curzon, abandoning earlier Entente schemes for a partition of Anatolia, accepted the basic modern borders of Turkey and the end of all extra-territorial rights for foreigners within it, signing with his French, Italian and Greek counterparts the Treaty of Lausanne that formally ended hostilities with the Ottoman state. Juridically, the main novelty of the treaty was the mutual ethnic cleansing proposed by the Norwegian philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen, who was awarded, the first in a long line of such recipients, the Nobel Peace Prize for his brainwave. The ‘population exchange’ between Turkey and Greece reflected the relative positions of victor and vanquished, driving 900,000 Greeks and 400,000 Turks from their homes in opposite directions.
Hailed as liberator of his country, Kemal was now master of the political scene. He had risen to power in large measure on the back of the parallel state Unionism had left behind when the Schastlivyi slipped its moorings, and for a time had more the status of primus inter pares among survivors of the CUP regime than of an uncontested chief. As late as the summer of 1921, Enver had hovered across the border on the Black Sea coast, waiting to re-enter the fray and take over leadership from Kemal, should he fail to stem the Greek advance. Military victory made Kemal immune to such a threat, which Talat in Berlin anyway thought ill-advised, instructing his followers to stick with the new leader. But the CUP also represented another kind of danger, as a potential albatross around the legitimacy of his rule. For under the Allied occupation, trials had been held of the key officials responsible for the Armenian genocide by the government in Istanbul, and all eight of the top leaders who had sailed to Sebastopol were condemned to death in absentia.
The Weimar regime, fearing they might implicate Germany if extradited, had given them cover. In Berlin, they had developed their own ambitious schemes for the recovery of Turkish power, crisscrossing Europe and Asia – Talat to Holland, Sweden, Italy; Cemal to Switzerland, Georgia; Sakir and Enver to Russia; others to Persia and Afghanistan – with differing plans for a comeback. Had they remained at large, they would have been an acute embarrassment to Kemal’s regime, as reminders of what linked them, forcing it to take a public position it wished at all costs to avoid. By a stroke of irony, Kemal was spared this problem by the Central Committee of the Armenian Revolutionary Party, the Dashnaks. Deciding at a meeting in Erevan to execute justice on its own account, the party dispatched operatives to carry out the verdicts of Istanbul. In March 1921, Talat was felled by a revolver outside his residence in the Uhlandstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm, in the centre of Berlin; in April 1922, Sakir and Cemal Azmi were shot a few doors down the same street; in July, Cemal was assassinated in Tbilisi; in August, beyond the reach of Dashnak vengeance, Enver was tracked down – supposedly by an Armenian Chekist – and killed fighting the Bolsheviks in Tajikistan. No clean sweep could have been more timely for the new order in Ankara. With the CUP chiefs out of the way, Kemal could proceed to build a Turkey in his image, unencumbered by too notorious memories of the past.
Three months after Enver was buried, the Ottomans finally followed the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Hohenzollerns, when the sultanate that the CUP had so carefully preserved was abolished. A year later, after tightly controlled elections had been held, Kemal was proclaimed president of a Turkish Republic. The symbolic break with centuries of a dynastic aura to which Unionism had clung was sharp enough, but by then small surprise. No such predictable logic marked what ensued. In the spring of 1924, Kemal scrapped the caliphate, a religious institution still revered across the Muslim world (there was a wave of protest as far away as India), and was soon closing down shrines and suppressing dervishes, banning the fez, changing the calendar, substituting civil law for the sharia, and replacing Arabic with Latin script. The scale and speed of this assault on religious tradition and household custom, embracing faith, time, dress, family, language, remain unique in the Umma to this day. No one could have guessed at such radicalism in advance. Its visionary drive separated Kemal from his predecessors with éclat.
But systematic though it was, the transformation that now gripped Turkey was a strange one: a cultural revolution without a social revolution, something historically very rare, indeed that might look a priori impossible. The structure of society, the rules of property, the pattern of class relations, remained unaltered. The CUP had repressed any strikes or labour organisation from the start. Kemal followed suit: Communists were killed or jailed, however good diplomatic relations were with Moscow. But if there was no anti-capitalist impulse in Kemalism, nor was there was any significant anti-feudal dimension to it. Ottoman rule, centred on an office-holding state, had never required or permitted a powerful landowning class in the countryside, least of all in Anatolia, where peasant holdings had traditionally prevailed – the only real exception being areas of the Kurdish south-east controlled by tribal chiefs. The scope for agrarian reform was thus anyway much more limited than in Russia, or even parts of the Balkans, and no attempt at it was made.
Yet the social landscape hit by the cultural revolution was at the same time the opposite of a stable traditional order, in one crucial respect. If no class struggles lay behind the dynamics of Kemalism, ethnic upheavals on a gigantic scale had reshaped Anatolian society. The influx of Turks and Circassians, refugees from Russian or Balkan wars, the extirpation of the Armenians, the expulsion of the Greeks, had produced a vast brassage of populations and properties in a still backward agricultural economy. It was in this shattered setting that a cultural revolution from above could be imposed without violent reaction from below. The extent of deracination, moral and material, at the conclusion of wars that had continued virtually without interruption for more than a decade – twice as long as in Europe – permitted a Kulturkampf that might otherwise have provoked an unmanageable explosion. But by the same token the revolution acquired no active popular impetus: Kemalism remained a vertical affair.
Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in one fundamental respect by abolishing its script and so at a stroke cutting off new generations from all written connection with the past, in its distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman tradition, but accentuated it. All premodern ruling groups spoke idioms differing in one way or another, if only in accent or vocabulary, from those they ruled. But the Ottoman elite, for long composed not even principally of Turks, was peculiarly detached from its subjects, as a corps of state servants bonded by command of a sophisticated language that was a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Turkish, with many foreign loan words, incomprehensible to the ruled. Administrative Ottoman was less elaborate than its literary forms, and Turkish remained in household use, but there was nevertheless a huge – linguistically fixed – gulf between high and low cultures in the empire.
Kemalism set out to do away with this, by creating a modern Turkish that would no longer be the despised patois of Ottoman times, but a language spoken alike by all citizens of the new republic. But while it sought to close the gap between rulers and ruled where it had been widest in the past, at the same it opened up a gap that had never existed to the same extent before, leaving the overall distance between them as great as ever. Language reform might unify; religious reform was bound to divide. The faith of the Ottoman elites had little in common with the forms of popular piety – variegated cults and folk beliefs looked down on by the educated. But at least there was a shared commitment to Islam. This tie was sundered by Kemal. Once the state started to target shrines and brotherhoods, preachers and prayer meetings, it was hitting at traditional objects of reverence and attachment, and the masses resisted it. At this level, the cultural revolution misfired. Rejected by the rural and small-town majority, Kemalist secularism was, however, adopted with aggressive zeal in the cities by modernised descendants of the Ottoman elite – bureaucrats, officers, professionals. In this urban stratum, secularism became over time, as it remains today, in its blinkered intensity, something like an ersatz religion in its own right. But the rigidity of this secularism is a peculiarly brittle one. Not just because it is intellectually thin, or divorced from popular feeling, but more profoundly because of a structural bad faith that has always been inseparable from it.
There is no reason to suppose that Kemal himself was anything other than a robust atheist, of more or less French Third Republic stamp, throughout his life. In that sense, he is entitled to be remembered as a Turkish Emile Combes, scourge of monkish mystification and superstition. But in his rise to power, he could no more dispense with Islam than Talat or Enver had done. ‘God’s help and protection are with us in the sacred struggle which we have entered upon for our fatherland,’ he declared in 1920. The struggle for independence was a holy war, which he led as Gazi, the Warrior for the Faith of original Ottoman expansion, a title he held onto down to the mid-1930s. ‘God is one, and great is his glory!’ he announced without a blush, in a sermon to the faithful delivered in a mosque in 1923. When the constitution of the Turkish Republic was framed in the following year, Islam was declared the state religion. The spirit in which Kemal made use of Muslim piety in these years was that of Napoleon enthroning himself with the blessing of the pope. But as exercises in cynicism they moved in opposite directions: Napoleon rising to power as a revolutionary, and manipulating religion to stabilise it, Kemal manipulating religion to make a revolution and turning on it once his power was stabilised. After 1926 little more was heard of the deity.
Tactical and transient, the new regime’s use of Islam, when no longer required, was easily reversed. But at a deeper level, a much tighter knot tied it to the very religion it proceeded on the surface to mortify. For even when at apparent fever pitch, Turkish secularism has never been truly secular. This is in part because, as often noted, Kemalism did not so much separate religion from the state as subordinate it to the state, creating ‘directorates’ that took over the ownership of all mosques, appointment of imams, administration of pious foundations – in effect, turning the faith into a branch of the bureaucracy. A much more profound reason, however, is that religion was never detached from the nation, becoming instead an unspoken definition of it. It was this that allowed Kemalism to become more than just a cult of the elites, leaving a durable imprint on the masses themselves. Secularism failed to take at village level: nationalism sank deeper popular roots. It is possible – such is the argument of Carter Findley in his Turks in World History – that in doing so it drew on a long Turkish cultural tradition, born in Central Asia and predating conversion to Islam, that figured a sacralisation of the state, which has vested its modern signifier, devlet, with an aura of unusual potency. However that may be, the ambiguity of Kemalism was to construct an ideological code in two registers. One was secular and appealed to the elite. The other was crypto-religious and accessible to the masses. Common to both was the integrity of the nation, as supreme political value.
As Christians, Greeks and Armenians were excluded from the outset. In the first elections to the National Assembly in 1919, only Muslims were entitled to vote, and when populations were ‘exchanged’ in 1923, even Greek communities in Cilicia whose language was Turkish, so thoroughly were they assimilated, were expelled on grounds that they were nevertheless infidels – their ethnicity defined not by culture, but by religion. Such excisions from the nation went virtually without saying. But there remained another large community within the country, most of whom spoke little Turkish, that could not be so dispatched, because it was Muslim. In ethnically cleansed Anatolia, Kurds made up perhaps a quarter of the population. They had played a central role in the Armenian genocide, supplying shock troops for the extermination, and fought alongside Turks in the War of Independence. What was to be their place in the new state?
While the struggle for independence was in the balance, Kemal promised them respect for their identity, and autonomy in the regions where they predominated. ‘There are Turks and Kurds,’ Kemal declared in 1920, ‘the nation is not one element. There are various bonded Muslim elements. All the Muslim elements which make this entity are citizens.’ But once victory was assured, Kurdish areas were stocked with Turkish officials, Kurdish place names were changed, and the Kurdish language banned from courts and schools. Then, with the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, Kemal did away with the common symbol of Islam to which he had himself appealed five years earlier, when he had vowed that ‘Turks and Kurds will continue to live together as brothers around the institution of the khilafa.’ The act detonated a major Kurdish revolt under a tribal religious leader, Sheikh Sait, in early 1925. A full half of the Turkish army, more than fifty thousand troops, was mobilised to crush the rebellion. On some reckonings, more of them died in its suppression than in the War of Independence.
In the south-east, repression was followed by deportations, executions and systematic Turkification. In the country as a whole, it was the signal for the imposition of a dictatorship, with a Law for the Maintenance of Order that closed down opposition parties and press for the rest of the decade. In 1937, in the face of a still more drastic programme of Turkification, Alevi Kurds rose in the Dersim region, and were put down yet more ruthlessly, with more modern weapons of destruction – bombers, gas, heavy artillery. Officially, the Kurds had by now ceased to exist. After 1925 Kemal never again uttered the word ‘Kurd’ in public. The nation was composed of one homogeneous people, and it alone, the Turks – a fiction that was to last another three generations.
But if Kurds were no different from Turks, whatever their language, customs or sense of themselves, what defined the indivisible identity of the two? Tacitly, it could only be what Kemalism could no longer admit, but with which it could never dispense – religion. There were still tiny Christian and Jewish communities in the country, preserved essentially in Istanbul and its environs, and in due course these would be subjected to treatment that made it clear how fundamental the division between believers and unbelievers continued to be in the Kemalist state. But though Islam delimited the nation, it now did so in a purely negative way: it was the covert identity that was left, after every positive determination had been subtracted, in the name of homogeneity. The result has been that Turkish secularism has always depended on what it repressed.
The repression, of course, had to be compensated. Once religion could no longer function publicly as common denominator of the nation, the state required a substitute as ideological cement. Kemal attempted to resolve the problem by generating a legendary essence of race and culture shared by all in the Turkish Republic. The materials to hand for this construction posed their own difficulties. The first Turkish tribes had arrived in Anatolia in the 11th century, recent newcomers compared with Greeks or Armenians, who had preceded them by more than a millennium, not to speak of Kurds, often identified with the Medes of antiquity. As even a casual glance at phenotypes in Turkey today suggests, centuries of genetic mixing followed. A purely Turkish culture was an equally doubtful quantity. The Ottoman elite had produced literary and visual riches of which any society could be proud, but this was a cosmopolitan culture, which was not only distinct from, but contemptuous of anything too specifically Turkish – the very term ‘Turk’ signifying a rustic churl well into the 19th century. Reform of the script now rendered most of this heritage inaccessible anyway.
Undaunted by these limitations, Kemalism fashioned for instruction the most extravagant mythology of any interwar nationalism. By the mid-1930s, the state was propagating an ideology in which the Turks, of whom Hittites and Phoenicians in the Mediterranean were said to be a branch, had spread civilisation from Central Asia to the world, from China to Brazil; and as the drivers of universal history, spoke a language that was the origin of all other tongues, which were derived from the Sun-Language of the first Turks. Such ethnic megalomania reflected the extent of the underlying insecurity and artificiality of the official enterprise: the less there was to be confident of, the more fanfare had to be made out of it.
Observing Kemalist cultural policies in 1936-37, Erich Auerbach wrote from Istanbul to Walter Benjamin: ‘the process is going fantastically and spookily fast: already there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic or Persian, and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible.’ Combining ‘a renunciation of all existing Islamic cultural tradition, a fastening onto a fantasy “ur-Turkey”, technical modernisation in the European sense in order to strike the hated and envied Europe with its own weapons’, it offered ‘nationalism in the superlative with the simultaneous destruction of the historic national character’.
Seventy years later, a Turkish intellectual would reflect on the deeper logic of this process. In an essay of unsurpassed power, one of the great texts in the world’s literature on nationalism, the sociologist Çaglar Keyder has described the desperate retroactive peopling of Anatolia with ur-Turks in the shape of Hittites and Trojans as a compensation mechanism for the emptying by ethnic cleansing at the origins of the regime. The repression of that memory created a complicity of silence between rulers and ruled, but no popular bond of the kind that a genuine anti-imperialist struggle would have generated, the War of Independence remaining a small-scale affair, compared with the traumatic mass experience of the First World War. Abstract in its imagination of space, hypomanic in its projection of time, the official ideology assumed a peculiarly ‘preceptorial’ character, with all that the word implies. ‘The choice of the particular founding myth referring national heritage to an obviously invented history, the deterritorialisation of “motherland”, and the studious avoidance and repression of what constituted a shared recent experience, rendered Turkish nationalism exceptionally arid.’
Such nationalism was a new formation, but the experience that it repressed tied it, intimately, to the nationalism out of which it had grown. The continuities between Kemalism and Unionism, plain enough in the treatment of the Kurds under the Republic, were starker still in other ways. For extermination of the Armenians did not cease in 1916. Determined to prevent the emergence of an Armenian state in the area awarded it – costlessly, on paper – by Woodrow Wilson in 1920, Kemal’s government in Ankara ordered an attack on the Armenian Republic that had been set up on the Russian side of the border in the Caucasus, where most of those who had escaped the killings of 1915-16 had fled. In a secret telegram the foreign minister, later Kemal’s first ambassador to the US, instructed Kazim Karabekir, the commander charged with the invasion, to ‘deceive the Armenians and fool the Europeans’, in carrying out the express order: ‘It is indispensable that Armenia be politically and physically annihilated.’ Soviet historians estimate 200,000 Armenians were slaughtered in the space of five months, before the Red Army intervened.
This was still, in some fashion, happening in time of war. Once peace came, what was the attitude of the Turkish Republic to the original genocide? To interested foreigners, Kemal would deplore, usually off the record, the killings as the work of a tiny handful of scoundrels. To its domestic audience, the regime went out of its way to honour the perpetrators, dead or alive. Two of the most prominent killers hanged in 1920 for their atrocities by the tribunals in Istanbul were proclaimed ‘national martyrs’ by the Kemalist Assembly, and in 1926 the families of Talat, Enver, Sakir and Cemal were officially granted pensions, properties and lands seized from the Armenians, in recognition of services to the country. Such decisions were not mere sentimental gestures. Kemal’s regime was packed, from top to bottom, with participants in the murders of 1915-16. At one time or another his ministers of foreign affairs and of the interior; of finance, education and defence; and of public works, were all veterans of the genocide; while a minister of justice, suitably enough, had been defence lawyer at the Istanbul trials. It was as if Adenauer’s cabinets had been composed of well-known chiefs of the SS and the Sicherheitsdienst.
What of Kemal himself? In Gallipoli till the end of 1915, he was posted to Diyarbekir in the south-east in the spring of 1916, after the region had been emptied of Armenians. He certainly knew of the genocide – someone in his position could hardly have been unaware of it – but played no part in it. How he would have acted had he been in the zone at the time is impossible to guess. After the event, it is clear that he regarded it as an accomplished fact that had become a condition of the new Turkey. In this he was like most of his countrymen, for the elimination of the Armenians in Anatolia, who were at least a tenth of the population, unlike that of the Jews in Germany, who were little more than 1 per cent, was of material benefit to large numbers of ordinary citizens, who acquired lands and wealth from those who had been wiped out, as from Greeks who had been expelled, another tenth of the population. Kemal himself was among the recipients of this vast largesse, receiving gratis villas abandoned by Greek owners in Bursa and Trabzon, and the mansion on the hill of Çankaya that became his official residence as head of state in Ankara. Originally the estate of an Armenian family, there the Presidential Palace of the Republic stands today, it too planted on booty from the genocide.
Yet between taking part in a crime, and gaining from one, there is a difference. Kemal was one of history’s most striking examples of ‘moral luck’, that philosophical oxymoron out of which Bernard Williams made a delphic grace. By accident of military appointments, his hands were clean of the worst that was committed in his time, making him a natural candidate for leadership of the national movement after the war. Personally, he was brave, intelligent and far-sighted. Successful as a military commander, he was formidable as the builder of a state. Bold or prudent as the occasion required, he showed an unswerving realism in the acquisition and exercise of power. Yet he was also moved by genuine ideals of a better life for his people, conceived as entry into a civilised modernity, modelled on the most advanced societies of the day. Whatever became of these in practice, he never turned on them.
Ends were one thing, means another. Kemal’s regime was a one-party dictatorship, centred on a personality cult of heroic proportions. Equestrian statues of Kemal were being erected as early as 1926, long before monuments to Stalin could be put up in Russia. The speech he gave in 1927 that became the official creed of the nation dwarfed any address by Khrushchev or Castro. Extolling his own achievements, it went on for 36 hours, delivered over six days, eventually composing a tome of 600 pages: a record in the annals of autocracy. Hardened in war, he held life cheap, and without hesitation meted out death to those who stood in his way. Kurds fell by the tens of thousands; though, once forcibly classified as Turks, they were not extirpated. Communists were murdered or jailed, the country’s greatest poet, Nazim Hikmet, spending most of his life in prison or exile. Kemal was capable of sparing old associates. But Unionists who resisted him were executed, trials were rigged, the press was muzzled. The regime was not invasive, by modern standards, but repression was routine.
It is conventional, and reasonable, to compare Kemal’s rule with the other Mediterranean dictatorships of his day. In that wan light, its relative merits are plain. On the one hand, unlike Salazar, Franco or Metaxas, Kemal was not a traditional conservative, enforcing reactionary moral codes in league with the Church, an enemy of progress as the time understood it. He was a resolute moderniser, who had not come to power as a defender of landlords or bankers. For him, the state was everything, family and religion nothing, beyond discardable backstops. At the same time, unlike Mussolini, who was a modernist too – one from whom he took the penal code under which Turkey still suffers – he was not an expansionist, hoping to build another empire in the region. Recovery of so much more territory than had seemed likely in 1918 was sufficient achievement in itself, even if Turkish borders could still be improved: one of his last acts was to engineer the annexation of Alexandretta (now known as Iskenderun), with the collusion of a weak government in Paris. But the imperial bombast of a New Rome was precluded: he was a seasoned soldier, not an adventurer, and the fate of Enver was too deeply burned into him. Nor did Kemal stage mass rallies, bombard the nation with speeches on radio, go in for spectacular processions or parades. There was no attempt at popular mobilisation – in this Turkey was closer to Portugal or Greece than Italy. None was needed, because there was so little class conflict to contain or suppress.
But just because his regime could dispense with a mass basis, Kemal was capable of reforms that Mussolini could never contemplate. In 1934 Turkish women were given equal voting rights, a change that did not come in Italy or France till 1945, in Greece the mid-1950s, in Portugal the mid-1970s. Yet here too the limits of his cultural revolution showed: 90 per cent of Turkish women were still illiterate when he died. The country had not been transformed into the modern society of which he had dreamed. It remained poor, agrarian, stifled rather than emancipated in the grip of the Father of the Turks, as he styled himself in the last period of his life.
By the end Kemal probably knew, at some level, that he had failed. There can be no certainty about his final years, because so much about his life remains a closely guarded secret of state. Only surmises are possible. What is clear is that he had never liked the administrative routines of rule, and from the late 1920s delegated day-to-day affairs of government to a mediocre subordinate, Ismet later called Inönü, who looked after these as premier, freeing Kemal to devote himself to his plans, pleasures and fancies in the salons of Çankaya or the cabarets of the Ankara or Pera Palace Hotels. There he summoned colleagues and cronies for sessions of all-night gambling or rousting, increasingly detached from daylight realities. In these flickering conclaves, Kemal shared a predilection with Stalin and Mao: all three, at the end, nocturnal rulers, as if tyranny requires the secrecy of the dark, and reversal of the order of hours, to bind its instruments to it. Nor did similarities stop there. If Kemal’s style of detachment from government resembled Mao’s – in his case too, it was a distance that did not preclude tight attention to big political operations: the crushing of Dersim or the Anschluss in Alexandretta – the fantastic theories of language that occupied his mind had their counterpart in the linguistic pronouncements of Stalin’s decline. All three, as they withdrew from the day, ended by suspecting those who had to live by it.
But in the taxonomy of dictators, Kemal stands apart in one unusual respect. When Politburo members assembled at Stalin’s villa, liquor was poured throughout the night; but the general secretary himself was careful to keep control of his consumption, the better to force his entourage to lose theirs, with the chance of revealing themselves in their cups. Kemal’s sessions were more genuine revelry. He had always been a heavy drinker, holding it well in debonair officer fashion. But in his final years, raki took its toll of him. Normally, absolute power is an intoxicant so much stronger than all others that alcohol, not infrequently shunned altogether, is at most only a tiny chaser. But in Kemal, perhaps because some scepticism in him – an underlying boredom with government – kept him from a full addiction to power, continual drinking became alcoholism.
Once pleasures of the will started to yield to pleasures of the flesh, women were the other obvious consolation. But they were no shield against his solitude; he was at ease only with men. In habits a soldier formed by a career in the barracks, he would have liked to move with grace in mixed society, that symbol of Western civility ever since Lettres Persanes, but was too crude for it. A marriage to the Western-educated daughter of a wealthy merchant lasted a couple of years. Thereafter, random connections and incidents followed, sometimes involving foreigners. A reputation for increasingly reckless behaviour developed. Adoptive daughters, guarded – a less up-to-date touch – by a black eunuch, multiplied. Towards the end, photographs of Kemal have something of the glazed look of a worn roué: a general incongruously reduced to a ravaged lounge lizard, terminal blankness nearby. Stricken with cirrhosis, he died in late 1938, at the age of 57.
A ruler who took to drink in despair at the ultimate sterility of his rule: that, at any rate, is one conjecture to be heard among critical spirits in Turkey today. Another, not necessarily contradictory of it, would recall Hegel’s description of the autocrats of Rome:
In the person of the emperor isolated subjectivity has gained a perfectly unlimited realisation. Spirit has renounced its proper nature, inasmuch as limitation of being and of volition has been constituted an unlimited absolute existence … Individual subjectivity thus entirely emancipated from control, has no inward life, no prospective nor retrospective emotions, no repentance, nor hope, nor fear – not even thought; for all these involve fixed conditions and aims, while here every condition is purely contingent. The springs of action are no more than desire, lust, passion, fancy – in short, caprice absolutely unfettered. It finds so little limitation in the will of others, that the relation of will to will may be called that of absolute sovereignty to absolute slavery.
The picture is highly coloured, and no modern ruler has ever quite fitted it, if only because ideology has typically become inseparable from tyranny, where on the whole legitimacy sufficed in classical times. But in its portrait of a kind of accidie of power, it hints at what might, on another reading, have been the inner dusk of Kemal’s dictatorship.
His successor, whom he had wanted to discard at the end, was another figure altogether. Inönü had served under Kemal as a CUP officer in 1916, collaborated with Karakol in the War Ministry in 1919-20, and held a senior command in the independence struggle. He was dour, pious and conservative, in appearance and outlook not unlike a somewhat less plump Turkish version of Franco. With war in Europe on the horizon by 1938, his regime sought an understanding with Germany, but was rebuffed by Berlin, at that point angling for the favour of Arab states apprehensive of Turkish revanchism. To insure itself against Italian expansion, and the potential implications for Turkey of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Ankara then signed a defence treaty with Britain and France in the Mediterranean, shortly after the outbreak of war. When Italy attacked France in 1940, however, Inönü’s government reneged on its obligations, and within a year had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Four days later, when Hitler invaded Russia, the Turkish leadership was ‘carried away with joy’.
Enver’s brother Nuri was dispatched posthaste to Berlin to discuss the prospect of arousing Turkic peoples in the USSR to rally to the Nazis, and a pair of Turkish generals, Emir Hüsnü Erkilet and Ali Fuad Erden, were soon touring the front lines of the Wehrmacht in Russia. After briefings from Von Rundstedt in the field, they were flown to Rastenberg to meet the Führer in person. ‘Hitler,’ General Erkilet reported, brimming with enthusiasm,
received us with an indescribable modesty and simplicity at his headquarters where he commands military operations and dispatches. It is a huge room. The long table in the middle and the walls were covered with maps that showed respective positions at the battle zones. Despite that, they did not hide or cover these maps, a clear sign of trust and respect towards us. I expressed my gratitude for the invitation. Then he half-turned towards the map. At the same time, he was looking into our eyes as if he was searching for something. His dark eyes and forelock were sweeter, livelier and more attractive than in photographs. His southern accent, his formal, perfect German, his distinctive, powerful voice, his sturdy look, are full of character.
Telling the Turks that they were the first foreigners, other than allies, to be ushered into the Wolfsschanze, and promising them the complete destruction of Russia, ‘the Führer also emphasised that “this war is a continuation of the old one, and those who suffered losses at the end of the last war, would receive compensation for them in this one.”’ Thanking him profusely for ‘these very important and valuable words’, Erkilet and Fuad hastened back to convey them to the ‘National Chief’, as Inönü liked to style himself.
Their mission was not taken lightly in Moscow. Within a week, Stalin issued a statement denouncing Erkilet’s exchange with Hitler, and soon afterwards embarked on a high-risk operation to try and cut off the prospect of joint compensation for 1918. Determined to stop the Turkish army linking arms with the Wehrmacht in the Caucasus, he sent the top NKVD operative Leonid Eitingon – responsible for the killing of Trotsky two years earlier – to Ankara to assassinate the German ambassador, Von Papen, in the hope of provoking Hitler into a punitive attack on Turkey. The attempt was bungled, and its origin quickly discovered. But Moscow had every reason for its misgivings. In August 1942, the Turkish premier Saraçoglu told Von Papen that as a Turk he ‘passionately desired the obliteration of Russia’. Indeed, it was his view that ‘the problem of Russia can only be solved by Germany on condition at least half the Russians living in Russia are annihilated.’ As late as the summer of 1943, another Turkish military mission was touring not only the Eastern Front but the west wall of Nazi defences in France, before flying once more to an audience in the Wolfsschanze. The war had revived Unionist ambitions: at one time or another, Turkey manoeuvred to regain Western Thrace, the Dodecanese, Syria, the region of Mosul, and protectoral rights over Albania.
Nor was alignment with the New Order confined to policy abroad. In June 1941, all non-Muslim males of draft age – Jewish, Greek or residual Armenian – were packed off to labour camps in the interior. In November 1942, as the battle for Stalingrad raged, a ‘wealth tax’ was inflicted on Jews and Christians, who had to pay up to ten times the rate for Muslims, amid a barrage of anti-semitic and anti-infidel attacks in the press – Turkish officials themselves becoming liable to investigation for Jewish origins. Those who could not or would not meet the demands of local boards were deported to punishment camps in the mountains. The effect was to destroy the larger part of non-Muslim businesses in Istanbul.
The operation, unabashedly targeting ethno-religious minorities, was in the lineal tradition of Turkish integral nationalism, passed down from Unionism to Kemalism. ‘Only the Turkish nation is entitled to claim ethnic and national rights in this country. No other element has any such right,’ Inönü had declared a decade earlier. His minister of justice dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s: ‘The Turk must be the only lord, the only master of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish stock can have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.’ New in the campaign of 1942-43 was only the extent of its anti-semitism, and the fact that the Inönü regime – hard pressed economically by the costs of a greatly increased military budget – levied any part of its exactions on Muslims at all. Jewish converts to Islam were not included among the faithful for these purposes. Such was the climate in which Hitler returned the compliment by sending Talat’s remains back to Turkey, in a ceremonial train bedecked with swastikas, to be buried with full honours in Istanbul, by the Martyrs’ Monument on Liberty Hill, where patriots can proceed to this day.
However, once the tide started to turn in Russia, and Germany looked as if it might be defeated, Ankara readjusted its stance. While continuing to supply the Third Reich with the chromite on which the Nazi war machine depended, Turkey now also entertained overtures from Britain and America. But, resisting Anglo-American pressures to come down on the Allied side, Inönü made it clear that his lodestar remained anti-Communism. The USSR was the main enemy, and Turkey expressly opposed any British or American strategy that risked altering Germany's position as a bastion against it, hoping London and Washington would make a separate peace with Berlin, for future joint action against Moscow. Dismayed at the prospect of unconditional surrender, Inönü issued a token declaration of war on Germany only after the Allies made it a condition of his getting a seat at the United Nations, a week before the deadline they had set for doing so expired, in late February 1945. No Turkish shot was fired in the fight against Fascism.
Peace left the regime in a precarious position. Internally, it was now thoroughly detested by the majority of the population, which had suffered from a steep fall in living standards as prices soared, taxes increased and forced labour was extorted in the service of its military build-up. Inflation had affected all classes, sparing not even bureaucrats, and the wealth tax had made even the well-off jumpy. Externally, the regime had been compromised by its affair with Nazism – which post-war Soviet diplomacy was quick to point out – and its refusal to contribute to Allied victory even after it had become certain.
Aware of his unpopularity, in early 1945 Inönü attempted to redress it with a belated redistribution of land, only to provoke a revolt in the ranks of the ruling party, without gaining credibility in the countryside. Something more was needed. Six months later, he announced that there would be free elections. Turkey, for twenty years a dictatorship, would now become a democracy. Inönü’s move was designed to kill two birds with one stone. Abroad, it would restore his regime to legitimacy, as a respectable partner of the West, taking its place in the comity of free nations led by the United States, and entitled to the benefits of that status. At home, it could neutralise discontent by offering an outlet for opposition without jeopardising the stability of his rule. He had no intention of permitting a true contest.
In 1946, a flagrantly crooked election returned the ruling Republican People's Party with a huge majority over a Democratic Party led by the defectors who had broken with it over the agrarian bill. The fraud was so scandalous that, domestically, rather than repairing the reputation of the regime, it damaged it yet further. Internationally, however, it did the trick. Turkey was duly proclaimed a pillar of the West, the Truman Doctrine picking it out for economic and military assistance to withstand the Soviet threat, and Marshall Aid began to pour in. Economic recovery was rapid, Turkey posting high rates of growth over the next four years.
These laurels, however, did not appease the Turkish masses. Inönü, after first appointing the leading pro-Fascist politician in his party – responsible for the worst repression under Kemal – as premier, then attempted to steal the more liberal clothes of the Democrats, with concessions to the market and to religion. It was of no avail. When elections were held in 1950, it was impossible to rig them as before, and by now – so Inönü imagined – unnecessary: the combination of his own prestige and relief from wartime rigours would carry the day for the RPP anyway. He was stunned when voters rejected his regime by a wide margin, putting the Democrats into power with a parliamentary majority, honestly gained, as large as the dishonest one he had engineered for himself four years earlier. The dictatorship Kemal had installed was over. |
As you might imagine, we Texans I'm seventh generation are mighty picky about the way our state is depicted in literature. Years ago, when I read Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, I simply had to suspend all disbelief since the book is littered with historical flaws and enjoy it as a pure work of fiction. Same goes for The Texicans.
You can't for a second pretend Nina Vida has done all her homework, but the book, set in 1840s Texas, is a completely engaging tale following a handful of remarkable settlers. Aurelia Ruíz is a young Mexican woman living in San Antonio whose father marries her off to a Texas Ranger; after her husband dies, she ends up in a Comanche camp. Soon after, she meets Joseph Kimmel, a Polish Jew who weds an Alsatian immigrant, Katrin, and who establishes a most unusual ranching community. Together, they struggle against the perils common in that day: disease, hunger, and outlaw bands of Rangers.
This isn't the Texas hill country my ancestors knew; it's the hill country purely of Vida's powerful imagination, shot with a dose of magic realism, with ''the clouds girdling the mountains in a rainbow of color'' and the sun ''a golden button overhead.'' I only wish Vida hadn't ended with a few pages on Aurelia's fate; they feel hastily tacked on and downright unnecessary. |
Terryl L. Givens. Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmology, God, Humanity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xv, 405 ppg. Notes, index. Cloth: $34.95. ISBN 978-1-9979492-8.
Few books encompass as audacious a scope as Wrestling the Angel. In this work, the first of projected two volumes, prolific Mormon scholar Terryl Givens presents a rigorous and exhaustive overview of Mormonism’s theological foundations. This is not necessarily a historical work that systematically traces theological developments and places them in cultural context as it is an attempt to faithfully reproduce the intellectual tradition founded by Joseph Smith, refined by Parley and Orson Pratt, and tinkered with by a handful of twentieth century thinkers like B.H. Roberts, James Talmage, John Widtsoe, and, sometimes, more contemporary LDS leaders. The finished product is an overwhelming account that makes a compelling case for Mormonism’s inclusion within the Christian theological canon.
The book is separated into five sections. The first, “Frameworks,” outlines Mormonism’s relationship with theology and posits a new prism through which to understand Joseph Smith’s conception of “restoration”; the second is a very brief overview of Mormonism’s theological narrative, which is meant to ground the remainder of the discussion. The final three chapters are the “meat” of the project by taking, in turn, the three broad topics under consideration: “Cosmology,” “The Divine,” and “The Human.” Each chapter within these sections engages particular topics—embodiment, salvation, theosis, etc.—and places them within Christian theological context. (more…)
I have a post up over at The Junto this morning reflecting on my audiobook listening habits. I note there, among other things, that “audiobooks … have become a means of helping me keep up with scholarship outside of early America (including periods and subjects I will likely need to teach at some future point), introducing myself to historical subjects in which I am peripherally interested (including the history of sport, the history of food), and of listening to popular and academic histories that fit under the broad umbrella of ‘early American history’ that I might not find time to read in the immediate future.” While writing that post, my thoughts turned to the relative dearth of quality audiobooks on subjects that fall under the large umbrella of Mormon Studies.
My reasons for wanting to listen to Mormon Studies audiobooks largely mirror the reasons cited in the first paragraph — it would be a convenient way to keep up with a field I remain committed to and interested in but one in which my current research does not fall. Given the general success of books in the subfield published by major university and trade presses over the last few years, I am a little surprised that more have not been recorded as audiobooks. Looking back through the library of audiobooks I’ve purchased, downloaded, and listened to over the last three or four years (a library of 50+ volumes), I realized that it included only one Mormon title — our very own Matt Bowman’s excellent survey of Mormon history. A quick search for “Mormon,” “LDS,” and “Latter-day Saints” in Audible.com’s library turns up an odd mix of ex-Mormon narratives, nineteenth-century faith promoting titles, a couple of volumes either for or against Mitt Romney, and only a small handful of Mormon Studies titles (including, most promisingly, Terryl Givens’s The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction and Spencer Fluhman’s A Peculiar People). The only biography of Joseph Smith available is Alex Beam’s American Crucifixion [edit: I somehow missed Robert Remini’s short and accessible biography of JS.]. The offerings at University Press Audiobooks are even slimmer. (more…)
Several years ago–perhaps 2009 or 2010–I first heard about a paper slated to be published in a major literary journal that radically reinterpreted the Book of Mormon as an Amerindian apocalypse. Whispers of both its imminent publication and its brilliance continued, and at some point, I was forwarded a prepublication draft of the paper. This isn’t altogether unusual in Mormon Studies–unpublished papers and theses, typescripts of difficult-to-access manuscript sources, and PDFs of out-of-print books passed from person to person have a long, storied, and sometime litigious history in the often insular world of Mormon scholarship. But unlike other instances I’m aware of, the importance of this paper was not in its access to otherwise unavailable primary source material or its controversial content, but rather in its interpretive significance. (more…)
Michael W. Homer, Joseph’s Temples: The Dynamic Relationship Between Freemasonry and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014).
There are few topics in Mormon history more fraught than the relationship between Mormonism and masonry. From the Mormon apologetic folklore that Joseph Smith only attended three masonic meetings to the anti-Mormon accusation that the temple rituals were merely plagiarized masonic rites, this is a topic that enlivens discussion in academic classrooms and missionary companionship study alike. Michael Homer’s Joseph’s Temples is the most recent contribution to this discussion, as it is a vastly expanded version of his previous work on the topic. And though it may not be up to addressing the deeper and more complex issues involved with the topic that are demanded by today’s Mormon studies field, it is the culmination of four decades of Mormon scholarship on the religion’s contested history with the contested fraternity.
Unlike most work on Mormonism and masonry, this book is not dedicated to the two years between Joseph Smith’s introduction of temple endowments, which came months after his induction to the Nauvoo Lodge, and his death in Carthage Jail, when his last words were the masonic call for distress. Rather, this book has a very broad chronological and geographic sweep, detailing freemasonry’s development in Renaissance Europe to masonry’s demise and resurgence in Utah. Half of the book does, though, detail with the Nauvoo period, which chapters dedicated to race, gender, ritual, and succession. Though this framework for chapters made it somewhat redundant at times—and certainly did not help with the book’s length—it did add to the book’s exhaustive nature, which is indeed its best strength. (more…)
The latest issue of the Journal of Mormon History arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes recently. Here’s a brief rundown of the articles:
- “The Curious Case of Joseph Howard, Palmyra’s Seventeen-Year-Old Somnium Preacher,” by Noel A. Carmack
- Carmack compares Joseph Smith’s method of translation through seer stones with two New York “somnium preachers,” Rachel Baker and Joseph Howard, who delivered devotional and theological messages while appearing to be asleep or entranced. Carmack argues that Baker and Howard provided a context within which to place JS’s “subconscious religious exhortations taken down by dictation–one of which occurred only blocks away from the reflective, developing boy prophet.”
- “The Upper-Room Work: Esotericism in the Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite), 1853-1912,” by Christopher James Blythe
- Blythe continues his ongoing investigation of Cutlerite history with an investigation of the role of esotericism (basically, the practice of “secret” rituals) in the development and persistence of Culterite identity in the face of competition from RLDS and other Restoration groups. (more…)
Just a quick note to turn your attention to two fine documentary articles published in the latest issue of BYU Studies Quarterly:
This post belongs to our occasional “Scholarly Inquiry” series which facilitates conversations with important scholars in Mormon history and studies. Today we reprise our focus on religious practice and ritual from a few months ago and hear from Dan Belnap, professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at BYU. Belnap, who has a particular interest in ritual in both ancient and contemporary contexts, is the editor of a book entitled By Our Rites of Worship: Latter-day Saint Views on Ritual in History, Scripture, and Practice, and published by the Religious Studies Center at BYU and Deseret Book last year. (And it features, one must add, a stellar chapter from our very own J. Stapley on the development of Mormon ritual!) We appreciate Professor Belnap’s responses and invite your thoughtful engagement. Also, stay tuned for Part 2.
Blaine M. Yorgason, Richard A. Schmutz, and Douglas D. Alder, All That Was Promised: The St. George Temple and the Unfolding of the Restoration (SLC: Deseret Book, 2013). 348 pp.
Those who have been to St. George, Utah, know that the LDS temple there is something of a spectacle. Blindingly white against the red-rock bluffs that surround it, the contrast is startling enough that it seems to demand some kind of compelling explanation. St. George is now flourishing as Utah’s warm-weather mecca, but for generations it was a quiet and dusty desert outpost like many others throughout the state. Then, the incongruity must have been even more glaring. Why build a temple of worship at such an early date and in such remote place? To what purpose? And, retrospectively, to what effect?
Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints. By Stephen H. Webb. Oxford University Press, 2013. 203 pages (with appendices). $27.95
Stephen Webb, a Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian, attempts to introduce non-Mormons to Mormon metaphysics and theology with a “rosy” outlook onto his subject (42). Although Mormon Christianity is published by Oxford University Press, its tone and Webb’s frank admission that he is a practicing Catholic may help Mormon Christianity to gain wide distribution from Christian bookstores, as well as Deseret Book (the LDS Church owned bookstore-which does carry the book). Webb’s means of understanding Mormonism are derived from his argument that Mormonism is a positive, Christian amalgamation of Catholicism and Protestantism. He employs each religious tradition to explain Mormonism to a non-specialized audience (15). (more…)
Susanna Morrill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of White Roses on the Floor of Heaven: Nature and Flower Imagery in Latter-day Saints Women’s Literature, 1880-1920 and several excellent articles. She has previously guest blogged for JI here and here.
In the latest issue of the Journal of Mormon History, Boyd J. Petersen effectively and succinctly describes Mormon women’s dialogic literary conversations about Eve in the Woman’s Exponent: “The speaking of many voices created a carnivalesque atmosphere where language was at once serious and subversive.” This is a really great description of what was going on in Emmeline B. Wells’ Exponent. This periodical gave Mormon women a distinct, authoritative bandwidth within the community to express their views, views that as Petersen notes sometimes “subvert[ed] and sometimes co-opt[ed] the patriarchal gaze that watched over the publication.” Petersen adds much to our understanding of how the present-day understanding of Eve developed as he meticulously chronicles the diversity of interpretations of Eve that appeared on the pages of the Exponent: she was alternately a hero, a goddess, “the hapless and unintentional instigator of the Fall.”
If you subscribe to BYU Studies Quartely like I do, you’ll know that the latest issue is no longer hot off the press. Not even warm, really. Mine has been lying around for a while, clamoring for recognition, languishing for want of care. Without further neglect, then, the JI brings you another content overview for BYUSQ 52:4. Three historical articles in the issue may be of interest to JI’s readers:
The latest Journal of Mormon History has been reaching subscribers’ mailboxes this week, which means it’s time for the JI’s semi-regular brief reviews of the issue.
Ronald W. Walker, joined by Matthew J. Grow, completes his two part analysis of the 1851-1852 “Runaways” incident in “The People Are ‘Hogaffed or Humbugged': The 1851-52 National Reaction to Utah’s ‘Runaway’ Officers, Part 2,’ 1-52. The first installment, which appeared in the last issue of JMH, chronicled the origins of the crisis with the first non-Mormon federal appointees in Utah Territory. This second part continues the story as the scene shifts to the nation’s capital, and follows the public affairs and behind-the-scenes activities of Jedediah Grant, John M. Berhisel, and Thomas L. Kane. Walker and Grow not only tell a gripping tale, but also demonstrate the importance of this event in the long and tortured history of Mormon-federal relations from the late 1840s through the 1890s. Unlike the similar struggle with federal appointees in the lead-up to the Utah War, the 1852 even actually turned out in the Mormons’ favor. The article provides a teaser for Walker and Grow’s forthcoming documentary volume on Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane’s correspondence. (more…)
Todd M. Compton. A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013. 642 pp. Illustrations, photos, maps, bibliography, index. Cloth: $44.95; ISBN: 978-1-60781-234-0
Todd Compton’s first major contribution to Mormon history was his 1997 In Sacred Loneliness, a collective biography of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. In his most recent offering, Compton has returned to the biographer’s craft, with a definitive examination of Jacob Hamblin, a prominent figure in the Mormon colonization of southern Utah and the Southwest. Hamblin was a devout Latter-day Saint, who preached the Gospel to Indians, married plural wives, and played a key role in the expanding Kingdom of God in the West. Even in his lifetime, Hamblin achieved renown not only among the Saints as the “Apostle to the Lamanites,” but also nationally as a guide and an interpreter for John Wesley Powell’s famed expeditions to the Grand Canyon. Previous Hamblin biographies have been either fictionalized or hagiographic, reflecting the “Hamblin legend” that emerged in the nineteenth century. More recent works, reacting against these earlier portrayals, have cast Hamblin in a more unfavorable light. Compton’s biography, the first full-length scholarly treatment of Hamblin’s life, presents a positive reevaluation, while not ignoring the frontiersman’s flaws. Compton expertly analyzes Hamblin’s evolving attitudes toward Indians, showing how the missionary gradually became the “Apostle to the Lamanites.” (more…)
Sheri Dew’s recently released Women and the Priesthood: What One Mormon Woman Believes (Deseret 2013) comes on the heels of an eventful year for liberal Mormon women. The day(s) of Pants, the petitions for women to pray in conference, and the launching of Ordain Women’s official site, among other events, have provoked widespread discussion on the well-worn but still dimly understood topic of women and the priesthood.
Women and the Priesthood, despite the title, isn’t so much an attempt to answer questions about women’s lack of priesthood authority (ordination), the nature of the priesthood, or the relationship between gender and the priesthood, so much as it is an attempt to discuss women’s general status and participation in the Church. This is important to note, since readers approaching the book with the former questions in mind will most likely be disappointed. Dew dedicates only one chapter to the topic of women and the priesthood, packed between seven other “contextual” or “foundation-laying” chapters, which highlight ways women should understand their eternal role, identity, and relationship to God and the Church.
It is clear early on that Dew’s imagined audience is split between those who think women have no significance in the Church (i.e. uninformed outsiders or members who are missing the picture) and those wishing to defend women’s current position in LDS belief and practice. As a result of this polarization, a considerable population is excluded: active, faithful members who are uneasy with or puzzled about the relationships between women, gender, and the priesthood, as currently practiced or discussed by the Church. (more…)
The last few years have been good for Mormon history.
This is the fifth annual installment of my “Retrospect” series here at JI, in which I offer an overview of scholarship in the field from the last twelve months. (For previous installments, see, in reverse chronological order, here, here, here, and here.) I always enjoy these posts, as it not only allows me to keep track of everything that has been done, but also see broader trends in the field. And to better accomplish that latter goal, I include articles from the last twelve months as well, since that gives a broader understanding of the current historiographical interests and movements.
As always, while I aim to be broad and liberal in scope, I am still human with my own interests and biases. Thus, it is very likely I overlooked some important books and articles, so it is your job to fill in my gaps in the comments. And just like last year, at the end of the post I will offer my own picks for MHA’s awards, and encourage you to do the same.
Also, remember that you can find the best and most in-depth tracing of Mormon studies at the recently launched Mormon Studies Review! (more…)
We’re pleased today to welcome back J.B. Haws for Part II of our Q & A on his recent article in the JMH and his forthcoming book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), both exploring the changing image of Mormons in American media from George Romney’s presidential run in the 1960s to his son Mitt Romney’s campaigns in the early 21st century. Last time, we focused mainly on Haws’ methods and sources. Today, we’re exploring specific aspects of his analysis and a few of his conclusions.
In August, I reviewed J.B. Haws’ recent article “When Mormonism Mattered Less in Presidential Politics: George Romney’s 1968 Window of Possibilities”, published in the summer issue of the Journal of Mormon History. Haws, an Assistant Professor of Church History at BYU, graciously agreed to participate in a Q & A to answer some of my lingering questions and those submitted by members of the JI community. In the course of our conversation, we also discussed how the research he presented in his article is extended in his forthcoming (and highly-anticipated!) book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), which promises to be an important and much-needed addition to our understanding of Mormonism in the contemporary period, as well as of public representations (and misrepresentations) of Mormonism across the last half of the 20th century.
JBH: I should say, by way of preface, that as I read through your questions, my reaction after every one was to think, “Wow—great question.” But I’m going to resist typing that every time (but just know I’m still thinking that!). Thanks for these thoughtful and thought-provoking questions.
CHJ: Thank you, J. B.! We’re excited that you were willing to offer us some answers. So—let’s get to it!
The Fall 2013 issue of BYU Studies Quarterly recently hit the web and print subscribers’ mailboxes, which means that it’s time for another quick journal content overview for JI’s readers. All the usual caveats apply—that is, these summaries are meant to whet your appetite, but for the full effect you’ll want to visit the pieces and their arguments in their totality. In this issue of BYUSQ, four original articles and other tidbits are on offer.
Kenneth L. Alford, ed. Civil War Saints. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center (BYU), 2012. xxxiii + 569 pp. Hardcover $31.99. ISBN 978-0-8425-2816-0.
I have contributed here a thorough and lengthy discussion of this book; if you would like just the highlights, please read my first and last paragraphs below. –NRR
As America continues its commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, it is fitting that at least one new book should come out examining the connections between Latter-day Saints and the war. Kenneth Alford aims in this edited volume to update and add to the small body of literature surrounding Mormons, the Utah Territory, and the Civil War. While he falls short of creating a one-volume comprehensive treatment of the subject, he and his co-contributors have explored important, previously-uncharted territory that make this book an important addition to any Mormon or Civil War History enthusiast’s library. (more…)
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Almost exactly one year ago, the University of North Carolina Press published Edward Blum and Paul Harvey’s The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, a sweeping and provocative analysis of the ways in which Americans from various walks of life over the last four hundred (!) years have imagined Jesus. Among the many contributions the book makes, and of particular interest to JI readers, is the authors’ situating Mormons as important players in the larger story of race and religion they narrate so masterfully. In fact, one paragraph in particular has garnered more attention than nearly any other part of the book—a brief discussion in chapter 9 of the large, white marble Christus statue instantly recognizable to Mormons the world over. In the latest issue of the Journal of Mormon History, Noel Carmack authored a 21 page review of The Color of Christ, focusing on their treatment of Mormonism and paying particular attention to their discussion of the Christus. Professors Blum and Harvey generously accepted our invitation to respond here, as part of both our ongoing Responses series and as an appropriate contribution to our look at Mormon material culture this month. |
REMARKS OF THE RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR,
ALEXANDER M.KADAKIN, AT THE SYMPOSIUM TO MARK THE 90TH BIRTH ANNIVERSARY OF ACADEMICIAN EUGENY P.CHELYSHEV
New Delhi, November 7, 2011
It is not very often that life affords us a chance to honour veterans who are over 90. Such jubilee itself is a strong reason which has assembled us today in this hall of Sahitya Akademi. Even more so – this morning we are celebrating an auspicious 90th birth anniversary of a scientist whose name, for over six decades, has been synonymous with Indian studies in Russia – Academician Eugeny P.Chelyshev.
Both President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh highly assessed Professor Chelyshev's talent in their messages. His life and achievements have inextricably linked the two countries more than any political treaties. President Medvedev noted that Eugeny Chelyshev's fundamental works dedicated to India's culture and literature became widely acclaimed not only in Russia but all over the world.
There are not so many scholars the realm of whose scientific interests would be so broad. Academician Chelyshev devoted his entire scientific and creative endeavor to our country’s best friend - India. His sphere of academic pursuits ranges from teaching and studying Russian to the cultural legacy of the Russia’s greatest émigrés many of whom Professor Chelyshev knows personally. He also studied the interaction of Russian culture with the Orient and discovered the famous phenomenon of the Oriental Renaissance.
Eugeny Chelyshev is one of the glorious cohort of those hero soldiers who fought at the battlefields of World War II. After 67 years since the crushing defeat of Nazism, the person whose 90th jubilee we are celebrating today, remains the only one living academician who marched along the Red Square at the historic Victory Parade in 1945.
It is natural and symbolic that the venue of the seminar to honour Academician Chelyshev’s anniversary is the prestigious Sahitya Akademi. The whole gamut of Eugeny Chelyshev’s illustrious contribution to Indological studies in Russia, research work on Russian and Indian literature in a global dimension embraces over a dozen books in Russian, several volumes in English and Hindi, over 600 articles and essays. The multidimensional character of academician Chelyshev’s oeuvre has served as the basis for his outstanding comprehensive comparative studies in interaction of Indian, British and Russian cultures and the history of Indian literature at large.
Academician E.P Chelyshev has always been at the forefront of Russian-Indian cultural and academic cooperation and is justly considered a pathbreaker of Soviet Indology. For 32 years he worked in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences. For a long time he headed the Indian Languages Department of the Moscow State University of International Relations under the Foreign Ministry. Eugeny Petrovich is a famous educationalist of great talent and wisdom. I am proud to be Guru Chelyshev’s “chela”, and many of us comprise the formidable “Indian mafia” within the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Academician Chelyshev remains a person of inexhaustible enthusiasm, joie de vivre and multifaceted talents. He keeps amazing his friends, colleagues, followers and disciples. At a ripe young age of 90 he is actively involved in academic and organizational activities. Eugeny P. Chelyshev co-chairs the Academic Council on Study and Preservation of Cultural and Environmental Heritage. His duties as the Vice-Chairman of the Russian Language Council of the Government occupy a special place in a day-to-day work of Eugeny Petrovich.
While celebrating today the 90th birth anniversary of the outstanding Russian scholar, our dearest Guru, public figure and colleague, I would like to express my sincere admiration for him as a great man of letters and a warm-hearted human being. May God further bless Academician Eugeny Petrovich Chelyshev with good health and success in implementing all of his cherished dreams and endeavors.
Many happy returns of the day, dear Guru-ji! |
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In an alternative version, she spent a night at Apollo's temple with her twin brother Helenus, at which time the temple snakes licked her ears clean so that she was able to hear the future. This is a recurring theme in Greek mythology, though sometimes it brings an ability to understand the language of animals rather than an ability to know the future. Apollo loved Cassandra and when she did not return his love, he cursed her so that her gift would become a source of endless pain and frustration. In some versions of the myth, this is symbolized by the god spitting into her mouth; in other Greek versions, this act was sufficient to remove the gift so recently given by Apollo, but Cassandra's case varies. From the play Agamemnon, it appears that she made a promise to Apollo to become his consort, but broke it, thus incurring his wrath.
While Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy (she warned the Trojans about the Trojan Horse, the death of Agamemnon, and her own demise), she was unable to do anything to forestall these tragedies. Her family believed she was mad, and according to some versions, kept her locked up. In versions where she was incarcerated, this was typically portrayed as driving her truly insane, although in versions where she was not, she is usually viewed as remaining simply misunderstood.
After the Trojan War, she sought shelter in the temple of Athena, where she was raped by Ajax the Lesser. Cassandra was then taken as a concubine by King Agamemnon of Mycenae. Unbeknownst to Agamemnon, while he was away at war, his wife, Clytemnestra, had begun an affair with Aegisthus. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus then murdered both Agamemnon and Cassandra. Some sources mention that Cassandra and Agamemnon had twin boys, Teledamus and Pelops, both of whom were killed by Aegisthus.
Homer. Iliad XXIV, 697-706; Homer. Odyssey XI, 405-434; Aeschylus. Agamemnon; Euripides. Trojan Women; Euripides. Electra; Apollodorus. Bibliotheke III, xii, 5; Apollodorus. Epitome V, 17-22; VI, 23; Virgil. Aeneid II, 246-
A modern psychological perspective on Cassandra is presented by Eric Shanower in Age of Bronze: Sacrifice. In this version, Cassandra, as a child, is molested by a man pretending to be a god. His warning "No one will believe you!" is one often spoken by abusers to their child victims.
A similar situation occurred in Lindsay Clarke's novel The Return from Troy (presented as a reawakened memory), where a priest of Apollo forced himself upon Cassandra and was stopped only when she spat in his mouth. When the priest used his benevolent reputation to convince Priam that he was innocent of her wild claims, Cassandra subsequently went insane.
The myth of Cassandra is also retold by German author Christa Wolf in Kassandra. She retells the story from the point of view of Cassandra at the moment of her death and uses the myth as an allegory for both the unheard voice of the woman writer and the oppression and strict censorship laws of East Germany.
Author William Faulkner, in his novel Absalom, Absalom!, writes of Rosa Coldfield, a principal character in the Sutpen Dynasty/Tragedy, and how her "childhood ... consisted of a Cassandra-like listening beyond closed doors", alluding to both mythological concerns that (1) Cassandra was locked away, or behind closed doors (as with Rosa's youth), and (2) that Cassandra's prophecies were true, yet fated to be ignored (as with Rosa's premonitions about Thomas Sutpen and his desire to forge a dynasty).
The author Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote a historical novel called, Firebrand, which presents a story from Cassandra's point of view.
In Clemence McLearn's Inside the Walls of Troy, Cassandra had a strong friendship with Queen Helen of Sparta when she came to Troy with Prince Paris. Cassandra essentially hated Helen but gave in to her unbearable joy and happiness and became Helen's "confidante". At the end of the story instead of Cassandra being raped and taken as Agamemnon's "battle prize", she simply joined her two sisters, Polyxena and Laodice at the temple of Athena. The rest of her story is left untold.
In more modern literature, Cassandra has often served as a model for tragedy and Romance, and has given rise to the archetypical character of someone whose prophetic insight is obscured by insanity, turning their revelations into riddles or disjointed statements that are not fully comprehended until after the fact. Notable examples are the character of River Tam from the science fiction TV series Firefly, the character Cassandra in the TV series The X-Files (she played an alien abductee that nobody took seriously), and the science fiction short story "Cassandra" by C. J. Cherryh.
"Cassandra" is the title of an episode of the British sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf. In it a futuristic computer, Cassandra, is discovered to have the ability to predict the future. She foretells a number of conversations and events which each come true, save for one scene where one character kills another in a jealous rage. It emerges this is a lie to try to punish the killer for his responsibility for her own later death, which Cassandra correctly predicts he accidentally causes. The story in the episode deviates somewhat from myth in that she is not universally disbelieved. The theme of the futility of trying to change the future is explored at several points in the episode.
In the film The Scorpion King, Cassandra is a sorceress who can read the future and is key to the antagonist king's (Memnon) battle victories. Memnon is in love with her, but she eventually leaves him for Mathayus, the protagonist. At first, she claims to lose her foreseeing abilities when sleeping with a man, but it is later revealed, after an intimate night with Mathayus and pretending to lose her abilities, that this was merely pretence to prevent Memnon from taking advantage of her. Cassandra is played by Kelly Hu.
In "Help," an episode of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a young girl named Cassandra "Cassie" Newton foresees her own death despite the attempts of the show's protagonist, Buffy Summers, to prevent it. She also foresees what will happen in Buffy's final battle with one of the show's antagonists, The First, and its army.
In the episode "Hourglass" of the sci-fi series Smallville, the plot revolves around an old people's home where one of the residents who was blinded on the day of the meteor shower, Cassandra Carver, can apparently see the future. She also makes reference to the story of Troy when mentioning to Lex Luthor, who had brought her a bunch of flowers, that "It was the Greeks who also brought gifts." The resident also sees Lex's future and his ascendancy to the US Presidency.
The Cassandra syndrome is a fictional condition used to describe someone who believes that he or she can see the future but cannot do anything about it. Comic writer Chris Claremont has used this syndrome as the motivation for the villainous actions of mutant terrorists Mystique and Destiny, the latter being a blind precognitive, whose attempts to prevent the destruction of the mutant race at the hands of humanity often lead to further anti-mutant hysteria.
In Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's Scream 2, Sidney Prescott, the main character played by Neve Campbell, is a mirror of Cassandra in the sense that she is cursed by forever being susceptible to murder, conspiracy, and being alone, and actually appears in a play within the film titled "Cassandra", where she also plays the lead. During the rest of the trilogy, she has made clear that if it weren't for her, the plot of the movies, and for Sidney, the events in her life, would have never happened, and that continually surviving attacks has made the ones closest to her even more vulnerable to the characteristics that plague her life. Sidney is also seen speaking the line, "You know, I saw it all coming. I knew it wasn't over", referring to the murders in Scream 2. This is a prophecy revealed, a play on the curse that plagued Cassandra.
German power metal group Blind Guardian featured two songs about Cassandra and the Trojan War on their 2002 album A Night at the Opera, Under the Ice and And Then There Was Silence, the latter of which was the title track of the 2001 "warmup" single for the album.
Fear Before the March of Flames released a song on the album The Always Open Mouth titled 'Taking Cassandra to the End of the World Party.'
The musical group ABBA released a song titled "Cassandra" as a B-side to the single, The Day Before You Came at the very end of their time as an active group. Anni-Frid Lyngstad has the lead vocal and sings about Cassandra's departure from a town after some unnamed disasters have occurred and her own regret about not believing Cassandra's warnings. The song has been included in subsequent compilation CD releases.
In Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, which features several appearances by classical Greek figures, Cassandra appears warning Allen's character not to move to the countryside. As usual, she is not listened to. She makes a later appearances, delivering the following line: "I see disaster. I see catastrophe. Worse, I see lawyers!" She is played by Danielle Ferland. In his 2007 movie Cassandra's Dream the main characters' boat is called "Cassandra's Dream". During the movie many characters have bad dreams. The final sequence is onboard the boat.
The Melbourne band Something for Kate released the song 'Cassandra Walks The Plank" as a B-side on their single "California" from 2007. Vocalist and guitarist Paul Dempsey later describes the song as a 'Straightforward angry rant' about warning signs in the modern world on their iTunes Originals release.
David Murray Black also released a song called "Prophet of Doom" in his CD Sacred Ground about Cassandra.
The Motorcycle Boy's girl Cassandra in Rumble Fish says that she is not hooked on drugs, but Rusty-James doesn't believe her.
American progressive metal group Dream Theater refer to Cassandra fleetingly in a song called "Voices" in which they mock the prophetic message of modern day religion.
The plight of Cassandra was a recurring motif in the 1995 film Twelve Monkeys.
The character Cassandra Kirschbaum in the 2004 MGM film Saved! is likely named after the Greek Cassandra. Cassandra Kirschbaum is the only Jewish student at the Evangelical Christian high school that serves as the film's setting. Her character fills the role of "truth-teller" at the school, exposing other characters' hypocrisy. Cassandra Kirschbaum also appears in the Off-Broadway musical based on the film.
Dr. Bocker, in John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes mentions Cassandra fleetingly in "Phase 2," referring to the aspect of one who predicts the future but goes unheeded, with dire consequences. The quote can be found on page 107 of the 1973 publishing by Penguin Books
Woody Allen - Cassandra's dream
Cassandra - Scream 2
Cassandra Aria - Composed for Scream 2 by Danny Elfman. |
If a poem is not forgotten as soon as the circumstances of its origin, it begins at once to evolve an existence of its own, in minds and lives, and then even in words, that its singular maker could never have imagined. The poem that survives the receding particulars of a given age and place soon becomes a shifting kaleidoscope of perceptions, each of them in turn provisional and subject to time and change, and increasingly foreign to those horizons of human history that fostered the original images and references.
Over the years of trying to approach Dante through the words he left and some of those written about him, I have come to wonder what his very name means now, and to whom. Toward the end of the Purgatorio
, in which the journey repeatedly brings the pilgrim to reunions with poets, memories and projections of poets, the recurring names of poets, Beatrice, at a moment of unfathomable loss and exposure, calls the poem's narrator and protagonist by name, "Dante," and the utterance of it is unaccountably startling and humbling. Even though it is spoken by that Beatrice who has been the sense and magnet of the whole poem and, as he has come to imagine it, of his life, and though it is heard at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, with the terrible journey done and the prospect of eternal joy ahead, the sound of his name at that moment is not at all reassuring. Would it ever be? And who would it reassure? There was, and there is, first of all, Dante the narrator. And there was Dante the man living and suffering in time, and at once we can see that there is a distinction, a division, between them. And then there was, and there is, Dante the representation of Everyman, of a brief period in the history of Italy and of Florence, of a philosophical position, a political allegiance -- the list is indeterminate. Sometimes he seems to be all of them at once, and sometimes particular aspects occupy the foreground.
The commentaries date back into his own lifetime -- indeed, he begins them himself, with the Vita Nuova
-- and the exegetes recognized from the beginning, whether they approved or not, the importance of the poem, the work, the vision, as they tried to arrive at some fixed significance in those words, in a later time when the words themselves were not quite the same.
Any reader of Dante now is in debt to generations of scholars working for centuries to illuminate the unknown by means of the known. Any translator shares that enormous debt. A translation, on the other hand, is seldom likely to be of much interest to scholars, who presumably sustain themselves directly upon the inexhaustible original. A translation is made for the general reader of its own time and language, a person who, it is presumed, cannot read, or is certainly not on familiar terms with, the original, and may scarcely know it except by reputation.
It is hazardous to generalize even about the general reader, who is nobody in particular and is encountered only as an exception. But my impression is that most readers at present whose first language is English probably think of Dante as the author of one work, The Divine Comedy
, of a date vaguely medieval, its subject a journey through Hell. The whole poem, for many, has come to be known by the Inferno
alone, the first of the three utterly distinct sections of the work, the first of the three states of the psyche that Dante set himself to explore and portray.
There are surely many reasons for this predilection, if that is the word, for the Inferno
. Some of them must come from the human sensibility's immediate recognition of perennial aspects of its own nature. In the language of modern psychology the Inferno
portrays the locked, unalterable ego, form after form of it, the self and its despair forever inseparable. The terrors and pain, the absence of any hope, are the ground of the drama of the Inferno
, its nightmare grip upon the reader, its awful authority, and the feeling, even among the secular, that it is depicting something in the human makeup that cannot, with real assurance, be denied. That authority, with the assistance of a succession of haunting illustrations of the Inferno
, has made moments and elements of that part of the journey familiar and disturbing images which remain current even in our scattered and evanescent culture.
The literary presence of the Inferno
in English has been renewed in recent years. In 1991 Daniel Halpern asked a number of contemporary poets to provide translations of cantos of the Inferno
which would eventually comprise a complete translation of the first part of the Commedia
. Seamus Heaney had already published fine versions of sections from several of the cantos, including part of canto 3 in Seeing Things
(1991), and he ended up doing the opening cantos. When Halpern asked me to contribute to the project, I replied chiefly with misgivings, to begin with. I had been trying to read Dante, and reading about him, since I was a student, carrying one volume or another of the bilingual Temple Classics edition -- pocket-sized books -- with me wherever I went. I had read parts, at least, of the best-known translations of the Commedia
: Henry Francis Cary's because it came with the Gustave Doré illustrations and was in the house when I was a child; Longfellow's despite a late-adolescent resistance to nineteenth-century poetic conventions; Laurence Binyon's at the recommendation of Ezra Pound, although he seemed to me terribly tangled; John Ciardi's toward which I had other reservations. The closer I got to feeling that I was beginning to "know" a line or a passage, having the words by memory, repeating some stumbling approximation of the sounds and cadence, pondering what I had been able to glimpse of the rings of sense, the more certain I became that -- beyond the ordinary and obvious impossibility of translating poetry or anything else -- the translation of Dante had a dimension of impossibility of its own. I had even lectured on Dante and demonstrated the impossibility of translating him, taking a single line from the introductory first canto, examining it word by word:Tant' ê amara che poco ê più morte
indicating the sounds of the words, their primary meanings, implications in the context of the poem and in the circumstances and life of the narrator, the sound of the line insofar as I could simulate it and those present could repeat it aloud and begin to hear its disturbing mantric tone. How could that, then, really be translated? It could not, of course. It could not be anything else. It could not be the original in other words, in another language. I presented the classical objection to translation with multiplied emphasis. Translation of poetry is an enterprise that is always in certain respects impossible, and yet on occasion it has produced something new, something else, of value, and sometimes, on the other side of a sea change, it has brought up poetry again.
Halpern did not dispute my objections, but he told me which poets he was asking to contribute to the project. He asked me which cantos I would like to do if I decided to try any myself. I thought, in spite of what I had said, of the passage at the end of canto 26, where Odysseus, adrift in a two-pointed flame in the abyss of Hell, tells Virgil "where he went to die" after his return to Ithaca. Odysseus recounts his own speech to "that small company by whom I had not been deserted," exhorting them to sail with him past the horizons of the known world to the unpeopled side of the earth, in order not to live "like brutes, but in pursuit of virtue and knowledge," and of their sailing, finally, so far that they saw the summit of Mount Purgatory rising from the sea, before a wave came out from its shore and overwhelmed them. It was the passage of the Commedia
that had first caught me by the hair when I was a student, and it had gone on ringing in my head as I read commentaries and essays about it, and about Dante's figure of Odysseus. Odysseus says to Virgil:Io e i compagni eravam vecchi e tardi
In the Temple Classics edition, where I first read it, or remember first reading it, the translation by John Aitken Carlyle, originally published in 1849, readsI and my companions were old and tardy
and it was the word "tardy" that seemed to me not quite right, from the start. While I was still a student, I read the John D. Sinclair translation (Oxford), originally published in 1939, where the words readI and my companions were old and slow
"Slow," I realized, must have been part of the original meaning, of the intent of the phrase, but I could not believe that it was the sense that had determined its being there.
The Charles S. Singleton translation, published in 1970, a masterful piece of scholarly summary, once again saysI and my companions were old and slow
That amounts to considerable authority, and it was, after all, technically correct, the dictionary meaning, and the companions surely must have been slowed down by age when Odysseus spoke to them. But I kept the original in my mind: "tardi," the principal sense of which, in that passage, I thought had not been conveyed by any of the translations.
When I told Halpern that I would see whether I could provide anything of use to him, I thought of that word, "tardi."
It had never occurred to me to try to translate it myself, and I suppose I believed that right there I would have all my reservations about translating Dante confirmed beyond further discussion. As I considered the word in that speech it seemed to me that the most important meaning of "tardi"
was not "tardy," although it had taken them all many years to sail from Troy. And not "slow," despite the fact that the quickness of youth must have been diminished in them. Nor "late," which I had seen in other versions, and certainly not "late" in the sense of being late for dinner. I thought the point was that they were late in the sense that an hour of the day may be late, or a day of a season or a year or a destiny: "late" meaning not having much time left. And I consideredI and my companions were old and near the end
and how that went with what we knew of those lines, how it bore upon the lines that followed. Without realizing it I was already caught.
That canto had always been for me one of the most magnetic sections of the Inferno
, and among the reasons for that was the figure of Dante's Odysseus, the voice in the flame, very far from Homer's hero, whom Dante is believed to have known only at second hand, from Virgil and other Latin classics and translations. Apparently Odysseus' final voyage is at least in part Dante's invention, and it allows him to make of Odysseus in some sense a "modern" figure, pursuing knowledge for its own sake. In Dante's own eagerness to learn about the flames floating like fireflies in the abyss he risks falling into the dark chasm himself.
That final voyage in the story of Odysseus is one of the links, within the ultimate metaphor of the poem, between the closed, immutable world of the Inferno
and Mount Purgatory. It represents Odysseus' attempt to break out of the limitations of his own time and place by the exercise of intelligence and audacity alone. In the poem, Mount Purgatory had been formed out of the abyss of Hell when the fall of Lucifer hollowed out the center of the earth and the displaced earth erupted on the other side of the globe and became the great mountain, its opposite. And canto 26 of the Inferno
bears several suggestive parallels to the canto of the same number in the Purgatorio
. In the latter once again there is fire, a ring of it encircling the mountain, and again with spirits in the flames. This time some of the spirits whom Dante meets are poets. They refer to each other in sequence with an unqualified generosity born of love of each other's talents and accomplishments (this is where the phrase "il miglior fabbro"
comes from, as one of Dante's predecessors refers to another) and their fault is love, presumably worldly love, and no doubt for its own sake. The end of that canto is one of Dante's many moving tributes to other poets and to the poetry of others. When at last he addresses the great Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, the troubadour generously refers to Dante's question as "courteous" -- a word that, within decades of the great days of the troubadours and the courts of love, and then the vicious devastations of the Albigensian Crusade, evoked an entire code of behavior and view of the world. And in Dante's poem, Daniel's reply, eight lines of it that are among the most beautiful lines in the poem, is in Daniel's own Provençal, and it echoes one of Daniel's own most personal and compelling poems with an affectionate, eloquent closeness like that of Mozart's quartets dedicated to Haydn.
must be one of the most carefully planned poems ever written. Everything in it seems to have been thought out beforehand, and yet such is the integrity of Dante's gift that the intricate consistency of the design is finally inseparable from the passion of the narrative and the power of the poetry. His interest in numerology, as in virtually every other field of thought or speculation in his time, was clearly part of the design at every other point, and the burning in the two cantos numbered twenty-six is unlikely to have come about without numerological consideration. His own evident attraction to the conditions of the soul, the "faults," in each canto, is a further connection.
The link between the Odysseus passage and Mount Purgatory was one of the things that impelled me to go on trying to translate that canto for Halpern's project. (I eventually sent him the result, along with a translation of the following canto.) Those two cantos which I contributed to his proposed Inferno
I include here even though Robert Pinsky has since published his own translation of the whole of the Inferno
-- a clear, powerful, masterful gift not only to Dante translation in our language but to the poetry of our time. I am beginning with my own translations of these cantos partly because they are where I started, and because they provide the first glimpse in the poem of Mount Purgatory, seen only once, at a great distance, and fatally, at the end of the mortal life of someone who was trying to break out of the laws of creation of Dante's moral universe
For in the years of my reading Dante, after the first overwhelming, reverberating spell of the Inferno
, which I think never leaves one afterward, it was the Purgatorio
that I had found myself returning to with a different, deepening attachment, until I reached a point when it was never far from me; I always had a copy within reach, and often seemed to be trying to recall part of a line, like some half-remembered song. One of the wonders of the Commedia
is that, within its single coherent vision, each of the three sections is distinct, even to the sensibility, the tone, the feeling of existence. The difference begins at once in the Purgatorio
, after the opening lines of invocation where Dante addresses the holy Muses (associated with their own Mount Helicon) to ask that poetry rise from the dead -- literally, "dead poetry [la morta poesì]
rise up again." Suddenly there is the word "dolce"
-- sweet, tender, or all that is to be desired in that word in Italian and in the word's siblings in Provençal and French -- and then "color," and there has been nothing like that before. Where are we?
We -- the reader on this pilgrimage, with the narrator and his guide, Virgil -- have plunged upside down into the dark frozen depths of Hell through the bowels of the Evil One, at the center of the earth, and have made our way through the tunnel of another birth to arrive utterly undone at a sight of the stars again. And we are standing on a shore seeing the first light before dawn seep into the sky, and the morning star, "lo bel pianeta che d'amar conforta"
"The beautiful planet that to love inclines us," with all the suggestions of consolation after the horrors of the infernal world. We are seeing the sky, our sky, the sky to which we wake in our days. There is no sky in Hell. There are no stars there, no hours of daylight, no colors of sky and sea. One of the first vast differences between Hell, the region of immutable despair, and Purgatory is that the latter place, when we step out on it, is earth again, the ground of our waking lives. We are standing on the earth under the sky, and Purgatory begins with a great welling of recognition and relief.
Of the three sections of the poem, only Purgatory happens on
the earth, as our lives do, with our feet on the ground, crossing a beach, climbing a mountain. All three parts of the poem are images of our lives, of our life, but there is an intimacy peculiar to the Purgatorio
. Here the times of day recur with all the sensations and associations that the hours bring with them, the hours of the world we are living in as we read the poem. Tenderness, affection, poignancy, the enchantment of music, the feeling of the evanescence of the moment in a context beyond time, occur in the Purgatorio
as they do in few other places in the poem. And hope, as it is experienced nowhere else in the poem, for there is none in Hell, and Paradise is fulfilment itself. Hope is central to the Purgatorio
and is there from the moment we stand on the shore at the foot of the mountain, before the stars fade. To the very top of the mountain hope is mixed with pain, which brings it still closer to the living present.
When I had sent the two cantos of the Inferno
to Halpern, I was curious to see what I could make of canto 26 of the Purgatorio
, which had captivated me for so long, and also of the lovely poem of Arnaut Daniel's which Dante echoed in that canto, and of at least one of the poems of Guido Guinizzelli, to whom he spoke with such reverence, as to a forebear.
Other moments in the Purgatorio
had held me repeatedly. Almost thirty years earlier, on the tube in London, I had been reading canto 5, which was already familiar ground. It was like listening to a much-loved piece of music, hearing a whole current in it that had never before seemed so clear. I rode three stops past my destination and had to get off and go back and be late. And here once again, trying vainly to find equivalents for words and phrases, I was in the grip of the Purgatorio
. After canto 26 I went back to the beginning.
The opening cantos that comprise the section known as the "Antepurgatorio" are among the most beautiful in the whole poem. I thought of trying to make something in English just of those, the first six in particular. I turned them over slowly, line by line, lingering over treasures such as La Pia's few lines at the end of canto 5, hoping that I was not betraying them by suggesting any other words for them (though Clarence Brown once said to me, to reassure me about another translation of mine, "Don't worry, no translation ever harmed the original") or at any rate betraying my relation to them. There were lines that had run in my head for years, their beauty inexhaustible. The morning of the first day, looking out to sea, in canto I:L'alba vinceva l'ora mattutina
che fuggia innanzi, sì che di lontano
conobbi il tremolar della marina.
What could anyone do? My attempt ran:The dawn was overcoming the pallor of daybreak
which fled before it, so that I could see
off in the distance the trembling of the sea.
It was, I kept saying, some indication of what was there, what was worth trying to suggest, at least, in English. I wanted to keep whatever I made by way of translation as close to the meaning of the Italian words as I could make it, taking no liberties, so that someone with no Italian would not be misled. And I hoped to make the translation a poem in English, for if it were not that it would have failed to indicate what gave the original its memorable power.
is the section of the poem in which poets, poetry, and music recur with fond vividness and intimacy. The meetings between poets -- Virgil's with his fellow Mantuan Sordello, over twelve hundred years after Virgil's own life on earth; his meeting with the Roman poet Statius; Dante's with Guido Guinizzelli and with Arnaut Daniel and the singer Casella -- are cherished and moving moments. It is worth noting something about the current of poetic tradition that Dante had come to in his youth.
Of course there was Virgil, to whose Aeneid
he alludes with such familiarity that he must have long known many parts of it by heart. And Statius and other Latin poets whose work was available in late-thirteenth-century Florence.
Another dominant lineage of poetic tradition which Dante inherited and felt around him as he reached maturity, that of the troubadours and their own antecedents, was at once closer to him and more complex, but it gathers into one strand the poetic conventions that were available to him, and some essentials of his thinking about love, and a crucial directive in the development of the figure of Beatrice in the Commedia
The three currents, and Dante's ideas about them, merge inextricably in the poem, as they seem to have done in the mind of its author. Beatrice, in the story as he finally made it, is the origin of the great journey itself, sending the poet Virgil to guide the lost Dante through the vast metaphor: the world of the dead which is the world of life, the world of eternity which is the world of time. The principle that binds the metaphor in all of its aspects, as we are told in one way after another, is love. After the passage around the beclouded terrace of anger, and Virgil's statement that "neither creator nor creature was ever without love," Dante asks, with considerable hesitation, for Virgil to explain (indeed to demonstrate, "dimostri"
) to him what love is. Virgil's presence there itself, as a guide on this unprecedented journey with nothing to gain for himself in all eternity, and the watchful provision of Beatrice that had sent him, and is waiting for Dante the pilgrim at the top of Mount Purgatory, are of course, both of them, dramatic demonstrations
of love; but Virgil proceeds to expound, to explain, the origins and evolution of love according to Aristotle, whose work he might have known in his lifetime, and Aquinas, whose work he could only have encountered posthumously somewhere between his own day and Dante's. In due course Beatrice speaks on the subject, and some of her sources are the same. But quite aside from the explications of the scholastics, the subject of love, including aspects of it that were being purged in canto 26 of the Purgatorio
, was the central theme of the great flowering of troubadour poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In that surge of new poetry and feeling, the forms of love ranged from the openly sensual to the unattainably ethereal, and from such familiar treatment as may have verged upon folk poetry of the time (and is still to be found in the popular culture of our own time) to courtly, allusive, highly stylized poetry that seemed to treat love on many planes at once.
In its rapid development the tradition of troubadour poetry evolved the convention of a beloved to whom, and about whom, for whom the poems were written. Of course love poetry, both erotic and idealized in one way or another, had existed and had been important in other ages and in many -- perhaps in most -- cultures. And the figure of the beloved who is the subject of the poems and to whom they are addressed had often been evoked, whether idealized or not. But the theme and elevation of a beloved emerged with particular intensity in the tenth-century Arabic poetry of the Omayyad Moorish kingdoms of southern Spain. In the highly cultivated poetry and culture that had evolved there, a code of attitudes, behavior, gestures developed, a stylized choreography, that were clearly the matured result of an ancient tradition. Early in the eleventh century Ali ibn-Hazm of Cordova, a philosopher and literary theoretician, produced a work entitled On Love
in thirty chapters. In the chapter "Love at First Sight" he tells of the poet Ibn-Harûn al-Ramadi, who met his beloved only once, at a gate in Cordova, and wrote all his poems for the rest of his life to her. Love in that tradition is spoken of as the greatest of inspirations and the ultimate happiness. In Spain, Arabic philosophy absorbed the work of Plato, which the Provençal poets and then their Italian successors drew upon in turn. The forms of the Andalusian Arabic poetry were developed from, or in accord with, the songs of the folk tradition. A stanza was evolved, its measure strictly marked for chanting, and it made important use of something that had not been part of the classical languages of Europe and their Latinate descendants -- rhyme. One form in particular, the zajal
, or "song," became the most common one in Spanish-Arabic poetry in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Out of the eleven surviving poems of the first Provençal poet whose works have come down to us, the one who is generally referred to as the first of the troubadours, Guilhem de Peitau, or Guillaume de Poitiers, three are in the form of the Hispano-Arabic zajal. And Count Guilhem, one of the most powerful men in Europe in his generation, was at least as familiar, and probably as sympathetic, with the courts of Arabic Spain as he was with much of northern France. So were the troubadours who were his immediate successors; and the brief-lived courts of love of Guilhem's granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine continued a brilliant kinship with the Moorish kingdoms to the south.
The rhymed and highly stylized poetry of the troubadours, with its allegiance to music, the codes of the courts of love, the Hispano-Arabic assimilation of the philosophy of classical Greece, were essentials of the great Provençal civilization of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The secular splendor of that culture and its relative indifference to the tedious imperium of the Church were in the end (1209) barbarously and viciously ruined by the wave of political ruthlessness and deadly self-righteousness known as the Albigensian Crusade, one of the great atrocities of European history. (It was a bishop, Arnaud de Cîteaux, who gave the order, at the sack of Beziers, "Kill them all. God will know His own." And they did.) Both that rich, generous, brilliant tradition and the devastation that had been visited upon it were part of Dante's heritage. The latter had taken place less than half a century before he was born; the Mantuan poet Sordello, for one, had spent a major part of his life at the court of Toulouse. The legacy of the troubadours survived even beyond Dante. Petrarch is sometimes described as the last of the troubadours. And the attention given to the manners, the psychic states, the perspectives, the ultimate power of love, the exalted beloved, the forms of verse, including rhyme, all come from the culture of Provence either directly or via the court of Frederick II of Sicily.
But Dante's beloved, Beatrice, did have an earthly original in his own life and youth. From what can be known at present she was named Bice, daughter of Folio Portinari. Dante describes his first sight of her, in 1284, when he was nineteen. She eventually married, and then died in 1290, when he was twenty-five, ten years before the ideal date of the Commedia
. In La Vita Nuova
, finished in the years just after Bice's death, Dante vows to leave her a literary monument such as no woman had ever had. So she led him, he tells us, to the journey that becomes the Commedia
and his own salvation.
That love, and that representation of it, took place in a life of enormous political turmoil and intellectual ferment. Dante, as his words and the passions in them make clear, was from Florence, where he was born in May 1265. His family believed themselves to be descended from the original Roman founders of the city. An ancestor, Dante's great-great-grandfather, had died, Dante tells us, on the second crusade. But his family ranked among the lesser nobility of the city and was not wealthy.
The Florence into which Dante was born was deeply divided into political factions. Principally, there were the Ghibellines, who were in effect the feudal aristocracy and, with the backing of the Empire, the holders of most power; and the Guelphs, the party of the lesser nobles and the artisans, bitterly opposed to the principles and conduct, the heedless self-interest of the Ghibellines. Dante was educated in Franciscan schools and at an early age began to write poetry. There were troubadours in Florence in his youth, and apparently he knew them, knew their poems, learned from them. His early friendship with the aristocrat Guido Cavalcanti led them both to develop a style and art which distinguished them from their predecessors and most of their contemporaries. Cavalcanti too had a literary beloved, named Mandetta, in his poems; he tells how he caught sight of her once in a church in Toulouse.
In his mid-twenties Dante served the commune of Florence in the cavalry. He was at the battle of Campaldino, and scenes of the battle return in the Purgatorio
. And his studies -- the Latin classics, philosophy, and the sciences -- continued. Within the circle of those who read poetry in Florence, his poems became well known, and after the death of the woman he called Beatrice he assembled a group of them, embedded in a highly stylized narrative -- La Vita Nuova
(1292-93). At a date now unknown he was married to Gemma di Manetta Donati, and they had at least three children, two sons and a daughter.
In 1295, in order to participate in municipal government, Dante became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries, and he came to serve in electoral and administrative councils, and as an ambassador of his city on a number of missions. He engaged in a Guelph campaign of opposition to Pope Boniface VIII, who had a plan to place all of Tuscany under the rule of the Church. The conflict became prolonged, bitter, and dangerous, with warnings of worse to come. The Pope's cynical proceedings became more ruthless and ominous. The opposition was no less determined. In 1301, on the occasion of Charles de Valois's meeting in Rome with the Pope, Dante was sent by the commune of Florence as one of three emissaries to the Pope to try to exact from the moment something that would help to maintain the independence of Florence. The Pope dismissed the other two emissaries and held Dante in Rome. There, and then in Siena shortly afterward, Dante learned of the triumph of his opponents, the "Blacks," in Florence, and then of their sentencing him to a heavy fine and two years' banishment, besides a perpetual ban on his holding any further public office, and charges of graft, embezzlement, opposition to papal and secular authority, disturbance of the peace, etc. Just over a month later, when he had not paid the fine, he was sentenced a second time. The new sentence stated that if ever he should come within reach of the representatives of the commune of Florence he was to be burned alive. He was then thirty-seven. There is no evidence that he ever saw Florence again.
In the subsequent years of exile he found lodging and employment in other city-states. He served as aide, courtier, and secretary to various men of power, lived for a time with the great lords of Verona. He wrote, in De Vulgare Eloquentia,
that the world was his fatherland, as the whole sea is the country of the fish; but he complained of having to wander as a pilgrim, almost a beggar, through all the regions where Italian was spoken.
At some point during those years in exile he conceived and began the work which, because of the plainness of its style and the fact that it moves from hopeless anguish to joy, he called the Commedia
. It was written not in Latin, nor in the Provençal that was the literary language of his immediate forebears -- a language that he certainly knew very well -- but in his own vernacular. And the subject of most poetry in the vernacular, in his heritage, was love.
Of the later years of his exile not much is known. Several great families -- the households of the Scaligeri, of Uguccione della Faggiuola, of Cangrande della Scala -- befriended and sheltered him and provided for him. The last years of his life were spent in Ravenna, apparently in peace and relative security. Probably his children and perhaps his wife were able to join him there. He may have lectured there, and he worked at completing the Commedia
. Shortly after it was finished he went on a diplomatic mission to Venice for Guido da Polenta, and he died on the way home, on September 13 or 14, 1321, four years short of the age of sixty.
He was buried in Ravenna, and despite repeated efforts by the city of Florence to claim them, there his bones remain.
We know as much as we ever will about what he looked like from a description by Boccaccio: a long face, aquiline nose, large jaw, protruding lower lip, large eyes, dark curly hair (and beard), and a melancholy, thoughtful appearance. None of the surviving portraits is entirely trustworthy, though two have become famous and are commonly accepted.
Since adolescence I have felt what I can only describe as reverence for him, a feeling that seems a bit odd in our age. It is there, of course, because of his poetry, and because of some authority of the imagination in the poetry, some wisdom quite distinct from doctrine, though his creed and his reason directed its form. I am as remote from his theological convictions, probably, as he was from the religion of Virgil, but the respect and awed affection he expresses for his guide sound familiar to me.
I have read, more or less at random, and over a long period, in the vast literature of Dante studies -- not much, to be sure, in view of how much of it there is. I am particularly grateful for works by Erich Auerbach, Irma Brandeis, Charles S. Singleton, Allan Gilbert, Thomas G. Bergin, Helmut Hatzfeld, Charles Spironi, Francis Fergusson, Robert Briffault, and Philippe Guiberteau. The notes to the individual cantos in the translation are above all indebted to Charles S. Singleton's lifelong dedication to Dante studies and to the notes in his own edition of the poem. But there has been no consistent method in my reading of studies about Dante. I have come upon what seemed to me individual illuminations of his work partly by chance, over a period of time, forgetting as I went, naturally. The one unfaltering presence has been a love of the poem, which has been there from the first inchmeal reading. I am as conscious as ever of the impossibility of putting the original into any words but its own. But I hope this version manages to convey something true and essential of what is there in the words of the poem that Dante wrote.
-- W. S. MerwinFrom the Hardcover edition.
Excerpted from Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri. . Excerpted by permission of Bantam Classics, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. |
Kennedy's 'Postcards from
Jonal entry 944 | Friday, January 27, 2006
Still thinking much about Anne Rice's novel, Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt, which I have now finished, it kept getting better right to the end, which is what a reader always wants from a work of literature. But it could have the effect of becoming a "fifth gospel" if it became as successful as, say, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (which sales thus far, though it's on best-seller lists, doesn't support). If that many people read it and if it became a major source of information about Jesus and His family, its opinions could take on the weight of fact in popular thinking.
To use an example already mentioned in this series, I prefer to think that James, "the Lord's brother," was a son of Joseph by a previous marriage to a wife who died before he took up with the Virgin Mary. But Rice's presentation of this scenario is so compelling that many may just start assuming it's a fact when there is no strong historical proof of whether James was the natural son of Joseph or a cousin who was taken in after losing his own parents or one of several other possibilities.
One of the lessons I've learned in thinking about these issues is that although when I concluded earlier that James was probably an adult when Jesus was born where Rice assumes him to be just a few years older than the Lord, it probably didn't matter as much as I was assuming anyway. From my earliest years of memories of my family, I had two already-grown brothers who were living outside the home when I was pre-school age. But in Rice's scenario, even if James had been grown, he would most likely have been a member of the household anyway, and on this I think Rice's assumption is more accurate, and likely better researched, than mine.
Meanwhile, I've come across an online interview with Anne Rice that I think anyone interested in either Christianity or her writing would find worthwhile. Among the news it contains: Rice hopes her series on Jesus will be made into a TV miniseries, which I hope comes to pass. The page linked below has both a condensed version of the interview in print and the full version in streaming video. You'll have to have high-speed Internet to watch the video, but if you have it, it's worth it. Otherwise, the written version is also worth reading, here.
Turning to other lessons recently learned but not from Rice's book.... Some years ago I was greatly impressed by another book, Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor who had been imprisoned by the Romanian Communists for many years until he was "ransomed" by Scandinavian relief workers who raised funds to buy his freedom in the late '60's. When he moved to America, he became famous by raising his shirt at public meetings to show the permanent scars of his tortures, which made headlines supported by photographs in news media across the country.
When I moved to Santa Barbara in 1968 he was already scheduled to make a presentation at the church I was pastoring, so it was my great privilege to meet him. It was my first year of pastoral ministry (having been in youth work and journalism ministry some years before) and I was ordained in a denomination that professed to believe the "great tribulation" would come before Jesus came back to establish his throne on earth but that true believers would be "raptured" before that awful reign of terror by the antichrist, the seven-years tribulation. Those I knew who believed this found great comfort in thinking they were to be spared the "great tribulation."
But Richard Wurmbrand said in his book, detailing his years of torture, that he couldn't imagine worse tortures than the Communists exacted on him and many others he had known, including, in a separate prison, his wife. This struck me deeply. How could we "pre-tribulationists" consider ourselves exempt for suffering for our faith when so many others had suffered and even had been martyred. That thinking was a hairline crack in the theology I'd been given but eventually led to a complete rupture.
The churches before the eighteenth century all held that the great tribulation had already occurred during the first 300 years of church history, with every imaginable form of torture and killing of believers from cross to being sawn in two, to being burned alive, and, of course, being fed to wild animals for spectator sport. Are we better Christians than they, that "we" deserve to be spared tribution? I seriously doubt it. |
We have received from the publisher, Frank Rosewater, one of the most amusing and instructive books that has for a long time been issued from the press. It is entitled "No More Free Rides on this Jackass, or Protection Forever and Everywhere," contains 160 pages, profusely illustrated with a series of comic drawings that are done by the hand of an artist. Mr. Frank Rosewater, the author, treats the subject of protection through a patchwork of stories that are written in a most playful and easy style, and are full of keen satire. He opens up an entirely new and original method of attack on free trade intended to overwhelm that doctrine; in fact, his work is a new analysis of the question that renders the decision conclusive in favor of protection. The work is destined to exert a large influence on the commerce and politics of the future, and will take a high rank in the field of economic literature. Everybody should read this work, to get a thorough understanding of the principles that are destined before long to begin a new era in political and social reform in all countries. For sale in bookstores or by enclosing the price, 50 cents, to the publisher, Frank Rosewater, 989 Woodland avenue, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Our French Visitors," published by Moses King, has met with an unusally welcome reception at the hands of both the press and the public. It should be in the hands of every one.
Mr. King has a number of copies of the last Register left. We commend it to the attention of freshmen and others who have not seen it. |
If you'd like to offer feedback or descriptions of these books, send me email (link at page bottom).
WORKING CLASS LITERATURE —
SHORT STORIES, NOVELS, POETRY, ACADEMIC BOOKS, HISTORIES
Class Matters: Working Class Studies Association Conference, Pittsburgh, PA
June 3 – 6, 2009 The Working Class Studies Association (WCSA) is pleased to announce that its biennial Conference will be held at the University of Pittsburgh, June 3 – 6, 2009. Proposals are invited for presentations, panels, workshops, and performances, according to the guidelines attached. Proposals must be received by January 4, 2009.
(Note to working class literature publishers — if your book costs more than two hours' wage for the average working class worker, you may be publishing about the working class, but are you publishing for the working class? Not all working people have access to public libraries, and not all libraries stock working class titles.)
Fiction — Non-fiction
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain. Mischief is Tom Sawyer's middle name. There is nothing he likes better than playing hookey from school, messing about on the Mississippi with his best friend, the hobo Huckleberry Finn, or wooing the elusive beauty Becky Thatcher. Lazy and reckless, he is a menace to his Aunt Polly — 'Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive' — an embarrassment to his teachers and the envy of his peers. But there is method in his badness. He exhibits all the cunning of a magpie when hatching an elaborate scheme to avoid whitewashing a fence, and an adventure downriver with Huck and Joe Harper plunges the little town of St Petersburg into such an outpouring of grief that Tom is spared the belt on his return. But the innocent adventures end suddenly when Tom and Huck witness a murder in the graveyard. Should they tell of what they saw under the moonlight, when Injun Joe slipped the bloodstained knife into the hands of Muff Potter? Or should they 'keep mum' and risk letting an innocent man go to the gallows?
Afternoon in the Jungle: The Selected Short Stories of Albert Maltz — Albert Maltz. Americans in America as it is, not as it is idealized. Without being outright disrespectful and critical of [the U.S.], the human dramas Maltz has written concern social problems that have not been fully resolved, even decades after these stories were written. The spiritually impoverishing drudgery of manual labor finds a home in a nameless town when a circus comes. Racism threatens the life of an unborn child. Suicide erupts in a tranquil urban setting. Corruption mars the landscape in a Southern town. A poor child learns the destructiveness of greed when he faces another, equally poor man one late winter afternoon. Two couples are ruined or threatened by dangerous job conditions.
An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk — Robert Wolf (Editor), Bonnie Koloc (Illustrator). Wolf helped found the nonprofit Free River Press to publish the writings of homeless men and women. He helped nonwriters overcome their inhibitions about writing by conducting "orally oriented" workshops. These proved to be so successful he widened the circle to include other groups in need of a forum, such as farm families and citizens of small towns. The resulting poems and personal narratives are authentic, involving, and enlightening. They do, indeed, create a mosaic, and it captures the frustration and determination of people whose lives are constricted by harsh economic realities. Homeless men and women write about their lives both before and after they ended up on the streets, and rural life is revealed in all its surprising diversity, demands, satisfactions, and traumas. Wolf characterizes rural America and the terrain of the homeless as a Third World country and believes that the only way things will improve is if the stories of its people are heard.
American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (American Crossroads, 9) — Shelley Streeby. Investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature.
American Working-Class Literature — Nicholas Coles & Janet Zandy. An Anthology. Key historical and cultural developments in working-class life. The only book of its kind, this groundbreaking anthology includes work not only by the industrial proletariat but also by slaves and unskilled workers, by those who work unpaid at home, and by workers in contemporary service industries. As diverse in race, gender, culture, and region as America's working class itself, the selections represent a wide range of genres including fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, oratory, journalism, letters, oral history, and songs. Works by little-known or anonymous authors are included alongside texts from such acclaimed writers as Frederick Douglass, Upton Sinclair, Tillie Olsen, Philip Levine, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko.
Andromeda: A Space Age Tale — Ivan Yefremov. (1957)
Animal Farm — George Orwell.
An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class, 1830S-1850s — Peter Scheckner.
Ardent Propaganda: Miners’ Novels and Class Conflict 1929-1939 — David Bell.
The Armies of Labor - A Chronicle of the Organised Wage-Earners — Samuel P. Orth. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Arrogant Beggar — Anzia Yezierska. This realistic, socially conscious, occasionally overly romantic novel by Yezierska (1880-1970) chronicles the adventures of narrator Adele Lindner, who exposes the hypocrisy of the charitably run Hellman Home for Working Girls (read the Clara de Hirsch Home) after fleeing from the poverty of the Lower East Side. In the seemingly picture-perfect institution, Adele's eyes are opened. She wants to be seen as an equal, but her benefactress instead sees her as a servant girl, someone whose role, she is told later, "consists in serving others." Later, after leaving the home and founding a restaurant, Adele is able to practice philanthropy the way she feels it should be practiced. On its publication in 1927, this book was criticized for its sarcastic attacks on boarding institutions. Though dated and sometimes melodramatic, particularly where Adele's romance with her benefactress's son is concerned, the social commentary about Jewish class and ethnic tensions still rings true. Fast-paced, the book brings to life the teeming activity of the Lower East Side with both passion and careful attention to detail.
Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America — Steven Fraser. The labor movement-reviled, held in contempt, or ignored for a generation-is making itself heard again. How can a newly aroused and combative labor movement restore social justice and economic security to postmodern America? This collection of essays by intellectuals and labor activists does nothing less than challenge the corporate domination of American life.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X.
Autobiography of Mother Jones — Mary Harris Jones. Widowed at the age of 30 when her husband and four young children died during a yellow fever epidemic, Jones spoke tirelessly and effectively throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries on behalf of workers' rights and unionists, and played a significant role in organizing mining strikes.
The Beans of Egypt, Maine — Carolyn Chute. Carolyn Chute is an American writer and populist political activist strongly identified with the culture of poor, rural western Maine. See Wikipedia.
Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography — Jim Tully (Author), Charles Ray Willeford (Introduction). A bestseller in 1924, this vivid piece of outlaw history has inexplicably faded from the public consciousness. Jim Tully takes us across the seamy underbelly of pre-WWI America on freight trains, and inside hobo jungles and brothels while narrowly averting railroad bulls (cops) and wardens of order. Written with unflinching honesty and insight, Beggars of Life follows Tully from his first ride at age thirteen, choosing life on the road over a deadening job, through his teenage years of learning the ropes of the rails and -living one meal to the next. Followed by: Circus Parade, "a series of none too happy and often ironical incidents with a circus"; Shanty Irish, "the background of a road-kid who becomes articulate"; Shadows of Men, "the tribulations, vagaries, and hallucinations of men in jail"; and Blood on the Moon, "the period which led to social adjustment. . . With it I bid farewell forever, I hope, to that life, the winds of which equally twisted and strengthened me for the sadder years ahead."
The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs — Ray Ginger, with a new introduction by Mike Davis. Presents "the definitive story of the life and legacy of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the US labor and socialist movements."
Betrayal of Work : How Low-wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans (03 Edition) — Beth Shulman. Following its publication in hardcover, the critically acclaimed The Betrayal of Work became one of the most influential policy books about economic life in America; it was discussed in the pages of Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, the Washington Post, Newsday, and USA Today, as well as in public policy journals and in broadcast interviews, including a one-on-one with Bill Moyers on PBS's Now, The American Prospect's James K. Galbraith's praise was typical: Shulman's slim and graceful book is a model combination of compelling portraiture, common sense, and understated conviction. Beth Shulman's powerfully argued book offers a full program to address the injustice faced by the 30 million Americans who work full time but do not make a living wage. As the influential Harvard Business School newsletter put it, Shulman specifically outlines how structural changes in the economy may be achieved, thus expanding opportunities for all Americans. This edition includes a new afterword that intervenes in the post-election debate by arguing that low-wage work is an urgent moral issue of our time.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 — Marcus Rediker.
Between the Hills and the Sea — K.B. Gilden. (1990) The cold war in the Connecticut labor movement.
Big Bad Love — Larry Brown. Ten short stories "dealing with sex, with drink, with fear, with all kinds of bad luck and obsession, these stories are unflinching and not for the fainthearted or the easily shocked. But as is true of all Brown's fiction, these ten stories are linked in a collected statement of redemption and hope, a statement here illuminated by the obsession that sets man apart from beast - the drive to communicate. Here are ten stories and ten heroes -- heroes who share many of the same characteristics, though not exactly the same name. Here are Leo, Lonnie, Leroy, Louis, Mr. Lawrence, Leon... some even have the initials L.B. All ten live in rural Mississippi. They like to drive around the back roads in pickup trucks with coolers of beer close at hand. Their marriages aren't ideal. They frequent local bars. They are men of few words driven to express themselves. Nine of the stories are irreverent, brutal, and funny. In the tenth story, one difference sets its hero apart. He is a writer. And by the end of this book, we understand what it is that drives this writer past alcoholism, infidelity, love, grief. His story is also irreverent and brutal, but it is not quite so funny. Instead, it is as close to the truth as human expression can take us."
Big Red Songbook — Archie Green, John Neuhaus. A collection of "the potent and piquant songs that Wobblies of many creeds and colors sang around copper mines and hobo campfires, on picket lines and in jail." The music of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Big Trouble — J. Anthony Lukas. An important work about the "Trial of the Century," the murder conspiracy trial of Western Federation of Miners (WFM) leader Bill Haywood and two associates, who were successfully defended by Clarence Darrow. While the book appreciates class issues, it fails in one significant way-- it explores in depth the lives of everyone connected with the trial except for the WFM miners. Also see The Corpse on Boomerang Road.
Biographies Of Working Men — Grant Allen.
Bisbee '17 — Robert Houston. (1979) About the Bisbee Deportation of 1917.
BLACK PIT — Albert Maltz. A workers’ drama about West Virginia miners and union organizing. The cause demands stern sacrifices, but some turn to treachery.
Blood Red Roses — John McGrath. Blood Red Roses explores the apathy and misery which overtook the working-class, especially in Scotland, under the Callaghan and Thatcher governments. The drama covers the same period as John Mortimer's series Paradise Postponed but whereas Mortimer explored the decline and fall of the English middle-class, McGrath was concerned with the experience of the Scottish working-class. The drama's central subject, the closure of the local factory - and largest local employer - following the union defeat of the multinational company which takes it over, was based on a real incident in East Kilbride. Bessie is a feisty heroine, almost too committed and brave to be true. When we first meet her, she is fighting, and she continues to fight everyone she sees as an enemy, whether it is her mother's lover or the chauvinist school minister. McGrath is concerned with sexual politics too; Bessie's political and sexual awakening coincide, but her new husband still expects her to stay at home to bring up the children. Her increasing trade union involvement inevitably puts a strain on the marriage, and eventually Bessie finds herself a single parent. Her problems worsen when she is victimised and cannot get another job, because of her union militancy. But she is a survivor. McGrath ends by bringing Bessie's story right up to date, and showing her marching with her children and other mothers at the Glasgow May Day parade, no longer alone but one of millions challenging the old order. -Janet Moat
Blood, Sweat & Tears: The Evolution of Work — Richard Donkin. Blood, Sweat & Tears is a captivating history of work, from prehistoric times to the present day. It offers fascinating and intelligent analyses of the individuals, assumptions, theories, developments, and practices that have so much changed work. Based on detailed research from around the world, the author examines early societies, slavery, the guilds, the creation of trade secrets and the influence of religion on work (such as the humanist ideals of the great Quaker industrialists). Donkin also investigates the ideas of the theorists, such as F. W. Taylor, Max Weber, Elton Mayo, Mary Parker Follett, and W. Edwards Demming, and the impact they have had on our lives. And, controversially, the author challenges the work ethic on behalf of all those whose lives have increasingly become subsumed by the demands of employers, asking the question: Why do we do it? Donkin challenges the Protestant work ethic and suggests that people would lead happier lives if they worked less.
Blue Collar Goodbyes — Sue Doro. Honest and powerful portraits of real blue collar working people facing imminent job loss. Doro chronicles the struggles and victories of her life and the lives of those around her.
The Bonds of Labor: German Journeys to the Working World, 1890-1990 (Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) — Carol Poore.
Border Country — Raymond Williams. An academic visits his sick father, who was a railway signalman. There are lengthy flashbacks to the 1920s and 1930s, including the General Strike of 1926. Though fiction, it has many points in common with Raymond Williams's own background. From Wikipedia.
Border Iron — Herbert Best.
Bows against the Barons — Geoffrey Trease.
Bread Givers — Anzia Yezierska. 1975.
British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) — Diana Maltz. Reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social reform movements. Following John Ruskin, who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival.
Broken Promise : Subversion of U. S. Labor Relations Policy, 1947-1994 (95 Edition) — James A. Gross and Paula Rayman and Cermen Sirianni. The Wagner Act of 1935 (later the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act of 1947) was intended to democratize vast numbers of American workplaces: the federal government was to encourage worker organization and the substitution of collective bargaining for employers' unilateral determination of vital work-place matters. Yet this system of industrial democracy was never realized; the promise was "broken." In this rare inside look at the process of government regulation over the last forty-five years, James A. Gross analyzes why the promise of the policy was never fulfilled. Gross looks at how the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) policy-making has been influenced by the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, public opinion, resistance by organized employers, the political and economic strategies of organized labor, and the ideological dispositions of NLRB appointees.
Brownsville: Stories — Oscar Casares. Probing underneath the surface of Tex-Mex culture, Casares's stories, with their wisecracking, temperamental, obsessive middle-aged men and their dramas straight from neighborhood gossip are in the direct line of descent from Mark Twain and Ring Lardner.
Burning Valley (Radical Novel Reconsidered) — Phillip Bonosky. The story of a young working class boy's developing conscience as he lives life out in a steeltown. While Benedict's dilemmas sometimes seem a trifle precious and overwrought, the author brings the character off in a way that endears the reader to him even while finding him sometimes annoying. This title should be of interest to anyone who enjoyed Thomas Bell's Out of the Furnace. It also deserves an audience from those interested in liberation theology.
By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America — Nicholas K. Bromell. The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism, and the challenge to slavery fueled an anxious debate about the meaning and value of work in antebellum America. In chapters on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, Nicholas Bromell argues that American writers generally sensed a deep affinity between the mental labor of writing and such bodily labors as blacksmithing, house building, housework, mothering, and farming.
Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados
Camaro City — Alan Sternberg. The economic blight that has devastated southeastern Connecticut's old industrial towns forms the backdrop for this debut collection about the problems of blue-collar workers in hard times. Most of Sternberg's stories are about men who build and fix things, who "might have worked in the factories if the factories hadn't closed." These men are concerned with keeping their jobs and their often better-educated and better-employed wives while dealing with problems from unruly kids to house fires. There is some diversity of character here in the occasional professional worker or person of color, but it is the beefy white blue-collar worker in a grittily realistic milieu who is so keenly, almost lovingly, portrayed.
Cane — Jean Toomer. African-American poetry.
Catch-22 — Heller.
The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 — Olivier Zunz. Originally published in 1983, The Changing Face of Inequality is the first systematic social history of a major American city undergoing industrialization. Zunz examines Detroit's evolution between 1880 and 1920 and discovers the ways in which ethnic and class relations profoundly altered its urban scene.
Chartism to Trainspotting — See Working Class Fiction.
Chicago Stories (Prairie State Books) — James T. Farrell.
Child Labour Issues 46 — Craig Donnellan. It is estimated that over 250 million children work for a living, 300,000 have fought in armed conflicts world-wide and each year over one million children enter the sex trade. This book looks at the growing problem of child exploitation and what is being done to eradicate it.
Child of the Dark — Carolina Maria De Jesus. The diary of a Brazilian peasant who lived most of her life in the favela (slums) of São Paulo, Brazil. See Wikipedia.
Children for Hire: The Perils of Child Labor in the United States — Marvin J. Levine. Despite popular belief, the problem of illegal child labor has not been remedied. The practice persists in the United States and even appears to be increasing. Levine, an acknowledged expert in the field, reveals the nature and magnitude of this "old" problem in today's economy. Levine explains that since 1981, there has been a relaxation in enforcement of federal child labor law provisions. He presents the complicated elements and troubling implications of a problem that has come to be ignored or overlooked in American society, focusing especially on matters of occupational health and safety. This book is important reading for the general public, as well as for scholars and policymakers involved with children's and labor issues in the United States. The United States has more of its children in the workforce than any other developed country. They are found in textile, jewelry, and machine shops in New York and New Jersey, in Southeast supermarkets operating meat-cutting machines and paper-box bailers, in Washington state selling candy door-to-door, and in farming operations throughout the country.
Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market — Jeremy Seabrook. Examines the international exploitation of children and exposes the hypocrisy, piety, and moral blindness that have informed much of the debate in the West on the rights of the child. Seabrook addresses the key question of whether the West can turn its benevolent attention to the evils of child labor in the rest of the world without first understanding that gross forms of poverty anywhere are part of the same pathology.
Choose a Bright Morning — Hillel Bernstein.
Christ in Concrete : a novel — Pietro Di Donato. Italian-American fiction.
Class (The New Critical Idiom) — Gary Day. Traces the phenomenon of class from the medieval to the postmodern period, examining its relevance to literary and cultural analysis today. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary writings, Gary Day gives an account of class at different historical moments; shows the role of class in literary constructions of the social; examines the complex relations between "class" and "culture"; focuses attention on the role of class in constructions of "the literary" and "the canon"; employs a revived and revised notion of class to critique recent theoretical movements.
Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy And Wells (The Nineteenth Century Series) — Christine Devine.
Class War: A Decade of Disorder — Ian Bone (Author), Alan Pullen (Author), Tim Scargill (Author). This book is about the class war federations tabloid (Class War). It contains the history of the paper, and events surrounding it, very interesting for anyone interested in class politics and direct action. Not much on the deeper side of the politics, refer to their book Unfinished Business for the politics behind the chaos. Great stories, comics, and propaganda graphics, a must have for syndicalists and anyone into what democracy really looks like.
The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found — Don J Snyder. Snyder was an English professor at Colgate University with books to his credit and teaching awards, a beautiful old house which comfortably housed his wife and four small children, and the perks and honors that normally acrue to a successful academic. Then he was fired. The book he has written about his subsequent two-year struggle to understand that fact is a painful one (particularly for another academic), because it is so unflinchingly honest. Without a trace of selfpity, Snyder describes his vain attempts to get another teaching job, his descent into a kind of twilight of disbelief and loss of faith in himself, and then his recovery through a stint as a carpenter's laborer. Snyder may not be much of a carpenter, as he himself admits, but he has written a wonderful and moving memoir." -- Daniel Weiss
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty — Eudora Welty. Character stories from the southern U.S.
Common Sense and a Little Fire (95 Edition) — Annelise Orleck. Traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely had more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Drawing from the women's writings and speeches, she paints a compelling picture of housewives' food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage. From that era of rebellion, Orleck charts the rise of a distinctly working-class feminism that fueled poor women's activism and shaped government labor, tenant, and consumer policies through the early 1950s.
The Common Thread: Writings by Working Class Woman — June Burnett.
Company Woman — Kathleen De Grave.
The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Now Collected for the First Time — Mark Twain, Charles Neider.
The Condition of the Working Class in England (World's Classics) — Friedrich Engels (Author), David McLellan (Editor). This, the first book written by Engels during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844, is the best known and in many ways the best study of the working class in Victorian England.
Co-op — Upton Sinclair.
Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama — edited by Kevin Danaher. Collection of essays by different writers on globalization, the rise of corporate power, and the downsizing of the American Dream. Forward by Noam Chomsky.
The Corpse on Boomerang Road — MaryJoy Martin. Written in the style of a novel, with a significant surprise revealed in the early chapters, this is the account of the war against the Western Federation of Miners in Telluride, Colorado. Adds a new perspective to the account of the WFM leadership explored in Big Trouble.
Cranford — Elizabeth Gaskell. Classic portrait of life in a quiet English village of the early nineteenth century.
The Cricket in Times Square — George Selden. A very sweet story about a cricket from Connecticut who accidentally ends up in the subway station at Times Square. While there, he makes some friends, and discovers that he has an amazing talent.
Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought — Michael Trask. Modern society, Michael Trask argues in this incisive and original book, chose to couch class difference in terms of illicit sexuality. Trask demonstrates how sexual science’s concept of erotic perversion mediated the writing of both literary figures and social theorists when it came to the innovative and unsettling social arrangements of the early twentieth century. Trask focuses on the James brothers in a critique of pragmatism and anti-immigrant sentiment, shows the influence of behavioral psychology on Gertrude Stein’s work, uncovers a sustained reflection on casual labor in Hart Crane’s lyric poetry, and traces the identification of working-class Catholics with deviant passions in Willa Cather’s fiction. Finally, Trask examines how literary leftists borrowed the antiprostitution rhetoric of Progressive-era reformers to protest the ascendence of consumerism in the 1920s. Viewing class as a restless and unstable category, Trask contends, American modernist writers appropriated sexology’s concept of evasive, unmoored desire to account for the seismic shift in social relations during the Progressive era and beyond. Looking closely at the fraught ideological space between real and perceived class differences, Cruising Modernism discloses there a pervasive representation of sexuality as well.
CUENTOS: STORIES BY LATINAS — edited by Alma Gómez, and Cherríe Moraga, and Mariana Romo-Carmona. Cuentos: Stories by Latinas describe the varied experiences of Hispanic women. Anger, love, compassion, humor and pathos fill the pages of this collection. Most importantly, these women speak of their ability to overcome daily struggles of survival, and prevail.
Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s — Laura Hapke
Death of a Salesman; Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem — Arthur Miller. American literary drama.
The Death Ship — B.
Traven. Describes the predicament of merchant seamen who lack documentation
of citizenship and cannot find legal residence or employment in any nation.
The narrator is Gerard Gales, an American sailor who claims to be from
New Orleans, and who is stranded in Antwerp without passport or working
papers. Unable to prove his identity or his eligibility for employment,
Gales is repeatedly arrested and deported from one country to the next,
by government officials who do not want to be bothered with either assisting
or prosecuting him. When he finally manages to find work, it is on the
Yorikke, the dangerous and decrepit ship of the title, where undocumented
workers from around the world are treated as expendable slaves. The term "death
to any boat so decrepit that it is worth more to its owners overinsured
and sunk than it would be
worth afloat. Due to its scathing criticism of bureaucratic authority,
nationalism, and abusive labor practices, The Death Ship is often described
as an anarchist novel. From Wikipedia.
Detroit Tales — Jim Ray Daniels, Jim Daniels. Michigan short stories.
Dharma Bums — Jack Kerouac.
Dickens And Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century) — Grace Moore.
Digger's Blues — Jim Daniels. American poetry chapbook.
Dirty Work — Larry Brown. "...Braiden Chaney has no arms or legs. Walter James has no face. They lost them in Vietnam, along with other, more vital parts of themselves. Now, twenty-two years later, these two Mississippians -- one black, the other white -- lie in adjoining beds in a V.A. hospital. In the course of one long night they tell each other how they came to be what they are and what they can only dream of becoming. Their stories, recounted in voices as distinct and indelible as those of Faulkner, add up to the story of the war itself, and make 'Dirty Work' the most devastating novel of its kind since Dalton Trumbo's Johnny got his gun."
The Disinherited — Jack Conroy. (1963)
Disposable American : Layoffs and Their Consequences (06 Edition) — Louis Uchitelle. The Disposable American is an eye-opening account of layoffs in America — their questionable necessity, their overuse, and their devastating impact on individuals at all income levels. Yet despite all this, they are accelerating.
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia — Ursula K. Le Guin.
Distinctions of Class — Anita Burgh.
The Dodo Bird — Manny Fried. A play that "brings union and working class life into the arts." -Les Fiedler
The Dogs of March — Ernest Hebert. The story of a middle-aged mill worker who loses his job when the shop closes. For more Hebert novels, see Wikipedia.
The Dollmaker — Harriette Arnow. (1972) Appalachian migrants in wartime Detroit from a woman's perspective.
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands — Jorge Amado. About the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia. See Wikipedia.
Down and Out in Paris and London — George Orwell.
Downsize This! — Michael Moore. Hardhitting and satirical essays on hard-pressed American workers, economic conditions, and political policies.
The Drinking Den — Ãmile Zola (Author), Robin Buss. "Incredibly interesting descriptions of people and Paris."
Drop Hammer — Manny Fried. A labor play.
The Economics of Gender and Mental Illness — D. E. Marcotte. While gender has so often been found to be an important determinant of prevalence and outcomes of mental illness, economists have rarely focused on gender differences as a central element of their analyses. In this volume, we direct the focus of research in the economics of mental health squarely on the topic of gender. Each paper in this volume provides insight into the ways in which women and men are afflicted and affected by mental illness in the labor market.
Educating Our Masters: Influences on the Growth of Literacy in Victorian Working Class Children — Alec Ellis.
Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets: 1700-1800 — John Goodridge.
Empire Falls — Richard Russo. A tale of blue-collar life, which itself increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets.
The End Of The Class War — Catherine Brady. The 14 interlinked stories in this moving collection are beautifully crafted snapshots of Irish immigrants to American cities (Chicago, San Francisco) in 1950. "It's no mercy... seeing into the insides of things, into the secret ways by which the bones absorb shock and mend themselves..." but Brady does it with compassion and joy. Her short fictions capture critical moments in the lives of the working-class women who absorb shocks, mend, go on.
Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay Life — Wendell Ricketts (Editor). Fascinating, diverse and refreshingly unique short fiction anthology blows apart many of the tired stereotypes of gay men that persist in Western culture. The struggling protagonists of these stories are acutely aware, not only of their place in the social strata, but of their status as outsiders. They sometimes remark on more privileged men that surround them with frustration and contempt. But even though their working class origins are plainly evident most of them occupy an uncomfortable grey area in between the two worlds, for it is with an equal degree of detachment they regard their own families and the environments they grew up in. Fathers are often belching, farting brutes firmly planted in front of the TV with beers in hand, while mothers are ineffectual, chain smoking, church-ladies. The (central) characters refuse to be pigeonholed. They come across as living, breathing individuals and thus are the strong suit in most of the stories.
The Exploited Child — Bernard Schlemmer. This investigation of child labor explores difficult conceptual and public policy issues. It demonstrates the sheer prevalence of the commercial exploitation of child labor in both industrial and developing countries, and its rapid growth today under the twin pressures of mass poverty and the globalized marketplace for labor. In addition to its rich empirical material from countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe, the author makes a clear distinction between the socialization of children through labor within the family and their economic exploitation for profit. It also focuses on the role of adults with responsibility for children, and the specific form which paternal domination takes towards children.
Factory Girl: Ellen Johnston And Working-class Poetry In Victorian Scotland (Scottish Studies International, Vol. 23) — H. Gustav Klaus. The first critical biography of the Glaswegian writer who signed her poems as The Factory Girl. An essay in recovery and exploration, situating Ellen Johnston at the intersection of gender, class and nation. Documents her range of subjects, styles and voices. The book is concluded by a selection of Ellen Johnston's verse.
The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century American Fiction (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture) — Amal Amireh. Studies the representations of working-class women in canonical and popular American fiction between 1820 and 1870. These representations have been invisible in nineteenth century American literary and cultural studies due to the general view that antebellum writers did not engage with their society's economic and social relaities. Against this view and to highlight the cultural importance of working-class women, this study argues that, in responding to industrialization, middle class writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, Fern, Davies, and Phelps used the figures of the factory worker and the seamstress to express their anxieties about unstable gender and class identitites. These fictional representations were influenced by, and contributed to, an important but understudied cultural debate about wage labor, working women, and class.
Falling through the Earth : a memoir — Danielle Trussoni. The author of Falling through the Earth is as much a casualty of the Viet Nam war as was her father, Dan, who returned from that war as damaged goods, a man unable to show his wife and children that he loved them. Trussoni's benign neglect of his children forced them to grow up tough and able to solve their own problems because he was a firm follower of the old adage that "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Sadly, their situation shows clearly how the crippling aftereffects of combat can be so easily passed on from one generation to the next.
Family and the Scottish Working-Class Novel, 1984-1994: A Study of Novels by Janice Galloway ... Et Al (Scottish Studies International, Vol. 29) — Horst Prillinger.
Fay — Larry Brown. The author writes about "the truly forgotten, the truly disenfranchised people of this country, the impoverished and working class white Americans of the South and Appalachia." Fay is "a beautiful 17-year-old woman, walking out of the hills of Mississippi, escaping the horror of attempted sexual abuse by her father, a migrant farm worker with a penchant for drink, bad judgment, and wife beating. FAY has only a vague idea about where she is going, having had almost no schooling. She only knows that wherever she is going can be no worse than what she is leaving. And as Brown reveals her home life, piece by piece, the reader is left with the same conclusion."
Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) — Richard Godden. A persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner’s work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.
Fire in Our Hearts: A Study of the Portrayal of Youth in a Selection of Post-War British Working-Class Fiction (Gothenburg Studies in English, 51) — Ronald Paul.
Florida's Farmworkers in the Twenty-First Century (Florida History and Culture) — Nano Riley. In a book that combines both oral history and documentary photography, Nano Riley and Davida Johns tell the story of Florida's farmworkers in the 21st century. Largely ignored by mainstream America, migrant laborers often toil under adverse labor and living conditions to provide the nation's food supply. Intimate photographs and lucid text offer a look not only into the difficulties faced by these laborers but also into the rich cultural heritages of their communities and the close ties of their family life. Until now, most publications on migrant farm labor focused on California or the Southeast in general, offering little information on conditions particular to farmworkers in Florida. Florida's Farmworkers focuses on the history of Florida agriculture, the unique climate, ecology, crops, and working conditions that distinguish the situation of Florida's farm laborers from those in other states. Organized thematically, the book explores the issues facing these migrant workers, who are largely Hispanic, Haitian, and from other regions of the Caribbean. Among the issues addressed are low wages, children's problems, education, substandard living conditions, health, pesticide exposure, and immigrant smuggling. Riley and Johns draw attention to a labor system greatly in need of reform.
For a Living: THE POETRY OF WORK — Nicholas Coles. Substantial collection surveys many different kinds and styles of laboring in poems... not just work but "nonindustrial" work, that of a short-order cook, a woman giving birth, a baseball coach, even a scholar in pursuit of tenure.
For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865-95 (Working Class in American History) — Clark D. Halker.
The Foundry — Albert Halper. (1934)
Front Lines — Jack Hirschman. Poetry. "Jack is a revolutionary whose poetic imagery, as well as his politics, are born of the heart--born of knowing the full capacity of the human spirit... He uses the art of poetry as the greatest artisans of language do; respectful, knowing his craft, while sharing the wisdom that just might prod us toward creating a better world."
George Gissing, the Working Woman, And Urban Culture — Emma Liggins.
Germinal — Zola. Coal mining in France more than a century ago, as starving families rise up against greed.
Giants in the Earth — O.E. Rolvagg. The saga of Norwegian immigrant Per Hansa, his family, and fellow settlers in the Dakota prairie in the late 1800s. A tale of hard work and harsh landscapes, hopes and homesickness, isolation and utter dependence on nature's whims.
The Girls Are Coming — Peggie Carlson. In 1974, due to passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, Peggie Carlson was one of the first four women hired by Minnegasco for a non-secretarial position. On the job, she met men who were hostile, men who were helpful, and those who were simply confused to find women in their midst.
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy — Barbara Ehrenreich. Women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor results in an odd displacement, in which the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones—easing a “care deficit” in rich countries, while creating one back home. Confronting a range of topics from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles, Global Woman offers an original look at a world increasingly shaped by mass migration and economic exchange.
Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America — Sinclair Lewis (Author), Sally E. Parry (Editor, Introduction). brand-new collection of Sinclair Lewis's prolific body of short fiction, focusing on the author's primary concerns: the issue of class, work and money in America.
Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job — Tom Wayman. 93 authors of working class poetry representing a diverse spectrum of the labor market: paid or unpaid; assembly line workers, oil riggers, doctors, managers, teachers, farmers, housewives and more.
Grandsons: A Story of American Lives — Louis Adamic. See Wikipedia.
Granny @ Work : Aging and New Technology on the
Job in America (04 Edition) — Karen E. Riggs. The advancing
age of Baby Boomers has generated an upsurge of older workers. And
as this aging workforce encounters radical technological changes, it
faces increasingly tumultuous work environments.
Granny D: You're Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell — Doris Haddock (Author), Dennis Burke (Author), Bill Moyers (Foreword). Doris Haddock raised her family during the Great Depression, and worked in a shoe factory for twenty years. She has spent 45 years of her life changing the things that are wrong. "In 2003 and 2004, she embarked on a 23,000 mile tour of the 'swing states', encouraging women and the residents of poor neighborhoods to register to vote. She walked through housing projects considered too dangerous to visit by many, and registering voters all along her way." --from the Granny D website. In 2007, she is 97 years old and not just active, but acting for change.
Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck.
The Great Midland (Radical Novel Reconsidered) — Alexander Saxton. Ignored by its publisher and the public (except by federal agents) when it was first published in 1948, "The Great Midland" will still be avoided by those who think it's no more than a novel by a Communist writer about Communists laborers. That would be shame, since the book is far more nuanced than the usual agitprop from the era. While several of the main characters are indeed Communist "agitators", the book is a multigenerational saga about American labor, racial strife, and ethnic communities. And it's an atypically realistic love story. The plot of "The Great Midland" frequently recalls Steinbeck's early labor novels; Saxton slyly quotes both the "in dubious battle" passage from "Paradise Lost" and "grapes of wrath" stanza from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." In Saxton's book, activists (some Communist, some not) struggle to organize Chicago railroad labor against both the callousness of the corporate structure, the hostility of law enforcement, and the unresponsiveness of the union. Unlike most novels at either end of the political spectrum (such as the pro-capitalist manifestos of Ayn Rand or the pro-labor sermonizing of "In Dubious Battle"), "The Great Midland" does not offer easy answers, and it does not portray its many heroes, Communist or not, as faultless. Saxton's characters have very human failings, they often bring their own bad luck on themselves, and the path to the utopia they envision is fraught with danger, dashed hopes, and the potential for abuse. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the bosses or the police, whose menace approaches caricature and whose motives or personal lives are never explored.
Growing Up Poor — a literary anthology — edited by Robert Coles (Children of Crisis) and Randy Testa. Selected writers whose work gives a real sense of what it means to be alive and poor in America.
Gunsmith's Boy — Seth Philips.
Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work — Janet Zandy. Demonstrates through examples of working-class literature, as well as other writings and art, how work-related injuries "collectively attest to untold stories of labor." Research that repeatedly shows, "The cause of death was not an unforeseen natural catastrophe, but rather unsafe working conditions where profits took precedence over human lives." Nearly 11,000 workers are treated in emergency rooms each day, with about 200 of these workers hospitalized. Each day, thousands of employees require time away from their jobs to recuperate, while 15 workers die from their injuries, and another 134 die from work-related diseases. Zandy also identifies some basic characteristics of working-class texts. At the center of these texts is the living experience of the workers, as represented by the working class. A working-class text "recognizes and resists the transformation of the human I/we into an it—a thing, a commodity, a working unit, a disembodied hand." Beyond affirming the working-class experience, these texts help recover "submerged labor histories," according to the author. The genre defies traditional structure and form, challenging dominant assumptions about aesthetics. Another common element of working-class writings, according to Zandy, is class consciousness, with many working-class writers taking sides in their writing. "Their words offer hope and model struggle." All of these characteristics are offered as an empirical framework for discussion, rather than a strict definition. The author does not hide her political views, which are shared by many worker writers—the language of class oppression and labor exploitation permeate much of this work. Zandy sees a "historicity of class experience being inseparable from an understanding of working-class literature."
The Harbor — Ernest Poole. (1915)
Haymarket: A Novel — Martin Duberman.
The Haymarket Tragedy — Paul Avrich.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter — by Carson McCullers. The story of five isolated, lonely people, in a sleepy Southern town, who come together in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves: John Singer, a deaf mute who moves into the Kelly family boarding house; Mick Kelly, a thirteen-year-old tomboy who dreams of a life in music; Biff Brannon, a café owner and recent widower; Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, the only black doctor in town; Jake Blount, a ne'er-do-well who is torn apart by awareness of the injustices perpetrated around him every day, but feels helpless and impotent.
Heart, Home & Hard Hats — Sue Doro. Poetry.
Henry Poulaille And Proletarian Literature (1920-1939). — Rosemary Chapman.
Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women & Victorian Social-Problem Fiction — Patricia E. Johnson.
Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell.
How to Tell When You're Tired: A Brief Examination of Work — Reg Theriault. Covers factory jobs, time-and-motion studies, accidents and injuries on the job, black and white workers, slave and prison labor, unions that only add more management, and strikes versus job actions. Theriault argues that workers do the work and so are the most familiar with how it should be done. Industrial workers, he believes, are alienated from their work and are not helped by the adversarial stance of capital and labor. There's no point, he maintains, in maximizing efficiency and increasing productivity if the only result is a higher quota at the same pay. Decrying the "warlike tension" between workers and management that has existed since the onset of the industrial revolution, the author concludes, "in all work situations where the production process takes place at the expense and denial of human values, production suffers." "...simply superb--just the right combination of personal anecdote, philosophical reflection, sociological commentary, old-timer's wisdom, and humor."
Hue and Cry: Stories — James Alan McPherson. McPherson's characters -- gritty, jazzy, authentic, and pristinely rendered -- give voice to unheard struggles along the dividing lines of race and poverty in subtle, fluid prose that bears no trace of sentimentality, agenda, or apology.
Human Tradition in American Labor History (04 Edition) — Eric Arnesen. The Human Tradition in American Labor History is a comprehensive exploration of the American working class from the colonial period to the present. In marked contrast to most academic treatments of American labor, this book presents history through mini-biographical portraits of a diverse selection of workers. Focusing on the contributions of women and minorities and using the racial and ethnic diversity of America's working people as its starting point, The Human Tradition in American Labor History features the most up-to-date research into the experiences of American workers and labor activists in the broadest range of occupations and sectors of the economy. This book encompasses all aspects of American labor history and reveals the diversity of movements for social change, including unionism, labor politics, and race relations.
Identity in Transition: The Images of Working-Class Women in Social Prose of the Vormarz (North American Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature) — Helen G. Morris-Keitel.
Ideology and Discourse in Contemporary Working-Class Culture : Five Contemporary American Writers and Filmakers (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities) — Nora Ru Roberts (Author), Nora Ruth Roberts (Author).
I know why the caged bird sings — Maya Angelou. "Tells of the hardships she experienced in her youth, beginning with her parents' divorce when Angelou was only three years old. As a result of the divorce, Maya and her older brother are sent to live with their grandmother in a small, Arkansas town. Here, she experiences the horrors of racism and learns to hate herself for not being white. When she is eight, Maya goes to live with her mother in St. Louis. There, she is sexually abused by her mother's live-in boyfriend, and is emotionally scarred by the terrible experience. Finally, after Maya has become aware of racial prejudice and religious hypocrisy, she begins to find her voice. Maya's mother marries a man who proves to be a positive father figure, and the family moves to Los Angeles. Here, Maya spends her teenage years being defiant and getting herself into a lot of trouble. When she becomes pregnant in her senior year of high school, however, she gains the confidence to become a strong woman and a good mother to her child."
The Impact of Occupational Dislocation; The American Indian Labor Force at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Native Americans) — Patricia Kasari. This study broadens our knowledge of the relationship between occupational prestige, family composition, and migratory patterns of American Indians at the close of the twentieth century. Findings suggest that although many urban Indians work in fields that offer little prestige, reservation Indians are even more likely to have undesirable jobs, due primarily to low educational attainment, gender affiliation, and familial responsibilities.
In Dubious Battle — John Steinbeck. (1936)
Industrial Valley — Ruth McKenney. (1939)
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale Nota Bene) — Jonathan Rose.
The Iron Heel — Jack London. Dystopian and prescient novel of fascism.
Ironweed — William Kennedy. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally — and fatally — dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and present.
Israel Horovitz, Vol. II: New England Blue: 6 Plays of Working-Class Life (Contemporary American Playwrights) — Israel Horovitz. American playwright Horovitz has produced a distinguished body of work. These six loosely related plays (The Widow's Blind Date, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, Henry Lumper, North Shore Fish, Strong Man's Weak Child, and Unexpected Tenderness) are his most recent and among his best. They are full of fiercely accurate regional dialog and an overwhelming spirit of time and place. His main subject in these and other plays is life in the workplace, a record of the world of manual labor and its cost. His characters live dehumanized existences, sometimes rising above their travails and relieved only briefly by the warmth of human contact. Family, competition, labor, and environment test their strength and endurance.
I Stand Here Ironing — see Tell Me a Riddle.
I Was Marching — Meridel Le Sueur. Takes the reader into the heart of the 1934 Minneapolis strike. Short story included in many collections, including Salute to Spring and Ripening.
The Jacket —
James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class — John Fordham.
Jarnegan — Jim Tully. (1926) The story of a he-man who kills a man in a fight, spends some time in jail, begins life anew on regaining freedom, drifts into Hollywood and becomes a successful movie director.
J.C. Prince and The Death of the Factory Child: A Study in Victorian Working Class Literature — B. E Maidment.
Jesus' Son : stories — Denis Johnson. Drug addiction.
Joe — Larry Brown. Author Brown writes about "poor Southern rednecks who exist from day to day, from hand to mouth, in tar-paper shacks and shabby mobile homes. Some are hard, mean and utterly lacking in moral fiber; others, such as the eponymous protagonist, try to live with integrity and dignity despite limited opportunities, despite the ingrained, ubiquitous habit of drinking prodigious amounts of beer and whiskey. Joe Ransom is almost 50, newly divorced, with bitter recollections of years spent in the pen for assaulting a police officer while drunk. A product of his time and place, Joe is reckless, self-destructive, hard-driving, hard-drinking, sometimes ruthless, but he is essentially kindhearted and decent. Joe manages a crew of black laborers who poison trees for a lumber company. When he gives a temporary job to teenage Gary Jones, part of a migratory family so destitute the boy has never seen a toothbrush or understood the significance of a traffic light, Joe is touched by the boy's dogged determination to work although Gary's alcoholic, vicious, amoral father takes the money as soon as Gary earns it. In his own laconic way Joe acts as mentor for Gary, until, in the novel's wrenching conclusion, fate and Joe's own stubborn morality wrench them apart."
Joe College — Tom Perrotta. Danny has survived his working-class adolescence and moved on to rarified air of early 1980s Yale. But he still spends his vacations back home in New Jersey, behind the wheel of his dad's lunch truck, pondering a complicated love life and dodging a gang of thugs bent on muscling their way into his dad's territory. A comic journey into the dark side of love, class, higher education, and food service.
The Jungle — Upton Sinclair. (1906) For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown. When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic flavor of the original, as well as some of the goriest descriptions of the meat-packing industry and much of Sinclair's most pointed social and political commentary.
Kellogg's Six-Hour Day (Labor and Social Change) — Benjamin Hunnicutt. Documents the struggle of Kellogg's workers, mostly women, who fought to keep six-hour work shifts originally instituted during the Depression of the 1930s, and examines their part in the century-old vision of progressively shorter hours for all workers.
L'Assommoir (Oxford World's Classics) — Émile Zola. The story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. At the centre of the novel stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband Coupeau squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, the local drinking shop, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor. L'Assommoir is the most finely crafted of Zola's novels, and this new translation captures not only the brutality but also the pathos of its characters' lives. This book is a powerful indictment of nineteenth-century social conditions...
L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement — Ruth Milkman.
Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835-1960 (Suny Series, American Labor History) — Robert Asher. An anthology on race, ethnicity and the history of American working- class struggles that gives substantial (and rare) attention to the experiences of African-American, Asian, and Hispanic workers as well as to workers from European backgrounds. The essays cover a time period of more than a century, and consider service workers as well as factory workers, women as well as men.
Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s — 40 illustrations. An unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor’s Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor’s Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal’s artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2001.
Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction — Laura Hapke. Includes working class fiction.
Labor's Troubadour — Joe Glazer. Thje singer tells his tale simply and directly in Labor's Troubadour, published in 2001, by the University of Illinois Press, as part of its series "Music in American Life." The book is both a memoir and a chronicle of Glazer's life's work in the American Labor Movement from the 1940s up to the present day, and it also presents, quite keenly, the struggles of the labor force in the United States and abroad during the last half of the 20th century.
The Language Of Gender And Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel — Patricia Ingham. The Language of Gender and Class challenges widely-held assumptions about the study of the Victorian novel. The author analyzes language as the framework for the concepts of gender and the formations of social class, specifically, how stereotypes of gender and class encode cultural myths that reinforce the status quo.
The Last of Her Kind — Sigrid Nunez. Nunez's ruthlessly observed portrait of countercultural America in the sixties and seventies opens in 1968, when two girls meet as roommates at Barnard College. Ann is rich and white and wants to be neither, confiding, "I wish I had been born poor"; Georgette has no illusions about poverty, having just escaped her depressed home town, where "whole families drank themselves to disgrace." Georgette finds Ann at once despicable and mesmerizing, and she's stunned — if not entirely surprised — when, years after the end of their friendship, Ann is arrested for killing a cop.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men : Three Tenant Families — James Agee. Photojournalism. Alabama, depression era.
Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness — Janet Zandy. This is a book about working-class identity, consciousness, and self-determination. It offers an alternative to middle-class assimiliation and working-class amnesia. The twenty-five contributors use memory--both personal and collective--to show the relationship between the uncertain economic rhythms of working-class life and the possibilities for cultural and political agency. Manual labor and intellectual work are connected in these multicultural autobiographies of writers, educators, artists, political activists, musicians, and photographers and in the cultural work--the poems, stories, photographs, lectures, music--they produce. Illustrated with family snapshots, this collection--the first of its kind--includes the work of a female machinist who is also a poet, a secretary who is also a writer, a poet who worked on the assembly line, a musician who was also a red-diaper baby, and an academic who is recovering the working-class writing of her father. The consciousness that is revealed in this book makes evident the value of class identity to collective, democratic struggle.
Life in the Iron Mills — Rebecca Harding Davis. A short story by Rebecca Harding Davis set in the factory world of nineteenth century Wheeling, Virginia (now Wheeling, West Virginia), appeared anonymously in April 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly where it caused a literary sensation with its powerful naturalism that anticipated the work of Theodore Dreiser and Emile Zola. The story is emphatically on the side of the exploited industrial workers, who are presented as physically stunted and mentally dulled but fully human and capable of tragedy. From Wikipedia.
Lights and Shades of a Factory Village: A Tale of Lowell — Norton. "Secret incidents in the history of Lowell, Massachusetts."
Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology — Paul Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald. Achieves a balance between traditional and lesser-known writers. Presents canonical writers such as Herman Melville and William Faulkner, and more obscure authors such as Sue Doro and Tom Wayman. Covers various genres of writing including fiction, poetry, essays, speeches, autobiographies, and songs. Includes information on working-class authors. Appropriate for classroom use.
The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing — H. Gustav Klaus.
The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) — by Cindy Weinstein. This book juxtaposes representations of labor in fictional texts with representations of labor in nonfictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. This intersection is particularly evident in the debates about symbol and allegory, and Cindy Weinstein contends that allegory during this period was critiqued on precisely the same grounds as mechanized labor.
The Literature of Work: Short Stories, Essays, and Poems by Men and Women of Business — Sheila E. Murphy (Author), John G. Sperling (Author), John D. Murphy (Editor).
Little House in the Big Woods — Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House on the Prairie series.
Living My Life — Emma Goldman.
London Labour and the London Poor — Henry Mayhew (Author), Victor E. Neuburg (Author). originated in a series of articles, later published in four volumes, written for the Morning Chronicle in 1849 and 1850 when journalist Henry Mayhew was at the height of his career. Mayhew aimed simply to report the realities of the poor from a compassionate and practical outlook. This penetrating selection shows how well he succeeded: the underprivileged of London become extraordinarily and often shockingly alive.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Contemporary Fiction, Plume) — Alan Sillitoe. Sillitoe's sympathy for the working class is best demonstrated in the title story, narrated by a teen resident of a reform school whose voice vibrates with rebellion. The youth shows a keen awareness of his position within England's rigid class structure and has made a conscious decision to resist those whom he says have "the whip hand" over him. Sillitoe reveals the motivation for his protagonist's attitude in an understated but memorable scene in which the youth remembers finding his laborer father dead, blood spilled out of his consumptive body. The reader sees the boy's perception that his father's life has been used up by the system. In the story's surprising final turn, the youth -- who has become a champion runner for his school -- attempts in his own way to turn the tables on that system.
Looking Backward — Edward Bellamy. Utopian.
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Race and American Culture) — Eric Lott. Lott (American Studies/University of Virginia) brings a mass of obscure information and a multidisciplinary approach, interpreting the meaning of black-face minstrelsy to the white working classes who invented and performed it. The appropriation of black music, dance, humor, and narratives for commercial entertainment, says Lott, expressed the deep racial conflicts suffered by the white working classes, especially in the North in the decades before the Civil War. Their parodies reflected their admiration and contempt, their envy and fear, their remoteness and--as the economy changed--their impending identification with the dispossessed, whom they represented as absurd. In their imitation of blacks, and in the cross-dressing that minstrelsy required, whites males gained control over the alien and the threatening (especially black sexuality) and changed the way they experienced themselves as men. Lott's study ranges through folklore, history, sociology, politics, economics, psychoanalysis, theater history, popular music, even film theory, but it's based clearly on contemporary and technical studies of race, gender, and class: The ``stars'' of minstrelsy, Lott says, ``inaugurated an American tradition of class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion.'' In the course of his analysis, Lott places Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the music of Stephen Foster in new and interesting perspective, and reveals the significance of an art form, a ritual, that has fallen into neglect after a period of universal popularity.
Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 — Ellen Ross. An academic book, exceptionally well researched, but also exquisitely well written and accessible. This book shows how motherhood is socially constructed, in this case by class as well as by era. But it also shows how central mothering in all its aspects (earning and spending and caring and negotiating) was to survivial among the working poor in industrializing England.
The Lowell Offering : Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845) —
The Magic of Blood — Dagoberto Gilb. Plain-spoken stories take readers to construction sites and cheap rentals where chronically underemployed, necessarily mobile, struggling yet optimistic Texas Mexicans survive in an ungenerous world.
Making Steel — Mark Reutter. Making Steel chronicles the rise and fall of American steel by focusing on the fateful decisions made at the world's once largest steel mill at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Mark Reutter examines the business, production, and daily lives of workers as corporate leaders became more interested in their own security and enrichment than in employees, community, or innovative technology. This edition marks the return of a classic and features 26 pages of photos, a new preface, and afterword.
The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic — Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker.
A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer — Oyama Shiro (Author), Edward Fowler (Translator). In Tokyo's San'ya district, day laborers live in crowded, smelly bunkhouses (doya) and rise early each morning to visit the San'ya Welfare Recruiting Office, where the competition is fierce for backbreaking work that pays paltry wages. Oyama (a pseudonym), a college graduate who dropped out of the corporate world at age 40, lived in San'ya for 12 years, six of them during the 1980s "bubble economy" and six after its collapse. At some point, he began writing down his experiences, and submitted his manuscript to a competition "as a lark." He won, but declined to attend the award ceremony, and continues to live on the streets of Tokyo, albeit in a different neighborhood. He has a self-described "inability to interact with other people," and translator Fowler acknowledges that even among day laborers, Oyama is particularly eccentric. But the narrative here is generally strong and engaging. To those interested in Japanese culture, this book will surely be an intriguing look at an obscure aspect of the culture.
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Reencounters With Colonialism--New Perspectives on the Americas) — C. L. R. James. Rather than see Ahab and Ishmael as representing respectively "totalitarian" and "American" cultural themes as critics in the 1950's saw it, James offers a vison focused on the Pequod and its crew. A view in which the MARINERS, RENEGADES & CASTAWAYS of the ship were at the mercy of their Captain. In James' interpretaion the Pequod is a factory ship and the crew are the workers. Ahab is no longer a mere sailor but is now illustrative of a "Captain of industry." -Michaeleve.
Masculinity and the English Working Class in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction (Literary Criticism & Cultural Theory) — Ying S. Lee.
Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture (The Haymarket Series) — Michael Denning (Author), Michael Sprinker (Author).
The Member of the Wedding — Carson McCullers. Twelve-year-old Frankie falls in love with her brother's wedding, convinced that her brother's honeymoon will be the start of her new and exciting life of world travel and inevitable fame. A coming-of-age story full of long summer afternoons and the shocking juxtapositions of puberty.
Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer (Working Class Biography) — George Sturt.
Men Working — John Faulkner (Author), Trent Watts (Introduction). : A novel.
Mid-Atlantic — Taffrail.
The Middle Sister: A Novel — Bonnie Glover.
Migrant Farmworkers: Hoping for a Better Life (Proud Heritage: The Hispanic Library) — Deborah Kent. Planting and harvesting crops is backbreaking labor that can take its toll on the strongest of workers. Migrant Farmworkers: Hoping for a Better Life introduces kids to the history and struggle of the many men, women, and children of Hispanic heritage who travel the United States in search of work and a better life for future generations.
Migration & the International Labour Market, 1850-1939 — Tim Hatton. "Migration and the International Labour Market 1850-1939" concentrates on the two central aspects of international migration--the forces which cause it and its economic effect. The contributors are drawn from a wide range of countries representing both the underdeveloped and the developed world, each of them examining and testing the validity of migration theories in a historical setting. In some cases migration is viewed from a comparative perspective--an approach which is facilitated by data on internationally comparable real wages. The authors also look at the responsiveness of migration from different countries, international wage differentials and the degree of international labor market integration. A number of chapters examine the impact of migration on real wage growth and economic convergence between original and destination countries--issues which remain at the heart of debates over international migration policy.
Milldust and Roses: Memoirs — Larry Smith. A poetic but bittersweet account of growing up in an eastern Ohio steel mill town. The town's residents, like the residents of many Mahoning Valley communities, were a varied ethnic mix from eastern and southern Europe. . . . The first section, the most interesting of the book, deals with his life until his graduation. Though Smith is only 59, he writes about a world that is almost gone now, a world where small towns were still vibrant and alive.
The Misadventures of Jack the Builder — W.J.P. Holgar. Follow Jack as he lurches between crises. This character-packed situational comedy is a potent laughter tonic to brighten the dullest day.
Moby Dick — Herman Melville. Among other themes — revenge, racism, and politics — Moby Dick explores the nature of hierarchical relationships. For some, including C.L.R. James, the work of men in one industry during the mid-19th Century represents a working class relationship with their boss. The doomed ship Pequod, with its full whale-processing facilities, can serve as a symbol for the American factory system, with its workers being used perilously and brought to their untimely deaths, with a mad captain of industry at the helm. See Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.
Modern Times, Ancient Hours - Updated and Expanded (Rev) 03 Edition— Pietro Bassom. It is a commonly expressed view that the sickness of our society is unemployment. Less frequently argued is the fact that we are, at the same time, suffering from overwork. It is even more rare to hear that the two sicknesses, unemployment and overwork, feed off one another and jointly attack the working classes worldwide. In Modern Times, Ancient Hours Pietro Basso argues convincingly that the average working time of wage labourers is more intense, fast-paced, flexible, and longer than at any period in recent history. This is true, he posits, not only in industry and agriculture, but also, and particularly, in the service industry. In this comprehensive survey of all the Western countries, not just the US, he demonstrates that extraordinary work pressure is increasing throughout. The introduction of the thirty-five-hour working week in France notwithstanding, all the signs of a creeping deterioration in the working lives of millions of people are explored: a reduction in the purchasing power of wages, the mass downsizing of corporations, the continual erosion of company and state-ensured benefits, and finally the availability of much cheaper labour from Latin America, Asia, Africa and eastern Europe. The only sensible response is a renewal of the working-class struggle. Modern Times, Ancient Hours forcefully reminds us that the human aspiration to do work that does not break the body or the spirit is universal and deep-rooted. Workers will rise, Basso argues, if they continue to be pushed beyond their limits.
Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry — Jill Louise Esbenshade. Monitoring Sweatshops offers the first comprehensive assessment of efforts to address and improve conditions in garment factories. The author describes the government's efforts to persuade retailers and clothing companies to participate in private monitoring programs. She shows the different approaches firms have taken, and the range of monitors chosen, from large accounting companies to local non-profits. Esbenshade also shows how the efforts of the anti-sweatshop movement forced companies to employ monitors overseas, as well.
Moving Up or Moving on: Who Advances in the Low-Wage Labor Market? — Fredrik Andersson. Offers a compelling argument about how low-wage workers can achieve upward mobility, and how public policy can facilitate the process.
The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 — Donna Landry. Donna Landry shows how an understanding of the remarkable but neglected careers of laboring-class women poets in the eighteenth century provokes a reassessment of our ideas concerning the literature of the period. Poets such as the washerwoman Mary Collier, the milkwoman Ann Yearsley, the domestic servants Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Hands, the dairywoman Jane Little, and the slave Phillis Wheatley can be seen employing various methods to adapt the conventions of polite verse for the purposes of social criticism. Historically important, technically impressive, and aesthetically innovative, the poetic achievements of these working class- women writers constitute an exciting literary discovery.
Music of the Mill — Luis J. Rodriguez. Focuses on diverse characters living, loving and just trying to get by in the L.A. barrios over a period of 60 years. Within the multigenerational saga of the Salcido family and its deep ties to the Nazareth Steel Mill, Rodriguez's main character is 20-year-old Johnny, a second-generation mill worker who tries to fight the abusive powers-that-be inside the operation's corporate and union hierarchies. The novel hums with intensity as Rodriguez passionately dramatizes the battle the mill's minority workers wage against the often-violent, KKK-aligned white mill workers in the 1970s.
The Naked and the Dead — Norman Mailer. A Pacific battleground of the Second World War, as seen through the eyes of a single platoon. Blighted by depression, divided by their parochialism and ethnicity, often callously used by their superiors — the survival of democracy nonetheless rests squarely on the shoulders of this generation of G.I.s., ordinary men called up for extraordinary duties.
Neighborhood Jobs, Race, and Skills: Urban Unemployment and Commuting (Garland Studies in the History of American Labor) — Daniel Immergluck. Examines the role of job proximity on neighborhood employment rates and the propensity of residents to work close to their own neighborhoods.
The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (Century Foundation Books) — Simon Head. Simon Head points to information technology as the prime cause of growing wage disparity. Many economists, technologists and business consultants have predicted that IT would liberate the work force, bringing self-managed work teams and decentralized decision making. Head argues that the opposite has happened. Reengineering, a prime example of how business processes have been computerized, has instead simplified the work of middle and lower level employees, fenced them in with elaborate rules, and set up digital monitoring to make sure that the rules are obeyed. This is true even in such high-skill professions as medicine, where decision-making software in the hands of HMO's decides the length of a patient's stay in hospital and determines the treatments patients will or will not receive. Head argues that these computer systems devalue a worker's experience and skill, and subject employees to a degree of supervision which is excessive and demeaning. The harsh and often unstable work regime of reengineering also undermines the security of employees and so weakens their bargaining power in the workplace.
Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell. Thought Police. Big Brother. Orwellian. These words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984. The story of one man's nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory.
The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez — John Rechy. Amalia Gomez awakens one day and looks out her window in the barrios of Los Angeles to see a silver cross in the sky--a sign from God. This Mexican-American woman is always looking for the brighter side of life, never wanting to face her real-life problems or those of her children, friends, or neighbors. From the early morning cross in the sky to Amalia's near murder at the end of the day, readers are given a glimpse of life in a decaying urban environment and see from Amalia's perspective the motivations and challenges of barrio life. Rechy, a Mexican-American author, presents a rich portrayal of Amalia in this readable and moving work, punctuating his work with Spanish dialog.
Next Upsurge : Labor and the New Social Movements (03 Edition) — Dan Clawson. The U.S. labor movement may be on the verge of massive growth, according to Dan Clawson. He argues that unions don't grow slowly and incrementally, but rather in bursts. Even if the AFL-CIO could organize twice as many members per year as it now does, it would take thirty years to return to the levels of union membership that existed when Ronald Reagan was elected president. In contrast, labor membership more than quadrupled in the years from 1934 to 1945. For there to be a new upsurge, Clawson asserts, labor must fuse with social movements concerned with race, gender, and global justice. The new forms may create a labor movement that breaks down the boundaries between "union" and "community" or between work and family issues. Clawson finds that this is already happening in some parts of the labor movement: labor has endorsed global justice and opposed war in Iraq, student activists combat sweatshops, unions struggle for immigrant rights. Innovative campaigns of this sort, Clawson shows, create new strategies--determined by workers rather than union organizers-that redefine the very meaning of the labor movement. "The Next Upsurge presents a range of examples from attempts to replace "macho" unions with more feminist models to campaigns linking labor and community issues and attempts to establish cross-border solidarity and a living wage.
The New Urban Immigrant Workforce: Innovative Models of Labor Organizing — Sarumathi Jayaraman and Immanuel Ness (eds).
Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America — Barbara Ehrenreich. The author worked undercover as a waitress in Florida, a housecleaner in Maine, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk in Minnesota to examine living conditions for the working poor. Reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and generosity.
Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain — Butch Lee (Author), Red Rover (Author). “A book that should be read by anyone who gives a damn about a non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic future.” [Bo Brown]. “The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as dramatic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart and reconstructing the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have.” [from the preface] Butch and Red break it down, how it all fits together, how to break it apart again.
Nothing in the World — Roy Kesey.
Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA — Bathsheba Monk. Seventeen dark and hilarious interwoven short stories covering 40 years in the lives of the stories’ two main characters, Annie Kusiak and Theresa Gojuk, who vow as young girls to escape their dying rust belt town and reinvent themselves. http://www.bathshebamonk.com/
Off-Season City Pipe — Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. Hedge Coke's reputation rests on her memoirs concerned with her Native American heritage, such as the searing and memorable Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Here she reveals another identity, as a poet of the American worker — "cracker-packin' girls" and "fieldworkers and framers like me" — in long-lined, conversational poems full of southern swing and storytelling zest. She captures the lives of people struggling, sometimes failing like the zoned-out man in the Mission District who needs a "Houdini mentality to stand," but also exulting in their strength, like the women who, "double-handed / popping apart plump green strings / fresh from leafy hills," can pint after pint of produce. Though informed by the history of Indian struggle, the poems are set more in the city than on the reservation, in places "the BIA forgot to watch." Anyone interested in the often silenced voices of America's working poor will appreciate these poems.
Of Mice & Men — John Steinbeck. Depression-era American fiction.
Olly's World — Edward Bond. This play opens in a small, working-class apartment in London, where Mike tries to communicate with his teenage daughter, Sheila. She remains entirely unresponsive, and ultimately Mike commits an extreme act which lands him in prison. Once there, Mike attempts to understand his behavior, journeying first to the brink of self-destruction, then to reconciliation and redemption. Meanwhile Sheila's former boyfriend Frank, now a policeman, sets out to take vengeance on Mike. They find Olly, a young criminal, who becomes the pawn in Mike's search for justice and Frank's for revenge. Caught in an endless cycle of violence and retribution, slaves to a system that grinds them down, the men and women of Olly’s Prison strive to create a world of order and humanity amidst a society of brutality and chaos.
On the Line — Harvey Swados. (1990) Fictional sketches of automobile assembly-line workers.
Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832-1898 — Anita Levy. Exposes certain forms of middle-class power that have been taken for granted as "common sense" and "laws of nature." Joining an emergent tradition of cultural historians who draw on Gramsci and Foucault, she shows how middle-class hegemony in the nineteenth century depended on notions of gender to legitimize a culture-specific and class-specific definition of the right and wrong ways of being human. The author examines not only domestic fiction, particularly Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights, but also nineteenth-century works of the human sciences, including sociological tracts, anthropological treatises, medical texts, and psychological studies. She finds that British intellectuals of the period produced gendered standards of behavior that did not so much subordinate women to men as they authorized the social class whose women met norms of "appropriate" behavior: this class was considered to be peculiarly fit to care for other social and cultural groups whose women were "improperly" gendered. When Levy reads fiction against the social sciences, she demonstrates that the history of fiction cannot be understood apart from the history of the human sciences. Both fiction and science share common narrative strategies for representing the "essential" female and "other women"--the prostitute, the "primitive," and the madwoman. Only fiction, however, represented these strategies in an idiom of everyday life that verified "theory" and "science."
Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature — Lance Newman. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. Our Common Dwelling engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.
Out of the Furnace — Thomas Bell. (1976) A Slovak-Hungarian immigrant family (three generations who worked in the steelmills in Braddock - PA. Bell based this book on the immigrant experiences of his own family. He tells the story not just of this immigrant family but of the process of unionization of the steel industry.
The Oxford Book of Work — Reference and anthology.
Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler.
People From the Backwoods: A novel (The Working class in Soviet literature) — Aleksandr Malyshkin.
Philadelphia Fire — John Edgar Wideman.
Pioneering: Poems from the Construction Site — Susan Eisenberg. "The poems speak with a voice that is by turns dangerous and exhilarating, rich with metaphors and unrelentingly physical--much like construction work itself."
The Pittsburgh Cycle — August Wilson. Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle" consists of ten plays—nine of which are set in Pittsburgh's Hill District, an African-American neighorhood that takes on a mythic literary significance. The plays are each set in a different decade and aim to sketch the Black experience in the 20th century. See Wikipedia.
Places/Everyone — Jim Daniels. Brittingham Prize in Poetry.
Pocket Monologues: Working-Class Characters for Women — Susan Pomerance.
The Politics of Turmoil; Essays on Poverty, Race, and the Urban Crisis — Richard A. Cloward.
The Politics of Whiteness — Michelle Brattain. Brattain (history, Georgia State U.) examines the textile industry in Rome, Georgia from the 1930s to the 1970s, and finds that white workers there had considerable collective political and social power, and supported each other in working-class conservative activism against civil rights. She traces how the textile industry offered one of the few alternatives to agricultural work for the working class in the South, how they protected their jobs more or less collectively. She also describes how labor unions both hit and missed the mark amongst whites during the Depression and after World War II, and how Rome eventually went Republican in the face of civil rights.
Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail — Richard A. Cloward. Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: -- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America -- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO -- The Southern Civil Rights Movement -- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.
Poor Workers' Unions : Rebuilding Labor From Below (05 Edition) — Vanessa Tait. "While the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions desperately try to figure out how to rebuild and energize the labor movement, this exceptional book reveals that poor workers have been showing the way for the past forty years. Utilizing original documents, Tait examines . . . a wide range of movements organized by poor workers to improve their circumstances and build a more just society, including the Revolutionary Union Movement, the National Welfare Rights Organization, ACORN's Unite Labor Unions, workfare unions, and independent workers'centers. She demonstrates that these movements were founded and developed upon principles of rank-and-file control, democracy, community involvement, and solidarity and aimed to improve all aspects of workers' lives. . . . Both labor activists and labor historians will learn much from this book."-Michael Yates
The Power of Privilege — Joseph Soares. Not about the working class, but rather an investigation of the elite privilege that reproduces the ruling class. Kim Martineau of the Hartford Courant has written about today's college admissions that, "...the system no longer screens out Jews but has done remarkably well at leaving the poor and working class outside the gates..."
The book The Power of Privilege "...clarifies the dynamics of elite reproduction, shows how privilege and social inequality are deeply embedded in institutions, and demonstrates the important role that meritocratic schools plays in society.” —Judith Blau
PRIVATE HICKS — Albert Maltz. One act play about a working-class soldier (National Guard) who refuses to shoot at strikers at an unnamed Midwest factory. A great short play with eight characters. (1935)
Punching Out — Jim Daniels. African American Life (Poetry, paperback).
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists — Robert Tressell. Set against the Free Trade Tariff Reform bills in a Sussex seaside town, early nineteen-hundreds.
A Raisin in the Sun — Lorraine Hansberry. The play debuted on Broadway in 1959. The story is based upon Hansberry's own experiences growing up in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, as well as the first play with a black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway. From Wikipedia.
Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get It Back — by Sheila Cohen.
The Rat Pit (Working Class Biography) — Patrick MacGill. The Rat-Pit tells the tragic story of the struggle of Donegal girl, Norah Ryan against poverty in turn-of-the-century Glasgow. The book's appearance proved deeply divisive due to its fierce anticlericalism and unflinching portrayal of social conditions in the early years of the century. In the intervening years it has lost none of its power to shock. Published in 1915, Children of the Dead End was MacGill's autobiographical novel of his childhood in Ireland and later Scotland. The Rat Pit was a semisequel that told the story of protagonist Norah Ryan, who is forced into the harshest of lives. Both volumes reveal the poverty and oppression suffered by Irish immigrants in Britain and the near slave conditions in which they toiled as laborers.
The Ravenmaster's secret : escape from the Tower of London — Elvira Woodruff. Workmanlike, engaging story of the son of the ravenmaster of the Tower of London who becomes involved in caring for the daughter of a Scottish Rebel who is imprisoned there. He is forced to decide where his loyalties truly lie. A secondary story involves a ratcatcher's boy who becomes a chimney sweep. A good sense of period.
Rear View: Stories — Peter Duval (Author), Jay Parini (Introduction). Working-class characters struggling with their fates populate the monochromatic New England landscape of Duval's 12 stories. Often lapsed Catholics, they measure the bleakness of their existence against memories of better times.
Reading Lives: Working-Class Children and Literacy Learning (Language and Literacy Series) — Deborah Hicks.
A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader — Jean Pfaelzer. A selection of stories and nonfiction essays. Davis inherited the sentimental literary tradition (of the latter half of the 1800s) but nonetheless wrote "common stories" that "exposed the tension between sentimentalism, a genre predicated on the repression of the self, and realism, a genre predicated on the search for individual identity." Also see Life in the Iron Mills.
Regulating The Poor:
The Functions of Public Relief —
Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare —
Representations of Working Class Life, 1957-64 — Stuart Laing.
Return to Wigan — Clancy Sigal.
Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory — Kevin Murphy. The most thorough investigation to date of working-class life during the revolutionary era (1917).
Rewriting White: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century America — Todd Vogel. Looks at how America has racialized language and aesthetic achievement. To make his point, he showcases the surprisingly complex interactions between four nineteenth-century writers of color and the "standard white English" they adapted for their own moral, political, and social ends. The African American, Native American, and Chinese American writers Vogel discusses delivered their messages in a manner that simultaneously demonstrated their command of the dominant discourse of their times—using styles and addressing forums considered above their station—and fashioned a subversive meaning in the very act of that demonstration. The close readings and meticulous archival research in ReWriting White upend our conventional expectations, enrich our understanding of the dynamics of hegemony and cultural struggle, and contribute to the efforts of other cutting-edge contemporary scholars to chip away at the walls of racial segregation that have for too long defined and defaced the landscape of American literary and cultural studies.
The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 — Meredith Tax. Focusing on the socialist housewives, settlement workers, and left-wing feminists who were the main allies of working women between the 1880s and World War I, The Rising of the Women explores the successes and failures of the "united fronts" within which middle- and working-class American women worked together to improve social and economic conditions for female laborers. Through detailed studies of the Illinois Women's Alliance, the Woman's Trade Union League, the New York shirtwaist makers strike of 1909-10, and the 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Meredith Tax uncovers the circumstances that helped and hindered cross-class and cross-gender cooperation on behalf of women of the working class. In a new introduction to this first Illinois paperback edition, Tax assesses the progress of women's solidarity since the book's original publication.
Rivethead : Tales From the Assembly Line (91 Edition) — Ben Hamper. The man the Detroit Free Press calls "a blue collar Tom Wolfe" delivers a full-barreled blast of truth and gritty reality in Rivethead, a no-holds-barred journey through the belly of the American industrial beast.
River: A Novel (Working Class in Soviet Literature) — Leonid Leonov.
Rivington Street — Meredith Tax. (1982) See Union Square.
The Road to Wigan Pier — George Orwell. Orwell brings his unparalleled powers of observation to portray the wretched conditions of the working class... A first-person account of the lives of coal miners and others in the poor north of England. See Wikipedia.
Ruined City — Nevil Shute.
Sailors Of Cattaro — Friedrich Wolf. A play with a battleship setting that emphasized the need for centralized direction in a Communist organization.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — Alan Sillitoe. A working class man in northern England, Sillitoe bring to life the way it used to be. Between cups of tea, Woodbines, too many pints for sobriety and a long list of ladies, our man Arthur spends his days in mindless bicycle manufacture and his nights forgetting it all. There is the smell of coal smoke in the winter air, the taste and crunch of fried bread and bacon, the scent of a woman and the hard reality of no exit. Arthur came from a family who had spent too many years on the dole, a situation now repreating itself in England. Prosperity was a full larder and an endless supply of cigarettes and new clothes. Sillitoe has captured it all in a book which still breathes the life he infused into it almost 40 years ago.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: Time and the Working Classes — John Rule. Content unknown.
Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland [ILLUSTRATED] — Terry Eagleton. Account of Ireland's neglected "national" intellectuals, an extraordinary group, including such figures as Oscar Wilde's father William Wilde, Charles Lever, Samuel Ferguson, Isaac Butt, Sheridan Le Fanu. They formed a kind of Irish version of "Bloomsbury", but one composed, exceptionally, of scientists, mathematicians, economists, and lawyers, rather than preponderantly of artists and critics. Their work, much of it published in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine, was deeply caught up in networks of kinship, shared cultural interests and intersecting biographies in the outsized village of nineteenth-century Dublin. Eagleton explores the preoccupations of this remarkable community, in all its fascinating ferment and diversity, through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's definitions of "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals, and maps the nature of its relation to the Young Ireland movement, combining his account with some reflections on intellectual work in general and its place in political life.
Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart — Liza Featherstone. This book is about much more than one company's mistreatment of its employees. It is about the history of the female working poor, and the impossible situation facing America's low-wage women workers. Fifteen percent of American women hold the kind of jobs Barbara Ehrenreich described in Nickel and Dimed, and their lives are impacted by the combination of sexism, low-wage work and poverty that is so evident in the story of Dukes. In the ongoing welfare reform debate, we are often told that a job — any job — is the ticket out of poverty and welfare dependence. But in fact, as Featherstone shows, dead-end jobs like those at Wal-Mart actually sustain poverty. Drawing extensively on interviews with the plaintiffs, the book shows how sex-discrimination in employment contributes to keeping women poor. The work being done by Betty Dukes and other like her, to reform and unionize Wal-Mart, offers hope for the future, and Featherstone reveals the creative solutions workers around the country have found — like fighting for unions, living wage ordinances, and childcare options.
Sent For You Yesterday — John Edgar Wideman.
The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below — Bruce W. Robbins. examines the representation of servants in nineteenth-century British fiction. Wandering in the margins of these texts that are not about them, servants are visible only as anachronistic appendages to their masters and as functions of traditional narrative form. Yet their persistence, Robbins argues, signals more than the absence of the "ordinary people" they are taken to represent. Robbins's argument offers a new and distinctive approach to the literary analysis of class, while it also bodies forth a revisionist counterpolitics to the realist tradition from Homer to Virginia Woolf.
Sex Worker Union Organizing: An International Study — Gregor Gall. Sex Worker Union Organising is the first study of the emerging phenomenon of sex workers - prostitutes, exotic dancers such as lap dancers, porn models and actresses, and sex chatline workers - asserting that their economic activites are work and as such, they are entitled to workers' rights. The most developed instances of this struggle, in Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany The Netherlands, New Zealand and the US, have taken the form of unionisation. The book analyses the basis and contexts for this struggle and assesses the opportunities and challenges facing these unionisation projects.
Shakespeare's Attitude Toward the Working Classes — Ernest Howard Crosby. Interesting title, content unknown.
Show and Tell : new and selected poems — Jim Daniels.
Shut Up Shut Down — Mark Nowak. The deindustrialization of these rust-belt cities, and the resulting economic impact on workers' lives, is one of the recurring themes of Nowak's poetry. He splices together newspaper quotes, photographs, song lyrics, and numerous other artifacts, as well as his own words, to create a collage of class struggle. The influences he cites are more often musical--Afrika Bambaataa, Negativeland--than literary. His goal is to create a radical, working-class literature that will speak to people who don't normally attend academic conferences or scrutinize poetry journals.
Signed With Their Honour — James Aldridge. War in Greece and Crete or Cyprus.
Silences — Tillie Olsen. Explores the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen's heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her.
The Silent Majority: A study of the working class in post-war British fiction (Vision critical studies) — Nigel Gray.
Singlejack Solidarity (Critical American Studies Series) — Stan Weir. This volume collects 38 essays by rank and file labor activist and writer Weir (1921-2001). The essays describe his experiences as an activist in the longshore and automotive industries, explore labor and union culture, analyze the human costs of automation, consider the need and proper forms of working class networks, attack the concept of the "vanguard party," present a rank and file alternative to the business unionism of the AFL-CIO, and other issues of the history and future directions of labor.
Sin Patron: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories — the lavaca collective, foreword by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis. The worker-run factories of Argentina offer an inspirational example of a struggle for social change that has achieved a real victory against corporate globalization.
Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt Vonnegut. (-)
Small Books and Pleasant Histories — by Margaret Spufford. Examines both the spread of reading ability, and one of the principal forms of cheap print available in the late seventeenth century at a price within the reach of the day labourer. Many historians, notably history of education specialists, had not realized the extent of elementary schooling and the consequent existence of a mass readership and a popular literature created especially for it before the Charity School movement.
So Long, See You Tomorrow — William Maxwell. American fiction, Illinois.
Sounder — William H. Armstrong.
The Space Merchants — Pohl & Kornbluth. (1953)
The Specialist — Sayles.
Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro — Barbara Foley. With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved. Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible in which the radicalism of the 1920s was forged. World War I and the Russian Revolution profoundly reshaped the American social landscape, with progressive reforms first halted and then reversed in the name of anti-Bolshevism. Dissent was stifled as labor activists and minority groups came under intense attack. Foley shows that African Americans had a significant relationship with the organized Left and that the New Negro movement's radical politics of race was also the politics of class.
The Spirit of Labor — Hutchins Hapgood. This non-fiction narrative is an entertaining look at labor struggles, anarchist politics, and proletarian culture in Chicago, the heart of the radical labor movement in the turn-of-the-century United States. Through the story of its central character, anarchist carpenter Anton Johannsen, The Spirit of Labor pulls the reader into a vibrant, gritty world inhabited by unionists and scabs, anarchists and socialists, hoboes and tramps, radical reformers, shady politicians and corrupt policemen, workers equipped with "ready fists and honest souls," and by business leaders bent on crushing the city's militant labor movement. The book also reflects the uncomfortable fit between the worlds of the bohemian intellectual and the radical worker.
The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class — Gary Lenhart. The essays in The Stamp of Class deal with the question of class as reflected in the works of Tracie Morris, Tillie Olsen, Melvin Tolson, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and others. The work is rooted in the author's own experiences as a working-class poet and teacher and is the result of more than a decade of exploration.
The Star Rover — see The Jacket.
Starving Amidst Too Much & Other Iww Writings on the Food Industry — Peter (edt) Rachleff. This is a book about the irrepressible conflict between the poorly paid workers who actually feed the world and the parasitical multi-billionaire corporate powers that make the rules and graba the profits. Reproduced here are rare classic documents on the "food question" by four old-time members of the IWW. T-Bone Slim provides a detailed critique of the industry - chockful of penetrating insight and knckout black humor. Organizer L S Chumley portrays the horrid living and working conditions of hotel and restaurant workers circa 1918, stressing the need for workers' direct action. Wobbly troubadour Jim Semour, with his inspired saga of "The Dishwasher" reflects on the possibilities of a radically different diet. Jack Sheridan's fascinating 1959 survey of the role of food in ancient and modern civilization, especially in economic development, is also a crash-course in the materialist conception of history at its Wobbly soapboxer best. In his introduction, historian/activist Peter Rachleff traces the history of the food-workers' self-organization, and brings the book up to date with a look at current point-of-production struggles to break the haughty power of an ecocidal agribusiness and the union-busting fast-food chains. Plus a foreword by Carlos Cortez.
Steady Eddie: A Novel — T. Glen Coughlin. The poignant angst of a 1970s teenager who dreams of escaping his dead-end life and sailing off to Florida in his grandfather's fishing boat. Although the reader sympathizes with Eddie's struggles about whether he should flee the law, this gritty, melodramatic, Bukowski-like tale loses steam when it solves Eddie's problems with a feel-good ending.
Stevedore — Paul Peters & George Sklar. "Black and white workers should and could present a united front." Innocent black union organizer is accused of rape, then is railroaded because he insists on his rights. Propaganda gives way to rousing action.
STREET: Poems by Jim Daniels, Photographs by Charlee Brodsky — Jim Daniels (Author), Charlee Brodsky (Photographer). Photographs shot by Brodsky in the 1980s of people in Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, each accompanied by a poem written by Daniels that tells the imagined story of the person pictured.
The Struggle for the Health and Legal Protection of Farm Workers: El Cortito (Hispanic Civil Rights) — Maurice Jourdane. This book chronicles Jourdane's decade-long struggle to advocate for a state ban of the short hoe and his efforts to protect other civil and human rights of California field workers.
Studs Lonigan — James T. Farrell (Author), Ann Douglas (Introduction). Studs starts out his life full of vigor and ambition, qualities that are crushed by the Chicago youth's limited social and economic environment. Studs's swaggering and vicious comrades, his narrow family, and his educational and religious background lead him to a life of futile dissipation.
Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism
in the United States — Sharon Smith. Workers
in the United States have a rich tradition of fighting back and achieving
gains previously thought unthinkable, from the weekend, to health care,
to the right to even form a union.
Suburban Sweatshops : Fight for Immigrant Rights (05 Edition) — Jennifer Gordon. The author weaves together Latino immigrant life and legal activism to tell the unexpected tale of how the most vulnerable workers in society came together to demand fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect from employers. Immigrant workers--many undocumented--won a series of remarkable victories, including a raise of thirty percent for day laborers and a domestic workers' bill of rights. In the process, they transformed themselves into effective political participants. Gordon neither ignores the obstacles faced by such grassroots organizations nor underestimates their very real potential for fundamental change. This revelatory work challenges widely held beliefs about the powerlessness of immigrant workers, what a union should be, and what constitutes effective lawyering. It opens up exciting new possibilities for labor organizing, community building, participatory democracy, legal strategies, and social justice.
Superman: Red Son (a graphic novel) — Mark Millar. (2004)
Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea — Laura Hapke. Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told. Not seeking a formal definition of the sort that policymakers are concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology, this unique book shows, rather, how the "real" sweatshop has become intertwined with the "invented" sweatshop of our national imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning. Hapke uncovers a wide variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists, reformers, and workers themselves have told about "the shop." Adding an important perspective to historical and economic approaches, Sweatshop draws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail how the shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives. An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy. Rutgers UP, 2004.
Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective — Daniel Bender. For over a century, the sweatshop has evoked outrage and moral repugnance. Once cast as a type of dangerous and immoral garment factory brought to American shores by European immigrants, today the sweatshop is reviled as emblematic of the abuses of an unregulated global economy. This collection unites some of the best recent work in the interdisciplinary field of "sweatshop studies." It examines changing understandings of the roots and problems of the sweatshop, and explores how the history of the American sweatshop is inexorably intertwined with global migration of capital, labor, ideas and goods. The American sweatshop may be located abroad but remains bound to the United States through ties of fashion, politics, labor and economics. The global character of the American sweatshop has presented a barrier to unionization and regulation. Anti-sweatshop campaigns have often focused on local organizing and national regulation while the sweatshop remains global. Thus, the epitaph for the sweatshop has frequently been written and re-written by unionists, reformers, activists and politicians. So, too, have they mourned its return.
Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory — Miriam Ching Louie. Showcases immigrant women workers speaking out for themselves, in their own words. While public outrage over sweatshops builds in intensity, this book shows us who these workers really are and how they are leading campaigns to fight for their rights. In-depth, accessible analyses of the immigration, labor, and trade policies, which together have forced these women into the most dangerous, poorly paid jobs.
The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America — Amy Schrager Lang. Explores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of wealth and power. As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the "dangerous classes." At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of "home" as a figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively classless nation. This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict... A finely achieved study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.
Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women — Anne E. Goldman. Demonstrates that ethnic women can and do speak for themselves, even in the most unlikely contexts. Citing a wide variety of nontraditional texts--including the cookbooks of Nuevo Mexicanas, African American memoirs of midwifery and healing, and Jewish women's histories of the garment industry--Goldman illustrates how American women have asserted their ethnic identities and made their voices heard over and sometimes against the interests of publishers, editors, and readers. While the dominant culture has interpreted works of ethnic literature as representative of a people rather than an individual, the working women of this study insist upon their own agency in narrating rich and complicated self-portraits.
Talking to Strangers — Patricia Dobler. Britingham Prize in Poetry.
Tell Me a Riddle — Tillie Olsen. [This collection of four stories, "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, what Ship?," "O Yes," and "Tell me a Riddle," had become an American classic. Since the title novella won the O. Henry Award in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and - most important - once read, they abide in the hearts of their readers.] --publisher. In "I Stand Here Ironing," a working-class mother, as she is doing her family's ironing, muses about how her college-age daughter is deserving of a life of possibilities just as much as are the daughters of families of privilege. "Hey Sailor, What Ship" is the most powerful, concentrated portrayal of alcoholism... Excerpts of comments at Amazon: "...Tillie Olsen packs a lifetime of enforced silences into this slender work of art. These are dense and poetic evocations of Joyce and Woolf, but with an added proletarian knife-thrust to the heart..." "...stories that are so powerful, and so well-written, you'll want to read them again and again..."
Ten Days That Shook The World — John Reed.
The Tiger Rising — Kate DiCamillo. Includes a child whose mother has died, and a child whose parents have divorced. The children learn to let their "tigers" rise; to bring expression to their fears and losses; to bring about change in their lives, understanding that they must do so for themselves.
They Came Like Swallows — William Maxwell.
Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe. Traces the growing friction between village leaders and Europeans determined to save the heathen souls of Africa. But its hero, a noble man who is driven by destructive forces, speaks a universal tongue.
The 13th Valley — John DelVecchio. A Vietnam novel.
Toward a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals, 1816-1858 (Studies in Victorian Life and Literature) — Paul Thomas Murphy.
Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working-Class Stories of the 1920s — H. Gustav Klaus (Editor).
Trash — Dorothy Allison. In 14 gritty, intimate stories, Allison's fictional persona exposes with poetic frankness the complexities of being "a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope," rebelling against the Southern "poor white trash" roots that inevitably define her. By the author of the National Book Award finalist Bastard Out of Carolina.
Tressell: The Real Story of 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' — Dave Harker.
Triangle — Katherine Weber. Different views exist about the Triangle Waist Factory fire. This novel explores the memories of a survivor and asks: who owns history and who decides how to tell its stories? Do we inevitably interpret history according to our own generation’s lenses? The novel invites and rewards careful reading, as revelation comes not in grandiose moments of high drama but through the slow accumulation of detail.
Triangle Factory Fire Project — Chris Piehler. A play. In the Triangle Waist Factory off downtown Manhattan’s Washington Square—where 500 immigrant workers from Poland, Russia and Italy toil fourteen-hour days making lady’s dresses—a cigarette is tossed into a bin of fabric scraps. Despite desperate efforts, flames sweep through the eighth, ninth and tenth floors. Panic-stricken workers run in all directions. On the ninth floor, some make it to the fire escape, only to have it collapse beneath their weight. Others run to the exit door but find it locked—many, including the soon-to-be-married Margaret Schwartz, die with their hands on the doorknob. Dozens leap from the windows to their deaths, shocking the crowd of onlookers gathered below. And some through bravery or sheer luck make it out alive. In the space of twenty-eight minutes, the fire is under control, but 146 people, mainly young immigrant girls, have died. THE TRIANGLE FACTORY FIRE PROJECT uses eyewitness accounts, court transcripts and other archival material to create a dramatic moment-by-moment account of this historic fire and the social upheaval that followed. (2005)
Triangle : the Fire that Changed America — Dave Von Drehle. Includes information from the long-lost transcript of the trial of the company's owner. The transcript included testimony from several dozen individuals associated with the incident.
Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class — John Kirk. Drawing extensively on the theoretical insights of Raymond Williams and the British cultural studies tradition to challenge suggestions that class is no longer relevant for literary analysis, this book examines how the lives and experiences of working-class people have changed over the past century and how these changes have been depicted and explored in a range of fictional and nonfictional texts.
The Underdogs — Mariano Azuela. A first-hand description of combat during the Mexican revolution. See Wikipedia.
Union Dues: A Novel — John Sayles. The setting is Boston, Fall 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It's a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions. His father Hunter, who has been involved in a brave and dangerous campaign to unseat a corrupt union president in the coal miners union, leaves West Virginia to hunt for his runaway son. To make ends meet, he takes day-labor jobs in order to survive while searching for him. Living parallel lives, their destinies ultimately movingly collide in this sprawling classic of radicalism across the generations, in the vein of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Richard Price.
Union Square — Meredith Tax. Rivington Street follows the lives of four Jewish women on Manhattan's Lower East Side at the turn of the century as they encounter love, politics, and the working world. Union Square recounts the story of several women in the United States and Europe between the world wars. Originally released in 1982 and 1988, respectively, this duo is probably more for feminist readers.
Union Street & Blow Your House Down (two novels in one) — Pat Barker. "[Union Street]'s point is life, and how rich and hard it is, and the different ways people have of toughing it through the pain without being crushed." --Meredith Tax
The Unmaking of the American Working Class — Reg Theriault. Describes the blue-collar culture and ethics that have defined America, and explains why they are worth preserving in the face of globalization and downsizing. The Unmaking of the American Working Class tells the story behind the disappearance of blue-collar work in America, giving both a humorous picture of working-class labor and a devastating indictment of the forces that threaten it. Whether Republican or Democratic, every administration since World War II has fostered the destruction of large segments of the blue-collar working class. Theriault maintains that America is the poorer for such action, and argues that our society doesn’t need to destroy this vital part of itself. Written for all workers, whatever color their collars, The Unmaking of the American Working Class takes a fresh look at the politics of work and its place in our society.
Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England — Patricia Fumerton. Migrants made up a growing class of workers in late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England. In fact, by 1650, half of England’s rural population consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Patricia Fumerton offers an expansive portrait of unsettledness in early modern England that includes the homeless and housed alike. Fumerton begins by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow’s journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts what he himself termed his “unsettled mind” and the perpetual anxieties of England’s working and wayfaring poor.
Up the Junction — Nell Dunn. A succ's de scandale when it was published in England in 1963, Up the Junction is a high-voltage, gorgeously visceral collection of portraits of working-class women's lives, finally restored to print. Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.
U.S.A. — John Dos Passos. Epic trilogy of American life in the first half of the twentieth century. From the novel: "U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dog-eared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world's greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people."
The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life With Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments — Richard Hoggart.
Valley of the Moon — Jack London.
Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature — Eric Schocket.
Victims of the latest dance craze : poems — Cornelius Eady. African-American.
The Victorian Working-Class Writer — Owen R. Ashton.
Voodoo Heart — Scott Snyder. Scott Snyder takes seemingly ordinary characters, gives them unique and slightly offbeat voices and then lets their actions transform them. Heartbreaking moments are interspersed with moments of profound transformation to give the collection a completeness that is often missing from short story collections.
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class — David Roediger. Examines the growth and social construction of racism as it was related to the working classes of the ninteenth century. Explores how white workers (with an emphasis on Irish Americans) sought after a "wage" for their color, by placing on Black Americans the mantle of "other", objectifying and stratifying blacks into an object of prejudice and discrimination.
Waiting for Lefty — Clifford Odets. In this 1935 play by an American playwright, cab drivers are planning a labor strike.
Welfare, the Working Poor, and Labor — Louise B. Simmons. Since the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, it has become clear that the issues associated with welfare are now inextricably woven into the problems of low-wage work. This volume analyzes poverty and welfare reform within a context of low-wage work and the contours of the labor market that welfare recipients are entering. Given the new welfare regime of time limits and work requirements, problems of welfare cannot be separated from problems of work, politics, organizing, and other questions of social and economic policy. Although there have been many volumes on welfare reform, the unique contribution of this volume is that it brings labor into the discussion and creates a bridge between the domains of labor and welfare.
Well — Matthew McIntosh. An unusual, dark debut novel with an ensemble cast. McIntosh assembles different episodes and voices to create an impressionistic tableau of Federal Way, Washington, a blue-collar town facing the loss of blue-collar jobs and culture. McIntosh's characters are introduced in first-person testimonies and third-person sketches that build matter-of-factly and then trail off ambiguously, like entries in a police blotter-if the police blotter were written by Samuel Beckett. They lead lives of quiet despair, punctuated by bursts of violence, benders and bad sex. Physical pain harries many of the characters, madness others, and almost all are cursed with deteriorating personal relationships.
What Night Brings (Working Classics) — Carla Trujillo. This first novel by a Chicana writer who has been active as a lesbian anthologist and editor is a pleasant surprise: a lively, picaresque tale, told in the world-weary but ever-hopeful voice of 12-year-old Marci Cruz. Marci's father, Eddie, is a drinker and womanizer who often takes his belt or his fists to Marci and her sister, Corin, but whose wife, the besotted Delia, seems oblivious of his faults. Much of the tale embraces the ingenious ways in which Marci and Corin try to outwit him, or least make their mother see him for the passive-aggressive monster he is; perhaps the most delightful of these is the long saga of their attempt to photograph him, with a cheap box camera lent by a sympathetic uncle, in incriminating situations with his girlfriend. Through all this, Marci is also becoming increasingly aware that she is romantically drawn to other girls and wishes she could become a boy so as to express such feelings appropriately.
What We Hold In Common — Janet Zandy. Anthology. Janet Zandy brings together-in poetry, fiction, memoir, and song-the voices of working-class people throughout history, with a strong emphasis on the often overlooked voices of working-class women. Critical essays place working-class studies in perspective for teacher and student, as scholars in the field write about recovering autobiographies and oral histories, practicing working-class studies, and current and emerging texts and theories. Course syllabi and curriculum materials offer concrete strategies and resources for the classroom.
Where We Stand: Class Matters — Bell Hooks. Incisive examination of class rooted in cultural critic hooks's (All About Love) personal experience, political commitment, and social theory, which links gender, race, and class. Starting with her working-class childhood, the author illustrates how everyday interactions reproduce class hierarchy while simultaneously denying its existence. Because she sustains an unflinching gaze on both her own personal motivations and on persistent social structures, hooks provides a valuable framework for discussing such difficult and unexplored areas as greed, the quest to live simply, the ruling-class co-optation of youth through popular culture, and real estate speculation as an instrument of racism.
Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Women in Culture & Society) — Joanne J Meyerowitz. Starting with Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Meyerowitz uses turn-of-the-century Chicago as a case study to explore both the image and the reality of single women's experiences as they lived apart from their families. In an era when family all but defined American womanhood, these women--neither victimized nor liberated--created new social ties and subcultures to cope with the conditions of urban life.
Women in Labor: Mothers, Medicine, and Occupational Health in the United States, 1890-1980 (Women and Health: Cultural and Social Perspectives) — Allison L Hepler. Early in the twentieth century, states and courts began limiting the workplace hours of wage-earning women in order to protect them from fatigue and ill health. It was felt that a woman's role was to be a mother and that working too many hours in an often unhealthy and dangerous workplace created risks to the performance of that task. In the 1970s, many Fortune 500 companies began implementing "fetal protection policies" to prohibit women from working in areas deemed risky to reproductive capacity. Again, assumptions about motherhood were the driving force behind employment regulations. Women in Labor examines how gender norms affected the workplace health of men and women. Did the desire to protect women result in a safer workplace for all workers? Did it advance or hinder the status of women in the work-place? In answering these questions, Hepler describes a complex network of medical experts, state bureaucrats, business owners, social reformers, industrial engineers, workers, and feminists, many with overlapping interests and identities. This overlap often resulted in tradeoffs and unintended consequences. For instance, efforts promoting gender equality sometimes created equal risks for workers, whereas emphasizing social realities resulted in job discrimination. Reformists efforts to promote the important connection between the home and the industrial environment also allowed an employer to shirk responsibility for worker health. The issue of women in the workplace will remain crucial in the twenty-first century as workers worldwide struggle to create safer workplaces without sacrificing socioeconomic benefits or the health of women and their children.
The Women Incendiaries — Edith Thomas. The Women Incendiaries tells the inspirational story of women who played a leading role in the Paris Commune, one of history's greatest moments of social upheaval.
Women of the Light — June Guralnick. A play about female lighthouse keepers. "From 1776 to 1924, there were approximately 360 female lighthouse keepers and assistant keepers working in the United States. Many more women unofficially tended lighthouses with, or in place of, their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons."
Women on the Line — Ruth Cavendish. Cavindish is the pseudonym of an academic who spent a year working in an auto parts factory in England with mostly immigrant co-workers. This book is adapted from the diary she kept at the time. She writes about repetitive assembly line work, job discrimination, health, poverty, immigration, a work-site dispute over wages and bonus and the women she worked with.
Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Working Class in American History) — James R. Barrett.
Work and Politics (Cambridge Studies in Modern Political Economies) — Charles F Sabel. Work and Politics develops a historical and comparative sociology of workplace relations in industrial capitalist societies. Professor Sabel argues that the system of mass production using specialized machines and mostly unskilled workers was the result of the distribution of power and wealth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, not of an inexorable logic of technological advance. Once in place, this system created the need for workers with systematically different ideas about the acquisition of skill and the desirability of long-term employment. Professor Sabel shows how capitalists have played on naturally existing division in the workforce in order to match workers with diverse ambitions to jobs in different parts of the labor market. But he also demonstrates the limits, different from work group to work group, of these forms of collaboration.
Working — Studs Terkel. Chicago writer and radio host Studs Terkel has an amazing ability to draw stories out of people in his oral histories. A look at a wide variety of folks on the job."People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do."
Working Class Fiction (Writers and Their Work) — Ian Haywood. Chartism to Trainspotting.
Working Class Monologues — Roger Karshner.
Working-Class Stories of the 1890s — P. J Keating.
Working Class Zero — Rob Payne. Office thriller/humorous business novel has been done much better by other authors. Jay Thompson is in a job he hates and is having a bit of a mid life crisis wondering where the Rock'n'Roll career ambitions of his youth went and if he really loves his girlfriend or should sleep with the hot new temp. Jay has to deal with stuck up and unfair colleagues and management.
Working Classes in Victorian Fiction — P. J. Keating.
Working Poor : Invisible in America (04 Edition) — David K. Shipler. "Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, 'working poor,' should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America." — from the Introduction
A Working Stiff's Manifesto: Confessions of a Wage Slave — Iain Levison. Levison is a "modern-day Tom Joad" who, over the last decade, has worked 42 jobs in six different states, including mover, fish cutter, cook, caterer and cable TV thief. He recalls those jobs in this entertaining, unusual mix of autobiography and social commentary reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Levison imagines himself a new breed of itinerant laborer a college graduate with a $40,000 English degree. His America is a desperate and brutal country, a place where you're hired with a promise of insurance after 90 days, then fired on the 89th; where criminals beat each other to a pulp in Alaska fisheries, and truckers make fraudulent entries in their logbooks in order to keep up with impossible schedules. But Levison's droll sense of humor eases him (and his readers) through the tough times; he recalls catering a party and bleeding into the guests' Merlot, expounds on the definition of "r sum " ("the French term for 'page full of bullshit' ") and proposes a new motto for Dutch Harbor, Alaska ("What fatal flaw in your character made you wind up here?"). As both a writer and an employee, Levison can come off as a trifle obnoxious some of his workplace misfortune he definitely brings on himself and he's mercilessly scornful of the corporate yes-men and unscrupulous characters he works with. Yet his moral vision more than makes up for it; he's a sharp-eyed, impassioned critic of the American workplace.
Working the Hard Side of the Street : Selected Stories, Poems, Screams — Kirk Alex. Contains forty-two prose poems and fifty-two "screams" and stories written from the gut; honest, hard-edged and, at times, explicit.
Working Classics: POEMS ON INDUSTRIAL LIFE — Peter Oresick (Editor), Nicholas Coles (Editor). So many foremen show so many workers how to do something "like this" in this book that after a while the phrase takes on a terrifying regularity, for these poems are about work: the hard, monotonous kind that changes people for the worse and makes ghosts of them. Almost all of these characters try to have a real life away from the job site, but they're never quite successful: one woman finds refuge in her partner's arms, but as she says, "big husband dead thirty years now." There are 169 poems here by 74 fine poets; one hopes at least a few bosses will read them. - David Kirby
Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Post-Contemporary Interventions) — Carolyn Lesjak (Author), Carolyn Lesjak (Author). In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.
Working in America: A Humanities Reader — Robert Sessions (Author), Jack Wortman (Editor).
Working Life : the Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work (00 Edition) — Joanne B. Ciulla. Joanne B. Ciulla, a noted scholar in Leadership and Ethics, examines why so many people today have let their jobs take over their lives. Technology was supposed to free us from work, but instead we work longer hours-often tethered to the office at home by cell phones and e-mail. People still look to work for self-fulfillment, community, and identity, but these things may be increasingly difficult to find in today's workplace. Gone is the social contract where employees and employers shared a sense of mutual loyalty, yet many of us still sacrifice personal time for jobs that we could lose at the drop of a stock price. Tracing the evolution of the meaning of work from Aesop to Dilbert, and critically examining the past 100 years of management practices, Ciulla asks questions that we often willfully ignore at our own peril.
World, Class, Women: Global Literature, Education, and Feminism — Robin Truth Goodman. A path-breaking book which not only challenges the market-based attack on all things public, but also examines how theory and literature can be used to reclaim feminism, schooling, and economic justice as part of a broader effort in imagining a global democratic public sphere.
The Worlds End — series — middle class leftish history novel from about 1911 to the 1950s.
A World to Win (Radical Novel Reconsidered) — Jack Conroy.
Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (Children's Literature and Culture) — Troy Boone. Examines the representation of English working-class children-the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed "darkest England"-in Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. In particular, the book focuses on how the writings for and about youth undertook an ideological project to enlist working class children into the British imperial enterprise. It is generally assumed that the dominant middle-classes succeeded in recruiting the working-class youth and thus easily manipulating these young people for nationalist purposes. However, Boone demonstrates convincingly that this was not the case and that the British working-class youth resisted a nationalist identification process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate class differences.
Articles/Overviews/Sources/Lists of Working Class Literature
A Good Night Out — John McGrath. The text of seven talks, a classic discussion of what working class theatre and drama for (if not by) workers is about or should be.
Working-Class Women's Literature--An Introduction to Study — Paul Lauter. Article. Women in Print, I, J. Hartman and E. Messer-Davidow, eds. New York: Modern Language Association, 1982. Reprinted in Politics of Education: Essays from Radical Teacher. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990, pp. 110-139; reprinted in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 837-856.
Labor history, and union organizing literature
Fiction — Non-fiction
Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the Twenty-First Century — Richard B. Freeman, Joni Hersch and Lawrence Mishel (eds).
From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future — Stanley Aronowitz. The future of American labor is deeply connected to America's future. In the last quarter century, most American workers — blue collar, white collar, and professional — have taken an enormous hit, while only 20 percent of the population has prospered. Corporate downsizing, technological change, mergers, and acquisitions have cut the workforce by half in some industries; in others, the best-paid employees have lost their jobs and have been replaced by part-time, temporary workers who often lack benefits. Meanwhile, government protections are slowly fading from the lives of ordinary Americans as health benefits, pensions, and safety and health standards deteriorate. Stanley Aronowitz, a teacher, writer, and former trade union organizer, examines the decline of the labor movement in the past twenty-five years and its recent reemergence as a major force in the country's economic and political life. Republicans suddenly find themselves under attack from a forgotten foe. Democrats are shocked to see this ghost walking about, compelling the party to fight for a minimum-wage law it had practically abandoned. The labor movement, once given up for dead, is now the engine of economic democracy and progressive politics. But to succeed, Aronowitz argues, labor must return to the social-movement unionism of Eugene Debs and Walter Reuther. Such an energetic new movement is the key to America's future. Bound to generate national debate, From the Ashes of the Old calls for a bold new agenda, covering the principal challenges facing the labor movement today: to organize in the South and among the working poor, to unionize white-collar and technical employees, and to reestablish labor's political independence.
Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Working Class in American History) — David Brody. American unions are weaker now than at any times in the past hundred years, with fewer than one in ten private-sector workers currently organized. In "Labor embattled, David Brody says this is a problem not only for the unions but also a disaster for American democracy and social justice. In a series of historically informed chapters, Brody explores recent developments affecting American workers in fight of labor's past. Of special concern to him is the erosion of the rights of workers under the modern labor law, which he argues is rooted in the original formulation of the Wagner Act. Brody explains how the ideals of free labor, free speech, freedom of association, and freedom of contract have been interpreted and canonized in ways that unfailingly reduce the capacity for workers' collective action while silently removing impediments to employers coercion of workers. His lucid and passionate essays combine legal and labor history to reveal how laws designed to undergird workers' rights now essentially hamstring them.
Labor Pains: Inside America's New Union Movement — Suzan Erem. Labor Pains is an insider's account of the struggle to rebuild a vibrant and powerful trade union movement in the United States. It takes as its starting point the daily experience of a union organizer, and brings that experience to life. It enables us to grasp how the conflicting demands of race, class, and gender are lived in the new union movement. The role of the unions is defined mainly by larger economic and political agendas. While keeping these agendas clearly in sight, Erem focuses primarily on aspects of the life of the union which often remain hidden. The personal crises of union members become entangled in the work of the union. The energies of the union are focused not only on winning gains from bosses but also on maintaining internal cohesion and morale among workers. Barriers of race, age and gender are constantly negotiated and overcome, and conflicts flare up across them at moments of tension. And union life goes on not only when the workers have made their point, or won a victory, but after defeat as well. The personalities and ambitions of union organizers converge at times and become a source of tension at others. Each individual within the larger collective has their own task of finding a viable balance between public and private selves. These intersecting lines of force are imaginatively recreated in this book. Erem writes as a woman in a union movement which is dominated by men; as the child of immigrants in a movement whose members are increasingly immigrants themselves; as one who finds herself in the racial no man's land between black and white. While never underestimating the obstacles in the way of the union movement, she makes a powerful and passionate case for organizing the disorganized and empowering the powerless.
Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 — Joseph Mccartin. Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers, and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace.
New Rank and File (00 Edition) — Alice Lynd and Staughton (eds.) Lynd. In their narratives, rank-and-file workers from many different industries and workplaces reveal the specific incidents and pervasive injustices that triggered their activism. They discuss the frustrations they faced in attempting to effect change through traditional means, and the ways in which they have learned to advocate through innovation. In an incisive introduction, the Lynds set forth their distinctive perspective on the labor movement, with a focus on "solidarity unionism": making decisions on the assumption that we all may be leaders at one time or another rather than relying on static hierarchies. Their insights, along with true stories told in the organizers' own words, contain much to inspire a new generation of workers and activists.
Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies — Kate Bronfenbrenner. At a time when the American labor movement is mobilizing
for a major resurgence through new organizing, here, at last, is a book
about research on union organizing strategies. Previous studies have
focused on factors contributing to union decline, devoting little attention
to the organizing process itself. The twenty chapters in this volume
dramatically increase understanding of the range and effectiveness of
new organizing strategies and their potential contribution to the revitalization
of the labor movement.
The Rights of Employees and Union Members — Wayne N. Outten, Robert J. Rabin, & Lisa R. Lipman. An American Civil Liberties Union handbook. Using a simple question-and-answer format, the authors examine in detail a variety of topics encompassing workplace protections, from hiring to firing and all the hours in-between. Written for every working American, this book sets forth individual rights under present law and offers suggestions on how workers can exercise them.
Strikes, Picketing and Inside Campaigns: A Legal Guide — Robert M. Schwartz. for any union or activist considering aggressive action to combat management’s growing economic war against workers. With a deep understanding of the complex web of rules regulating forceful work-related activities, noted labor attorney and author Robert Schwartz offers examples of what unions can do, pointers on how to do it legally, picketing nstructions, sample letters and answers to scores of common questions. Valuable guidance is provided on working without a contract, residential picketing, pressuring secondaries, unemployment benefits, unfair labor practice strikes, offers to return, lockouts and other related topics.
Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back — Thomas Geoghegan. When it first appeared in hardcover, Which Side Are You On? received widespread critical accolades, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. In this new paperback edition, Thomas Geoghegan has updated his eloquent plea for the relevance of organized labor in America with an afterword covering the labor movement through the 1990s. A funny, sharp, unsentimental career memoir, Which Side Are You On? pairs a compelling history of the rise and near-fall of labor in the United States with an idealist's disgruntled exercise in self-evaluation. Writing with the honesty of an embattled veteran still hoping for the best, Geoghegan offers an entertaining, accessible, and literary introduction to the labor movement, as well as an indispensable touchstone for anyone whose hopes have run up against the unaccommodating facts on the ground. Wry and inspiring, Which Side Are You On? is the ideal book for anyone who has ever woken up and realized, "You must change your life."
A Will of Their Own: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Working Children — Manfred Liebel. Children's work is on the increase in all parts of the world, including the affluent countries of Europe and North America, and is closely linked with the processes of globalization. It can take on widely differing forms and can harm children, but also benefit them. This book's approach is distinctive: it endeavors to understand working children, and their ways of living and acting, from their own perspective. It is interested in the children's own experiences and hopes, especially their attempts to speak out in public and to fight together against exploitation and discrimination. It shows that children frequently see and evaluate their work differently from adults, and that measures directed against children's work are not always in the interests of the children. It argues for a new, subject-oriented approach in dealing with children's work, which takes account of socio-cultural contexts, both in theory and practice. (If you have this book, please provide feedback.)
Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle — David Brody. This famous book, representing some of the finest thinking and writing about the history of American labor in the twentieth century, is now revised to incorporate two important recent essays, one surveying the historical study of the CIO from its founding to its fiftieth anniversary in 1985, another placing in historical and comparative perspective the declining fortunes of the labor movement from 1980 to the present. As always, Brody confronts central questions, both substantive and historiographical, focusing primarily on the efforts of laboring people to assert some control over their working lives, and on the equal determination of American business to conserve the prerogatives of management. Long a classic in the field of American labor history, valued by general readers and specialists alike for its brilliance of argument and clarity of style, Workers in Industrial America is now more timely than ever.
Windows on the Workplace: Computers, Jobs, and the Organization of Office Work — Joan Greenbaum. debunks technological determinism by looking closely at work and the organization and meaning of work and jobs, finding that workers are enduring insecurity, increased competition, demands for more and more specialization, and management's inability to organize work properly. In this edition, which she has updated to include current conditions in the workplace, she describes the changes wrought by the computer in the office environment in the past 50 years, the reasons why the office of the future has remained in the future, and the clots of conventional wisdom that workers in the "knowledge industry" must confront collectively if they want to do meaningful work and avoid being absorbed into the milling millions of the downsized.
Other Related Literature Lists
Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read:
Indigenous Peoples Literature:
Working Class Fiction, a very comprehensive list of titles:
Working Class Literature, focusing on Working class writers:
Working Class Poetry at the Media Drome:
Working Class Literature Discussion Lists
Working Class Literature discussion group on Yahoo:
Other Working Class Lists (not necessarily literature-related)
The Commons In nonindustrial farming communities, “the commons" refers to a plot of land that all farmers in the community can share. The commons is also a metaphor, referring to any resource available to an entire group. This workgoup thus becomes a virtual commons -- a space to discuss issues relating to humanity and equality, on equal turf.
The Working Class Studies Discussion List provides opportunities for interaction among people with a shared interest in working-class life, culture, and politics. Participants use the list to share announcements of conferences, calls for papers, and events related to working-class studies, and to enjoy a discussion about key issues.
Working Class Publishers
Bottom Dog Press — An Ohio press run by Larry Smith that publishes works by individual authors as well as anthologies:
The Federation of Worker Writers & Community Publishers (FWWCP) — The FWWCP is a non-profit making umbrella organization for writer's groups and community publishers. The FWWCP publishes Federation Magazine, holds an annual Festival of Writing and develops participation in the arts and cultural activities. Includes links to writer organizations and arts and cultural organizations in the UK:
Partisan Press (Blue Collar Review) — Partisan Press is a not for profit publisher. Its mission is the preservation, expansion, and promotion of the literature of the working class, primarily poetry, which might not find a place in profit-driven publishing channels:
The Vulgar Press — The Vulgar Press is “…dedicated to the publication of working-class and other radical forms of writing.” Links to books, authors, new releases and more:
West End Press:
Working Class Sweat at the Exquisite Corpse
Recommended book sellers/resellers
Book lists & bibliographies
Contemporary Labor Bibliography (Kim Scipes):
Spirit of America Bookstore (IWW and Labor Movement):
BOOKS — Lists, reviews, articles about movies with working class or labor themes
Reel To Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies — Bell Hooks. Hooks's essays on film are not film criticism: they are criticism of culture as viewed through the prism of film. This mix of theory, reality, popular art and popular criticism (reviews and public reaction play a large part in her discussions) is effective in forcing a rethinking of the films in question... A discussion of the black female gaze recalls that slaves could be punished for looking, and another on representations of black masculinity notes that in movies with two male leads, one black and one white, such as Rising Sun, the white man plays the "father" role.
Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films About Labor (check it out here, buy from a union-friendly book store...)
See also: working class movies
These books are "working class" books. They may be pro-union, or simply pro-worker. They may be anti-fascist. Some of them have a leftist flavor, or an anti-war flavor.
Someone may make a distinction between "working class" books and "labor" books. I agree that this is an important consideration. I can even imagine a book that would be pro-"labor" and anti-working class, given the nature of many unions. But while such distinctions may be reflected in the reviews, i do not intend to create separate categories. This is not for lack of appreciation, it is simply due to lack of time or familiarity with the content.
I have not read all of these (or even most of these) books, their presence here in most cases is the result of recommendations.
I've decided to add a method of voting against books that appear here. Each (-) means that someone thought the book was innappropriate for this list. Additional votes against books may get them removed from the list.
Send me email (below) for additions or comments on existing entries, or to write a brief review.
Working Class Literature
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E. Gerdes is an Associate Professor in the School of Social work at Arizona
State University at the Downtown Campus. She earned a PhD in Social Work
from Florida State University. Her research interests include empathy,
empathy measurement, poverty, conation and issues related to Latino
"We propose that a targeted and structured
explication of empathy is a useful, if not essential, foundation
for social work theory and practice. We outline a social work
framework for empathy, one that is rooted in an interdisciplinary
context, emphasizes recent findings in the field of social
cognitive neuroscience, and yet is embedded in a social work
context..., students can learn to use their knowledge, values, and
skills, informed by empathy, to take empathic action consciously."
* Associate Professor, School of Social
Work, Arizona State University
* Research interests are empathy and empathy measurements
* At Arizona State for 16 years. Last sabbatical in 2007 read the
neuroscience literature on empathy. Got excited about the four neural
that they had observed and identified. Went through all her social
career as student and professor, without hearing anyone talking about
this way. So how can we apply this in the classroom, how do we bring
conscience awareness the aspect-sharing component and teach the three
components, perspective taking, emotion regulation and self/other
* Now thinking about a new area, about how to teach and cultivate
empathy in the
classroom, apply it to Social Work
02:28 Article: ‘Teaching Empathy, a Framework rooted in social
neuroscience and social justice”
* In social work, up to now, never
connected the emotion regulation piece with
empathy so need to teach student that there is this automatic
mirroring aspect. If you are with a client who is sad and you start to
feel sad this
feeling can overwhelm you unless you know how to regulate that
other piece is that this sadness, this mirroring, happens
unconsciously. Now at least, they are aware of the process – “I am
the client is feeling. I need to keep that boundary there but at the
same time, try to
understand what is behind the client’s anger/sadness”.
* Importance of emotion regulation. Example is single parent with
Parent may be capable of mirroring and therefore knowing when their
frustrated. But what they don’t know is that they are absorbing that
Then if they can’t separate baby’s frustration from their own, and
they don’t have
emotion regulation, that is when they become frustrated and
consequently at risk
for abusive behaviour to stop the child’s frustration when in reality,
they are trying
to stop their own frustration.
* Importance of self-soothing when a Social Worker is working with
clients who are
angry or depressed or frustrated.
* So in teaching social work, it’s important to talk about empathy,
what it is, how is
it experienced, how recognize it - by bringing it to a conscious
start to engage in specific tools to help cultivate it, such as
* For perspective taking: you need to have information – for example,.
There’s a punishing, condescending way of talking about it in the
discourse. A lot of this comes from a lack of information as to why
want to come to America. All kinds of ‘Boogieman’ stories about this
jobs, they’re all criminals, and want to kill us. People respond to
this with fear and
this fear overrides any natural empathy that would otherwise be there.
perspective-taking is very cognitive and is about giving people
provide a context for social problems and issues so people can
07:33 How are you defining empathy?
* I like the Social cognitive
neuroscientists’ definition - an induction process where
our bodies and minds are taking in information at rapid speed
scale), processing this information partly at an unconscious level,
the mirroring and
aspect-sharing piece, and part of it is cognitive. The end result of
this process is
that you can basically understand the feelings, emotions, intentions
even sometimes the thoughts of the other person where you’re not just
world as they see it but also feeling the world as they feel it. And
happening very rapidly.
* The more skills our students have, especially those cognitive ones
that we can
actually work on like perspective taking and emotion regulation, the
that process will be and the more empathy you will have.
2. Mirrored/emotional empathy based on mirror neurons, we can mirror
3. Imaginative, perspective taking cognitive empathy. Take the point
of view of
4. Empathic action
* Fourth level is important in social work. Once students have
empathy, what do you do with it, how do you serve someone. You don’t
transform this into pity or even sympathy. You don’t want to enable
You want to keep it open, how do I empower my client? If I have
better see the world as my client sees it. It might give me some
insight into better
how to facilitate the client’s own empowerment. Social workers need to
not to enable their client and not to do for them, things that they
should be doing
11:29 Importance of Self-empathy.
* It’s key because those who are
self-aware about their own feelings and thoughts
are quicker to learn to separate those from the ones they are picking
* Self empathy improves ability to articulate about empathy and
feelings. It gives
you a vocabulary.
* One block to empathy is that some people have mentioned that you can
yourself in empathy. They don’t know who they are and who the other
is. That is
why self-awareness is important. Being able to have a boundary and
being able to
know you can let someone have their pain and you don’t have to take it
can step into it for a few seconds to feel it and appreciate it, but
then step back
out of it to maintain your empathy otherwise you get burned out.
* There is a real gap with respect to self-awareness. There seems to
be no education
to provide children with these skills. Self-empathy and knowledge is
understanding each other and to benefit from the empathy that we feel
* Mindfulness and how critical it is to emotion regulation. A lot of
kids don’t have
self-soothing behaviour, how to articulate or manage their emotions
behaviour. There is a real lack of this kind of training in the K-12
system. It’s probably because it is seen as ‘New Age’. The amount of
research now backing up how useful this is to us, it is really
16:51 A self-report for empathy
* The one in use now was created in
1980 and it’s not very effective. It’s more a
measure of sympathy and only a small perspective-taking part of
Social Work you really need something to show interventions are
actually in fact
cultivating empathy. After this step, then I will be more involved in
at the K to 12 level taking building blocks and skills into those
Finding ways to effectively measure empathy.
* Created with colleagues, an Empathy Assessment Index. It’s being
validity and reliability. Currently writing a study comparing a group
Work professionals with populations known for empathy deficits such as
offenders, domestic violence perpetrators. The test held up well in
those groups. Our index is looking solid. It could maybe replace the
Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Our index is more informed by the
Aspect Sharing/Mirror Empathy/An empathy curriculum
* Very coherent and observable idea that there are 4 neural networks
in our brain
that help us experience empathy. We need to make sure that all four
and like any muscle, we need to work the networks, build them, and
them. Teach them how to regulate emotions, take someone else’s
identify self/other boundaries and help understand that mirrored
happens: an emotion contagion to their job.
* Next step to measurement will be working on a curriculum, first for
students, working on mindfulness and other techniques that can help
cognitive skills. After that, how do we make this more
particularly for K to 12 groups?
23:45 Teaching empathy and building a
culture of empathy
* Social Work curriculum will be
transferrable to other disciplines such as
counselling, nursing, psychology. Protective factor is important.
Nurses and Social
Workers are susceptible to compassion fatigue and burnout. They are
sensitive and empathic. They need to not be overwhelmed to have a
* We need a culture of empathy. The skills Social Workers learn would
transferrable to their clients. Could teach/inform clients on how
working on them with respect to other family members. When one family
gets frustrated and angry, they all step into this dark place, and how
to stop it
from happening. Also how to talk to each other differently, take the
* The domino effect: it spreads. The more people that have these
skills, the more
empathy is understood, modelled, worked, taught, in the professions,
the home, at
school, the workplace the more we will have this culture of empathy.
27:30 How do we bring the empathy
conversation into the national dialogue?
* We seem to be hearing the word
empathy more in the public since Obama used it
in his campaigning. Also talk of candidates having an ‘empathy gap’.
media talks about it, there are no explanations of the word. Could be
education going on around these conversations. The word is used very
* Senate debates about Obama’s Supreme Court Justice Nomination: the
empathy was used around 500 times during the senate debates. You can
lack of understanding of the word. It’s apparent that many use the
synonymous with sympathy. Many felt empathy was inappropriate for a
But empathy is the core of the human contract. How can you do the job
empathy? Still a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation. This
would make a
great study! To look at the content of the debates for the use of the
empathy, and the contexts of the use. Would be interesting for US
have a hearing on what is empathy?
* Change the focus. Two parties are talking past each other and trying
to win debate
points. Focus is not on the people that need assistance or country’s
Need to stop the ‘debate habit’. Focus on the problem and challenge
from a values
place, where we listen and try to understand each other.
* How we define the problem often determines how we decide to tackle
problem. For example, if we define poverty as a moral failing, then
the policies we
create are attempts to make people more moral instead of fixing a
economic, education, health system that seems to be out of balance. So
what we need to do is find out how the various groups are defining the
problem and then find some common ground in those definitions. Right
isn’t happening – each side just wants to make their point and be
* Maybe educating politicians about empathy might be a good answer. A
people see empathy as a ‘touchy-feely’ kind of thing but it’s not. Its
Sympathy versus empathy
* Sympathy or pity leads us to give a homeless person a dollar.
Empathy on the
other hand, makes us ask the harder questions about what causes
what can we do to make sure that fewer people are homeless? This is
empathic action takes us, to empowerment.
* Often people think that empathic action is just sympathy and that
Workers want to do is give people handouts. In fact that’s not what we
do. We want to figure out ways to create jobs so they can work and
earn a living
wage. This is a harder conversation to have than a handout is.
* Until we have more empathy we’re probably going to keep walking away
those difficult conversations.
40:27 Empathy in Social Work at
* We are pioneers in the sense that we
are using the Social Cognitive Framework.
We are not necessarily pioneers in empathy. It has been a part of
profession for a long time. Throughout my career for many years, no
one had ever
framed empathy in such a concrete way that you could break it down and
understand how to cultivate it. That’s what we are trying to pioneer –
down more into the ways that our brain is processing this information
strengthen those parts of the brain through mindfulness techniques,
and education where we learn about the social contexts of people’s
problems. It is exciting and rejuvenating.
"The human brain evolved to ensure our survival. One
example of that survival instinct is our sense of competition –
historically, it’s part of what drives us to wage wars over power and
resources. But an equally powerful survival tactic is our ability to
love and cooperate with others.
“A lot of times, that story never gets told,” says Karen
Gerdes, a social worker at ASU. She is interested in empathy, which is
the ability to perceive the world from other people’s points of view and
to feel what they are feeling. Empathy is a complex emotion because it
involves both unconscious, involuntary responses and conscious,
cognitive processes. For example, suppose you’ve had a traumatic
experience, like losing a loved one."
A mile in their
shoes: understanding empathy
"Empathy is a relatively new word, only having come about in the 20th
century. Karen Gerdes, a social worker at ASU, explains what empathy is,
how to measure it and how we can develop it to improve our quality of
life and our relationships"
Articles on Empathy
Developing the Social Empathy Index: An Exploratory
"Abstract: Social empathy, the ability to understand people from
different socioeconomic classes and racial/ethnic backgrounds, with
insight into the context of institutionalized inequalities and
disparities, can inspire positive societal change and promote social
wellbeing. The value of teaching social empathy and creating
interventions that promote social empathy is enhanced by the ability
to measure and assess it. This article provides a validation of the
Social Empathy Index, a tool that practitioners can easily use to
assess individuals’ levels of interpersonal and social empathy. An
exploratory factor analysis was used to validate the instrument and
confirm the conceptual model for social empathy"
A Social Work Model for Empathy "Abstract: This article presents a social work model of empathy that
reflects the latest interdisciplinary research findings on empathy.
The model reflects the social work commitment to social justice. The
three model components are: 1) the affective response to another’s
emotions and actions; 2) the cognitive processing of one’s affective
response and the other person’s perspective; and 3) the conscious
decision-making to take empathic action. Mirrored affective responses
are involuntary, while cognitive processing and conscious
decision-making are voluntary. The affective component requires
healthy, neural pathways to function appropriately and accurately. The
cognitive aspects of perspective-taking, self-awareness, and emotion
regulation can be practiced and cultivated, particularly through the
use of mindfulness techniques. Empathic action requires that we move
beyond affective responses and cognitive processing toward utilizing
social work values and knowledge to inform our actions. By introducing
the proposed model of empathy, we hope it will serve as a catalyst for
discussion and future research and development of the model."
Benefits of Empathy The
list of studies in social work mentioning the importance of empathy is
studies on the importance of practitioner-to-client empathy would
fill several volumes. Examples include
Berg, Raminani, Greer, Harwood & Safren (2008)
Forrester, Kershaw, Moss & Hughes (2007);
Green & Christensen (2006);
Mishara et al. (2007); and
Sale, Bellamy, Springer & Wang (2008)].
While empathy is essential to an effective
client-worker relationship, it is also crucial that we help
populations such as at risk parents, partners and sex offenders to
develop and cultivate empathy
(Curtner-Smith et al., 2006,
Busby & Gardner, 2008;
Hunter, Figueredo, Becker & Malamuth, 2007;
Waldinger, Schultz, Hauser, Allen & Crowell
Parental empathy has been cited as crucial for
raising healthy children (Curtner-Smith et al., 2006)
Partner empathy is a key element in satisfying
relationships (Busby & Gardner, 2008; Waldinger et al., 2004).
Empathy is one of the core elements of healthy
relationships at every level,
"Research demonstrates that empathy is an important tool for
positive therapeutic intervention (Watson, 2002).
Clients experiencing empathy through treatment by others inhibits
antisocial behavior in children and adolescents (Eisenberg, Spinard,
& Sadovsky, 2005; Hoffman, 2000). Empathy inhibits aggression toward
others (Weisner & Silbereisen, 2003)
and promotes healthy personal development (Hoffman, 2001).
The lack of empathy is correlated with bullying, aggressive
behavior, violent crime, and sexual offending (Gini, Albieri,
Benelli, & Altoe, 2008; Joliffe & Farrington, 2004; Loper,
Hoffschmidt, & Ash, 2001; Sams & Truscott, 2004).
A practitioner's own level of empathy is correlated with positive
client outcomes (Forrester, Kershaw, Moss, & Hughes, 2008).
Weersing, Hoagwood, and Goldman (2005) completed a review of 52
child psychotherapy treatment studies and concluded that therapist
empathy, attention, and positive regard are essential to effective
Forrester et al. (2008) found that empathy is central to effective
communication in child protection situations. Empathy is critical to
both practitioner and client outcomes. "
We propose that a targeted and
structured explication of empathy is a useful, if not essential,
foundation for social work theory and practice. We outline a social
work framework for empathy, one that is rooted in an
interdisciplinary context, emphasizes recent findings in the field
of social cognitive neuroscience, and yet is embedded in a social
work context..., students can learn to use their knowledge, values,
and skills, informed by empathy, to take empathic action
Gerdes, K. E. (2011)..
Empathy, sympathy and pity: 21st Century
Definitions and Implications for Practice and Research..
Journal of Social Service
Research, 37(3), 5-12.(2011).
Gerdes, K. E. (2011)..
Introduction: 21st century
conceptualizations of empathy: Implications for social work practice and
research. Journal of
Social Service Research, 37(3), 1-4.(2011).
Gerdes, K. E., & Segal,
E. A., Jackson, K. F., & Mullins, J. (2011)..
Teaching empathy: A model rooted in
social cognitive neuroscience and social justice..
Journal of Social Work
Education, 47(1), DOI: 10.5175/JSWE.2011.200900085.(2011). |
The 2012 International John McGahern Seminar
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
NUI Galway and Leitrim County Council have announced that the sixth International John McGahern Seminar, commemorating the work of the renowned Irish writer, will take place from 24-26 May in Co. Leitrim.
“The literary, historical and environmental aspects of McGahern’s work will be the focus this year, and the keynote lecture will be given by Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin and a regular broadcaster on RTÉ television and radio,” explains NUI Galway’s Dr John Kenny, Academic Director of the Seminar.
The Seminar includes a rich variety of lectures, open discussions, readings, tours and book launches. The Chinese-American writer, Yiyun Li, will talk about McGahern’s work and will discuss and read from her own fiction. Winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2005, Li made a special recording of one of McGahern’s masterpiece stories, ‘The Wine Breath’, for The New Yorker in 2009, a podcast of which can be listened to at www.newyorker.com. Other speakers at the event will include Professor Joe Cleary of NUI Maynooth and Yale University, Professor Eamonn Wall of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and author and former Irish Times journalist, Paddy Woodworth, who will give a talk about McGahern and the relationship between landscape and literature.
The preeminent scholar of McGahern’s work, Denis Sampson, will be giving a public interview about his new book, Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist, recently published by Oxford University Press, and another established McGahern scholar, Dr Stanley van der Ziel, will be providing the talk for the Seminar launch of the book. Dr Frank Shovlin of the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool will give a lecture about the influence of James Joyce on John McGahern and will also be launching his new book, Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival, for which Professor Emeritus in History at NUI Galway, Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, will provide the talk.
The Seminar will also include a feature discussion by Cormac O’Malley about his father, Ernie O’Malley, whose writing was much admired by McGahern. There will be visits, guided by local historian Dr Frank Brennan, to places around Aughawillan, Ballinamore and Mohill important to the author’s life and works, and also a boat trip to Cootehall in Co. Roscommon where writers and readers groups from the region will give public readings from McGahern’s autobiography, Memoir. The archaeologist Chris Read will follow his talk about the landscape around Fenagh, where McGahern lived, with a field trip to a number of significant archaeological sites in South Leitrim.
Announcing the McGahern events, President of NUI Galway, Dr Jim Browne, said: “Through the International John McGahern Seminar, we at NUI Galway are working to broaden access to literary scholarship and to share the riches of the McGahern archive with the widest possible audience. In holding this valuable archive in the West of Ireland, we feel that the University is holding in trust a treasure for the world of literary scholarship, for the Irish nation and most especially for this region which we have served for more than 160 years. I wish the 2012 International McGahern Seminar every success and I welcome the continued partnership of Leitrim County Council in this culturally important endeavour.”
Speaking at the launch of the 2012 programme, Leitrim County Manager, Jackie Maguire, said: “Leitrim County Council views the John McGahern Seminar as an important part of the county’s and indeed Ireland’s literary calendar which presents an excellent opportunity for both academic and general readers to engage richly with the work of John McGahern and we are delighted to continue to work in partnership with NUI Galway in organising this sixth International Seminar.”
As well as appealing to all lovers of McGahern’s own work, the International Seminar will be of interest to literary researchers and to book clubs, to readers of contemporary fiction and modern writing, and to all national and international students of Irish literature, culture society and history. NUI Galway is providing five Scholarships to assist students to attend the Seminar and visit the McGahern Archive, which is held at the University in the James Hardiman Library. Scholarships are valued at €500 each and interested students should apply directly to the Academic Director, Dr John Kenny, at email@example.com.
Author: Marketing and Communications Office, NUI Galway |
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- Table of Contents
Volume 2011 (2011), Article ID 915239, 7 pages
Life History Tactics in Cohorts of a Partial Migratory Brown Trout (Salmo trutta L.) Population
1Department of Biology, Karlstad University, 651 88 Karlstad, Sweden
2Department of Environmental Affairs, Aquatic Ecology, County Administrative Board of Scania, 205 15 Malmö, Sweden
Received 22 June 2011; Accepted 11 August 2011
Academic Editor: D. Pimentel
Copyright © 2011 Ivan C. Olsson and Larry A. Greenberg. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
We monitored temporal changes in body size for three cohorts of a partial migratory, lake-migrating brown trout population. We tested if body mass differed between nonmigratory males, migrants, and other members of the cohort (females and immature males). We hypothesized that large-sized individuals would mature as nonmigratory males or migrate at younger ages than small-sized individuals. As previous studies have shown that female fecundity is influenced by body size and that more trout from the downstream section (D) of the stream migrated than from the upstream section (U), we hypothesized that there would be a greater proportion of mature males in D than U. We found that body size of males that reproduced was similar to migrants that migrated the subsequent spring and larger than other cohort members. Reproducing males had a larger body size than equal-aged males that delayed reproduction. Similarly, individuals that migrated had a larger body size than equal-aged individuals that migrated subsequently. The proportion of mature males was greater in D than in U. The fact that body size differentiation occurred late in ontogeny and that age of maturation and migration varied within cohorts suggests that the decision to mature or migrate might be conditionally dependent.
For salmonids, migration is normally associated with movements between feeding, refuge, and reproductive areas . By exploiting better feeding habitats (i.e., the sea or a lake), migration normally enables individuals to attain high growth rates, size-at-age, and fecundity . There are also drawbacks to migration as the migratory journey itself often is associated with delayed reproduction, high mortality, and energy and time losses [3, 4]. Females should predominate among migrants [5–8] because high fecundity is more closely associated with large body size in females than in males [9–11]. Females may also benefit from large body size as they may be more attractive to males and better able to defend and obtain high-quality spawning nests than small-sized females [12, 13].
Thorpe’s studies of Atlantic salmon suggest that migratory and resident tactics can be viewed as two conflicting developmental processes, where individuals that optimize for residency (i.e., delay or exclude migration) focus their energy on maturation, whereas migrants focus their energy on somatic growth, with the potential of obtaining high payoffs by delaying reproduction. Maturation should be the first priority for all individuals, occurring if a series of genetically determined threshold conditions are met . The thresholds are believed to be based on some combination of an individual’s body size, growth rate, and/or energy reserves [15–18]. If the threshold is not exceeded, the individual may either become migratory, or else delay its decision as to whether it should migrate or become sexually mature [14, 15].
Several studies have demonstrated that environmental factors can promote residency in migratory populations and migration in resident populations, although the role of genetics cannot be ignored [4, 19–22]. Individual growth rates are believed to be of particular importance [21–24], in part because habitats providing high growth rates normally promote residency, whereas habitats providing low growth rates promote migration, although the opposite relationship has also been reported [2, 20]. It is believed that individuals with high metabolic demands experience stronger food limitations than individuals with low metabolic demands . However, the extent to which this is realized should depend on environmental conditions. For example, Álvares and Nicieza found that survival and growth of brown trout were negatively correlated with metabolic rate in two wild populations, whereas no correlation was detected in two other populations. Thus, a combination of internal (i.e., metabolic rates) and external factors (i.e., growth opportunities) presumably determines individual fate and whether an individual decides to migrate or mature as a nonmigrant.
In partial migratory populations, migration is not undertaken by all individuals, even though all individuals presumably originate from the same gene pool [19, 27]. Previously, in Greåna River, we studied partial migration in a lake-migrating, brown trout population, whose genetic background is not known, and found that most migrants originated from a downstream section (D: downstream section) in Greåna River, where population density was high and individual growth rates were low. In contrast, few migrants originated from an upstream section (U = upstream section) in the river, where population density was low and individual growth rates were high . A transplant experiment, in which brown trout from the D was moved to the U and vice-versa, showed that the decision to migrate to the lake was influenced by environmental factors as U individuals exposed to D conditions decreased their growth rates and increased their migratory tendency, whereas D individuals exposed to U conditions increased their growth rates and decreased their migratory tendency .
Because growth rates and body weight might influence whether an individual will become migratory or mature as a nonmigrant [4, 20], we tested if body mass differed between future (1) nonmigratory males, (2) migrants (include both males and females), and (3) other members (i.e., females and immature males that never developed any detectable tactic during the study period) from three different cohorts of this landlocked, partial migratory lake-migrating population of brown trout. Within each of the cohorts, we hypothesized that large-sized individuals would mature as nonmigratory males or become migratory at younger ages than small-sized individuals. Furthermore, based on differences in growth and migration rates between the D and the U, we hypothesized that U males would mature at a younger age than D males. Moreover, we hypothesized that the relative proportion of mature males would be greater in D (migratory habitat) than in U (nonmigratory habitat). The high proportion of mature males in D is predicted because females are believed to be more motivated to migrate to the lake, where growth opportunities are presumed to be good than males, since female fecundity (i.e., number of eggs produced) is more strongly influenced by body size than male fecundity.
2. Material and Methods
2.1. Study Site
The study was conducted in Greåna River, which is characterized by two distinct spawning and rearing areas, D (250 m-long, 1335 m2) and U (265 m-long, 950 m2), that are geographically separated by a slow-flowing 560 m long lentic segment (area: 70 000 m2). Migrants from both D and U migrate downstream to Lake Övre Gla. Detailed information about the study site, the brown trout population and the tagging program is found in Olsson and Greenberg .
2.2. The Cohorts
Three cohorts of individually PIT-tagged brown trout (approximately 1200 individuals were tagged) were monitored by sampling the D and the U of Greåna River in May (only 2002 and 2003), September, and October each year from 2001 to 2003. By following individual development during this period, we were able to divide the fish into three groups: (1) nonmigratory mature males, (2) migrants and (3) an unspecified nonmigratory group consisting of females and immature males (hereafter referred to as the mixed group). We estimated population density of each age class of brown trout in 2001 and 2002 in the D and the U by the three-pass electrofishing removal method, conducted in 6–39 m long stream sections [29, 30]. Age was determined by examining length frequency distributions and through the fact that we followed individually marked fish, of which many were marked during their first year of life. Migrants were identified based on captures in a fish trap that was designed to capture all fish as they exited the mouth of the river. Non-migratory mature males were captured by electrofishing in October and November 2001–2003 and identified by palpating the abdomen to see if milt was released. During the spawning season in 2003, mature males were also identified by analyzing blood plasma 11-ketotestosteron (11-kt) samples for 27 (26 tagged) individuals from the D and 21 (20 tagged) individuals from the U. Blood plasma was sampled from the caudal peduncle using a syringe and then collected in heparinized tubes that were centrifuged so that the plasma content could be drawn off before being stored at −70°C. Later, the plasma content of 11-kt was analyzed by radioimmunoassay . The concentration of 11-kt ranged from 0.9–7.3 ng mL−1, where values of 0.9–1.6 ng mL−1 corresponded to females and immature males, and values >1.6 ng mL−1 11-kt corresponded to mature males, based on previous abdominal palpations of the fish.
Olsson et al. conducted a transplant experiment in Greåna River in 2001 and found that growth rates increased for D individuals transplanted to the U during autumn 2001, whereas U individuals transplanted to the D decreased their growth rates. Thus, the 2001 data on body mass for transplanted fish is presumably biased and has therefore been removed (number of body mass readings removed: 689) from the analysis, that is, only data for nontransplanted fish were analyzed. However, the transplantation did not change original densities and the transplantation effect on growth rates was short-termed as growth differences between transplanted and nontransplanted individuals were non-significant in subsequent years. Thus, body mass development of transplanted and nontransplanted individuals was analyzed together for each of the cohorts in 2002 and 2003.
Ideally, we would have wanted to test for differences in individual growth rates between nonmigratory males, migrants, and the unspecified group of nonmigrants. In theory, this should have been possible as PIT-tagging individuals allowed us to follow fish over time. However, such an analysis requires that the same fish be recaptured between successive samplings, which in our case would have reduced sample sizes for nonmigratory males and migrants to levels that precluded statistical testing. Consequently, we tested body mass, and we followed changes in body mass over time as a proxy for growth rates. Because of both low sample sizes for some groups and very large differences in sample sizes between groups, Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to test for differences in body mass (g) between migrants, mature males, and the mixed group for each sampling period separately. Chi-square tests were used to test if the propensity to mature and the age of maturation differed between D and the U, and if the number of individuals with low (<1.6 ng mL−1) and high (>1.6 ng mL−1) concentrations of 11-kt differed between the D and U habitats in 2003. All statistics were performed using SAS, version 8.2 (SAS Institute, Cary, NC, USA).
For 2001 and 2002, the mean densities (100 m−2 ± 95% CI) of brown trout aged 0+ and 1+ years were higher in the D (43.0 ± 2.6 and 14.9 ± 1.3, resp.) than in the U (34.7 ± 0.9 and 11.0 ± 0.2, resp.). These between section differences in density were substantial since there was no overlap in the 95% CI. In contrast, densities of ≥2+ year old brown trout did not differ between sections (D: 3.7 ± 0.3 and U: 4.1 ± 0.25).
The proportion of mature males in the river ranged from 2.3–5.7% for 1+ brown trout, 8.1–21.6% for 2+ brown trout and 46.7–50.0% for 3+ brown trout in October 2001–2003 (Table 1). For migrants, the proportion ranged between 16.2–17.2% for 2+ brown trout, and 73.7–76.7% for 3+ brown trout in May 2002 and 2003 (Table 1). As we caught all migrants in the trap at the river mouth and approximately 70% of the population in the river, based on Zippin , the nonmigratory fraction is probably underestimated in relation to the migratory fraction for each of the three cohorts. The two different tactics, that is, to migrate or to remain in the river, were not irreversible as three mature males (one 1+ and two 2+ years old) captured in the river in 2001 and 2002 became migrants the year following spawning. In addition, three male migrants (two 2+ and one 3+ years old) returned and matured in Greåna River after two to four months in the lake (referred to as “finnocks”).
In May of each year, an average of 6% (range: 4–8%) of all brown trout sampled in the river was mature males, and 25–40% of these males had bite marks on their bodies, presumably originating from spawning activities. The proportion of mature males did not differ between the U and the D habitats (aged 1+: = 0.3, , 2+: = 0.05, , 3+:, ), nor was there a significant difference in the age of maturation between the U (mean age: 1.9) and the D (mean age: 1.7) habitats, although there was a tendency for U males to mature at a younger age than D males in 2002 and 2003 (, and , , 2002 and 2003, resp.). The hormone level analysis in 2003 revealed that the relative number of mature males was higher in the D than in the U (, , Figure 1).
3.3. Changes in Body Mass over Time
By examining changes in body mass over time, three general patterns emerged. First, for a given age class, individuals belonging to the mixed group had a lower body mass than mature males that would reproduce later in the same year and migrants that would migrate the following spring (Table 1, Figure 2). Second, males maturing during the current year had larger body mass than same-aged males that reproduced in subsequent years. Similarly, body mass of individuals that migrated the following spring had larger body masses in the autumn than same-aged individuals that migrated in subsequent years. Below we illustrate these general patterns for each of the three monitored cohorts.
3.3.1. Cohort A
In October 2001, body mass of 0+ males that would reproduce at age 1+ (2002) was larger than for males that would reproduce at age 2+ (2003) and for individuals belonging to the mixed group (Table 1, Figure 2(a)). The following May, there were no differences in body mass between maturing males, migrants, and the mixed group. In autumn 2002, mature males and individuals that would migrate the following spring (2003) had similar body masses and were larger than individuals in the mixed group. Similarly, in 2003, mature males had a larger body mass than the mixed-group individuals. Spawning in 2003 started sooner than in 2001 and 2002, and the decrease in body mass from September to October (2003) by mature males was probably due to spawning activities.
3.3.2. Cohort B
In autumn 2001, body mass of reproducing males at age 1+ (2001) and migrants that would migrate the following spring at age 2+ (2002) was larger than all other groups of brown trout (Table 1, Figure 2(b)). In May 2002, 2+ migrants had a larger body mass than 2+ males that would reproduce in autumn 2002, as well as future migrants (2003) and individuals belonging to the mixed group. In September 2002, mature males had larger mean body mass than both individuals migrating the subsequent year (2003) and the mixed-group individuals, whereas in October migrants exhibited an accelerated growth so that mature males and migrants had similar mean body masses, and both these groups of fish had larger body masses than individuals from the mixed group. By May 2003, the migrants had larger body mass than the postspawned males (2+), which in turn were larger than the mixed-group individuals. Due to small sample sizes, we did not test for differences among groups in autumn 2003. However, during September and October 2003, three individuals originating from the mixed group decreased in body mass considerably, indicating they might have been females that spawned.
3.3.3. Cohort C
In autumn 2001, individuals migrating the subsequent year (2002) had larger body masses than individuals belonging to the mixed-group (Table 1, Figure 2(c)). By May 2002, migrants of age 3+ had increased their body mass considerably and were larger than 3+ males that would reproduce in autumn 2002 and 3+ individuals in the mixed group. In September 2002, mature males had significantly larger body masses than the mixed group individuals (), but this was not the case in October (). No analysis was conducted on data from 2003 due to low sample sizes.
Variation in life-history tactics within the brown trout population in Greåna River was considerable, with patterns just as complex as shown for many anadromous salmonid populations . Individuals aged ≥1+ developed either migratory or resident tactics, and in a few cases individuals chose both tactics (i.e., mature males became migrants in subsequent years and vice-versa). Interestingly, a relative large fraction of the population never developed any detectable tactic, that is, the mixed group that consisted of females and immature males during the study period (Table 1). In general, the females and immature males had a lower body mass than both migrants and mature males. Presumably, many of these individuals died during the study period. Moreover, some of these individuals were likely to have been mature females, especially in the U, as less than 5% of the brown trout migrated from this river section. The large loss in weight (20%) by 3 individuals belonging to the mixed group in autumn 2003 may reflect the fact that some of these individuals were postspawning females.
As migration rates were higher in the D than in the U , we predicted that the male to female sex ratio would be higher in the D than in the U. The hormone analysis supported this prediction as the number of mature males relative to the number of females and immature males was higher in the D than in the U. This result is consistent with previous studies, where females have been reported to migrate at a higher rate than males, suggesting that females benefit more from migration than males [5, 6, 8–10].
As reported previously in Greåna River , migrants increased their body mass dramatically from October to May, presumably due to high consumption rates, particularly in the spring [25, 32]. Large body mass is associated with a relatively low size-dependent mortality during migration and post-migration [3, 20]. In contrast, postspawning mature males sampled in May (2003) showed no increase in body mass and had severe bite marks on their body, probably due to high energy expenditures and hazardous activities involved in spawning as sneakers . The fact that only a few males were recaptured during postspawning conditions may also indicate that mortality rates were high during spawning . Another possible explanation as to why so few mature males were recaptured could be that they migrated to the lake. This “mix” of tactics is typical for salmon but has rarely been reported for brown trout [5, 6, 23]. In Greåna River, however, migration does not appear to be responsible for the low recapture rates since only three postspawning males became migratory, based on captures in the fish trap.
As numerous studies have shown that it is mainly large-sized and fast-growing individuals that mature as resident males and at a young age [32, 33], we predicted that nonmigratory males would mature at younger age in the U where growth rates were higher than in the D, where growth rates were low. However, we did not find statistical support for this hypothesis, given that there was a tendency for mature males to be younger in the U than in the D in 2002 and 2003 ( and 0.091, for respective years), but this may reflect small sample sizes for mature males.
For both hatchery-reared salmon and wild populations of brown trout and brook trout, it has been reported or proposed that individuals with high metabolic rates and feeding motivation often grow fast and develop migratory behavior as they become growth-limited, which contrasts with the situation for slow-growing, nonmigratory individuals with low metabolic rates and feeding motivation [23, 25, 34–37]. Our results corroborate these earlier findings in so far as the migrants had a larger body mass than females and immature males. However, we were unable to distinguish between migratory individuals and mature males based on size. In the literature, the evidence is equivocal as to whether fast-growers migrate or mature as residents . Thorpe hypothesized that a salmon’s first priority should be to mature as soon as possible and that migration should only take place if energy resources are insufficient for maturation. Furthermore, Thorpe et al. suggested that individuals have several windows of opportunity to decide whether to mature or to migrate, the first one is approximately one year before spawning in autumn and the second the following spring. At each of these “windows,” the individual evaluates whether or not its energy reserves exceed a certain threshold level. If the thresholds are not met, maturation will not take place, instead the individual is believed to prepare itself for migration, but only if an additional threshold is exceeded. The thresholds are believed to be genetically determined and influenced by both “internal factors,” such as metabolic costs and feeding intensity and “external factors”, such as feeding opportunities and competition.
We hypothesize that brown trout that elects to mature meets the necessary energetic requirements for maturation, whereas other individuals, albeit of similar size, elect to migrate, presumably due to higher metabolic requirements than the maturing resident males . The facts that there was a large variation in the age of maturation and migration and that the decision to mature as a resident or become migratory is taken relatively late in ontogeny are consistent with the notion that both the resident and the migratory tactics might be influenced by environmental factors , even though the role of heritability has not been evaluated in this system. This is probably because growth and survival vary with body size (age) and between habitats . Moreover, individuals within the same population might vary in their metabolic requirements, which should also lead to differences in the age at which individuals decide to mature as residents or migrate . This high level of variation in different attributes, in combination with the work by Wysujack et al. and Olsson et al. , who found that the proportion of migrants varied in response to changing food availability, suggests that the decision to mature as a resident or become migratory is conditionally dependent.
The authors thank the field workers, especially M. Magnusson, M. Olofsson, J. Witwiky, R.-K. Ratilainen, P. Gustavsson, J. Karlsson, K. Wysujack, C. Hollenstein, and O. Gustavsson, including the people living in the Glaskogen Nature Reserve, for their permission to work in their streams, in particular M. and A. Gustavsson. The National Board of Forestry, the MiljöFocus group, Carl Tryggers Stiftelse, and the Department of Biology supported this study financially. Erik Degerman gave them helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.
- T. G. Northcote, “Juvenile current response, growth and maturity of above and below waterfall stocks of rainbow trout, Salmo gairdneri,” Journal of Fish Biology, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 741–751, 1981.
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- E. P. Van Den Berghe and M. R. Cross, “Natural selection resulting from female breeding competition in a Pacific salmon (coho: Oncorhynchus kisutch),” Evolution, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 125–140, 1989.
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- D. K. Rowe, J. E. Thorpe, and A. M. Shanks, “Role of fat stores in the maturation of male Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) parr,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 405–413, 1991.
- I. Berglund, “Growth and early sexual-maturation in baltic salmon (Salmo salar) parr,” Canadian Journal of Zoology, vol. 70, pp. 205–211, 1992.
- T. Bohlin, C. Dellefors, and U. Faremo, “Probability of first sexual maturation of male parr in wild sea-run brown trout (Salmo trutta) depends on condition factor 1 yr in advance,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 1920–1926, 1994.
- K. Hindar, B. Jonsson, N. Ryman, and G. Stahl, “Genetic relationships among landlocked, resident, and anadromous brown trout, Salmo trutta L.,” Heredity, vol. 66, pp. 83–91, 1991.
- B. Jonsson and N. Jonsson, “Partial migration: niche shift versus sexual maturation in fishes,” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 348–365, 1993.
- K. Morita, S. Yamamoto, and N. Hoshino, “Extreme life history change of white-spotted char (Salvelinus ieucomaenis) after damming,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, vol. 57, no. 6, pp. 1300–1306, 2000.
- I. C. Olsson, L. A. Greenberg, E. Bergman, and K. Wysujack, “Environmentally induced migration: the importance of food,” Ecology Letters, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 645–651, 2006.
- J. Cucherousset, D. Ombredane, K. Charles, F. Marchand, and J. L. Baglinière, “A continuum of life history tactics in a brown trout (Salmo trutta) population,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, vol. 62, no. 7, pp. 1600–1610, 2005.
- G. B. Zydlewski, J. Zydlewski, and J. Johnson, “Patterns of migration and residency in coastal cutthroat trout Oncorhynchus clarkii clarkii from two tributaries of the lower Columbia River,” Journal of Fish Biology, vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 203–222, 2009.
- N. B. Metcalfe, F. A. Huntingford, and J. E. Thorpe, “Feeding intensity, growth rates, and the establishment of life- history patterns in juvenile Atlantic salmon Salmo salar,” Journal of Animal Ecology, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 463–474, 1988.
- D. Álvarez and A. G. Nicieza, “Is metabolic rate a reliable predictor of growth and survival of brown trout (Salmo trutta) in the wild?” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 643–649, 2005.
- H. Nordeng, “Solution to the “char problem” based on Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) in Norway,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, vol. 40, no. 9, pp. 1372–1387, 1983.
- I. C. Olsson and L. A. Greenberg, “Partial migration in a landlocked brown trout population,” Journal of Fish Biology, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 106–121, 2004.
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- I. Mayer, H. Lundqvist, B. Berglund, M. Schmitz, R. Schultz, and B. Borg, “Seasonal endocrine changes in Baltic salmon, Salmo salar, immature parr and mature male parr. I. Plasma levels of five androgens, 17-hydroxy-20-dihydroprogesterone and of 17-estradiol,” vol. 68, pp. 1360–1365, 1990.
- B. H. Letcher and G. Gries, “Effects of life history variation on size and growth in stream-dwelling Atlantic salmon,” Journal of Fish Biology, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 97–114, 2003.
- L. Österdahl, “The smolt run of a small Swedish river,” in Salmon and Trout in Streams, T. G. Northcote, Ed., pp. 205–215, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canda, 1969.
- N. B. Metcalfe, F. A. Huntingford, and J. E. Thorpe, “Seasonal changes in feeding motivation of juvenile Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar),” Canadian Journal of Zoology, vol. 64, pp. 2439–2446, 1986.
- T. Forseth, T. F. Næsje, B. Jonsson, and K. Hårsaker, “Juvenile migration in brown trout: a consequence of energetic state,” Journal of Animal Ecology, vol. 68, no. 4, pp. 783–793, 1999.
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- K. Wysujack, L. A. Greenberg, E. Bergman, and I. C. Olsson, “The role of the environment in partial migration: food availability affects the adoption of a migratory tactic in brown trout Salmo trutta,” Ecology of Freshwater Fish, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 52–59, 2009. |
(→Celebrity Mastermind: To 04.01.13)
(→Celebrity Mastermind: All for 2012-3 now in.)
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|Jonathan Meades||Stewart Lee||[[Nick Hancock]]
|Jonathan Meades||Stewart Lee||[[Nick Hancock]]
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|Shaun Williamson||[[Paul Gambaccini]]
|Bill Oddie||John Bird
|Bill Oddie||John Bird
Revision as of 18:04, 6 January 2013
Alan Watson (unaired pilot)
Magnus Magnusson (BBC1 & BBC Two Celebrity Special)
Peter Snow (BBC Radio 4)
Clive Anderson (Discovery Channel)
John Humphrys (BBC Two)
Betsan Powys (Mastermind Cymru and Mastermind Plant Cymru)
Des Lynam (Sport Mastermind)
Griff Rhys Jones (2011 special)
Scorer and Timekeeper: Mary Craig (often referred to as the "Dark Lady" who sat by Magnus' side but never spoke).
BBC 1, 11 September 1972 to 1 September 1997
BBC Radio 4, 1998 to 2000
as Discovery Mastermind BBC Manchester for Discovery Channel, 14 November 2001 to 16 January 2002
BBC Two, 30 December 2002 to present
as Celebrity Mastermind BBC One, 26 December 2003 to present
as Junior Mastermind BBC One, 30 August 2004 to 21 December 2007
as Mastermind Cymru BBC for S4C, 8 October 2006 to 8 December 2007
as Celebrity Mastermind Cymru 2006 to 26 December 2009
as Sport Mastermind BBC Two, 8 July to 20 August 2008
as Mastermind Plant Cymru BBC for S4C, 8 December 2008 to 15 October 2009
bbc.co.uk webcast, 5 to 6 March 2011 (24 Hour Panel People)
Considered by many to be "the ultimate test of memory and knowledge", Mastermind is a simple quiz. However, at times it can prove quite fascinating.
Originally set in the chapel of a college or hall, nowadays a studio in sunny Salford, John (originally Magnus) puts four contestants through their paces. Each contestant has previously submitted a specialist subject, which can be anything you like as long as the subject is deep enough. These are judiciously researched beforehand.
The seating arrangements
In Round One, each contestant goes up to the famous black chair (pictured) one by one, and is asked "Name?", "Occupation?" and "Specialised subject?" The contestant is then subjected to two minutes of quick-fire questions about their subject. (Contestants can pass if they wish, although in the event of a tie these are taken into account.) At the end of the two minutes, a buzzer is sounded and, if John is in the middle of a question, he uses one of television's most famous catchphrases, originally used by Magnus: "I've started so I'll finish". (Though unlike Magnus, he does not follow this up with "And you may answer".)
And now, general knowledge
After each of the four contestants have had their go, the scores are read out in reverse order. Round Two is played similarly to Round One, but this time the subject is always general knowledge, and contestants play in the order of position, the person with the least points going first.
After that, the scores are read out again and the winner declared. (If there is a tie on points, the player with the "fewer or fewest" passes is declared the winner; if there is still a tie after passes are taken into consideration - a very rare occurence - then there is a "sudden death" tiebreaker in which both players separately face the same five questions and whoever gets the most right, wins.) The winner goes through to the semi-finals, the four (later six) winners of them going through to the final for the chance to win the engraved punchbowl which signifies the title of Mastermind champion.
And that's it. Bells? Whistles? Not one (with the possible exception of the intriguing black chair). And it doesn't need it for Mastermind, despite being simple, has become something of a national institution.
The end... not quite
The very last programme (at least, that's what it seemed at the time) was in 1997, where the programme went for the ego-trip of a lifetime to the remote Scottish island of Orkney to film in St. Magnus (geddit?), an 860 year old cathedral. Anne Ashurst, a novelist for Mills and Boon, was crowned the 'last ever' champion, and Magnus Magnusson got to keep the black chair, as was only right.
But it wasn't quite the end. Peter Snow hosted a version on BBC Radio 4 (although the impact of the chair was a bit less...) and what felt like a slightly dumbed-down version ran for a year on the Discovery Channel, with a redeeming feature being a separate final for interactive play-along viewers.
And that really did seem to be it until a celebrity special aired in 2002...followed by the show itself returning the next year! Everything remained pretty much the same, including the theme tune and chair (a replica of the original) though there was a bit more interaction between new host John Humphrys and contestant. (At least, there was until the 2009-10 series, whereby Humphrys no longer chatted to the contenders in between the rounds: instead, the contenders all did a brief spiel just before their first rounds about why they'd chosen their subjects and what they found interesting about them. However, that's now also gone in the 2010-11 series, because the general knowledge rounds are now two and a half minutes long). Some believe the show has been 'dumbed down' seeing as more people are choosing subjects such as Doctor Who rather than The Crimean War, but it's good to see the show back again on the BBC.
An example specialist round on Buffy the Vampire Slayer
There's even been a regular kids' series, a Welsh-language version for S4C, and (almost inevitably) a children's series in Welsh. In 2008, Des Lynam returned with a sport-themed version. It wasn't his first time in the question master's chair, as he used to host special editions of the quiz on FA Cup Final mornings, though he does seem uncharacteristically wooden in the role of questionmaster. It does however show what a good, no, let's make that great, format Mastermind is. As long as the basic structure is in place, it's almost impossible to mess it up, wooden host or not.
Who's the greatest?
As if being crowned Mastermind wasn't honour enough, winners have often been invited to take part in further contests against other quiz show champions. In the 1970s there was Supermind, and the 1990s gave us Masterbrain, in which winners of Mastermind and Brain of Britain played off against each other. 1997 even saw a University Challenge crossover, with that year's four "last ever" Mastermind finalists making up a team to take on UC's reigning champions (the latter won). The 1997 winner, Anne Ashurst, also appeared on 'University Challenge - The Professionals' as part of the Romantic Novelists team, who were the defeated finallists in the 2005 series.
In 1979 Magnus hosted a special Mastermind International programme involving quiz show winners from around the world (including UK Mastermind champions David Hunt and Rosemary James, together with the champions of the Nigerian, Australian and New Zealand versions of the show, and winners from Ireland's Top Score and the Canadian version of The $128,000 Quiz), which was won by the Irish contender John Mulcahy. Following this, Mastermind International became an annual event for the next four years. In 1980 it was hosted by Magnus again, but after that it followed a Eurovision-type "winning nation hosts next year" system. In 1981 the programme was filmed in the Sydney Opera House with questionmaster Huw Evans, who hosted the Australian version of the show. The 1982 edition was made in New Zealand and hosted by Peter Sinclair, who was the questionmaster on the local versions of both Mastermind and University Challenge. Finally, after the first British victory, 1983 saw Huw Evans fly to the UK to present what turned out to be the last edition, made at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.
There was also a Mastemind Champions contest aired over three consecutive nights in 1982 (in lieu of a proper series that year) featuring the first ten series champions - five in each of two heats, top two from each progressing to the final. The winner was David Hunt, with the specialist subjects of the history of Crete, and Alexander the Great. 2010 saw a Champion of Champions competition featuring sixteen past winners, which the 2005 champion Pat Gibson won with specialist subjects of Pixar films and Great Mathematicians. In addition to Gibson, the Grand Final line-up comprised the 1993 champion Gavin Fuller, the 1990 winner David Edwards and the reigning champion Jesse Honey, who managed to set two new records in his first round (see Scoring records, below). The final scores were most impressive - Fuller and Edwards tied for third place on 32 points, while Gibson and Honey tied on 36 points, but Gibson won it on passes - and it should be noted that the general knowledge round was two and a half minutes long in this case. Humphrys reckoned that there had never been a contest quite like it before, and 2008 champion David Clark (who lost to Gibson on passes in the heats) suggests that it may be the highest four-person aggregate score ever (it's certainly the highest for the Humphrys era).
The final of each series attracts a lot of attention, the most famous winner being Fred Housego, a London taxicab driver. Mr Housego was the first of three drivers to win the series, since Christopher Hughes, a London Underground train driver, won it in 1983 and Ian Meadows, a hospital driver, did so in 1985.
"I've started so I'll finish." (At the end of his last-ever show, Magnus adapted it slightly: "I started, and now...I've finished. Bye bye".)
"Hello, and welcome to another round of 'Mastermind', with me, John Humphrys..."
"May I have our first contender, please?"
"And at the end of a close competition, let's glance at the scores."
"...And it doesn't get much closer than this..."
"So on now to the second round, the general knowledge round - and remember, if there is a tie at the end of this round, then the number of passes will be taken into consideration, and the contender with the fewer or fewest passes will be declared the winner. And if there is still a tie on passes, then there will be a sudden death play-off" (or "shoot-out", as John Humphrys has sometimes put it).
(Magnusson-era): "...and you may answer". Also: "Our thanks and commiserations to our three gallant runners-up!"
Magnus Magnusson normally signed off with, "All that it remains for me to do now is to thank the authorities here at (wherever) for all their great kindness and hospitality to us. Next week, we shall be at (wherever else). Until then, from 'Mastermind' in (wherever), it's goodbye!" John Humphrys signs off more simply, but equally effectively, with, "Do join us next time for more 'Mastermind'. Thank you for watching - goodbye!" In fact, nowadays he says "Join us next time for more Masterminds", which is really rather cute. He's not going to like us for saying that, is he?
(John Humphrys, since 2009): "Four contenders, two rounds of questions, one aim - to become the nation's Mastermind" and, for the 'Champion of Champions' series, "Four former winners, two rounds of questions, one aim - to become the 'Mastermind' Champion of Champions".
The idea for the show comes from the experiences of the producer (Bill Wright) when he was a Prisoner of War during WWII. He was often asked for his "Name", "Rank" and "Number" (the only information he was obliged to give under the Geneva Convention). He decided to change this to "Name", "Occupation" and "Specialised Subject". Note the dark mise-en-scene, which is meant to give a sort of individualised, cross-examination feel. In the early days, this theme was even carried through to the on-screen credit for Magnus Magnusson, who was described not as "questionmaster" or something fluffy like that, but as "Interrogator".
The theme tune is called Approaching Menace by Neil Richardson (who, incidentally, co-composed and conducted the score for the film Four Weddings and a Funeral).
The 2010 final featured a new orchestration recorded by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. BBC Manchester then promptly forgot they'd ever commissioned it and reverted to the original library-music version for the 2010-11 series, before bringing it out to serve as the main theme for the 2011-12 run.
One quirk of the show is that participants are always referred to as "contenders", never "contestants". Well, almost never, as both Magnusson and Humphrys have been known to slip up on occasion.
Because the first three Mastermind champions were women, the BBC were once apparently on the verge of debating whether to change the title of the programme to 'Mistressmind'. And if you believe that, you'll believe anything! Nevertheless, it's true that the 1975 series was accompanied by a lot of speculation in the press about whether a man would ever - or could ever! - win the title, which all proved somewhat academic at the end of that year's contest when a man, John Hart, did just that. The balance was largely redressed throughout the 80's, as the mix of male and female victories became fairly even, but it later became rather more male-dominated. A relative lack of female applicants has often been a concern for producers of quiz shows, as reflected in the fact that Magnus would often ask for more ladies on the show when requesting future contestants. Gordon Burns often did the same thing on The Krypton Factor, as did William G. Stewart on Fifteen-to-One. The problem is particularly bad for "prestige" shows like these since they can't really be seen to indulge in positive discrimination in the way that other, less "serious" shows can.
The oldest-ever 'Mastermind' champion, at 64, was Sir David Hunt in 1977, while the youngest-ever, at 24, was Gavin Fuller in 1993. It was therefore most appropriate that Hunt presented the trophy to Fuller in the latter year's Grand Final.
Probably the first-ever contender to win the game before he'd even started his second round was a 2005 semi-finallist, Tom King. He'd scored 17 on his specialist subject, namely "Dad's Army" and all his three opponents finished with scores below that. "Well, I can't pretend that it's a close match", declared Humphrys, "but we're going to test your general knowledge anyway", and King went on to score a total of 24. One contender to match this feat was the 2006 finallist Ray Eaton in one of his first two rounds.
Several series champions had been highest-scoring runners-up in at least one of their previous matches. They included Margaret Harris, David Edwards, Anne Ashurst and, from the 'Junior' series, Domhnall Ryan. This has also occasionally happened on University Challenge and quite often on The Krypton Factor.
Champions, especially those from non-academic backgrounds, sometimes find that their success leads to other TV and radio work. Cab driver Fred Housego, the 1980 champion, went on to present a BBC1 series entitled 'History On Your Doorstep' and he appeared on certain other shows too, before settling into a long career on local radio. 1983 winner Chris Hughes, then a train driver, went on to appear on other quizzes such as Call My Bluff, in which he helped Frank Muir to victory and The Adventure Game, in which he was unfortunately evaporated for giving an inappropriate gift to the Rangdo - but he's more than bounced back from that little setback, since he's now best-known as one of the Eggheads. He also narrated a series on steam trains (which had been one of his specialist subjects) for TVS, and most unusual of all, was the subject of a QED programme about what makes someone clever.
Other champs who turned up elsewhere included the 1984 champion, Margaret Harris, appeared on a special Christmas edition of Bullseye that same year and proved surprisingly adept at dart-throwing as well as answering questions, and the 1993 (and youngest-ever) champion, Gavin Fuller, who went on Noel's House Party, on which he was gunged (well, what else could you expect on that show?) and was later the defeated finallist on Grand Slam. Other than that, however, the majority of 'Mastermind' champions have returned to (relative) obscurity following their victories (but see also 'Who's The Greatest' above).
The famous Arfor Wyn Hughes, who scored only 12, revealed on 'Disastermind' (part of a 'TV Hell' night screened on BBC2 in 1992) that his appearance on the programme caused him considerable grief with the pupils that he taught. Apparently, whenever he asked one of them a question in class, the response would inevitably be, "Pass!" followed by a cheeky snigger - and, as if that wasn't bad enough, the kids would deliberately hum the 'Mastermind' theme tune as he walked down the corridors. Somehow, the famous "Scooby Doo" cartoon phrase "I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for them pesky kids!" springs to mind.
Another former contender to appear on 'Disastermind' was the 1974 finallist Susan Reynolds (now Halstead), who had apparently been partially concussed when hit in the face by a brass knob on the wardrobe door in her hotel room not long before the recording and found herself in the black chair facing, as the programme described it, 'two Magnusses'. As a result, she struggled considerably on her specialist subject, 'British Ornithology', scoring only 5 points: she made a comeback in her general knowledge round, but unfortunately it was too little, too late, although she did manage to finish in third place. She later stated in interviews that she was knocked out "by three other contestants and a brass knob". Magnus actually went to visit her to find out more as part of another quiz-related programme, some time after his version of the show had finished, because he had suspected at the time that something wasn't right and that she may well otherwise have won the series. He always remembered her fondly as the greatest champion that 'Mastermind' never had - and she would certainly have also been the youngest-ever champion, as she was only 19 at the time.
1990 champion David Edwards subsequently scooped the top prize on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, while Millionaire winner Pat Gibson completed "the double" the other way around in 2005 (and made it a treble by going on to win Brain of Britain as well). Humphrys spoke to Gibson during the latter's first round about his winning WWTBAM and asked him, "What would you do if we were to give you a million pounds?" then added hastily, "No - I'm getting a voice in my earpiece, saying, 'Don't go down that route!'". (Yes, one can believe that it was best that he didn't). There was also a victory for 1995 champion Kevin Ashman at Torquay in the live, touring stage version of WWTBAM.
The 1994 champion George Davidson received his prize from none other than Bamber Gascoigne. It is surely no coincidence that this final went out just a month before the BBC revival of University Challenge began.
A 1996 edition of the programme featured contenders from all corners of the UK, as Magnus was keen to point out in his introductory spiel: an Irishman, a Scotsman, an Englishman and a Welsh woman. The Irishman, Robert Devlin, and the Scotsman, Dr Malcolm Walker-Kinnear, went through to the next round as winner and highest-scoring runner-up respectively. Similarly, the winners of the Junior series represented three of the four corners of the UK: the 2004 winner, Daniel Parker, was from Wales, the 2006 winner, Domnhall Ryan, was from Northern Ireland, while the remaining three, Robin Geddes, Robert Stutter and David Verghese, were all from England.
There has always been a considerable University Challenge/'Mastermind'-crossover, with many contestants from the former going on to take part in the latter (and occasionally vice versa), but 'Mastermind's' 2010 Grand Final almost certainly holds the record for the greatest number of former UC contestants competing in one edition of 'Mastermind'. The series winner, Jesse Honey, had been part of the Durham University team that had reached the UC semi-finals in 1999. Kathryn Johnson, who finished in second place, had been a member of the victorious British Library team in the 2004 UC 'Professionals' series. Barbara Thompson had been the captain of the Open University team that had won the 1985 UC series and had also reached the semi-finals in the 2002 'Reunited' series. Finally, Les Morrell had competed in the 2004/5 UC series as part of an East Anglia University team, who reached the second round. In addition, one other contestant, Mark Grant, was appearing in his second "Mastermind" Grand Final, having previously achieved the feat in 2005. The 2011 champion, Dr Ian Bayley, had previously been a contestant twice on 'University Challenge', reaching the second round on his first appearance (on behalf of Imperial College, London, in 1996) and the quarter-finals the second time (on behalf of Balliol College, Oxford, in 2001). Bayley later went on to become a 'Mastermind' finallist in 2009 and was narrowly beaten by Nancy Dickmann, which made him all the more determined to go one better in the 2011 series. (Oh, and he'd also previously won 'Brain of Britain', as Humphrys pointed out when presenting Bayley with the 'Mastermind' trophy).
The rules were changed in 1995 to allow previous contenders, except finalists, to return. This has since been changed again to allow defeated finalists another go as well. Isabelle Heward has been a contender four times (1983, 1996, 2003, 2005) and reached the semi-finals on each of her last three entries. All of her specialist subjects have been related to the cinema. Sheila Altree has also appeared in four series (1980, 1985, 1997, 2007), the first time under her first married name, Sheila Denyer. She won her heat in 1985 before someone tipped off the producers that Altree and Denyer were the same person and they disqualified her. Geoff Thomas won the title at his fourth attempt: he was a semi-finalist in 1994 and again in 2001's one-off Discovery Mastermind series, runner-up in 2003 and finally champion in 2006.
A panel of clergy contested a heat at Norwich Cathedral in 1996 and the winner, Dr Richard Sturch, went on to win that series' grand final. When he returned for the 2010 'Champion of Champions' series, Sturch revealed that he had originally gone on mainly because, at the time, the clergy had not been getting a very good press within the field of quizzing and other aspects of popular culture, so he had wanted to try to redress the balance, as did the 'Mastermind' team, which was why they had decided to have an all-clergymen edition. However, it's also worth noting that the famous 'showbiz vicar', the Reverend David Smith, was still very active in the quizzing world at the time: he had always proved highly entertaining and knowledgeable in all the (many) shows he had been on.
In 1987, married couple Paul and Christine Hancock competed in the same edition of the show. Both scored 34 correct answers and two passes; Mr. Hancock won the play-off by one question. Magnus very appropriately entitled that edition 'Hancock's Half-Hour'. The couple also later appeared on Masterteam, along with Mr Hancock's brother.
Similarly, a father and son who appeared on the programme were Ashok Venkatesh, who had been a finallist in the 2006 regular series, and his son, Nikhil, who had previously done well in his first round match in that year's 'Junior' series.
Another family event occurred during the two 2007 series of Junior Mastermind. In the series screened early that year, twins Robert and Tintin (real name Antonia) Stutter competed in separate heats. Although they both scored impressively, only Robert made it into the Grand Final, which he duly won - with the specialised subject of Tintin, appropriately enough. Their younger brother Edmund took part in the later series, having apparently been determined to follow in his siblings' footsteps, and also performed well: he was one of the defeated finallists. Had he won, he would have received the trophy from his own brother, because the previous champions in that series always came to present the trophy. Previous winners also presented the trophy on several occasions during the regular series.
One of Robert's opponents in the aforementioned Grand Final, William, had interested Humphrys in his first round by answering questions (and winning the heat) on 'Hancock's Half Hour' - Humphrys was surprised that a radio comedy from so long ago held the interest of such a young contender. It also transpired that William listened to the 'Today' programme, much to Humphrys's delight - but in fact, the only reason for that was the fact that the lad's parents insisted on listening to said programme while driving him to school and, as he was always sat in the back of the car, he could not change the channel. Oh well, you can't win 'em all, Humphrys, eh?
Another memorable moment from 'Junior Mastermind' was just after the last (so far) champion, David Verghese, had been presented with his trophy by the aforementioned Robert: Humphrys asked David what he hoped to do next and the latter stated that, as soon as he was old enough, he wanted to go on University Challenge, adult Mastermind and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Humphrys duly wished him luck with all that.
Many of the celebrities' appearances on their version of the show proved memorable. Vic Reeves did a silly walk to the black chair and Magnus (rather sourly) asked him, "Occupation? - as if I needed to ask."
When John Humphrys asked Edward Stourton for his name, Stourton responded in mock-indignation, "John - we practically sleep together!" (A bit too much information there, maybe, but he was, of course, referring to the fact that he and Humphrys work together on the 'Today' programme).
When Peter Serafinowicz was presented with his trophy, he returned to the black chair and pretended to drop off to sleep, as if indicating that the whole experience was a very draining one. Humphrys was somewhat nonplussed and tried nudging him - but to no avail.
When Bernard Cribbins appeared, Humphrys asked him to do a 'Wombles'-narration, which he was famous for doing in the 70's - Cribbins duly obliged with his usual great aplomb, finishing with, "John - go out and collect any old rubbish you can, but John - don't bring her back to the burrow!" (Nice one).
Humphrys also asked Tim Vine to do his most famous trick of telling as many jokes as he could in a short space of time (probably one minute in this case?) and, like Cribbins, Vine certainly did not disappoint us. In addition, thanks to Humphrys, we got to find out how Spoony got his nickname - apparently, his head was shaped like a spoon when he was a kid.
We also found out that the veteran quiz host and producer William G. Stewart found asking the questions much easier than answering them - and, when Humphrys asked his former "Nine O'Clock News" colleague, Julia Somerville, why she had chosen 'Winnie The Pooh' as a specialist subject, she responded, "I just wanted to hear a distinguished journalist like you talk about Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger". (Why not indeed?)
A classic moment occurred in the all-comedians 2009 Children In Need special, when Stephen K Amos scored 5 points with 5 passes on his specialist subject, which just happened to be Five Star, the 1980s pop group! Amos then went on to achieve an equally appropriate final score of 15, admittedly with a bit of help from Humphrys, but rightly so in this case.
Soon after this, when Michael Winner appeared, he failed to live up to his name (quite the reverse, in fact) and even resorted to constantly asking Humphrys, "Can I ask the audience?" and "Can I phone a friend?" etc etc. (Actually, it was nice to see Winner showing a sense of humour, rather than his usual abrasive persona).
In the 2010 Children In Need Special, Stewart Francis told Humphrys, "You look like a much younger person". "I wish I could say the same for you", answered Humphrys, then Francis added, "I was talking to Pudsey", (who, of course, was sitting strategically on Humphrys's desk). Humphrys decided to move swiftly on.
When Humphrys presented the trophy to Hilary Kay in a 2010 Celebrity edition, he asked her to give a valuation for said trophy, much as she would in her main show, The Antiques Roadshow. Kay responded, in her usual style, "Well, how much would you say it's worth?" "You were meant to say, 'It's priceless'!" exclaimed Humphrys in mock-indignation, and Kay was quick to answer, "Oh, it's definitely that", much to Humphrys' relief.
On another 2010 Celebrity edition, David Threlfall was answering questions on the Bonzo Dog Band. One question (enquiring after the title of their 2007 reunion album) had to be answered in French (Pour l'Amour des Chiens) and he failed to do so, but was most indignant when Humphrys took it as a pass. At the end of his round, Threlfall protested that he knew what it was but just couldn't manage the French pronunciation. "Yes, it is a problem, but it's actually your problem, not mine", declared Humphrys, with some severity. Threlfall still looked and sounded disgruntled, although he appeared slightly mollified when he found out that he'd scored 12 points. "And our final contender, please - and I hope that he's going to be less trouble than the last one", was Humphrys' parting shot. Humphrys' apparent rudeness was explained and excused when Threlfall returned for his General Knowledge questions and their chat revealed that Humphrys and Threlfall knew each other from the school run, as their children went to the same school.
Actor Rhys Thomas not only scored a (celebrity) record 21 points on his specialist subject, the rock group Queen, but did so dressed in a replica of Freddie Mercury's famous harlequin costume, much to Humphrys' amusement.
Comedian Andi Osho made a considerable impact when competing in one of the 2012 celebrity specials. Not only did she become the first celebrity to win twice, having previously done so in the 2010 Children In Need Special, but she also chose 'The Life and Career of John Humphrys' as her specialist subject, ("for reasons best known to herself", declared a rather bemused Humphrys).
Oh, and let's not forget that classic moment when "Dad's Army's" Ian Lavender had just sat down in the black chair: Humphrys asked him his name and one of Lavender's opponents, Rick Wakeman, called out that immortal line, "Don't tell him, Pike!" with immaculate timing and to the great amusement of all concerned. "Yes, we let anyone on this show nowadays", chuckled Humphrys.
Questions and Answers
Over 57,000 questions were asked over the course of the original series.
The last ever question asked on the Magnus version of the programme was virtually the same as the first one asked back in 1972 (concerning Picasso's Guernica). This was plotted beforehand as an in-joke to be played only if the scores did not depend on it.
In 1996, one contender took The Sex Pistols as a specialist subject, but the BBC insisted that the word "bollocks" (as in "Never Mind the...") be bleeped out of the broadcast. According to question-setter Elizabeth Salmon, this was the first and only time a question on the show was censored in this way.
Magnus Magnusson claimed that he once got a letter from an irate viewer who accused him of blasphemy for saying that Jesus' first name was Reginald. It turned out that the correspondent had actually misheard a question concerning Jeeves's first name!
With the many hundreds, if not thousands of questions asked each series, it's perhaps inevitable an incorrect question will slip through now and again. In one episode in February 2010, a contender was asked of which African country was Janet Jagan the president between 1997-1999. The contender guessed Ghana, but was told the answer was Guyana - which is in fact a South American country. The contender in question ultimately finished in last place however, some 13 points behind the winner, and 6 points behind their nearest competitor, meaning it didn't materially affect the game.
In a heat in 1997, Colin Cadby was judged to have given an incorrect answer to a question when he had actually got it correct. He ended up losing to Tony Dart - however, he qualified as one of the highest-scoring losers, and ended up reaching the final (beating Dart in his semi-final).
Around 2008, John Humphrys asked the question 'Which chemical has the symbol Ti?' The contestant gave the (correct) answer 'Titanium' - however Humphrys said that the answer was 'Thallium' (he had obviously misread the lower-case L in the chemical symbol Tl as a capital I). Thankfully it made no difference to the outcome of the match.
Pleasingly, one former contender, Anna Torpey, is now a question-setter for the programme and is listed as such in the end credits. Torpey was a finallist in the 2007-8 series.
- The famous Arfor Wyn Hughes is not, and never was, Mastermind's lowest scorer - he scored 12. The lowest ever score is 5 points, achieved by Kajen Thuraaisingham in the 2009-10 series (4 points on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and just 1 on general knowledge).
- Before this, the lowest score record for the regular (non-celebrity) series was 7 points, set by Colin Kidd in the 2005 series. He scored 4 on the history of the World Chess Championships and 3 on general knowledge. This was equalled by Michael Burton in the 2009-10 series with 2 on angels, 5 on general knowledge.
- In 2004, Gill Perry scored 8 points, 4 on her specialist subject (Babylon 5, series 1 & 2) and 4 on general knowledge.
- Previously, scores of 9 points were 'achieved' by Armando Margiotta, Sally Copeland and a community worker from Warwickshire who wishes to remain anonymous. 9 points have also been scored by Michael Kane in the 2004 final, and in 2006 by Steve Bolsover in the first round and Simon Curtis (who fell into "pass hell" and scored just one point on his specialist subject, the films of Jim Carrey) in the second. Mr Curtis was not the first contestant to score only one point on a specialist subject, however - Arabella Weir had also done so in a 2004 celebrity special, her subject having been 'Dallas' (the television series). Three other contestants to score 9 points have been Cliff Hughes and Andrew Hesford, both in the 2007 series, and Joyce Wilson in the 2012 series. In the 2010 series, Paul Robson scored only 2 points on his chosen subject ('The Weimar Republic') - however, he did considerably better on general knowledge, finishing on 11 points. In 2012, Steve Ferry scored only 1 point on his specialist subject ('The 30 Years War'), but made an even more impressive comeback in his second round, finishing on 16 points.
- The lowest-ever score on the programme (until the aforementioned Mr Thuraaisingham's match) was achieved by both Arabella Weir and Tara Palmer-Tompkinson in the above-mentioned 2004 celebrity special: 6 points. Only the previous week, Murray Walker had scored 7 points, despite the fact that his specialist subject was 'Formula One'. Politicians had mixed fortunes - David Blunkett and Gyles Brandreth both only scored 11, Neil Hamilton, David Lammy and Michael Howard did slightly better, Lembit Öpik and Diane Abbott better still and Edwina Currie and Jacqui Smith both won their games.
- The highest score was 41, set by Kevin Ashman in 1995. Jennifer Keaveney, Mary Elizabeth Raw and Anne Ashurst all scored 40. Keaveney did so twice. Prior to Keaveney setting the new record in 1986, the highest-ever score was 38, achieved by the 1984 champion Margaret Harris in that series' Grand Final. 38 is also the highest score in the Humphrys era, which was achieved by Jesse Honey in the heats of the 2010 'Champion of Champions' series - beating his own record of 37 set in the 2010 Grand Final. Before this, the revival record was 36 points, earned by Geoff Thomas in the 2006 Grand Final.
- The 2010-11 series changed the format a little, with the heats and final having the general knowledge round extended to two and a half minutes, meaning scores are not directly comparable to those in earlier series. The highest score to date in the extended format is Ian Bayley's 37 points in the 2011 Grand Final. Brian Pendreigh had previously came close in the heats by scoring 35 points, his chosen subject having been The Beatles. In the same series, two other contenders, Keith Nickless and Nick Mills, tied on 34 points, with Nickless winning the game on passes. Mills, it should also be noted, was an impressive former University Challenge contestant, having the been the captain (and star player) of a Manchester University team that made it as far as the semi-finals in the 2004/5 series. (See also 'Trivia - Contenders' below). Strangely enough, Mills and Nickless went on to appear in the same semi-final, in which they did not score quite so highly (due in part to there being less time available to each contender - 3½ minutes rather than the 4½ minutes in the heats) and this time Mills outscored Nickless, but was himself beaten by another contender, Peter Riley, who went on to finish in second place in the Grand Final.
- Jesse Honey's 38 points included the all-time record score in a specialised subjects round: 23 points on Flags of the World. The previous record was set in 1979 when Joe West, a helicopter pilot from Shetland, scored 22 points on the life of Lord Nelson. The highest score in that round in the Junior series was scored in the early-2007 Grand Final by a boy named Callum: he scored 19 points on the life and career of the cricketer Andrew Flintoff, but was narrowly beaten in the General Knowledge round.
- Even allowing for the fact that celeb participants aren't subjected to quite as hard a challenge as regular contenders, the 2010-11 yuletide Celebrity Mastermind series saw some very impressive performances. Frank Gardener scored 20 in his general knowledge round, which has to be one of the highest scores for that round, though this was presumably equalled and/or beaten on several editions of the regular series - and almost certainly by Kevin Ashman when he achieved his record-breaking score of 41 points. And Rhys Thomas racked up a magnificent 21 points in his specialist round, on the group Queen.
- The highest score for the Celebrity version of the show, 36 points, was achieved by Hilary Kay and matched by Rhys Thomas in two separate 2010 editions. One of Kay's opponents, Richard Herring, equalled the previous record, which had been set by Lucy Porter in the 2009 Comedians Special for Children in Need: 35 points. Mark Watson had been close behind Porter in the latter edition with 33: this score was matched in 2011 by Lord Digby Jones. Prior to these records being set, the highest score for this version of the show had probably been the one achieved by Tom Ward in 2005: 31 points.
- In a 2005 celebrity special, former Popstars winner Myleene Klass may have set a record for the most asynchronous performance - scoring 17 points from 18 questions about Sex & The City series 3, but only answering one question right in the general knowledge round. A contender on the 2003 regular series did something similar (if not quite on the same scale), scoring 12 points on the Harry Potter films (of which there were only two at the time), but only getting one right in her general knowledge round.
By 1981 the programme had visited every British university, with Aberdeen the last to play host to the show.
One venue that provided some very interesting scenery was the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu, Hampshire, which played host to the show in 1983: it was certainly refreshingly different to see the contenders competing amid a collection of vintage vehicles. The same museum reappeared 21 years later on the first 'Junior Mastermind' Grand Final - not as a venue for the programme, but as the place where the eventual winner, Daniel Parker, had gone to research his chosen subject. That subject was 'James Bond Villains', although one would suspect that the museum was actually a more obvious research-venue for his previous subject, namely 'The Volkswagen Beetle'. (Not that it ultimately mattered in any case: he won the series in considerable style).
Though the regular series is produced in Manchester, the celebrity version was made for many years at BBC TV Centre in London. It only moved north in 2011, when the Salford complex opened.
In the Magnus Magnusson years, the questions and responses were carefully measured to give an optimum 20 questions per two-minute round. Each contestant's general knowledge round included one question about their home region, history, geography, literature, and science. According to question setter Janet Barker in a Radio Times article in 2010, modern general knowledge rounds take the individual contenders' backgrounds into account: "if someone’s got a career in science they might have a slightly harder one [on science] in their general knowledge than someone who was a musician."
In some of the early finals, the rounds were extended to three minutes. In the second round of the 2010 series, the specialist rounds were shortened to 90 seconds in order to cram five contenders into the regular half-hour slot (a format which has been retained for subsequent semi-finals). The 2010-11 series has also seen the general knowledge round extended to two and a half minutes in the heats, yet, bizarrely, this did not happen in any of the subsequent celebrity matches, in which the general knowledge round went back to the original two minutes. Actually, this may have been because Humphrys still chats to the celebrities between the rounds, which he no longer does with the regular series contenders.
Although Junior Mastermind did not make its debut until 2004, there had been a few children's versions of Mastermind during the Magnus-era. Around 1980/81, a special edition was made on Jim'll Fix It with a girl answering questions on the 'Mister Men' books by Roger Hargreaves: she achieved a very impressive score. There had also been a special edition screened as part of one of the BBC's Saturday morning programmes (either 'Swap Shop' or 'Saturday Superstore') around 1981/82. In addition, the show was amusingly mentioned on an early edition of The Vicar of Dibley, in which Geraldine (alias Dawn French) was telling her congregation that she'd once wanted to go on 'Mastermind', but had been unable to, partly because she was too young (at only four and a half) and partly because there wasn't much call for "The Wombles" as a specialist subject. Not at that time, maybe, but of course 'Junior Mastermind' started some ten years later - and, soon after that, on the regular series, one contender answered questions (which were actually quite hard) on "The Trumptonshire Trilogy", ie the Brian Cant-narrated kids' series, "Camberwick Green", "Trumpton" and "Chigley". As a minor footnote to this, when a contender on the 2005 Junior series took The Vicar of Dibley as a specialist subject, the question-setters couldn't resist a cheeky bit of self-reference and included one asking for Geraldine's proposed specialist subject - which, we're pleased to report, the contender, Robin Geddes, (who went on to win the series) got right.
An equally cheeky piece of self-reference occurred on another episode of the same series, when one contestant, James, was answering questions on "Fawlty Towers". During his chat with James in between the two rounds, Humphrys referred to the moment in the comedy when Basil told Sybil that she should go on "Mastermind" and that her specialist subject should be 'The Bleeding Obvious' - and James (not surprisingly, given that he had gained a high score on the subject) knew it well. This was actually used as a question in the 2010 Children In Need Celebrity Special, in which Fred MacAulay was also answering questions on 'Fawlty Towers' (or as the onscreen caption had it, "Farty Towels"), and he got it right too. Oh, and just to keep up the self-reference theme, MacAulay's general knowledge round also included the question, "Which comedy duo once performed a 'Mastermind' sketch with the specialist subject being 'Answering the Question Before Last'?" and he got that one right too - the answer being 'The Two Ronnies', of course.
There was a Doctor Who special in 2005, with Christopher Eccleston awarding the trophy. Eccleston also appeared on 'Junior Mastermind' the following year, offering help and encouragement to one of the finallists, Sam, who was answering questions on the former's 'Doctor Who' series. (Sam, by the way, turned out to be the grandson of the late and legendary cricket commentator Brian ('Johnners') Johnston, and John Humphrys was only too keen to talk with Sam about Johnners' most famous line, "The bowler's Holding, the batsman's Willey".)
Throughout most of the Magnus-years, Magnus would tell contenders who had passed their score, followed by an initial round of applause, then he would go through the passes, while those who hadn't would be told their score, followed by "And no passes - thank you very much". From time to time, the contenders who had passed would make to leave, thinking they had no passes, then do a double take and sit back down again and Magnus would usually say (humorously), "And just before you dash away, let me give you your (however many) passes..." One contender in the 1986 series, however, was so convinced that he had no passes that he actually returned to his seat and Magnus had to call him back. Probably as a result of this, the system later changed so that Magnus would announce the score, immediately followed by the number of passes (if any), so that there could be no doubt on the matter. The system was tweaked again when John Humphrys took over: he always deals with the passes before announcing the score.
A modified version of the Mastermind format was used for the US sports quiz series 2 Minute Drill (2000-1). Confusingly, there has since been a US quiz show called MasterMinds, which isn't based on this programme, but is rather a version of the College Bowl (UK: University Challenge) format.
There was also a version in the Netherlands, called Megabrein. Marga Scott-Johnson tells us:
- Sadly, it only ran for two seasons (1991-2 and 1992-3) due to disappointing viewing figures. I took part in the 1992-3 series and made it to the semi-final. In fact, taking part in Megabrein completely changed my life, as I met my first husband (Keith Scott, a contender on Mastermind in 1987 and 1995) through the Mastermind Club in the UK and as a result have lived in Britain since 1999!
Magnus Magnusson on one of Esther Rantzen's chat shows revealed that Mastermind's success was due in part to TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Mastermind was originally intentioned as a quiz for "insomniac academics" and shown in an appropriately late-night slot (around 10.15pm most weeks, with a daytime repeat later in the week, around 3.30pm). In 1973 the BBC were showing a sitcom called Casanova '73, written by Galton & Simpson and starring Leslie Phillips in full-on "hellllo laydees" mode. It wasn't exactly The Borgias, but nevertheless Whitehouse cast a glance at the BBC and they moved it past the watershed, leaving the way clear for Mastermind to fill the plum 8pm slot, right after Top of the Pops. And the rest, as they say, is history. So there we are.
Some of the show's 1996 editions were screened back-to-back with a very different show, namely Small Talk and the BBC produced an amusing trailer for both shows as a result. Magnus's voice would be heard saying, "May I have our first contender, please?" and a little boy would appear and announce, "My name's Jamie, I'm six years old and I'm a genius". Magnus would then ask, "Occupation?" and a little girl would say, "I can do a magic trick - watch!" (This 'trick' was putting a pencil on her top lip as a moustache - and the pencil duly fell off, surprise, surprise!) Finally, Magnus would ask, "And your chosen specialised subject?" and a rather serious little boy would say, "Er - I'm not sure about that question". A clever way of trailering two very contrasting shows and certainly a cut above the average BBC trailer.
The black chair was voted the second most iconic chair of the 20th century in a 2009 survey for House Beautiful magazine. Now that's trivial! It was beaten to the top spot by the copy of an Arne Jacobsen model 3107 from that famous photo of Christine Keeler. Should you want to buy one to intimidate your house guests, you may wish to know that the current chair is an Eames Soft Pad Chair made by Herman Miller. The one used on TV is specially modified, with detachable arms (in case a contender is too large to fit between them) and four feet instead of the usual five.
Winners are listed with their specialist subjects. Before 1992, contenders could revert to their original subject for the final if they so wished. Discovery Mastermind, Junior Mastermind and Mastermind Cymru did not have a semi-final phase. There were two Junior Mastermind series in 2007. The 2007 Mastermind Series ran on into 2008.
|1972||Nancy Wilkinson||French Literature||European antiques||History of music 1550-1900|
|1973||Patricia Owen||Grand Opera||Byzantine art||Grand Opera|
|1974||Elizabeth Horrocks||Shakespeare's plays||Works of JRR Tolkein||Works of Dorothy L Sayers|
|1975||John Hart||Athens 500-400 BC||Rome 100-1 BC||Athens 500-400 BC|
|1976||Roger Prichard||Duke of Wellington||20th Century British warships||Duke of Wellington|
|1977||Sir David Hunt||WW2 British campaigns in N.Africa||WW2 Allied campaign in Italy||Roman Revolution 60-14 BC|
|1978||Rosemary James||Roman & Greek mythology||Works of Frederick Wolfe||Roman & Greek mythology|
|1979||Philip Jenkins||Christianity 30-150 AD||Vikings in Scotland & Ireland 800-1150 AD||History of Wales 400-1100 AD|
|1980||Fred Housego||King Henry II||Westminster Abbey||The Tower of London|
|1981||Leslie Grout||St George's Chapel Windsor||Burial Grounds of London||St George's Chapel Windsor|
|1983||Christopher Hughes||British Steam Locomotives 1900-63||The Flashman novels||British Steam Locomotives 1900-63|
|1984||Margaret Harris||Cecil Rhodes||Postal history of Southern Africa||Cecil Rhodes|
|1985||Ian Meadows||English Civil War||History of Astronomy to 1700||English Civil War|
|1986||Jennifer Keaveney||Elizabeth Gaskell||E. Nesbitt||Elizabeth Gaskell|
|1987||Dr Jeremy Bradbrooke||Franco-Prussian War||Anglo-American War 1812-15||Crimean War|
|1988||David Beamish||Nancy Astor||British Royal Family 1714-1910||Nancy Astor|
|1989||Mary Elizabeth Raw||Charles I||Prince Albert||Charles I|
|1990||David Edwards||Michael Faraday||Benjamin Thompson, Count Romford||James Clerk Maxwell|
|1991||Stephen Allen||Henry VII||Dartmoor & its environs||Sir Francis Drake|
|1992||Steve Williams||Surrealist art 1918-1939||Peter the Great||Post-Socratic Philosophy|
|1993||Gavin Fuller||Doctor Who||The Medieval Castle in the British Isles||The Crusades|
|1994||Dr George Davidson||English coinage 1066-1662||History of Chemistry 1500-1870||John Dalton|
|1995||Kevin Ashman||Martin Luther King||History of the Western film||The Zulu War|
|1996||The Reverend Dr Richard Sturch||Charles Williams||Emperor Frederick III||Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan|
|1997||Anne Ashurst||Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset||Regency Novels of Georgette Heyer||Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland|
|Radio 4 version|
|1998||Robert Gibson||The Solar System||Charles II||Robert The Bruce|
|1999||Christopher Carter||Birds of Europe||The House of Tudor||British customs and traditions|
|2000||Stephen Follows||Benjamin Britten||T.S. Eliot||Leos Janacek|
|2001||Michael Penrice||Professional Boxing to 1980||(no semi-final)||English History 1603-1714|
|2003||Andy Page||The Academy Awards||Gilbert and Sullivan||Golfing majors since 1970|
|2004||Shaun Wallace||European Champions League Finals since 1970||English football team at the European Championships since 1960||FA Cup finals since 1970|
|2005||Patrick Gibson||The films of Quentin Tarantino||The Culture novels of Iain M. Banks||Father Ted|
|2006||Geoff Thomas||Edith Piaf||William Joyce||Margaret Mitchell|
|2008||David Clark||Henry Ford||The Prince Regent||History of London Bridge|
|2009||Nancy Dickmann||The Amelia Peabody novels||Life and German films of Fritz Lang||The Lewis and Clark Expedition|
|2010||Jesse Honey||The London borough of Wandsworth||Antoni Gaudi||Liverpool Anglican Cathedral|
|2011||Dr Ian Bayley||Romanov Dynasty 1613-1917||Jean Sibelius||Pictures in the National Gallery|
|2012||Dr Gary Grant||The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World||The History of the Monaco Grand Prix||Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises|
|Champion of Champions|
|1982||Sir David Hunt||History of Crete||(no semi-final)||Alexander the Great|
|2010||Pat Gibson||The films of Pixar||(no semi-final)||Great mathematicians|
|2004||Daniel Parker||Volkswagen Beetle||(no semi-final)||James Bond villains|
|2005||Robin Geddes||The Vicar of Dibley||(no semi-final)||A Series of Unfortunate Events|
|2006||Domhnall Ryan||The Spitfire||(no semi-final)||Animals of the African plains|
|2007||Robert Stutter||Madame Tussaud||(no semi-final)||Tintin|
|2007||David Verghese||The Jurassic Park films||(no semi-final)||George Lucas|
|2006||Emyr Rhys Jones||The Simpsons||(no semi-final)||The Eurovision Song Contest to 1990|
|2007||Siôn Aled||Welsh Religious Revival of 1904-06||(no semi-final)||Life and poetry of Goronwy Owen|
|Mastermind Plant Cymru|
|2008/9||Seren Jones||Doctor Who revival series 3||(no semi-final)||St. Clears books by Enid Blyton|
|2009||Joseff Glyn Owen||Cyfres Gwaed Oer||(no semi-final)||C'mon Midffild|
|2008||Chris Bell||British and Irish Lions||(no semi-final)||Life and career of Geoffrey Boycott|
1979 John Mulcahy (Ireland): Irish History (1916-22)
1980 Rachel "Ray" Stewart (Australia): Life and times of Julius Caesar
1981 David Harvey (New Zealand): The Lord of the Rings trilogy
1982 Leslie Grout (UK): Windsor Castle
1983 Christopher Hughes (UK): British Steam Locomotives
The following have won their respective show, which is not in a tournament format:
|Jonathan Meades||Stewart Lee||Nick Hancock|
|Shaun Williamson||Paul Gambaccini||Tim Bentinck|
|Bill Oddie||John Bird|
|Stephen Fry||Nigel Planer|
|Edwina Currie||Beverley Knight|
|Matt Allwright||Andi Osho*|
|Steve Rider||Hilary Kay|
|Hugh Quarshie||Samira Ahmed|
|Tom Ward||Frank Gardener|
|Jeremy Beadle||Hattie Hayridge|
|Monty Don||Rhys Thomas|
|Graham Le Saux||Stephen Mangan|
|Paul Ross||Michael Buerk|
|Iain Banks||Lord Digby Jones|
|Steven Pinder||Brian Moore|
|Edward Stourton||Seeta Indrani|
|Todd Carty||Russell Kane|
|Iain Lee||Simon Calder|
|Dave Spikey||Simon Day|
|Peter Serafinowicz||Chris Packham|
|Jan Ravens||Justin Moorhouse|
|Steve Cram||Andi Osho*|
|Kaye Adams||Miles Jupp|
|Dave Myers||Neil Dudgeon|
|Philippa Gregory||Jacqui Smith|
|John Sessions||Martin Lewis|
|Sally Lindsay||Val McDermid|
|Tim Vine||Simon Evans|
|Lucy Porter||Neil Pearson|
|Loyd Grossman||Ken Bruce|
|Stuart Maconie||Denise Robertson|
|Alastair Stewart||Pete Firman|
|Tony Audenshaw||Naga Munchetty|
|Tristan Gemmill||Steve Punt|
* Andi Osho has won a Children in Need special on BBC2, and a regular Celebrity Mastermind on BBC1.
Doctor Who special: Karen Davies
I've Started So I'll Finish - The Story of Mastermind by Magnus Magnusson (ISBN: 0-316-64132-4) is an exhaustive account of the programme, by the person who knew it best.
BBC: Junior Mastermind 2005 press release and 5min showreel
BBC: Junior Mastermind 2004 showreel (Real Media)
The classic Two Ronnies sketch
We also have the script from the extended stage version of this sketch for you to read.
Hobby Horse, a short-lived team version for children.
How to apply
Prospective contenders can fill in the online application form.
Application details are provided as a service to readers, but please note that all contestant enquiries should be directed to the named production company and not to UKGameshows.com. Addresses can be found on our list of contact details for production companies. |
Religion calendar and briefs
Allen Temple AME Church announced the arrival of the Rev. Curtis Lewis, along with his wife, Christine, at the church in September. Lewis replaces the Rev. Charles R. Jackson as pastor of the 143-year-old church. Services are at 11 a.m. Sundays, with Sunday school classes at 9:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. There is Bible study at 7 p.m. each Tuesday. The church is at 824 Leonard St.
Youth With a Mission of Tampa Bay and Live Oak Theatre are selling tickets for a presentation of the musical Judah Ben-Hur at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 17 and 18 and at 3 p.m. Jan. 19 at Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church, 200 Mount Fair Ave. Adult admission is $15. For students age 13 and under admission is $5 with the purchase of an adult ticket. Tickets include coffee/tea and dessert, which will be served when the doors open a half-hour before each performance. Proceeds will be used to send the production team to the Philippines to build homes and present free performances of the musical.
According to a news release, the musical is "a magical tale of romance, comedy and adventure. The audience is invited to relive the legend of Rome's great character, the hate that nearly destroyed him and the love of Christ that transformed him."
For information, visit LiveOakTheatre.org or call the box office at (352) 593-0027, or look for Live Oak Theatre on Facebook.
Fellowship Community Church, 11250 Spring Hill Drive, will present "The Story," a 31-week reading of Bible selections that are arranged chronologically to read like a novel, beginning with the 10:45 a.m. service Jan. 5.
For information, call (352) 686-4612.
Sunshine State Bible Institute, 3140 Mariner Blvd., has set a deadline of Jan. 1 for registration for its spring semester, which will begin on Jan. 6. All courses cost $60 per credit hour. Four courses are available: Theology I, Introduction to Apologetics, Bible Study Methods and Introduction to New Testament Literature. Visit MySSBI.com for details. The institute is a ministry of Spring Hill Baptist Church.
Information for the Religion Calendar and Briefs may be emailed to Gail Hollenbeck at firstname.lastname@example.org, faxed to (352) 754-6133 or mailed to Hernando Times, Religion Calendar and Briefs, 15365 Cortez Blvd., Brooksville, FL 34613. The deadline for calendar items is two weeks before the event or reservation deadline. If your church/organization has news of interest to the community, briefly state the news. Information cannot be published if the time, date, exact street address, cost, contact person (first and last names) and phone number are missing. For questions, call (352) 754-6112 and leave a message. |
Dr. Kathleen McGrath
Assistant Professor of Education
- Office Location:
- Academic Complex 326E
- Office Hours:
- Contact for Appointment
Dr. Kathleen McGrath is an Assistant Professor in Niagara University’s College of Education, Department of Professional Studies, where she teaches graduate courses in primary and intermediate level literacy, diagnostic assessment and instruction, and children & adolescent literature
Dr. McGrath is also the Faculty Director of the Niagara University Family Literacy Center. The FLC provides a valuable resource to the community as well as an exceptional learning opportunity for students in the Advanced Literacy Program. Services and benefits provided by the FLC include the comprehensive evaluation of literacy abilities, individualized instructional programs built upon each participating child’s strengths and needs, state-of-the-art resources, current research, and evidence-based interventions. Graduate students in the Advanced Literacy Program benefit from authentic, hands-on experiences to enact theory to practice.
Dr. McGrath received a BA in English and Elementary Education from Niagara University and an MA in Literacy from SUNY at Buffalo. She completed her doctoral studies at SUNY at Buffalo and received a PhD in Literacy Education.
Dr. McGrath taught both the primary and elementary grades in the Sweet Home School District from 1993-2006. In 1995, she was given the opportunity to direct the Preschool Program at the International School of Grenada. She also has worked in the clinical setting at the Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction, SUNY Buffalo and was responsible for the supervision of graduate level students during their clinical practicum.
Dr. McGrath’s research has focused on family literacy, struggling readers, and teacher training in diagnostic assessment and clinical instruction. |
In a mythical castle hidden under misty cover away from reality, children of all ages flock to classes in robes with books under their arms. In gothic classrooms, colorful smoke arises from cauldrons and the students’ textbooks talk about things we’ve only heard about in fairy tales. They study magic.
But the magic I am used to doesn’t come from a wand. It is in the binding, in the texture of the printed ink on thin paper, in the anticipated turn of the page.
There is an unknown power that takes hold of me each time I crack open a new book. A kind of relaxed excitement builds up in me as I read the first few lines, and within seconds I am transported to an entirely different place and time. Between pages, I visited the ruins of Vietnam, pirate ships in the Caribbean, Victorian England, the French Quarter and our very own city of Phoenix.
But I have yet to visit Hogwarts.
I guess I was expecting another great adventure. I read books to escape the dull routine of everyday life, and the ideas behind the Harry Potter series seemed so far removed from reality that I couldn’t imagine a better book. I was told it had adventure, romance, magic, the unthinkable and the traditional good-versus-evil.
It seemed like a perfect book, but something held me back.
The series of books created by the beloved British author J. K. Rowlingcaptivated readers and earned its place in the pantheon of great literature of our time. As contemporary literature classes start to require the books, the world of witches and wizards, of magic wands and potions, has become a staple in the lives of many readers and continues to bewitch new generations of bibliophiles.
I know that I am committing some kind of sacrilegious act against the institution of literature by not reading about brooms, snitches and the boy with the round glasses and a lightning bolt scar on his forehead.
As I continue the sinful act of never reading the book series that has defined a generation, horrified looks plaster my friend’s faces. Jaws drop, eyes widen – you’d think I had confessed to being pregnant.
Believe me, I have tried numerous times to get lost in Rowling’s words. At least four times I have opened to the first page of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and tried to read. I tried to see the dim English street, crowded Diagon Alley, and our protagonist on a broomstick in a gravity-defying game similar to British cricket.
But for some reason, I could never get past Chapter 3.
An invisible mental barrier seemed to activate whenever I reached for the hardback dressed in its richly illustrated jacket. I would settle into my pillows underneath the window in my room and open to the first page. I was excited for the story, but after 20 pages my mind was bored. I would start to fidget and would frequently take a break from reading to gaze out the window. My mind would wander and soon my thoughts were too loud to focus on the text. I was unable to immerse myself in the story and, therefore, couldn’t stand to read more.
It’s similar to when you’re trying to read required books for English classes on a deadline.
It is important to note that this never happened to me before I picked up the Harry Potter series. I would absorb the words of nearly any book I could get my hands on. Like Roald Dahl’s “Matilda,“ I would check out stacks of books from several libraries and was known to spend lunch and recess with my nose buried between the pages.
To this day, I am often lost in a classic Charles Dickens or a dystopian Suzanne Collins. Words are just in my blood.
So what is the deal with this book? Why is it so difficult for me?
The answer still eludes me to this day, as fellow bookworms insist I try again. Friends have acted as literary matchmakers, offering advice to encourage a relationship between the “wizarding world“ and myself.
One friend assures me that the first book is unimportant. One pushes me to begin with “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” And one friend audaciously recommends I start from the final book in the series.
I know it isn’t the subject of Rowling’s work that turned me off to reading the series. As odd as it sounds, I have always been interested in the world of magic and witchcraft — sans the dark, Puritan allegations. To me, magic was something among us and not completely removed, as it is in Harry Potter. I envisioned witches to be similar to Samantha of “Bewitched,” a person with power living the same routine life as all of us. Maybe it had something to do with my own desire to live a normal life, but with a bit of abnormality to spice it up.
Several Halloween nights I have donned a pointed hat and black cape and willed my fingers to perform impossible feats. However, while I maintained this stereotypical view of sorcerers, I could never see myself dressing as Hermione Granger to go trick-or-treating. I’ve never been one for imitating favorite characters, excepting a Disney’s Belle costume when I was five.
Maybe I am too much of a realist, but every time I break out the bestseller it no longer matters how interested I am in the magical and enchanting. I still can’t get past those first few chapters.
The same thing seems to happen with any kind of fantasy novel, from “Wicked” to “The Lord of the Rings.” My brain becomes fuzzy and my eyes glaze over as I get restless and must move on to something else. These concepts are too far removed from reality for me. I just can’t imagine any of these things without a strong anchor in the world I know. That part of the brain that allows readers to escape into the unreal is just missing for me. It must have been replaced with an unhealthy obsession for murder mysteries.
Even watching the movie adaptations of these series is exhausting. I feel like I am drowning in the mythical language and creatures. Sometimes I literally get headaches from trying to keep up with these stories.
However, I do love the books for one specific reason: their ability to make people fall in love with reading. I am a firm believer that everyone loves to read and they just need to find the right book to get lost in. For many, the Harry Potter series not only gave people the opportunity to love reading, they united generations. Just watching the proliferation of this book series is inspiring to a person like myself, who would like to write books in the future.
I have always considered myself an imaginative person, but I am nowhere near that of Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien. The way these writers created such worlds from nothing but their own minds is amazing. I don’t try to belittle their work; instead I admire it from a half-engaged point of view.
I followed the films from beginning to end. I laughed at every joke, hated every villain and held my breath for every death. The honest truth is that the story is undeniably wonderful. The portrayal of characters, the vivid scenery and the engaging plot-line evoke emotion from readers and viewers alike. One cannot help but care for Harry, suspect Professor Snape of villainy and despise the bully Draco Malfoy. Having the story become more tangible than just sentences and paragraphs made the story more accessible to me – it was more real.
And so it became tradition for me to see the new films every year on my birthday.
I don’t claim to be a die-hard “Potterhead.” While I enjoy the concept of the story, I simply do not have the mental capacity to understand these works in their written form.
Although, I am certain I will make several more attempts to delve into Rowling’s world of magically inclined good versus evil. But for now, I am content to enjoy ABC Family’s running Harry Potter marathons, as I continue trying to break down the barrier that plagues my reading of fantasy.
Reach the writer at email@example.com or via Twitter @mackenziemicro |
A Warm School in a Warm City
Study Spanish through Immersion in Arequipa, Peru
The moment I set foot on the tarmac at the Arequipa Airport I knew I wouldn’t regret my last-minute decision to study Spanish in Peru’s second largest city. I had arranged language classes, a week-long homestay, and a free airport pickup only three days before my arrival. When I stepped off the plane after a 24-hour journey, the two highest mountains
I had ever seen greeted me with snow-glazed summits gleaming in the tropical sun. And as soon as I reached the baggage claim area, I heard a man playfully chanting my name.
Jose, the representative for Centro de Estudios e Interacción Cultural Arequipa (CEICA), whizzed me off on an informal city tour en route to my host family’s home. From that moment on,
I didn’t speak a word of English for two days.
While getting to know my host parents over fresh bread and mate de coca (a traditional tea made from the leaves of the coca plant), they invited me to a gathering of their extended family that evening. I was delighted
with this opportunity to not only practice my Spanish but also experience Peruvian family life. By the end of the night, I had learned all seven of my host father’s siblings’ names, sampled local pisco and Arequipeña beer,
sang along to classic Peruvian songs, and learned, above all, that Peruvians take family very seriously. I had also become a little overwhelmed by all the Spanish I needed to learn.
During my week in Arequipa, my only respites from Spanish-language immersion occurred during the short coffee breaks every morning at school. Then I enjoyed the chance to compare notes on host families and travel
destinations with the five other students at CEICA that week, all from Western Europe and Australia. When coffee breaks were over, however, my teacher, Elvira, quickly swept me back into non-stop Spanish conversation.
I have been to several other Spanish schools in Latin America, and CEICA is without question the most professional. I never once heard teachers speaking English with students there, and the school provides each teacher
with outstanding handouts and worksheets. The building itself is bright and clean, and most of the tables are outdoors in a garden courtyard or covered balcony. All of this also comes at a very reasonable price. Twenty hours of one-on-one instruction
(four hours, five days a week) costs $144. Cheaper group classes ($108-$120) are also available in July and August, when the school is busiest.
If your Spanish homework isn’t enough to keep you busy when you’re not in class, CEICA also offers classes in Peruvian history, literature, dancing, music, and cooking for an additional fee. The prices
depend on whether you take them alone or in a group and range from $14 for three group dance lessons to $51 for three individual cooking classes.
CEICA’s teachers are also eager to extend learning outside the confines of the school, and they take an active interest in helping you make the most of your stay in Arequipa. One morning Elvira proposed that
she and I take a walk to the nearby Mercado Altiplano, where I could try countless kinds of fruits I had never seen before. As we explored the crowded alleys of the market, Elvira taught me the names of everything in sight, including local
specialties such as a locust-bean-shaped fruit called pacae and chicha, a ubiquitous alcoholic beverage made from corn.
We returned to the school with bags of fresh figs, lucumas, pepinos, pacae, and prickly pears, and then covered the language of eating as we sampled all the fruit.
Later in the week, a local guide took us on a 3-hour car excursion through the colonial villages surrounding the city, bringing us to historic sites and vistas we wouldn’t have been able to access on our own.
The most memorable part of this tour was simply the landscape. The contrast between the area’s lush, irrigated river valleys and barren desert hills is breathtaking. And behind it all, those two Andean volcanoes are always there reaching
into the clouds.
Curious to get a little closer to the mountains, I asked Arturo Soto, who runs a tour agency called Mystic Peru with Patricia Galarza, my host sister, if he could take me on an excursion into the countryside. After
lunch Arturo drove me to his aunt’s tienda on the outskirts of the city, where we swapped his truck for two mountain bikes. Then the hard work of climbing 3,000 feet out of the city began. With every hairpin turn views of the sprawling
city behind us, and the high, open grassland ahead opened up.
Arturo and Patricia are both young and energetic and speak some English and German. They can arrange trips anywhere in Peru and know the canyon country around Arequipa especially well.
The Colca and Cotahuasi Canyons near Arequipa, the deepest in the world, are just two sources of pride for the justifiably proud Arequipeñans. In Peru, Arequipa has a reputation for being a self-appointed
independent republic. Its Plaza de Armas is reputed to be the most beautiful in South America. The city is famous for its traditional cuisine, and Arequipeñans are said to be among the most educated and politically-impassioned people
in the country.
These are all good reasons to study Spanish in Arequipa. But CEICA’s genuine welcome and high-quality, Spanish instruction are what really made spending a week there one of the warmest and most worthwhile learning
experiences I have ever had.
For More Info
Costs for homestays with a CEICA-affiliated family in Arequipa depend on whether you are alone or with a partner and how many meals you eat with the family. The cost for a week’s accommodation and breakfast
for one person is $90, for two people including breakfast $157. A week’s full board for one person costs $119; a double room with full board costs $215.
To learn more about CEICA, get the latest prices, and see pictures of the school, visit the school’s website at www.ceica-peru.com. |
Teaching Who Rules America?
by Shelly Tenenbaum & Robert J. S. Ross
From Teaching Sociology, Vol. 34, October 2006 (pp. 389-397).
At a small private liberal arts school such as Clark University, students are familiar with people from upper middle class backgrounds. Either they themselves are from upper middle class families or, if they are from working class or lower middle class backgrounds, they are acquainted with more affluent peers. Clark students have a clear image of how wealthy professionals, managers, and entrepreneurs live; they know what their homes look like, where they go for vacations, and are familiar with their patterns of material consumption. In contrast, the upper class -- the top 1 percent of the population who owns 51.4 percent of the privately held corporate stock -- is so far removed from the vast majority of our students' experiences that our required social stratification course, "Class, Status, and Power," is usually their first introduction to this social group (Kerbo 2003). In this article, we explore two assignments that help our students understand the formidable political and economic power of the "invisible" elite and the corporate structure that sustains it.
Fortunately professors have access to an array of sociological studies on the upper and corporate classes to use in their courses (Sernau 2000), including G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? (2002), C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956), Susan Ostrander's Women of the Upper Class (1984), Michael Useem's The Inner Circle (1984), and Richard Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff's Diversity in the Power Elite (1998). While reading texts provides students with one level of knowledge, applying concepts to concrete situations requires an even higher degree of understanding (Angelo 1993; Gamson and Chickering 1987; Gronlund and Linn 1990). As a result, instructors of social stratification have developed classroom projects to reinforce their course materials and to help students move beyond individualistic interpretations to sociological analyses of inequality (Davis 1992; Manning, Price, and Rich 1997; McCammon 1999; Misra 1997). Johnson and Steward (1997), for example, developed an exercise that focuses on the intersection between wealth and politics by asking students to research cabinet members' class backgrounds. Our course projects add to the repertoire by exploring the class backgrounds, political affiliations, and other organizational roles of university trustees and board members of major American corporations.
Since our department offers "Class, Status, and Power" every semester, we typically each teach this required course once per year. We both assign Domhoff's (2002) Who Rules America? and Harold Kerbo's (2003) Social Stratification and Inequality. To complement these texts, we have each developed a power structure research exercise to provide undergraduates with the opportunity to engage in original research and to make new discoveries. In one class, students focus on the boards of trustees of two American universities while in the other class, they investigate the board of directors of a major American corporation. Although students gain different institutional expertise depending on which project they complete, the exercises have identical goals: 1) to reinforce our students' understanding of the texts they read on the upper and corporate classes and 2) to teach our students the skills used by Domhoff and other sociologists so that they are able to conduct research on the corporate community. Since it is often the first time that students have been asked to conduct research that goes beyond synthesis of secondary sources, many students are palpably anxious when they first read the assignment. By the end, however, most report a sense of enormous accomplishment, and a large number get immersed in the project.
The upper class is characterized by old wealth and by a certain lifestyle. Through a network of expensive prep schools, exclusive social clubs, summer resorts, high status philanthropic and cultural organizations, elite universities, and the "right" fraternities and sororities, the upper class has developed a higher degree of class consciousness than any other class in the United States. Rituals such as debutante balls and leisure activities such as fox hunts, polo matches, and yachting facilitate the solidarity and close social interactions between members of the economic elite (Baltzell 1958; Domhoff 1967).
While the material base of the upper class is its ownership role in the primary means of production, a new part of the capitalist class, whose power lies in the control of corporate resources, has emerged alongside it at the top of the contemporary stratification system in the United States: the corporate class. Domhoff (2002) calls the combined upper class and corporate class the "corporate community. " The distinction between ownership versus control of productive property as a basis of power was a major issue in social theory from the era of Weber (1946) and Veblen ( 1982) in the early twentieth century, through Berle and Means (1932) closer to the midcentury, and then Dahrendorf (1959) in the second half of the period. By now, however, sociological theory has "compromised" by accepting Domhoff's concept of a corporate "community" (by which Domhoff appears to designate what classical theory termed the "capitalist class") with different strata.
Teaching about the intertwined corporate and upper classes is central to any course on social stratification. Together, these two elite groups dominate America's economic and political institutions. Of the top 20 industrial corporations, 54 percent of the board members were from the upper class and of the top 15 banks, 62 percent were upper class members (Domhoff 2002). Similarly, in his large study of institutional elites, Thomas Dye (1995) found that 44 percent of 3572 board members and top executive officers of the largest 201 corporations were members of the upper class.
Through campaign contributions, lobby organizations, the policy-formation process, and direct participation in government, economic elites yield considerable political influence. Of 205 cabinet members serving between 1897 and 1973, 66 percent belonged to the upper class before they obtained their government positions (Mintz 1975) as did 63 percent of the secretaries of defense, treasury, and state between 1932 and 1964 (Domhoff 1967). The most affluent Americans are disproportionately represented among the ranks of policy planning groups such as the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Committee on Economic Development (CED). Members of the corporate and upper classes come together in these groups to discuss policy, to publish and disseminate research, and to arrive at some consensus about what should be done about foreign policy and domestic issues. The 61 directors of the CED held an average of 4.1 corporate directorships and the 22 directors of the CPR held an average of 3.2 corporate directorships. Seventy-two percent of the CED directors belonged to upper class clubs, as did 64 percent of the CFR directors (Dye 1995).
What are the indicators for upper and corporate class membership? In his classic text, Who Rules America?, G. William Domhoff lists three major indicators for upper class membership: 1) a listing in one of the various blue books or the Social Register, 2) attendance in an elite prep school, and 3) belonging to an exclusive social club (2002:5-7). (Domhoff provides a listing of upper class prep schools and social clubs.) Members of the corporate class are chief executive officers (CEOs) or board members of a major corporation and at the same time board members of other corporations (Kerbo 2003). But among the corporate class, there is an inner circle that comprises an even more elite group. This inner group tends to have positions on multiple corporate boards, on boards of large corporations, and on boards of large banks. In addition, they are likely to belong to elite social clubs, to have worked their way up the corporate ladder to top positions rather than to have entered at the top, and to represent corporate interests in other institutions such as foundations, universities, and government (Useem 1984; Kerbo 2003).
Assignment #1: Who rules American universities?
This assignment asks students to address the following question: To what extent do members of the upper and corporate classes govern American universities? To help them explore this question, the instructor gives students the names, places of employment, and job titles of the Executive Committee of Clark University's Board of Trustees (ten members) and of the President and Fellows of Harvard University'S Corporation (seven people). All the information distributed in class is in the public domain. To show students the broad authority that these groups have in governing their respective institutions, the instructor provides descriptions of their responsibilities from university documents.
To determine which of the women and men are upper and corporate class, students consult the following sources: The Social Register; Who's Who in America; Who's Who in Finance and Industry; Standard and Poor's Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives; the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory; and the website http://www.theyrule.net/. In addition, they use the Clark University Library's web page to access Lexis-Nexis for business and corporate information and Academic Universe/Biographical Information for data on individuals. Through these sources, students try to determine who has attended one of Domhoff's (2002) exclusive prep school and/or social clubs. In addition, they gather data on corporate affiliations, government positions, membership in policy planning groups (e.g. Committee on Economic De velopment, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission), and board memberships on cultural and philanthropic organizations. If an individual is an officer or board member of a corporation, students must find out the Fortune ranking of the corporation. The assignment requires students to discuss gender, race, ethnicity, and religion (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 1998) and to determine if individuals are members of the corporate community's inner circle (Useem 1984).
Students must limit their papers to 12 double-spaced pages and organize them into the following four sections: 1) Introduction (thesis statement and brief literature review based on Domhoff and Kerbo ), 2) Methods (description of the social indicators for upper and corporate class membership, strengths and limitations of these indicators, description of sources), 3) Discussion of Findings, and 4) Conclusion. While the students have two weeks to complete the research project, they are required to bring a copy of their Introduction and Methods sections to class a week after the assignment is distributed. This helps to ensure that they understand the assignment, have formulated a thesis, and that they are basing their research on correct indicators. This project is labor intensive and it would be frustrating for students to devote considerable time and effort only to find out in the end that their indicators were incorrect. Since an indicator of corporate class membership is being a CEO or board member of a major corporation, together we discuss criteria for what constitutes a "major" corporation. Students usually decide that if a corporation is a Fortune 500 company, then it is major. During our discussion of their research methods, it becomes clear that some students confuse a listing in one of the Who's Who books with an indicator of upper class membership. We distinguish between sources that yield evidence of indicators and a text such as the Social Register, which is an indicator. We devote an entire class session to a discussion that includes peer review of the Introduction and Methods sections. Students exchange papers and comment on classmates' drafts in reference to a set of questions that explore thesis development, content, clarity, paragraph construction, proper citations, and writing mechanics.
Since Clark and Harvard are two very different educational institutions in terms of academic prestige and wealth (Clark's endowment is $202 million compared to Harvard's $23 billion), it is not surprising that students fmd vast differences between the Harvard and Clark trustees in terms of socio-economic class. While all the Harvard people appear in the sources and a majority qualifies as corporate class, students uncover relatively little information about the Clark members. Students found that none of the Clark trustees appeared in any of the Who's Who books or in Standard and Poor's. One of the Clark members met one of Domhoff's (2002) upper class indicators by having attended an exclusive prep school. But since he was neither affiliated with any social clubs nor had corporate ties, students suspected that he might be a false positive. The students concluded that the Clark trustees are largely upper middle class people whose power and influence rests on the local level.
In contrast, students could see the strong economic and political influence that the Harvard people commanded on the national and even global scene. Three members of Harvard's Corporation sat on multiple Fortune 100 companies, with a fourth on multiple Fortune 500 companies. The corporations included JP Morgan Chase, New York Life Insurance, Exxon Mobil, Metropolitan Life, Corning, Citigroup, and Ford. Two were former cabinet members and five belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Brookings Institution and the Trilateral Commission often surfaced during the course of the students' research. Several members sat together on other boards including boards of art museums and television stations. Only one person, however, met an indicator for upper class membership by belonging to three elite social clubs. As Domhoff (2002) warned in Who Rules America?, private schools were rarely reported in the reference books and few people chose to be listed in the Social Register.
As they do their research, many students complain of frustration and boredom when they cannot fmd data about the Clark people. They come to learn, however, that silence is a significant fmding and they have the chance to experience the lows, as well as the highs, of the research process. Some students become protective of the Clark board members because they think that the Clark trustees do not look good in comparison with the Harvard members. They interpret fmding evidence that someone is upper or corporate class as the goal and they want the representatives of their university to meet the benchmark. We critically discuss this assumption that the Clark board members are somehow deficient because they do not appear in the sources. A few students actually end up deviating from their indicators just so they can say that some of the Clark people are upper or corporate class. We discuss this impulse to manipulate data to fit a researcher's expectations and the importance of being conscious of and resisting biases. Including the students' own university in the project, then, is both positive and negative. On the one hand, doing research on their own institution inspires curiosity, committnent, and an intrinsic motive for completing the project. On the other hand, this vested interest can lead to bias.
As the students use Domhoff's (2002) indicators of upper class membership, they become aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each indicator. Before working on the research project, they, like most readers, generally do not question the author's research methods. After they began conducting their own research, however, students quickly realized that the Social Register was not useful since even the member of the Harvard Corporation who was clearly upper class was not listed in this source. In addition, students found little information on prep schools and they became critical of this indicator since some knew people who attended schools on Domhoff's list who were not upper class. These methodological problems, however, are a boon to teaching. They force us to acknowledge the limits of indicators while also emphasizing the need for indicators in power structure research. Domhoff's discussion of factors that might lead to false positives and to false negatives only left an impression after students implemented his methods. Becoming critical readers of social science research is one of the most important benefits of participation in this project.
Assignment #2: The boards of directors of Wal-Mart/ |
Santa Monica, a Lifelong Learning Community
Lifelong Learning Community News - August 2006...
July 31st is the deadline for senior exemptions for the School District's parcel tax for 06/07.
When voters approved school funding Measure S in June of 2003, they included an exemption for senior citizens. Seniors (over 65 by June 30th) who wish to apply for or renew their exemption, must file an application by July 31st, 2006.
For more information and to apply for an exemption, please go to http://www.smmusd.org/ and click on "Senior Exemption." or call (310) 450-8338, ext. 269.
Applications must be received and/or postmarked no later than 5:00 p.m. on July 31, 2006.
Congratulations to Santa Monica College Trustee Carole Currey who has been chosen as the recipient of the 2006 Pacific Region Trustee Leadership Award from the national Association of Community College Trustees. Ms. Currey is one of five community college trustees nationally to be selected for this award which will be presented in October in Orlando, Florida. For more information, please go to http://www.smc.edu/news/Archive/2006/July27B.htm
Speaking of leaders....
Hello and welcome to:
The leadership may change but the work remains...
This Thursday, August 3rd, 5:30pm, there will be a special meeting of the Board of Education to decide whether or not to place a facilities bond measure on the ballot for the November 7, 2006 election.
SMMUSD Board Room, 1651 16th Street
The filing period for prospective candidates interested in running for seats on the City Council, the Rent Board, the School Board, and the College Board is now open. For more information on vacant seats and eligibility requirements, please go to http://santa-monica.org/cityclerk/Election2006/electionpublish.htm
Citywide Reads.... what?
Suggestions are now being accepted for a book for next year's Citywide Reads. Please fill out the online survey at http://www.smpl.org/cwr/index.htm if you have a book you'd like to recommend.
For a listing of library programs tailored to children and teens, please go to http://www.smpl.org/depts/pub/index.htm#CulturalPrograms
Join a library book group.... or three or four!
Santa Monica Public Library currently hosts and moderates book groups at the main library and all branches. These include California Classics, Mysteries, Biographies, and literature groups. Please see the LLC Calendar for listings or go to http://www.smpl.org/reading/bookgroups.htm
There are many summer events occurring this August including free movies and concerts on the Pier. Please be sure to check out the Lifelong Learning Community Calendar at http://smllc.org/calendar.html
That's all for now. Enjoy what's left of the summer!
Thanks, Cheers, and Onward,
Please note that Lifelong Learning Community Links include many local theatrical companies listed under "Local Museums and Special Venues" as well as other useful websites. Please use these links to stay abreast of these wonderful local organizations. Links can be found at http://smllc.org/links.html
Thank you for forwarding this email to others who may be interested.
If you would like to receive Lifelong Learning Community eNews, please go to http://smllc.org/subscribe.html
For more information about the Lifelong Learning Community, contact
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A male eastern bluebird perches on an eastern redbud tree. Bluebirds are unique to North America, and at least one of the three American bluebird species graces every state except Hawaii and every Canadian province except Newfoundland.
PHOTO: RICHARD DAY/DAYBREAK IMAGERY
Everybody loves a bluebird. No other bird is featured more often in our prose, poetry, and song. The bluebird is the cheery little guy on your shoulder as you sing zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Bluebirds fly somewhere over the rainbow. “The bluebird carries the sky on his back,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. But there is substance, not just lyrical literature, behind our fondness for bluebirds. They have earned their place in our hearts.
Bluebirds occur only in North America. European settlers called them “blue robins,” because the birds’ size and rusty breast reminded them of English robins. Comparatively scarce in pre-colonial days, the American bluebird thrived as pioneers cleared forests and plowed fields, creating the open, woodland-edged habitat they favor. Orchards and field crops served up concentrations of tasty insects. Bluebirds nest in tree cavities, and farmers furnished housing by surrounding their fields with cavity-prone wood fence posts. At the turn of the 20th century, bluebirds were common in much of rural America, and even nested in urban residential areas.
The story changed soon after, however, when bluebirds were hit with a double whammy: House sparrows and starlings — aggressive European imports whose populations had burgeoned since their arrival on our shores — robbed bluebirds of their traditional nest sites, destroyed eggs and killed fledglings. At the same time, modern orchard pruning practices, routine removal of dead trees, and replacement of wood fence posts with metal drastically diminished the number of nesting cavities available to bluebirds. The use of DDT and other pesticides also harmed bluebirds. Their numbers nose-dived. “During the past 40 years,” wrote bluebird expert Lawrence Zeleny in the June 1977 National Geographic, “the population of the eastern bluebird may have plummeted by as much as 90 percent.” The birds, Zeleny said, had become “so scarce that most people under 30 have never seen one.” Extinction, he wrote, was “a real possibility.”
Zeleny’s alarming article, as well as his 1976 book pointedly titled The Bluebird: How You Can Help Its Fight for Survival, were wake-up calls to the public, and a movement was born. In 1978, Zeleny founded the North American Bluebird Society (NABS) to provide information on building and siting nest boxes, dealing with competing species, and nurturing bluebirds and other cavity-nesters. To this day, NABS and many similar state organizations continue to help people in the United States and Canada help bluebirds. Thanks to the organization’s advice and the efforts of countless people, bluebird populations are bouncing back in most areas.
The Blues Trio
Three bluebird species live in North America: the eastern (Sialia sialis), the western (Sialia mexicana) and the mountain (Sialia currucoides). At least one kind graces every state except Hawaii and every Canadian province except Newfoundland. The birds’ names pretty much tell you where they live. The eastern bluebird occupies the eastern two-thirds of the United States (except for extreme southern Florida) and southern Canada. The western bluebird’s range picks up where the eastern bluebird’s leaves off and extends westward to the Pacific Coast and south into Mexico. The two overlap in southern Arizona and, in winter, the Great Plains and west Texas, where they sometimes seasonally mingle.
The mountain bluebird shares much of the western bluebird’s summer range, but occupies high, open habitat — mountain meadows, high hills, and plains — while the western avoids exposed meadows and prefers open woods and forest edges at lower elevations. The mountain bluebird’s nesting range also extends farther north, through much of the western third of Canada (where it shares territory with the eastern bluebird) and north through inland Alaska.
Even in places shared by two or more species, there’s no problem telling bluebirds apart — at least not the distinctly colored males (in general, female bluebirds are paler and more subtly colored than males). Eastern and western male bluebirds both sport a rusty breast and a blue back, head, wings, and tail: the bird most of us probably picture when we think of bluebirds. The western male’s blue is deeper and richer than the eastern’s bright blue, but the birds’ bellies and throats really tell the tale. The eastern bluebird’s belly is white, and the rust color of its breast extends up over its throat, like a turtleneck. The western’s belly is light blue or gray, and the blue of its head extends down over its throat, like a ski mask. And the male mountain bluebird? It looks unlike either of the others: Its entire body is strikingly sky blue.
All three bluebirds are closely related members of the thrush family and share similar habits. In summer they eat mostly worms and insects, including many garden pests. The birds seem to relish a munch with crunch; grasshoppers are a favorite food. Perched on a post or branch, a bluebird will spot an insect on the ground, flutter-glide and land momentarily to grab it, then return to its perch — a behavior known as ground sallying. Eastern species do this less often, and mountain bluebirds most often — they hover-hunt nearly as much as a kestrel, North America’s smallest raptor.
Bluebirds also eat wild fruit, such as berries from cedar, juniper and sumac. Their diet shifts almost exclusively to fruit in winter. Only partially migratory, bluebirds in the northernmost parts of their range move south to reach a dependable food supply, while their southern cousins generally stay put.
Come spring, bluebirds that migrated south return to their nesting grounds, earning their reputations among Northerners as the trumpets of spring. Spring is also when bluebirds commence courting and homemaking. Males, which in the North arrive first, find suitable nesting sites and stake out territories. Perched in the highest branches, the male proclaims its presence in song — in the eastern bluebird’s case, sweet warbles, whistles, and chirps in varying combinations comprising a repertoire of about 50 different song phrases. Western and mountain bluebirds’ songs are somewhat less melodious — throaty churr notes in halting series — but the purpose is the same.
With luck, the male’s performances will gain a female’s attention. But it’s not just song that woos a mate. Studies show that the brightest, bluest males are quickest to catch the eyes of females. Even then, a male must convince an interested prospect that he and his nest site are worthy. For up to a week, depending on how coy the female is, he flits and flirts, warbling to her atop the nest site or perched nearby, bringing her choice morsels to eat, popping in and out of the cavity as if to say, “See? Try it!” She watches passively until the magic moment: She enters the hole and accepts his invitation.
Nest-building begins, with the female doing most of the work while the male looks on, warbling encouragement and flying in to intervene should a predator — or a stray Lothario looking to tempt his mate — come by. The nest is a tight cup woven mostly of grass, plant stems or pine needles. After completing it, the female lays her eggs one per day. To ensure her young will hatch at the same time, she starts incubating only after she has laid the entire clutch, which is usually four to six eggs. For the next two weeks, she leaves the eggs only often enough to feed herself.
Chicks hatch naked, blind and hungry. Atop each tiny, pink, fuzzy-downed body is an upturned, bright yellow mouth, gaping wide — imploring, “Feed me!” And so begins the parents’ marathon feeding frenzy, in which they take turns bringing food — caterpillars, grasshoppers, spiders and worms — to the babies roughly every 15 minutes from dawn to dusk. Not surprisingly, the baby birds grow rapidly. After a week and a half, their eyes are open and they have feathers. Within three weeks, they’re able to fly from the nest, though the parents continue to feed them until they’re 4 to 6 weeks old, when they can forage on their own.
Even before the fledglings have gained independence, the mother turns her attention to building a new nest for her next brood. Western and mountain bluebirds typically produce two broods per year, while eastern bluebirds have two, three or, rarely, four.
Attracting and Caring for Bluebirds
If you’re interested in attracting and housing bluebirds, you’ll not suffer for lack of advice. There is a flock of books, websites, and organizations dedicated to helping humans help bluebirds (see “Resources,” below).
Providing nest boxes is the first step. Not all “birdhouses” offer the essentials: protection from predators and weather, and dimensions that welcome bluebirds but discourage non-native bird species. The basics include sturdy, untreated wood, an overhanging roof to provide shade and shed rain, a top or side that opens, and a circular hole 1 1⁄2 inches in diameter for eastern bluebirds or 1 9⁄16 inches for western and mountain bluebirds (the hole size keeps out starlings). The box should be watertight, with drainage holes and air vents.
Properly locating a nest box is critical. An open area with low grass — such as a pasture or a large lawn — is ideal. Mount the box on a post or pole facing away from prevailing winds. If cats or raccoons prowl the area, use a baffle or some other predator guard that prevents animals from reaching the nest box. If you’re putting up more than one box, space them at least a football field’s length apart to provide sufficient territory.
Monitoring each nest box (opening it and examining the nest and eggs or chicks) is important during the nesting period. Once a week is recommended. Bluebirds tolerate humans — the parents won’t abandon the nest or kill their young as a result of your presence. Open the box carefully on a calm, mild day. You’re looking mainly for two problems: 1) the small larvae of blowflies, which parasitize and weaken the birds (you’ll need to remove the larvae and nest and replace it with a similar cup of dried grass) and 2) the tall, coarse-grass nest or cream-colored, brown-splotched eggs of house sparrows. As invasive, non-native birds, house sparrows aren’t protected by law (disturbing any native bird’s active nest is illegal) and their eggs should be removed to stifle further population growth. Be aware, however, that chickadees, house wrens, and tree swallows — which are native and beneficial — also favor bluebird nest boxes. Consult a field guide or an online resource to learn how to recognize their distinctive nests and eggs, and consider them welcome inhabitants.
When bluebird babies are 12 to 13 days old and almost ready to fledge, stop opening the nest box to avoid prompting them to leave prematurely. After all the chicks have left the nest on their own, remove the nest. This encourages the female to use the same nest box for another brood.
Spread the Love
Bluebirds are beautiful, pleasant to our eyes and to our ears. Their continuing rebound is thanks largely to the collective impact of countless human admirers taking steps to assure their survival. But bluebirds aren’t the only species that needs our help, of course. Some may not be as charismatic, and others may not be as tolerant of or responsive to human intervention, but all could benefit from the heartfelt caring we’ve shown bluebirds. You can start in your own backyard: Avoid using pesticides, protect the water supply, and plant native trees and shrubs that provide food and shelter for wildlife.
By spreading our affection beyond the beloved Mr. Bluebird, perhaps all species now threatened or endangered could someday bounce back. My, oh my, that would be a wonderful day.
Are Bluebirds Really Blue?
Scientifically speaking, the answer is no — bluebirds aren’t really blue, at least not in the sense that they get their color from chemical pigments. Nor are blue jays or indigo buntings or most other blue-feathered birds really blue. If you were to grind a bluebird feather to a powder, its color would be ashen gray.
The bluebird’s blue is called a “structural color,” caused when light is scattered and reflected by tiny structures within each feather’s myriad microscopic barbules. In the bluebird’s case, the feathers reflect short-wavelength blue light, creating the lovely hue that inspired Thoreau to say bluebirds carry the sky on their backs.
In nature, the color blue among vertebrates — birds and lizards, for example — is almost always structural. Oranges, yellows and reds, on the other hand, are generally pigment-based. There are some exceptions. A ruby-throated hummingbird’s iridescent greens and reds are structural colors. If you’ve ever watched a hummingbird, you may have noticed its color disappears at some angles.
For more information on bluebirds and how to attract and care for them, head to your local library or research online. Here’s a starter listing of helpful books and organizations.
The Bluebird Book: The Complete Guide to Attracting Bluebirds
by Donald and Lillian Stokes (Little, Brown and Co.)
The Bluebird Monitor’s Guide to Bluebirds and Other Small Cavity Nesters
by Cynthia Berger, Jack Griggs and Keith Kridler (Collins Reference)
North American Bluebird Society
To find a bluebird organization in your state, visit The Bluebird Box, or do an online search for “bluebirds” and the name of your state. |
by Nedra Floyd Pautler
Robin McCabe. Photo by Mary Levin.
A chance meeting helped launch both of their careers.
Juilliard piano student Robin McCabe and would-be author Helen Drees Ruttencutter met by happenstance in a Manhattan apartment in the fall of 1973.
McCabe, a Puyallup native and UW graduate then in her early 20s, was earnestly studying piano at the Juilliard School: Her goal was to become a concert pianist. Ruttencutter was a copy editor for the New Yorker: Her goal was to break into the "big time" by writing a piece for the magazine.
Ruttencutter met McCabe at a friend's apartment near Central Park; McCabe and another piano student were renting rooms in the friend's duplex. The would-be writer was looking for a compelling topic and thought a music student's years of training and first steps into a career might work. As a young pianist from an obscure town in Washington state, McCabe's experiences could make for high drama.
After following McCabe to school and practice for three years--and after months of careful, detailed writing--Ruttencutter's article appeared in the Sept. 19, 1977, New Yorker. An immediate success, it was later expanded into a book, Pianist's Progress, and was translated into Japanese. Ruttencutter went on to write profiles of André Previn and the Guarneri String Quartet and was working on a piece on Bill Cosby when she died in 1993.
The article was "quite magical, a wonderful break for me," says McCabe, now 45 and director of the UW School of Music, where she still maintains an active teaching and performing career. "It was a very serendipitous thing." Ruttencutter's profile, coupled with McCabe's winning performances at major piano competitions, prompted New York music critics to attend her Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall debuts.
It was a long way to come for a young woman from an unpronounceable town in the far corner of the country. McCabe is the oldest of three daughters of Edward McCabe, a Puyallup physician, and his wife, Lou. Both parents played the piano and, when Robin was five, they discovered that she had perfect pitch. Soon after, they found a piano teacher and Robin started taking lessons.
Robin McCabe at age 10 playing the organ in her parent's home. Photo courtesy of Robin McCabe.
She showed her adaptability at an early age. Childhood summers at the family cabin on Spirit Lake, Idaho, meant finding creative ways to keep up with piano practice while not missing out on fishing.
"My parents asked me to play for a group of nuns. This meant being coaxed away from fishing, so I found a compromise. I anchored my fishing pole to the dock while the line stayed in the water. As soon as I was done performing, I ran down to the dock, and there was the biggest trout I'd ever seen on that line just waiting for me. I thought God was rewarding me,'" she says.
A straight-A student at Puyallup High School, McCabe enjoyed tennis and skiing and even ran for student body secretary (she lost to another doctor's daughter). She played glockenspiel in the high school band so that she could accompany the football team to all its games.
At the UW, McCabe continued her academic and musical success, graduating summa cum laude and taking courses in art history, literature, French and even economics. When she was a freshman and sophomore, she performed the morning chimes concerts heard across campus. "My friends kept my identity secret, but would tell me how various classmates throughout campus would react," McCabe recalls. "Some of my apparent smash hits were Norwegian Wood and Scarborough Fair. And, I did an unforgettable Winchester Cathedral."
But her love remained the piano. "She was the rare undergraduate who had a clear goal," recalls UW Professor Emeritus Béla Siki, a concert pianist who led the school's keyboard division when McCabe was a UW student.
Siki was in his second year at the UW when Robin showed up in his class. The connection they made has lasted a lifetime. "I was very happy to have Robin. She knew what she wanted: She wanted the best instruction. She wanted to work hard. Many undergraduate students falter. Not Robin."
Nearing graduation in 1971, McCabe took Siki's advice to audition for the Juilliard School, regarded by many as the premier music conservatory in the country. She was accepted to the doctoral program and studied under Ilona Kabos, Rudolf Firkusny, Ania Dorfmann and Joseph Bloch.
A 40-year veteran of the Juilliard faculty, Bloch counts McCabe among his stable of talented students, which also includes Van Cliburn. "I could go through the alphabet from A to Z and come up with a positive adjective for every letter to describe Robin," Bloch says. "And, I'd end with zeal."
She is among the handful of Bloch's students who became colleagues on the Juilliard faculty and lifelong friends. "She had all the qualities of an ideal student. She was a natural pianist, a marvelous sight reader. She is a very strong lady. Solid. Dependable."
Bloch knows much of the challenges facing concert pianists, especially women. "It is much more difficult for women to be successful in this business," he says of classical music performance and recording. "For one thing, there are 18 women for every man trying for this kind of career. It takes a certain aggressiveness. The extensive travel is physically and emotionally demanding, and there are fewer booking opportunities for women," he says.
Conventional wisdom says that organizations responsible for booking classical pianists are typically women's organizations, and that they prefer to have male performers, Bloch adds. "I'd don't know if this is true or not, but I do know there are fewer opportunities for women."
McCabe experienced this subtle discrimination first-hand at her Alice Tully Hall debut. One New York critic spent most of her review condemning the color of McCabe's dress, rather than critiquing the performance.
It was a publicity nightmare that tuxedo-clad male performers don't encounter, and that McCabe--and other female performers--can't forget. "It's terrible," she says. "A man puts on a good-looking tux and a white shirt and he's set. But a woman comes out in a dress somebody doesn't like and the dress gets reviewed more than the performance. When I read that review I was ready to get a dagger, silk pillow and a kimono and just finish myself off. I met that critic years later and she sort of apologized. She said she didn't mean to hurt me. I told her it was a pretty low blow. It was a bitter pill, but we all have a few of those."
Experiences like this have made McCabe philosophical about the music business. "I tell talented music students to be as open as they can to everything," she says. "Life will give you some winners and some losers, but open yourself up to experiences. To make it you have to have talent, resilience and good breaks. There is no question in music that you need help; you need people who will believe in you and sort of grease the wheels for you. My first record came because someone believed in me and helped me get an audition with the record company.
"I'm not saying you have to charm everybody, but raw talent is not enough. The person with the explosive talent and the sociopathic personality who goes to the post-concert party and says all the wrong things is not going to be asked back."
In the 18 years since the New Yorker article appeared, McCabe has proven her staying power. Today she can select her piano students and her concert performances. Recent seasons have seen her performing with the Prague Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Seattle Symphony and the Tokyo Symphony. She is especially popular in Asia, and her concert tours there often inspire Asian students to study at the UW.
Her recordings on Vanguard and the Swedish Grammafon BIS labels have won accolades. Of her CD recording of Bartók piano works, Stereo Review wrote, "The recording is all we have come to expect--which is to say--first rate!"
But her recording and concert career looks tame compared to her latest new experience--leading the UW School of Music, a position she assumed last June. Money is tight and getting tighter, space is at a premium, much of the public is unaware of the array of services the school performs, and its ___ professors don't always agree on the school's direction.
"I'm a performer. The School of Music, to my knowledge, has never really had a performer as director," McCabe says. "But, I have enough academic background that I feel comfortable here. I think that is the reason the faculty urged me into this chair. We had 10 years of a very different kind of director, so maybe it was time for a little bit of the other side.
"The school does many different things with many different brushes. We have ethnomusicologists, some who concentrate in very specialized areas like Nepalese music; we have violinists, performers, composers dedicated to computer music. Sometimes bringing everyone together can be a problem."
Part of the answer, she tells the faculty, is similar to what she tells her students: Be open to change.
"There are ways to make a living in music that were not viable 20 or 30 years ago," McCabe says. "The field of music technology changes as fast as computer chips change. Now there are careers in managing, arranging and business. The UW School of Music is in a better position than the traditional music conservatory to offer the type of interdisciplinary education now sought. It is important that our students be aware of that, and that our training reflects new career opportunities."
She has several concrete plans with that end in mind:
* Offer a performing certificate program for graduate students who are talented performers but may not have the scholarly abilities or desire to be in high-level academic seminars.
* Increase the visibility of school performances, including the much-improved University Symphony.
* Increase interdisciplinary projects, such as the five-performances of West Side Story that the school staged with drama and dance last month.
* Increase fund-raising efforts, particularly for scholarships.
* Increase the school's participation in international music by hosting more competitions and conferences.
The music faculty recently rewrote its undergraduate curriculum, changing some requirements and giving students more flexibility. The most popular undergraduate degree in the school--the bachelor of music degree--is a five-year program preparing students for careers in teaching and performing. The school offers another degree for students who want to focus solely on performance.
"I am hoping there can be a real morale boost within these halls even with the economic anxiety we are experiencing. I want people to know they are appreciated for what they do," McCabe says.
"But we need to stop thinking of ourselves as some kind of rarefied item. I think the arts are just as important to life as water. People will come to appreciate the arts the more they are exposed to them."
The pressures of running the school, teaching piano students and performing might crush some artists. But years of success as a concert pianist, teacher and an administrator have boosted McCabe's confidence. "I've found it also helps to have a sense of humor," she says.
Some of her fans might wonder why she now sits behind a desk more often than behind a keyboard. "I have spent so much of my time sitting at a piano or playing it somewhere in the world or preparing to play it somewhere. And, recently, I've been sitting next to young, good pianists who are trying to do the same thing. It is interesting to take yourself out of that and look at the bigger problems--collegial problems, curricular problems. I've always loved the University environment."
Does taking on administrative tasks mean an end to her concert career? Not on your life. "Obviously, I have to cut back, but I have two excellent associate directors who are a tremendous help to me. So, I will be able to perform some. The ideal career for me is playing and teaching," she says.
"If someone told me I could not play piano in public for the next five years, I would die."
Nedra Floyd Pautler is a writer in the UW Office of News and Information and editor of University Week, the UW faculty/staff newspaper.
Send a letter to the editor at email@example.com. |
Literary Baby Names
These days, more moms are look to best-sellers for the perfect name (Come on, had you met a Bella before Twilight came out?). Although your baby won’t read about these characters for a while, here’s the Cliff Notes version to give them.
Holden (The Catcher in the Rye)
Many consider Holden Caulfield the most important character in American Literature. Unfortunately, he’s famous for being angsty and a bit of a bad boy. Then again, what boy doesn’t go through that phase?
Alice (Alice in Wonderland)
Alice would prefer her imagination to an iPad, and hopefully your daughter will too! She may be a bit of a daydreamer, but she’ll also be determined to succeed. Just keep an eye on her when you pass a rabbit hole.
Jay (The Great Gatsby)
No one exemplifies rags-to-riches quite like Jay Gatsby. The man turned himself into a high society millionaire in hopes of winning over a woman. If your son doesn’t find love, at least he’ll be able to support you in your old age.
Nancy (Nancy Drew)
She speaks French, succeeds in several sports, and has the respect of many adults. Who wouldn’t want their daughter to emulate the famous female detective? Besides, she’d probably make more money as an after-school detective than she would at babysitting.
Harry (Harry Potter)
While the magic makes Harry a memorable character, it’s his loyalty and do-good attitude that make him the perfect namesake. Just be sure to tell your son that, try as he might, he can’t rely on magic to clean his room.
Juliet (Romeo and Juliet)
Many describe this heroine as headstrong, intelligent and beautiful. Sounds like everything you want in a daughter. Be warned: she may be a bit dramatic when it comes to boys.
William (Pride and Prejudice)
We wanted to go with Fitzwilliam, but that might be a name that gets a boy bullied. Instead, try this abbreviated version of the name for a son you’d like to have all of the charm and romance that made women fall for Mr. Darcy.
Anne (Anne of Green Gables)
Intelligent and imaginative are just a few words to describe this loveable orphan. If you plan on making your daughter after this optimistic character, don’t’ forget the “e” at the end! As Anne says, “it’s more distinguished.”
Atticus (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Who doesn’t want their son to be a lawyer? Okay, we don’t want you putting any career pressures on your son. Even if he doesn’t follow Atticus’ legal path, he will (hopefully) follow his morals and integrity.
Josephine (Little Women)
It’s hard to pick one of the Alcott sisters, but in the end we went with the tomboy of the group. Jo is able to hang with the boys and girls and, in doing so, can see life from everyone’s perspective.
What character would you name your child after? Who is your favorite character?
Plus more from The Bump: |
By Zara Martirosova Torlone
In 1979 one of the most prominent Russian classical scholars of the later part of the twentienth century, Mikhail Gasparov stated: “Virgil did not have much luck in Russia: they neither knew nor loved him . . .”. This lack of interest in Virgil on Russian soil Gasparov mostly blamed on the absence of canonical Russian translations of Virgil, especially the Aeneid. There have been several attempts at translating the Roman epic into Russian, four of them most notable and significant. In the 18th century Vasilii Petrov (1730-1778), the court poet of Catherine the Great was the first poet to undertake this monumental task. His translation, however, although highly praised by Catherine and the newly established Russian Academy, was ridiculed by the educated elite as a feeble shadow of the great Roman poem. Another attempt at translating the whole epic did not happen until late nineteenth century and was undertaken by a prominent Russian poet Afanasii Fet (1820-1892) who together with a Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev (1853-1900) attempted to finally bring the Aeneid to the Russian reading public. While this translation was received much more favorably, it still did not acquire the desired canonical status. Valerii Briusov (1873-1924), one of the founders of Russian Symbolism and an accomplished translator, devoted most of his life to yet another translation of the Aeneid, but also fell short of the mark because the final version of his translation exhibited many ‘foreignizing’ tendencies replete with incomprehensible Latinisms, which rendered the text almost unreadable. Sergei Osherov (1931-1983), a Russian classical scholar, who undertook another translation during the era of ‘socialist realism’ took a more liberal approach to the Virgilian text, one that rendered it significanltly more readable by a wider audience but steered away from the poetic intricacies and complexity of the Latin text.
This is the situation Gasparov was referrring to when alluding the failure of Virgil to provoke interest in Russian reading public. And yet the importance of Virgil for the formation of Russian literary identity remained consistent as Russian writers partcipated in building their national literary canon.
Russian consciousness formed its connection to Rome and thus to Virgil through two venues: one was through the great but pagan Roman empire – that was the political claim that entailed imperial power and expansion. Another was via Byzantine Rome and the piety associated with its Orthodoxy. Even Catherine the Great who prided herself on her secularism and association with Voltaire and Montesquieu, had in mind the leadership of Russia as the religious and political ideal of a unified ecumenical Orthodoxy under which all the Orthodox East would be politically united.
Virgil came to be seen as the answer to both discourses and to encompass both the imperial rhetoric and the spiritual quest for a Russian Christian soul.
The eighteenth century Virgilian reception was mainly concerned with the imperial aspirations as the initial reaction to the text of the Aeneid in Russian literature. Antiokh Kantemir’s (1708-1744), Mikhailo Lomonosov’s (1711-1765), and Nikolai Kheraskov’s (1733-1807) failed attempts at a national heroic epic were encouraged by the Russian ruling family but failed to elicit any interest in the reading public. In the same way Vasilii Petrov’s first unfortunate translation of the Aeneid reflected the tendency to glorify and idealize the ruling monarch as a way to promote national pride but was found lacking in adequately reflecting the poetic genius of Virgil in Russian.
As Russian literary figures of the eighteenth century were experimenting with different approaches to a national epic, there emerged a quite influential and popular genre of travesitied epics. In opposition to the courtly attempts to glorify the house of the Romanovs through Virgilian reception, Nikolai Osipov wrote his burlesque Aeneid Turned Upside Down (1791-6) where following the European examples of French Paul Scarron and German Aloys Blumauer he made Aeneas speak the base language of the Russian everyday man and cast his adventures in a less than heroic light.
Epic, however, was not the only genre through which Russian literati tried to bringVirgil to Russia. As with the most European receptions of the Aeneid, the tragic pathos of Dido’s love and suicide attracted attention already in the eighteenth century at the same time with the epics. Iakov Kniazhnin’s ((1758-1815) play Dido (1769), which stands at the very beginnings of Russian mythological tragedy, offered his readers an unusual and politicized interpretation of Book 4 of the Aeneid combined with French and Italian influences on his Virgilian reception.
With Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) Russian literature entered yet another stage of Virgilian reception. The courtly literature was long forgotten and so were the monumental attempts at epic grandeur. Pushkin refrained from any open allusion to or evocation of Virgil limiting them usually to a few passing jokes. Instead he penned his own diminutive epic of national pride, the Bronze Horseman in which he conteplated the same issues pondered by Virgil two thousand years earlier. At the center of his poem is the confrontation between the man and a state, individual happiness and civic duty, which Pushkin approaches in ways familiar to the readers of Virgil.
While the connection of Virgilian reception with Russia’s ‘messianic’ Orthodox mission manifested itself intermittently in secular court literature and even in Petrov’s translation, the specific and pointedly deliberate articulation of that mission occured in the literature at the beginning of the twentieth century and is represented by such formative thinkers as Vladimir Solov’ev (1853-1900), Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), and Georgii Fedotov (1886-1951), who saw Virgil in messianic and prophetic light and as the source of answers for Russian spiritual quest both at home and abroad.
With Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) the Russian Virgil entered the stage of post-modernism. Brodsky’s Virgilian allusions are numerous and persist in Brodsky’s poetics through its entire evolution. However, the monumental themes of either imperial pride or messianic mission become replaced in Brodsky by simpler, mundane, and even base themes. Brodsky reshaped Virgil’s Arcadia into a snow covered terrain and his Aeneas is a man tormented by the brutalizing price of his heroic destiny. As Brodsky reconfigured different episodes from the Virgilian texts through the lyric prism of human emotion, Virgil remained a constant presence both in his poetry and his essays as the poet moved with ease between ancient and modern, between emotion and detachment, between Russian and English, providing a remarkable closure to the Russian Virgil in the twentieth century.
Zara Martirosova Torlone is an Associate Professor of Classics and on the Core Faculty at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University (Ohio, USA). She received her B.A. from Moscow State University, Russia and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York. Her publications include Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (2009) and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (2014). She has edited a special issue of Classical Receptions Journal, entitled ‘Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe’ to which she also contributed an essay on Joseph Brodsky’s reception of Virgil’s Eclogues.
Classical Receptions Journal covers all aspects of the reception of the texts and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome from antiquity to the present day. It aims to explore the relationships between transmission, interpretation, translation, transplantation, rewriting, redesigning and rethinking of Greek and Roman material in other contexts and cultures. It addresses the implications both for the receiving contexts and for the ancient, and compares different types of linguistic, textual and ideological interactions. |
“The Beginning-End of Yiddish,” is poet/essayist Richard Fein’s core subject: his love for a language largely eviscerated in his lifetime.
Yiddish Genesis by Richard J. Fein. BrickHouse Books, 90 pages, $15.
B’KLYN by Richard J. Fein. BrickHouse Books 96 pages, $15.
By Susan de Sola Rodstein.
The brief, jewel-like essays of Richard J. Fein’s Yiddish Genesis touch on the Jewish short story, translation, poetry, and the Old Testament. The collection, spanning 1968 to 2010, signals the two dominant sources of inspiration for Fein’s work as a poet-translator: the Yiddish language and the Book of Genesis. The title is nearly an oxymoron, as Genesis is origins and creation, while Fein’s beloved Yiddish is shadowed everywhere by death, destruction and disappearance.
“The Beginning-End of Yiddish,” is Fein’s core subject: his love for a language largely eviscerated in his lifetime. The roots of this “love affair” are in his earliest years, in the associative rhythms of a “throng of sounds” overheard but not understood. In mid-life, Fein made the thrilling discovery of its poetry and learned Yiddish in order to translate it, and reflect it back in his English-language writing. Yiddish is a past “that shimmers with a newness only the past can possess.”
Despite this Romantic given, Fein is skeptical towards Yiddish nostalgia. Fein’s call for rejuvenation in new films and works of art is salutary. He imagines Larry Rivers painting Yiddish proverbs as Brueghel painted German ones. Fein is of a generation able to go back, in mid-life, to what shaped him—to a lost overheard language in a “waning Brooklyn version.” Like a reclaimed love affair, it is a return to parts of him “previously rejected,” even with all of their discomforts and confusions. His explorations include ambivalence. As a child, he was repulsed by posters of the actor Menashe Skulnik, dreading “the bony-comic clang” of his name and his “goggle-eyed, shit-eating smile.” He had “hoped that none of him would rub off on me.” The sea-change of later acceptance through the medium of poetry brings questions. “How does that life of Jewish Eastern Europe inhabit those of us who were born in Brooklyn?” Fein asks. One asks further how it may inhabit the next generation, who lack even the formative “throng of sounds”? What is the continued vitality of Yiddish?
Yet, Fein possibly overstates the demise of Yiddish. He calls himself “the last Yiddish poet, who happens to write in English.” He even claims to be one of its last readers—a conceit which may be the poet’s approximation of solitude, a condition Fein deems necessary to poetic creation. Yiddish continues to be spoken and studied in various enclaves in the world, albeit by vastly diminished numbers. Fein mourns the loss of the “transitional generation” of writers equally steeped in Yiddish and the Western canon. There are no Yiddish equivalents to Yeats and Larkin, “who will pick up from where the 20th century Yiddish poets left off.”
Like Jacob, he has “schemed himself into a legacy,” albeit a truncated one. If Yiddish is mother tongue, and lost lover, it is also essentially a ghostly tie to the dead. Fein can speak of visitations from Yankev Glatshteyn and other poets bringing him to a seedbed or a tribal tongue—to an essential, if partial, recuperation of a lost world. He translates with fidelity, but also enters into poetic dialogues with these poets. For Fein, loss is the ground of poetry. In bringing these poets to readers of English, he unlocks his own poetic practice. Fein is not concerned with the ancient origin of Yiddish but with its end, in its last flowering of poetic activity while the very conditions for its continued existence were under siege. This is akin to his poetic practice beginning late in life.
Fein’s other great subject is the Book of Genesis, the book of beginnings. The strength of Fein’s reflections on Genesis is his ability to read the stories in such empathic terms, through the lens of the mame loshn, or mother-tongue, rather than the holy tongue. A spirit of Yiddish sympathy infuses his careful readings, which highlight the stories’ humanity, but he never loses his awe at their sublimity.
In “Sarah’s Laugh,” Fein asks what kind of laugh it may have been–rueful, skeptical, challenging, relieved, ironic–possibly even finding in it the origins of that “redoubtable genre,” the Jewish joke. “We share her laughter—struck as we are by the barren, ill-used, resentful wife who at last becomes fertile. Who are these guests, a bunch of comedians?”
He gives subtle readings of the flawed character of Jacob and of the conditions of prophecy in Isaiah. He analyzes the stories of Abraham and Isaac, and of Moses and the burning bush, without rationalizing them into coherent examples of justice or ethics. Fein’s readings are not specifically religious, but like his explorations of Yiddish, they are at ease with mystery. Fein is held by the cryptic God of miracles and contradiction. Peril and uncertainty drive us to contemplation. These are also points of departure for a poet and a translator.
Also striking is Fein’s reading of the God of Genesis not as a static god, but as an active participant in the Creation who must react, mend and adjust. The first such necessity is to provide clothing for Adam and Eve, newly aware of their nakedness. Noting that God actually sews garments for them, Fein suddenly sees him as the first Yiddish tailor or shnayder, sitting humbly to sew. The introduction of labor to man is at the same time God’s first true labor, and this labor is above all an act of caring. We create the God we need, who in turn creates us.
While Fein sees the humble and the everyday, he is also caught in the dark and daemonic moments of Genesis. Just as the God of Judaism resists total images but is present in synecdoche (a hand saving Lot, a voice speaking to Moses), Fein’s preference is for the deeper places of illogic, centrally in the stories of Job, and most resonantly in the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. He infuses the details with luminous insights, but does not explain away the story’s unintelligibility or use it to confirm a preconception. Fein’s strengths are a fertile, humane imagination and a wariness of too much taming. Failures of understanding and contradictions are what life is like, he tells us. But Fein also refuses any easy moral self-congratulation for his efforts.
The last essay, “Return to Yiddish,” takes us to the recognition scene between Joseph and his brothers. Fein boldly structures the essay as an encounter between two beloved translations, the King James and the Yiddish of Yehoash, forming a counterpoint of fearful wonder and approachability. Joseph, like Fein, “confirms a tie to those he had looked down upon in his youth,” and at this juncture the counterpoint on the page of the majestic rhythms of the King James and the expressive demotic of the Yiddish has its own emotional impact. It is hard not to be moved by Fein’s passionate yet delicate engagements, in which learning, teaching, translating, writing, and Yiddish itself, are infused with all of the intensity of living beings.
His newest collection of poems, his eighth, is titled B’KLYN, the erasure of the vowels perhaps echoing consonantal Hebraic script. It tells us that this will not be a literal Brooklyn, but an elliptical and perhaps symbolic Brooklyn. B’KLYN is the ground for a fertile imagination and a startlingly detailed capacity to remember. Some of the most immediate poems go 70 years back in time.
The world is born again
to a potent lack of purpose…
delivering him up to the residual
intimacies of things…
funding the commerce of sense impressions—
as if each external guise existed only to seek
the tally of itself in the child’s mind (“Second Childhood”).
Fein’s “spots of time” continue to resonate, and are folded into rich, complex poems. “I’m still crossing a corner in Brooklyn while walking the streets I’m on now” (“The Office”). The collection is neither linear nor strictly bound to its titular borough.
Fein’s essays had led me to expect, mistakenly, an irrepressible Yiddish demotic and English inflected by its exuberant rhythms. Fein is not a poet given to impersonation, let alone caricature. The few bits of Yiddish quotation exist alongside exact, honed English, which strengthens the inference that the quoted Yiddish is just as elegant. (As do the handful of beautiful translations here, of Sutskever, Slutski, and Korn.)
Fein’s fidelity to memory also expresses itself in intense, life-long engagements with other poets. In central poems, “The Office” and “A Born-Again Song of Myself,” Fein’s memory of his first encounters with Whitman or Glatshteyn (“I…sliced my way through your uncut deckle-edged pages”), is overlaid with repeated readings over decades that have become part of the fabric of his life (“I bore down and pressed the poem into being…our lives catching fire and passing between us”).
His engagement with Whitman is apparent in the long lines, copia, and generous embrace of some of the crafted first-person narrations. But there are also poems in narrow columns or set stanzas. The variety of form and tone is one of the great pleasures of the volume. A world poised to fall is called up in the single nine-line stanza of “Not a maw enhanced its diet”:
. . . not a syrinx cruised the gamut,
not a paw sublet its haunts,
not a pinion banked a flight. . .
Several poems, such as “A Photograph of a Yiddish Poet in the Park” and “Dear Yiddish” recast the themes of the essays, as Fein literally ingests Glatshteyn, relishing the syllables, or finds inspiration in a literal exchange of breath. And then, just when we might feel possibly submerged by this intensity and verbal flow, we arrive at spare, exact poems. Fein is also an inheritor of Pound, whose influence is apparent in his clarity and precision. He is superlative when turning his formidable powers of observation upon an object. In “Karakul,” a child touches a pile of fur overcoats heaped upon a bed, singling out one recalcitrant fur, “a resistant twist,” of Central Asian origin. With that seemingly simple warp, Fein conjures up a lost Tadzhikistan:
. . . black knolls unobliging to his forays,
his fingering for the fluent drift—
he saw those coarse loops lustered
to a louring, palm-repellent shag.
That frizzled, defiant Tadzhik thicket
denied a buoyant glide, and though he
coaxed with pat, stroke, poke, press, rub,
wanting the coat to relent under his touch,
the nitid tangle of hairs refused to unclench,
fixed, like frozen ripples on a black lake.
He is a poet who can see the “run of a ruche-flap/hiding the strip of blue buttons” on a nightgown (“Some Like it Hot”) or a bicycle’s “tiny paint blisters” and “geometries between the hub and the rim” (“Sleep-Chasings”). Fein’s agility with the poetic line is reflected in a surprising affinity with mechanics, from the vivid, estranging depictions of hospital equipment in “The Patient,” (“A punctured neck bells out /from a clipboard and a bulbous thumb /presses on a nub,”) to the “clews of a hammock” (“Catskills”) to the car tires’ “paralleling cuneiforms that go deeper/than the rubber they’re grooved into” (“Second Childhood”). He is interested in how things work, unexpected in a poet with such receptivity to the unaccountable, even the supernatural.
In “The Automat,” the precise workings of the coffee automat and the subway turnstile frame the surprising appearance of a ghostly Yiddish poet. Fein’s exactitude leaves us in no doubt as to the authenticity of the experience, even if imagined. In “Priming the Pump,” the near unintelligibility of his grandmother’s request Brengkaltvaserfunpump, contrasts with the accuracy of his memory, from the shining nail heads on the aluminum platform. . . to “the mouth/close to the flanged nozzle” and “frantic/bubbles tempered to beads ringing the lip of water.” But 67 years distance brings a new element to the scene, a finger of an own “third hand” writing his name on the mist of the celery-green pitcher, anointing him. This is an overlay that may not even have been needed, given Fein’s descriptive powers.
These are in full force in section IV in the unsteady symbiosis of “Snow and Tree”: “as the snow’s inclined or driven; to the uneven sleeving of the branches.” “Two Shrubs” are “wrapped to burly abstractions.” Rigor mortis is made oddly beautiful in “Bacon-bird.” These are some of the most satisfying poems in the book, perhaps because of their controlled forms but also because the ghosts are submerged in the objects, just beyond our view.
The seven untitled sections of B’KLYN hint at the days of the week. The last section, the long poem “Sleep-Chasings,” perhaps evokes the timelessness of the Sabbath as it cross-cuts through time. It is a visibly modern poem, with variably formed lines and sudden shifts. In a striking passage, a boy runs errands for his mother and consults a shape-shifting list: “. . . the mobilized articles, the sutures of conjunctions, the motile prepositions, the hinges of intonations. . .” But the teasing uncertainty of this long virtuoso section is perhaps too soon solved, as the “self-sufficient speech of manhood and middle age” finally “arrive for a spell.”
The very last passage of this eight-page poem includes a fragment from each of the foregoing sections. An impulse to summation prevails. This and a handful of poems might have been even stronger with a less courteous guide, less willing to explain. (Fein was for many years a teacher, and one can only imagine what a good one.) But this is a small price of admission for the riches here.
Our stock of literature from the first-hand perspective of old age is relatively small. Flashes of humor shine in the spaces of death and decrepitude, as in the very funny “Assisted Living.” But the wonder of this volume is the capacity of Fein’s work to contain a palimpsest of encounters and a lifetime of reading and re-readings. He gives us the gift of a truth that must be lived to be known: that things do not happen only once but resonate in many directions through time. In one of his most haunting poems, Fein invents a fictional Pole, Yankev Rivlin, and gives us two diary excerpts, one from 1934, the other from 1947, a precipice in time Fein crosses and re-crosses with great courage:
Some tips of twigs darkly bud
with aborted life or forgery of spring,
though branches mostly taper at the end.
I strain to find that node of transfer
where a twig ends and alters to air
or air ends and becomes the twig.
We can only marvel at the transfers Fein has created, often in a void of only air. |
Monday, September 26, 2011
Drug Company: Scios Division of Johnson & Johnson
Drug: Nesiritide (Natrecor)
Settled Federal charges of: Misbranding, off label marketing
Fine paid: $85M
Fine as % of Sales of Drug during Peak Year: 37% (2004)
Company Admits Guilt?: Can't tell from news report
The above from Bloomberg News:
Hat tip to the Health Care Renewal Blog which also provides good backstory analysis:
Now, you may ask, why am I bothering even to mention this judgment involving the chump change of $85M, when the record for settlements in such cases is now well upwards of $1B? As HCR informs us, the reason is well summarized in two commentaries by cardiologist Dr. Eric Topol:
What we have here is a drug (brand name Natrecor) that was approved by the FDA based on very slimsy evidence involving surrogate endpoints and despite considerable suggestion of risk of harm, for congestive heart failure, a condition for which many other treatment options exist. The company then aggressively marketed the drug for an off label use, weekly "tune-ups" by injection, and instructed cardiologists how to get big bucks in reimbursement for these "tune-ups," similar to what cancer docs get for injecting chemotherapy. Dr. Topol wrote in 2005 that more than 600,000 patients were getting these tune-ups despite the lack of any evidence that this use of the drug was helpful and despite these being off-label.
Finally, a company-sponsored trial was published in July, 2011, showing no excess deaths or cases of renal failure from nesiritide, but no benefits either when added to a regimen of other drugs. In short, Scios was making a lot of money for several years (before warnings such as Topol's took hold around 2004-5) on a drug that could not have helped and may very well have hurt a lot of folks.
If you wanted firm evidence of the Inverse Benefit Law in action--
--I can't think of a more obvious case.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
--that we cannot expect drug/device industry wrongdoing to cease so long as the corporation merely has to pay a fine for legal transgressions; they merely budget the looked-for fine as a cost of doing business and go merrily on their way. Only if individual execs are held accountable under criminal law can we expect behavior to improve.
Well, at least one French judge seems to have gotten the message (not sure if non-subscribers can access but here goes anyway):
Basic bottom line-- a drug (benfluorex) was approved for use in Europe but not the U.S. that seems to be a cousin of the fen-phen combo that I discussed in HOOKED, marketed as a weight loss drug and then shown to cause deadly adverse reactions including heart valve damage and pulmonary fibrosis. The head of Servier, France's second-largest drug company, has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, aggravated deception, and fraud for marketing the drug despite known risks. The CEO has had to post $5.5M bail (which, if French CEO compensation is anything like the U.S., he probably was carrying around as loose change).
My own comment is that the French more or less have the right idea, but I'm an old softie. I would have been happy with just the aggravated deception (whatever that is) and fraud charges. I would not have seen the need to add manslaughter.
Monday, September 12, 2011
"Gooz," author of the excellent book, The $800 Million Pill, offers a comment on the recent NIH study showing that stents for arteries in the brain do not prevent strokes and indeed worsen the stroke risk. The good news was that Medicare-Medicaid had held off paying for these stents even with an earlier, smaller study funded by the stent company (Stryker) that was much more promising. (The definitive study, that was stopped early due to the poor outcomes, was funded by NIH.) This was billed as a success story for evidence-based medicine. Medicare-Medicaid insisted that any patient who wanted such a stent had to be enrolled in a proper clinical trial so that the evidence could be collected.
Gooz says-- not so fast. Why wasn't Stryker required to do the large-scale study right from the get-go? He even suggests that the US taxpayers ought to get a refund for the NIH study.
Gooz may be counseling perfection on some matters, but I concur with his general point that the FDA requirements for approving new devices need to be tightened up generally, as we have addressed in previous posts such as:
Thursday, September 8, 2011
What's most intriguing here to my mind is the reports of how two institutions, the U. Colorado School of Medicine and National Jewish Health, have taken on the task of prohibiting many practices that constitute conflicts of interest and demanding oversight of other relationships between their physicians and pharmaceutical companies. The U. was especially embarrassed by how many of their docs were listed on the first ProPublica database when it came out last year and so vowed to take action.
The upshot is that suppose you read on the database that Dr. House at one of these centers took $100,000 from Eli Lilly. You are not sure just what to make of that. But the institution can now tell you that it looked over the contract and that Dr. House is doing legitimate research with that money, not putting it in his own pocket, and not shilling for Lilly.
This seems to be another example to demonstrate that while mere disclosure of conflicts of interest cannot make everything ethically pristine-- a song I've been singing since this blog started--disclosure can lead to other steps that constitute a true ethical advance.
--announce that they have updated their "Dollars for Docs" database:
They note that they are offering a sneak preview of 2013 when the Federal sunshine provisions in the health reform law take effect, and disclosures that are now semi-voluntary become required. (I say "semi" because some of the companies now disclosing are doing so under orders from court settlements.) The total database accounts for $760M betweeen 2009 and 2011. Given Gagnon and Lexchin's estimate several years ago that the US pharmaceutical industry spends a total of $57B annually on marketing, and given that at least some of the money on the database is in the form of research grants which at least officially is not marketing, we still have to ask how much of the total picture we are seeing.
To my mind the big news from ProPublica's initial analysis of their data is the possibility that sunshine is having an impact. There is some evidence of cutting back on the amount companies pay to speakers, in particular. The companies pitch this as a purely business decision, but it has several twists:
- A mini-scandal erupted when the media noted that a number of drug company speakers were in trouble with their state licensing boards. This has led some companies both to pare back and also to be more selective about paid speakers. (They also mention it's smarter from a business point of view to pay fewer speakers to give more talks each; saves on training.) But that scandal was indirectly due to the sunshine of Dollars for Docs, as that provided the database for enterprising journalists to compare to the lists of in-trouble docs.
- Some universities with policies prohibiting their faculty from being paid speakers had not been enforcing those policies, but Dollars for Docs makes them look pretty silly and has emboldened more of them to search the database for names of their own faculty. Apparently anticipating this scrutiny, some of those docs have chosen to withdraw from speakers' bureaus.
Indirect evidence that the Dollars for Docs is having an impact is the fact that PhRMA seemed to feel it necessary to come out with a preeptive-strike news release just before the update was announced, in which they defended their payments to physicians.
Expect to see more stories from the database as journalists around the country now start peering into their local doctors' names and tracking down what they are up to.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Exhibit A is a great summary from our friend Dr. Roy Poses at Health Care Renewal of the case of the contaminated heparin:
Bottom line: As most people have by now forgotten, 21 Americans died in 2007 due to contaminated heparin sold by Baxter Laboratories and made from ingredients manufactured in China. Dr. Poses shows that even recently written reports and news summaries dodge the tough questions of corporate responsibility. If a madman had slipped poison into bottles of an over-the-counter medicine and 21 people died, there would be a huge hue and cry and demands that heads roll. As Dr. Poses lays out in detail, various people made some important corporate decisions, all in the name of saving money, that predictably resulted in an unsafe drug being inflicted upon US patients. If you buy a Rolex at a certain discounted price, we all assume, with justification, that you ought to know that it's been stolen. Similarly, if Dr. Poses's summary is factual, anyone buying the heparin or the raw ingredients at the discounted prices being charged ought to have known that the chemicals came from unsupervised and unregulated workshops where purity and safety could not be assured. Not to have carefully tested and monitored the chemicals thus obtained, even assuming it was OK to get the chemicals from those sources at all, was another deliberate corporate decision. Yet no one, apparently, is accountable.
Exhibit B is an investigative reporting piece published by the AP today:
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, who's written many good pieces on the pharmaceutical industry, here reports on a recent study of campaign contributions to the twelve members of the Congressional "supercommittee" charged with coming up with a deficit reduction plan. Not surprisingly, deep-pockets health care interests, including Pharma and doctors, are near the top of the list. Not surprisingly, the offices of the involved congresspeople deny that any of these saintly individuals is ever swayed by mere campaign cash. Not surprisingly, if you believe that line, you have to believe that smart people who manage to make large bundles of money are completing wasting millions of dollars of it by giving campaign donations that produce no results for them at all.
As we have commented on previously:
--the smart Washington money is currently betting that these health-care special interests want the supercommittee plan to fail, based on their assumption that the across-the-board cuts that would automatically be triggered by that failure would be easier for them to live with than targeted and really smart Medicare and Medicaid cost reductions that were aimed at those things that don't help patients. (Given that doctors, hospitals, and drug and device companies all make billions off tests and treatments that fail to provide health benefits according to the best scientific evidence.) Is it possible that all the supercommittee members who take such major campaign contributions from these special interests are not going to be influenced by this preference of their corporate handlers?
The above was all reasonably temperate. Here comes the intemperate part. If all this was happening in Afghanistan or India, and corporations were getting away with murder and the media was keeping quiet about it just because it was corporate and not individual behavior, and politicians were being bought (or even appeared to be bought) by big money, the word we would use for it is "corruption." So my question is--why are people so reluctant to use this word when this happens right in front of us in the USA? Why don't we admit flat out that we have a corrupt corporate system, and that with the Citizens United Supreme Court decision opening the door wide to unrestricted corporate campaign contributions, we have let the corruption flow unhindered from the corporate world into government; and that the media, owned by large corporate interests, has little desire to shine much light at least on the corporate side of the equation?
Saturday, September 3, 2011
In this somewhat older article (hat tip to Primary Care Medical Abstracts and Drs. Bukata and Hoffman for pointing it out) the authors tried to gather data on how many studies in six of the top medical journals in English are industry-sponsored, what impact these articles have on the impact factor of the journal; and how much money the journals make from industry ads and from sales of reprints to drug companies. The impact factor is key; journals are in cutthroat competition over this measure of how widely cited their articles are in the rest of the medical literature. Impact factor plays a role in determining where important studies are submitted, how many libraries subscribe to the journal, and how easily the journal can attract advertising.
When Lundh and colleagues went looking for the financial data, they adopted the excellent initial strategy of asking. Of the six journals they were studying, BMJ and Lancet replied, while JAMA, Archives of Internal Medicine, New England Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine refused to supply any data. When the authors then obtained tax reports and tried to calculate some of the relevant numbers, and sent their calculations to the publishing organizations for confirmation, American College of Physicians (publishers of Annals) responded but the others again refused to divulge any financial information.
Bottom line: most medical journals keep their financial numbers very close to the vest--even journals that have editorial policies that encourage full disclosure of financial conflicts among other parties.
So with what they could get their hands on, Lundh and colleagues noted that the percentage of clinical trials supported solely by industry varied from a low of 3% in BMJ to 32% in New England Journal. Industry-funded trials were more widely cited than other studies (a phenomenon noted in a number of previous surveys; being sure to write more articles that cite a successful study, and then placing those articles in turn in higher-impact journals, is standard industry marketing practice). Therefore as one would expect, publishing more industry-sponsored studies has an effect on the journal's impact factor. Had those studies not been published the impact factor would have dropped only by 1% at BMJ, the low end of the scale, but by 15% for NEJM. In other words, journals have a significant financial interest in publishing industry-sponsored studies on the grounds of impact factor alone even before we get to ad and reprint sales.
For the only two journals for which they could raise the data, Lundh et al. found that journal reprints made up only 3% of revenue for BMJ but all of 41% for Lancet. Tax returns indicate that the AMA, publisher of JAMA and Archives, derives 12% of revenue from reprint sales and a whopping 53% from ads.
The authors end with the following sensible recommendation: "We suggest that journals abide by the same standards related to conflicts of interest, which they rightly require from their authors, and that the sources and the amount of income are disclosed to improve transparency."
So here is my answer to Jerry. You'll naturally wonder why it's here on this blog which is about ethics and Pharma and not about placebo effect. In the end I'll suggest an important connection.
The paper that started all this is a thoughtful editorial by Wilson (subscription required) about the placebo effect and adherence. There have now been a good number of studies that show that when you do a double-blind trial with a placebo arm, there is quite often (indeed rather consistently) a significant improvement of outcomes among those who take their placebos faithfully, compared to those who are relatively non-adherent to taking their placebos. Wilson does a neat analysis of what we know, and what we don't yet know, about this adherence phenomenon, and suggests linkages to what we are learning about placebo effects and why this phenomenon might be viewed (at least as a working hypothesis) as a variant of placebo effect.
Jerry then raises the question: what's the message here for clinicians? Should we give patients pep talks to try to both encourage and energize them about the treatments we're prescribing (whether drug or nondrug) to try to enhance their expectations of a good outcome, which has been shown to be positively associated with a placebo response? Should this pep talk include advice to be sure to take their pills (or other treatments) faithfully? Or might it be the case that the adherence research shows that what really matters is what's already inside the patient's head, not what we say--that those in the trials that were more adherent were simply that sort of person, and being that sort of person is what matters in terms of triggering a placebo effect--and our pep talk is worthless?
OK, Jerry, here's my answer, followed by my hunch.
My answer, as Wilson's nice review suggests, is: we don't know. No one has yet done the sort of fine-grained study of the more-adherent research subjects, analogous to some of the latest generation of placebo-effect research done in the last decade with brain imaging etc. So the underlying psychological and neurochemical factors that might explain the adherence-placebo effect link are unknown.
Now my hunch. The placebo effect is almost certainly multifactorial. Indeed, Fabrizio Benedetti of Turin titled his excellent 2009 book Placebo Effects (rather than Placebo Effect) to make the argument that continued research will almost certainly reveal multiple underlying mechanisms that may operate in different diseases and different organ systems.
The best available evidence that we have suggests two very general psychological mechanisms for most placebo effects--expectancy and conditioning. Expectancy is basically forward looking--your body is likely to heal itself when you think it will get better in the future. Conditioning is backward--your body is more likely to heal itself when you associate the circumstances you're in now with circumstances in which your body experienced healing previously.
The adherence effect probably partakes of both. Subjects who take their medicines regularly probably anticipate a good outcome with greater confidence. These same people probably got better in the past when they religiously took their pills, and so conditioning can contribute to their getting better this time by reactivating the same neural pathways.
Now what happens if a physician acts enthusiastic and encouraging about the nature of the treatment? This is likely to increase both expectancy and conditioning effects--expectancy for obvious reasons, conditioning because the patient probably associates an emotionally supportive environment with past healing (going as far back as when Mommy kissed your boo-boo and it got better afterwards). So I cannot see how the encouraging physician could detract in any way from the patient's inner tendency to experience an adherence-placebo reaction, and I can see several ways that the former might enhance the latter. So: bring on the pep-talk.
I have recently become interested in the connection between placebo response and medicine viewed as ritual/performance/theater. We scientific types are used to dismissing ritual as meaningless superstition, but the current placebo research indicates the neuroanatomical and neurochemical reasons why ritual can be efficacious in changing bodily function as well as in altering our cognitive and emotional views of the world. Much of medicine, when we think about it, is ritual and/or performance. (Science writer Nicholas Wade once wrote something like, "All medicine is a form of theater.") Rituals include taking one's pills once or several times a day and can readily trigger both expectancy and conditioning responses. Smart physicians who prescribe exercise and other lifestyle changes try whever possible to suggest rituals to patients to increase adherence, in some cases going so far as to write the instructions on a prescription pad, which when in practice I always found especially powerful. All of these measures seem well calculated to increase placebo effects, as well as to make patients healthier by way of the drug or the exercise or whatever.
I promised in the end to bring this back around to Pharma, so here goes. I suggest that you read Wilson's article and look especially at the effect sizes reported for the adherence-placebo effect. Just for example: Mortality difference between adherent and nonadherent placebo group subjects in the Coronary Drug Project (1980): 15% vs. 25%. More recently, adherence effect in mortality in heart failure, based on the SOLV-TT and SOLV-PT trials: hazard ratio 0.52 (Avins 2010). And remember, according to the body of data Wilson reviews, these are not one-time flukes. And remember too we are talking here about people keeling over dead, not some meaningless surrogate endpoint.
Why is this of importance? The drug companies would kill to come up with a new drug that had efficacy numbers this good. So you could spin this in a pro- or anti-industry fashion. On the side of the industry, have a pity--look what they have to overcome to show that a new drug is better than placebo, when the placebo effect alone can be this powerful. But on the other side of the coin, when mere encouragement and positive thinking can have this much beneficial effect on patient outcomes, why in heaven's name would we want to give drugs that have dangerous side effects and that cost an arm and a leg, unless the drugs had been clearly shown to be really superior to cheap and safe encouragement?
Wilson IB. Adherence, placebo effects, amd mortality [editorial]. Journal of General Internal Medicine 25:1270-1272, December 2010.
Avins AL, Pressman A, Ackerson L, et al. Placebo adherence and its association with morbidity and mortality in the studies of left ventricular dysfunction. Journal of General Internal Medicine 25: 1275-1281, December 2010.
Friday, September 2, 2011
--by former Clinton health adviser Christopher C. Jennings, on why a lot of special interests in the health field will do their best to torpedo any proposals coming out of the Congressional "super-committee." The political wisdom seems to be that the threat of $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts, that would be triggered by a rejection of the committee's proposals, is so scary that everyone will rush to embrace what the committee proposes, Jennings says--no, if you go by the old adage of better the devil you know, then most healthcare special interests have every reason to choose the fallback across-the-board cuts.
Jennings proceeds to list all the various special interests and explain why they'd be better able to cope with the fallback cuts, from their self-interested point of view--despite the fact that public policy and public health goals would clearly be better served by avoiding such cuts and adopting proposals that the super-committee is likely to propose. (In other words, our dysfunctional political process, far from having discovered the way to get beyond the present partisan impasse, has once again assured gridlock.)
What role does the drug industry play in all this? Jennings has little to say about them as a specific player in this game except to point out that there seem to be two options open. One is the automatic fallback cuts. These are likely to amount to 2% overall in Medicare, but Medicaid would be protected from these cuts. The other option would be a sensible plan to reduce costs of both Medicaid and Medicare without cutting useful services for patients, and almost for sure, any such deal would call for extending to Medicare the privilege now enjoyed by Medicaid of using its bulk purchasing power to force discounts in drug prices. The specter of Medicare being able to bargain from a position of real strength has always sent shivers of the spine of the drug industry. So they'll take the fallback cuts, thank you very much.
--addresses how well drug ads in major medical journals adhere to FDA guidelines, and whether, secondarily, the ads tell physicians what they need to know to prescribe properly. Is the glass half empty or half full? You be the judge.
The authors looked at 83 unique ads appearing in 9 high-impact medical journals during November 2008. They found that only 18% clearly met all the FDA criteria, 49% were clearly nonadherent in at least one criterion, and the rest were uncertain due to missing information. (half empty) But the articles that were clearly nonadherent failed, on average, to meet only 1-2 of 21 FDA guidelines. (half full)
Where were the ads most likely to fail? The chief deficiencies identified by the authors were:
- Unbalanced literature citations making the drug sound better than the evidence shows
- Misleading use of headlines or pictures
- Implying doses recommended for one class of patients also safe and effective for other classes
The authors went on to assess whether the ads provided important prescribing information. They found few ads that met this goal, mostly due to failure to quantify either safety or efficacy. (half empty)
So, what's the take-home message? The ads may be deficient according to FDA guidelines but most ads seem adherent to most of the guidelines. On the other hand, any physician trying to figure out how to prescribe drugs for patients should never trust drug ads to tell what she needs to know. On the other other hand, who didn't know that?
A few comments. First: the FDA is probably always destined to be toothless regarding ads unless it were to be equipped with SWAT teams. Ads have a natural and limited life cycle, somewhere just upward of the May fly. They are run for a few weeks or months and then replaced by a new round of ads. Almost always, by the time the FDA gets wind of a major violation in an ad and can gather itself to take formal action, the ad has already run its course and the damage is done.
Second: As I tried to describe in HOOKED, drug companies never market a drug in just one way. A drug marketing campaign is a carefully orchestrated symphony. Not only are there a lot of sections, but great care is taken to precisely coordinate the timing of all the different elements. So looking only at one section of the orchestra--the journal ads, the TV DTCA ads, the drug rep visits, the dinner talks, etc.--is almost certainly to miss the forest for the trees (to mix metaphors shamelessly).
Third, having said all that, it would be wrong to blow off journal ads as not worth powder and shot. Korenstein et al. cite industry data to show that the drug companies estimate return on investment for journal ads at $5 in drug sales for every $1 spent on ads, making this one of the best returns in any area of marketing.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
According to Duff Wilson at the New York Times:
--the FTC has just reported that companies have figured out a new twist. To evade regulations, apparently, the brand-name firm no longer comes out with a blatant payoff to the generic firm. Rather the payoff is indirect. The brand-name firm simply agrees to postpone for the requisite length of time its own generic version of the drug. I know this gets complicated when we start talking about the apparently self-contradictory term "brand-name generics." The FTC claims in its report that when in the first 6 months of competition (during which by law a single generic firm can have a monopoly on the generic side of the trade), if the brand-name company (the only company legally entitled to compete during that time window, as I gather) puts it own generic out on the market, the overall cost savings to the consumer is 4-8%. So if the brand-name company can promise the generic company that it won't compete, that amounts to the same thing as handing over cash, but without handing over any cash.
At least I think that's the way it works. Anyone among the four regular readers of this blog who understands the law better than I or who can explain it better, please send us a comment.
The FTC report struck a nerve because both the brand-name drug industry, in the person of PhRMA, and the generic industry association are grousing. Each insists that agreements that prevent extended patent fights in court are good for consumers and the FTC should take a hike. Of course they are partly right--if the patent laws were effectively enforced as they were intended, all of these lawsuits would get tossed out of court from the get-go. But the FTC is certainly right in claiming that sweetheart deals by which both drug firms make a bundle at the consumers' expense is not the answer.
Dr. Stephen M. Stahl, "award-winning author and psychiatrist" according to the website, founded the Neuroscience Education Institute and is a paid consultant and/or speaker for numerous pharmaceutical firms. He wrote the initial post bemoaning the activities of "pharmascolds" and accusing them of causing drug companies to be putting less research effort into finding valuable new paychiatric drugs because of the grief they are causing the industry.
This led Dr. Danny Carlat, of Carlat Psychiatry Blog and a well-known critic of Pharma, to comment that Dr. Stahl was not quite correct on a number of his facts, and that the real reasons why there are not more new and powerful psychiatric drugs now on the market is because the drugs being promoted by the industry don't work very well, and the companies prefer financially less risky me-too drugs over genuine innovation.
So that has led to a lot of back-and-forth commentary and I don't want to get involved in who said what to whom or who called whom what name, but I do want to pull out a couple of comments from the blog that struck me as illuminating.
First: One of the regular bloggers on Dr. Stahl's site is Dr. Debbi Ann Morrissette, a medical writer who I gather is employed by their firm. Dr. Morrissette took issue with a number of Dr. Carlat's objections to Dr. Stahl's statement. Here is a part of her comment:
CARLAT ASSERTION:3. Drug companies have introduced many psychiatric medications over the last two decades, but they have made the business decision to invest heavily in me-too agents, some of which, such as Pristiq and Invega, are embarrassingly blatant patent-extenders with no clear advantages over existing agents. Perhaps if companies had invested more resources into developing truly novel compounds, they wouldn’t be in the pickle they are in.
FACT: THE SUBSTANCE P ANTAGONISTS WERE NOVEL, AS WERE THE CRF1 ANTAGONISTS, NEUROKININ 2, NEUROKININ 3, BETA 3 AGONISTS, AND MANY OTHERS THAT FAILED TO SHOW CONSISTENT EFFICACY. AGOMELATINE IS NOVEL AND FACES AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE IN THE US BECAUSE OF POTENTIAL HEPATOTOXICITY. OVER A DOZEN NOVEL MECHANISMS WERE ADDED ON TO ANTIPSYCHOTICS TO TEST COGNITIVE IMPROVEMENT, FROM 5HT6, TO NICOTINIC AGONISTS, AMPAKINES, MANY MORE. THE FACT IS THAT INDUSTRY IS PUNISHED FOR PURSUSING TRULY NOVEL COMPOUNDS AND REWARDED FOR ME TOOS.
Okay, so let me see if I get this. Here is a highly trained medical writer trying to defend the drug industry from the supposedly uninformed anti-psychiatry rants of Dr. Carlat. She lists a variety of novel compounds being studied recently by the drug industry, that involve molecular mechanisms different from existing psychiatric drugs. (Real innovation--so far, so good.) She then lists the unfortunate fate of these compounds in clinical trials--they don't work very well, or they cause nasty adverse reactions. She then makes the astounding claim, that on this basis, "industry is punished for pursuing truly novel compounds and rewarded for me toos."
If you consider discovering a new chemical, subjecting it to clinical trials, and finding out that it does not perform as well as you have hoped "punishment," then you seem to be saying that normal, routine clinical research is punishment--which makes Pharma's claim that that's the business they are in rather odd. Are you saying that Pharma ought to be "rewarded" by being allowed to sell useless and dangerous drugs for huge profits? Pharma is indeed "rewarded" when it makes and markets me-too drugs, but the reward is solely economic; by definition, patient care is not significantly advanced. So are you saying that Pharma is really all about profits and not about patient care? Funny, that's what the pharmascolds have been saying.
Second: Here is a comment signed "Former Pharma sales rep":
As a former sales representative for a major international pharma company, I learned firsthand clinician and patient attitudes toward the pharma companies. Patients eyed pharma reps suspiciously in waiting rooms, the front-desk staff treated us miserably, and the doctors refused time with us. Even my acquaintences, some of whom owed their lives to modern pharmaceuticals, could not understand why pharmaceutical companies promote their products or sell them at any significant price. All education efforts, sales efforts, or marketing was considered questionable. As sales representatives, we had a hard time recruiting attendance for educational events because by this time, we were prohibited from providing lunch to go with the presentation. Soon, sales reps were banned from most clinics in the area, and we could no nothing more than drop off copies of clinical studies with scowling front-desk staff. It wasn't long before my entire sales team was laid off due to shrinking sales budgets. Any luxury item is heavily promoted and nobody complains. But a drug that saves lives is expected to be available for free and without sales or marketing behind it. I feel that the clinics in my sales territory did get what they asked for. The absence of up-to-date drug information and education from live representatives.
I am unable to say whether this is an accurate report of the status of being a drug rep in today's world, or some combination of bellyaching and sour grapes, or some of each. But if this is even partly true then I think the important take-home message is the incredible attitude shift that has occurred in this whole field since I started doing the research for HOOKED a little more than a decade ago. Back then the drug rep business was flying high, physicians rolled out the red carpet for reps, and the whole crew was fat and sassy and thought critics of these arrangements were completely crazy. If things have changed as much as "former rep" says, can we pharmascolds actually be responsible? As Dr. Carlat suggests in his reply to Dr. Stahl, it would seem odd that a bunch of generally powerless folks like us could have somehow engineered such a huge change. But hey, we'll take it.
This former rep says that the downside of these changes has been "The absence of up-to-date drug information and education from live representatives." Is that so? Of course this is nonsense in terms of the reps being a reliable source of up-to-date information, or that docs don't have far better evidence-based sources than reps. But that would take us back into far too many previous posts on this blog about how the industry thinks marketing is education. |
Blogger: JP Morgenthal
Anne's blog entry SOA is Dead; Long Live Services has drummed up many opinions and emotions from both technical and non-technical camps. The intellectual gyrations are phenomenal, but at the end of the day, if it only served to break us out of our doldrums, create drama and generate traffic for Twitter, then we have a net sum gain of zero.
Prior to joining Burton Group I was heading up a software company that developed Web Services for Supply-Chain Management. We used all the key buzzwords in our marketing literature, SOA, Supply-Chain-as-a-Service, etc. What we developed definitely leveraged SOA principles. We focused on granularity of the services and ensured we didn't introduce tight-coupling between services, which, by the way, was a royal pain in the a$$! But, to Anne's point, the desired outcome was achieved simply by focusing on the services. When the resulting services were layered on top of monolithic, home-grown SCM applications, we created an environment where new capabilities and business processes could be added in weeks verses months.
Lesson #1: Services is the new components. Call them what you will. I am not a fan of the term "service" because I believe it is too overloaded, but all the good terms were already applied in years past and are now associated with failed initiatives. Still, the key here is tactical works and it's okay to be tactical; especially if you are not prepared to commit to the costs, resources and time to take a holistic look at your information technology assets and structure them in a way that will benefit your enterprise long-term.
Lesson #2: The concept of word-of-mouth needs to be totally re-evaluated in the age of social networking. I actually noticed re-tweets pointing to Anne's blog entry in multiple languages. The speed that this news traveled across the World was incredible. And along with this lesson a reminder that what you post on the Internet can, and most likely will, be seen by an audience you never anticipated.
Lesson #3: There's a lot of smart people out there, too! I saw some really well-thought-out responses to Anne's blog entry and some great comments. There was also various perspectives on the issue from practitioners and vendors alike. Being in the midst of the game, it's easy to forget that the poor schnook on the sidelines doesn't have a clue who to listen to. Hence, my advice to them ... listen to me! (that was a joke for those humoristically disabled). In all seriousness, it illustrates the importance of trust that can only be seriously built face-to-face and cannot be replaced by all the Tweets in the world (yes, that was a pun).
Lesson #4: A group of smart people can be ignorant. There was a lot of responses directed at, and rightfully so, "the next shiny thing" that IT will move toward. Will it be Cloud? SaaS? Mashups? To Anne's point, "The latest shiny new technology will not make things better." As I like to say, business has a Neanderthal brain--it lives in the "now", cannot incorporate past experience into current situations and likes shiny things. There's a great quote, that I could not locate, about the lack of utility of people operating in a group that is very apt here. If you know it, please share.
Lesson #5: It was Marshal McLuhan that said, "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication." I found this statement remarkably relevant in this situation. It seems many individuals felt the need to make a statement irrelevant of the original thesis. McLuhan's message can be applied at many levels, but most simply applied, I saw quite a few postings that incorrectly addressed either the issue or the original content. For me, these individuals were seeking to leverage the medium regardless of the content to gain attention.
Lesson #6: Shakespeare was a smart dude! I quote, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." I don't know if I'd go so far as to say good architecture is sweet smelling, but the statement holds. Whether you call it SOA or call it good architectural principles, the act of designing for longevity, agility, reuse is a good thing and will reduce total cost of ownership over time.
Lesson #6a: If you're flipping properties, don't get caught holding any when the bubble bursts! Many businesses treat their business like flipping properties in the real estate market. For them, software just has to be good enough, not great. It's a disposable mindset in which they believe that business changes very rapidly and they want to invest just enough in IT to keep the ship running. This mentality limits perspective to months versus years, but this may be okay. I'm not critcizing this approach as it seems in many cases to be viable. The key, just like in real estate, is don't get caught holding in a downturn. As the business climate slows, like we are seeing now, the cycles of change get further apart and you will be left with IT investments that cannot support continued execution without more investment in a climate where being frugal would be best. Still, I wouldn't be trying to sell management in these businesses on the virtues of SOA governance anytime soon. Moreover, you can bet these will be the first businesses trying to run 100% on Cloud infrastructure. That is, in the land of the blind, a one-eyed architect is ... essentially out of work!
As for any advice I have on SOA futures, its death, its life, etc., I will defer (happily!) to Anne, Richard, Chris and Mike at Burton Group and revel in the fact that I get to cover other amorphous topics like BPM and PaaS! |
Merriam's Pub (t merriam) is a small pub on Tapestries owned by Harwich and Travi. Merriam's Pub caters to those who believe that the quality of one's text-based self-presentation (i.e. the overall quality of one's writing, including grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, vocabulary, etc) to be an integral part of their enjoyment of the text-based medium.
First-time visitors should read the rules and also type "commands" in the Main Room to show all the local commands available. Note: the lsay and lpose commands used with the seating areas code are currently BROKEN until WhiteWizard fixes part of the MPI engine. This is unlikely to happen since WhiteWizard does not consider MPI broken.
- Rule #1. This is a room dedicated to those who believe fundamentally that quality writing and readable typing are both important to a better experience in a text-based environment. However, no one is required to be Pulitzer Prize material. Hostility toward those who do not type or write well is forbidden. They wouldn't be in here if they weren't interested in improving. Help them, don't hurt them.
- Rule #1a. Corollary: Don't be an asshole.
- Rule #2. Harwich and Travi own and run this joint. Please defer to them for anything that requires decision-making. The main room of the pub is logged by Regulus, the pub mascot, to make settling disputes easier. No other rooms are logged.
- Rule #3. This area is an explicit mixture of OOC/chat and IC/roleplaying. Both types of social activity are to be tolerated. We expect you wouldn't have made it past the "entrance exam" if this wasn't okay with you. If you're looking for "pure" roleplaying of any kind, turn around. If you're looking for "pure" OOC/chat, go to IRC. kthx.
- Rule #4. Yes, sex. Sex. Sex, sex, sex. SEX. Sexity-sex-sex. Sexx0rz. Sexitude. Sex. Thank you.
Over 30 years ago, Merriam ran the place as a sort of hip, Bohemian art-pub that attracted the intellectual crowd. They discussed art and politics, wrote poetry and painted, or at least pretended to, to get laid. The stories of what went on in the back rooms were legend in their time. But the times changed and Merriam moved on to other projects, though she remained somewhat the black sheep of her family.
Recently, she decided to reopen the old place, and let her nephew Harwich run the place- she must see something in him the rest of his family does not. She keeps out of the way, for the most part, not wanting to drag his scene down, as she may have said back in the 60's.
Besides cleaning out the cobwebs, Harwich has not changed the vintage decor. It's someone's early 70's nightmare in there still- a conversation pit, a rumpus room with shag carpeting, etc.
- Main Room: Usually the most populated room in the pub. The first one patrons come to when they come inside. It has the conversation pit, the uh... conjugation pit, the bar, the ferret hammock, the couch, and on and on. There is MPI for sitting in the various areas. Typing "seats" will show a list. Anyone is welcome to tend bar if they wish, it's a great way to meet people! It can get loud and sometimes weird in the Main Room. The management prefers that heated arguments (which sometimes happen when people talk politics) get taken to the Smoking Room, please. Scening is encouraged and appreciated in the Main Room!
- Back Yard: An enclosed urban courtyard, open to the sky. There's a porch out back for hanging out on, and a hot tub for lounging in. More MPI seating can be found here.
- Smoking Room: The aforementioned spot for heated debate or scenes that are a bit too bloody for the Main Room. It's tastefully appointed in leather and wood panelling, though, so try not to stain the upholstery.
- Rumpus Room: A classic 70's rec-room, with shag carpeting, horrible zebra-stripe-print velvet wallpaper, one of those sex swing contraptions... you get the idea. It's in the basement, naturally.
- Exhibition Room: A small soundstage, furnished with a comfortable, well-lit nest for... putting on shows! Plus a big two-way mirror. It's upstairs.
- Gallery: The counterpart of the Exhibition Room, this is where the audience for the shows sits on the other side of the two-way mirror. Carpeted risers, lots of pillows, a mini-bar, and a bell system to let you know when a show is starting.
- Reading Room: A popular private spot for reading, discusstion literature, or a quickie on the couch. Also upstairs. |
Das, Kaushik and Ghose, Debasish (2009) Positional Consensus in Multi-Agent Systems using a Broadcast Control Mechanism. In: 2009 American Control Conference, June 10-12, 2009, Hyatt Regency Riverfront, St. Louis, MO, USA, pp. 5731-5736.
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In this paper a strategy for controlling a group of agents to achieve positional consensus is presented. The proposed technique is based on the constraint that every agents must be given the same control input through a broadcast communication mechanism. Although the control command is computed using state information in a global framework, the control input is implemented by the agents in a local coordinate frame. We propose a novel linear programming formulation that is computationally less intensive than earlier proposed methods. Moreover, we introduce a random perturbation input in the control command that helps us to achieve perfect consensus even for a large number of agents, which was not possible with the existing strategy in the literature. Moreover, we extend the method to achieve positional consensus at a pre-specified location. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated through simulation results.
|Item Type:||Conference Paper|
|Additional Information:||Copyright 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.|
|Department/Centre:||Division of Mechanical Sciences > Aerospace Engineering (Formerly, Aeronautical Engineering)|
|Date Deposited:||08 Jan 2010 08:58|
|Last Modified:||19 Sep 2010 05:49|
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|Part of the Politics series|
The Borda count is a single-winner election method in which voters rank options or candidates in order of preference. The Borda count determines the outcome of a debate or the winner of an election by giving each candidate, for each ballot, a number of points corresponding to the number of candidates ranked lower. Once all votes have been counted the option or candidate with the most points is the winner. Because it sometimes elects broadly acceptable options or candidates, rather than those preferred by a majority, the Borda count is often described as a consensus-based voting system rather than a majoritarian one.
The Modified Borda Count is used for decision-making. For elections, especially when proportional representation is important, the Quota Borda System is used.
The Borda count was developed independently several times, but is named for the 18th-century French mathematician and political scientist Jean-Charles de Borda, who devised the system in 1770. It is currently used to elect members of the Parliament of Nauru and two ethnic minority members of the National Assembly of Slovenia, and, in modified forms, for apportionment of all seats in the Icelandic parliamentary elections and for selecting presidential election candidates in Kiribati. It is also used throughout the world by various private organizations and competitions.
- 1 Voting and counting
- 2 An example
- 3 Variants
- 4 Truncated ballots
- 5 Modified Borda count
- 6 Multiple winners
- 7 Other systems
- 8 As a consensual method
- 9 Potential for tactical manipulation
- 10 Evaluation by criteria
- 11 Current uses
- 12 History
- 13 See also
- 14 Notes
- 15 Further reading
- 16 External links
Voting and counting
Under the Borda count the voter ranks the list of candidates in order of preference. So, for example, the voter gives a '1' to their first preference, a '2' to their second preference, and so on. In this respect, a Borda count election is the same as elections under other ranked voting systems, such as instant-runoff voting, the single transferable vote or Condorcet methods.
The number of points given to candidates for each ranking is determined by the number of candidates standing in the election. Thus, under the simplest form of the Borda count, if there are five candidates in an election then a candidate will receive five points each time they are ranked first, four for being ranked second, and so on, with a candidate receiving 1 point for being ranked last (or left unranked). In other words, where there are n candidates a candidate will receive n points for a first preference, n − 1 points for a second preference, n − 2 for a third, and so on, as shown in the following example:
Alternatively, votes can be counted by giving each candidate a number of points equal to the number of candidates ranked lower than them, so that a candidate receives n − 1 points for a first preference, n − 2 for a second, and so on, with zero points for being ranked last (or left unranked). In other words, a candidate ranked in ith place receives n−i points. For example, in a five-candidate election, the number of points assigned for the preferences expressed by a voter on a single ballot paper might be:
While the first of the above two formulae is used in the Slovenian parliamentary elections (as mentioned, for two out of 90 seats only), Nauru uses a sort of modified Borda count: the voter awards the first-ranked candidate with one point, while the second-ranked candidate receives half of a point, the third-ranked candidate receives one-third of a point, etc. (A similar system of weighting lower-preference votes was used in the 1925 Oklahoma primary electoral system.) Using the above example, in Nauru the point distribution among the five candidates would be this:
When all votes have been counted, and the points added up, the candidate with most points wins. The Borda count is a preferential voting system; because, from each voter, candidates receive a certain number of points, the Borda count is also classified as a positional voting system. Other positional methods include First-past-the-post voting, bloc voting, approval voting and limited voting.
Imagine that Tennessee is having an election on the location of its capital. The population of Tennessee is concentrated around its four major cities, which are spread throughout the state. For this example, suppose that the entire electorate lives in these four cities and that everyone wants to live as near to the capital as possible.
The candidates for the capital are:
- Memphis, the state's largest city, with 42% of the voters, but located far from the other cities
- Nashville, with 26% of the voters, near the center of the state
- Knoxville, with 17% of the voters
- Chattanooga, with 15% of the voters
The preferences of the voters would be divided like this:
|42% of voters
(close to Memphis)
|26% of voters
(close to Nashville)
|15% of voters
(close to Chattanooga)
|17% of voters
(close to Knoxville)
If the various rankings given to each candidate are added up they are as follows.
It can be seen above, for example, that Chattanooga is ranked first by 15% of voters, second by 43%, third by 42%, and last by no voters at all. To give points to each candidate for these rankings this example will use the formula, explained above, whereby a candidate receives one point for each time a candidate is ranked lower than them (or n – i points). Thus when Chattanooga's votes are added up the results are calculated as: (15×3) + (43×2) + (42×1) + (0×0) = 173. When the points of all candidates are added up, the results are as follows:
Result: The winner of the election is Nashville, as it has 194 points, which is more than any other candidate. Since this example was worked purely according to geographical distance, we would expect the "most acceptable" city to be the most central; a glance at the map above confirms that this is indeed the case.
Different outcome by tactical voting
If voters in both Knoxville and Chattanooga were to put Chattanooga first and Nashville last, the winner would be Chattanooga, a preferable outcome for voters in both those cities. These tactical votes (differing from above example) are indicated by this emphasis.
|42% of voters
|26% of voters
|15% of voters
|17% of voters
This lowers Nashville, "sacrifices" Knoxville, and raises Chattanooga for point totals of:
As noted above, there is more than one formula for assigning points for each ranking of a candidate. In Nauru, a distinctive formula is used based on increasingly small fractions of points. Under the system a candidate receives 1 point for a first preference, ½ a point for a second preference, ⅓ for third preference, and so on, then converted into decimal form. This method is far more favorable to candidates with many first preferences than the conventional Borda count; it also substantially reduces the impact of electors indicating late preferences at random because they have to complete the full ballot. The tables below compare the official layout of the aggregated decimal vote, used in the Nauruan electoral system (see Elections in Nauru), with an example of the single voting card, in raw form. Under the Nauruan system candidates 1 and 5 would be elected into parliament.
|Candidate||Vote Rank||Decimal Value|
In Kiribati, a variant is employed which uses a traditional Borda formula, but in which voters rank only four candidates, irrespective of how many are standing – an example of a truncated ballot.
A common way in which versions of the Borda count differ is the method for dealing with truncated ballots, that is, ballots on which a voter has not expressed a full list of preferences. There are several methods:
- The simplest method is to allow voters to rank as many or as few candidates as they wish, but simply give every unranked candidate the minimum number of points. For example, if there are 10 candidates, and a voter votes for candidate A first and candidate B second, leaving everyone else unranked, candidate A receives 9 or 10 points (depending on the formula used), candidate B receives 8 or 9 points, and all other candidates receive either zero or 1. However, this method allows strategic voting in the form of bullet voting: voting for only one candidate and leaving every other candidate unranked. This variant makes a bullet vote more effective than a fully ranked ballot.
- Voters can simply be obliged to rank all candidates. This is the method used in Nauru.
- Voters can be permitted to rank only a subset of the total number of candidates but obliged to rank all of those, with all unranked candidates being given zero points. This is the system used in Kiribati.
- In Slovenia, legislation does not mention the truncated ballots. Consequently, in the past, election bodies dealt with them differently from district to district and from election to election. In 2004 parliamentary election, for instance, in one district unranked candidates received one point while in the other district they received zero points. In 2008, unranked candidates in both districts that use Borda Count received one point.
Modified Borda count
In a modified Borda count (MBC), the number of points given for a voter's first and subsequent preferences is determined by the total number of options or candidates they have actually ranked, rather than the total number listed. This is to say, typically, on a ballot of n options/candidates, if a voter casts preferences for only m options (where n ≥ m ≥ 1), a first preference gets m points, a second preference m – 1 points, and so on. This means, in other words, that if there are five options/candidates and a voter ranks all five, then their first preference will receive five points; their second preference will receive 4 points, their next 3, and so on.
But he who votes for only one option/candidate exercises only 1 point; while she who casts two preferences will exercise 3 (2 plus 1) points.
In more general terms, an 'x'th preference, if cast, gets one more point than an 'x+1'th preference (whether cast or not). The MBC involves no special weighting: the difference is always just one point.
Now in a BC on five options, she who votes for all five options gives her first preference 5 points, her second preference 4 points, and so on; whereas he who votes for only one option still gives his first preference 5 points. In effect, therefore, a Borda count encourages the voter to submit only a first preference, in which case it degenerates into a plurality vote.
In a five-option MBC, by contrast, he who votes for only one option thus gives his favorite just 1 point; she who votes for two options gives her first preference 2 points (and her second preference 1 point). To ensure your favorite gets the maximum 5 points, therefore, you should cast all five preferences, then your favorite gets 5 points, your second preference gets 4 points, and so on. The MBC thus encourages voters to submit a fully marked ballot.
The system invented by Jean-Charles de Borda was intended for use in elections with a single winner, but it is also possible to conduct a Borda count with more than one winner, by recognizing the desired number of candidates with the most points as the winners. In other words, if there are two seats to be filled, then the two candidates with most points win; in a three-seat election, the three candidates with most points, and so on. In Nauru, which uses the multi-seat variant of the Borda count, parliamentary constituencies of two and four seats are used. The Quota Borda System is a system of proportional representation in multi-seat constituencies that uses the Borda count.
A number of voting systems other than the Borda count employ its system of assigning points for rankings. The Nanson and Baldwin methods are single-winner voting systems that combine elements of the Borda count and instant-runoff voting. Unlike the Borda count, Nanson and Baldwin are majoritarian and Condorcet methods.
As a consensual method
Unlike most other voting systems, in the Borda count it is possible for a candidate who is the first preference of an absolute majority of voters to fail to be elected; this is because the Borda count affords greater importance to a voter's lower preferences than most other systems, including other preferential methods such as instant-runoff voting and Condorcet's method. The Borda count tends to favor candidates supported by a broad consensus among voters, rather than the candidate who is necessarily the favorite of a majority; for this reason, some of its supporters see the Borda count as a method that promotes consensus and avoids the 'tyranny of the majority'. Advocates argue, for example, that where the majority candidate is strongly opposed by a large minority of the electorate, the Borda winner may have higher overall utility than the majority winner. On grounds such as these, the de Borda Institute of Northern Ireland advocates the use of a form of referendum based on the Borda count in divided societies such as Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Kashmir.
Because it will not necessarily elect a candidate who is the first preference of a majority of voters, the Borda count is said by scholars to fail the majority criterion. It is also theoretically possible for such a candidate to fail to be elected under approval voting.
Imagine an election in which 100 voters express the following preferences:
|#||51 voters||5 voters||23 voters||21 voters|
The Borda scores of the candidates are:
- Andrew: 153
- Catherine: 205
- Brian: 151
- David: 91
Under most single-winner voting systems – including 'first-past-the-post' (plurality), instant-runoff and Condorcet's method – Andrew would have been the winning candidate; however, under the Borda count, Catherine has the highest Borda score and so is elected instead. Although Andrew is supported by an unambiguous absolute majority of voters, he is the last preference of 49 voters, which suggests that he may be strongly opposed by almost one half of the electorate. Catherine, though she receives only a handful of first-preference votes, is at least the second choice of all voters, implying that she is broadly acceptable to all.
Potential for tactical manipulation
Like many other voting systems, the Borda count is vulnerable to tactical voting. In particular, it is highly vulnerable to the tactics of compromising and burying. Compromising: voters can benefit by insincerely raising the position of their second choice candidate over their first choice candidate, in order to help the second choice candidate to beat a candidate they like even less. Burying: voters can help a more-preferred candidate by insincerely lowering the position of a less-preferred candidate on their ballot.
An effective tactic is to combine these two strategies. For example, if there are two candidates whom a voter considers to be the most likely to win, the voter can maximise his impact on the contest between these front runners by ranking the candidate whom he likes more in first place, and ranking the candidate whom he likes less in last place. If neither front runner is his sincere first or last choice, the voter is employing both the compromising and burying tactics at once; if many voters employ such strategies, then the result will no longer reflect the sincere preferences of the electorate.
Using the above example based on choosing the capital of Tennessee, if polls suggest a toss-up between Nashville and Chattanooga, citizens of Knoxville might change their ranking to
- Chattanooga (compromising their sincere first choice, Knoxville)
- Memphis (burying their sincere third choice, Nashville)
If many Knoxville voters voted in this way, it would result in the election of Chattanooga. Citizens of Chattanooga could also increase the likelihood of the election of their city by voting tactically, but would require the assistance of some tactical voters from Knoxville to be successful.
In response to the issue of strategic manipulation in the Borda count, M. de Borda said, "My scheme is intended for only honest men". The academic Donald G. Saari has created a mathematical framework for evaluating positional methods in which he claims to show that the Borda count has fewer opportunities for tactical voting than other positional methods such as plurality voting.
The Borda count is highly vulnerable to a form of strategic nomination called teaming or cloning. (See the article on the Independence of Clone Alternatives criterion.) This means that when more candidates run with similar ideologies, the probability of one of those candidates winning increases. Therefore, under the Borda count, it is to a faction's advantage to run as many candidates in that faction as they can. For example, even in a single-seat election, it would be to the advantage of a political party to stand as many candidates as possible in an election. In this respect, the Borda count differs from many other single-winner systems, such as the 'first past the post' plurality system, in which a political faction is disadvantaged by running too many candidates. Under systems such as plurality, 'splitting' a party's vote in this way can lead to the spoiler effect, which harms the chances of any of a faction's candidates being elected.
In 1980, William Gehrlein and Peter Fishburn compared the Borda count to other positional methods, such as plurality and approval voting. They investigated the likelihood of a positional method choosing the same candidate when the set of candidates was modified by eliminating one losing candidate from a three-candidate election, and two losing candidates from a four-candidate election. They found that the Borda count was the positional rule which maximises the probability of electing the same candidate after this modification of the choice set.
Evaluation by criteria
Scholars of electoral systems often compare them using mathematically defined voting system criteria. From among these:
- The Borda count satisfies the monotonicity criterion, the consistency criterion, the participation criterion, the resolvability criterion, the plurality criterion (trivially), reversal symmetry, and the Condorcet loser criterion
- The Borda count does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion, the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, the independence of clones criterion, the later-no-harm criterion, or the majority criterion.
The variant of the Borda count that permits bullet voting satisfies the plurality criterion, but the 'modified Borda count' does not. Variants that oblige voters to rank only a certain specified number of candidates satisfy the same criteria as the conventional Borda count.
The Borda count is used for certain political elections in at least three countries, Slovenia and the tiny Micronesian nations of Kiribati and Nauru. In Slovenia, the Borda count is used to elect two of the ninety members of the National Assembly: one member represents a constituency of ethnic Italians, the other a constituency of the Hungarian minority. As noted above, members of the Parliament of Nauru are elected based on a variant of the Borda count that involves two departures from the normal practice: (1) multi-seat constituencies, of either two or four seats, and (2) a point-allocation formula that involves increasingly small fractions of points for each ranking, rather than whole points. In Kiribati, the president (or Beretitenti) is elected by the plurality system, but a variant of the Borda count is used to select either three or four candidates to stand in the election. The constituency consists of members of the legislature (Maneaba). Voters in the legislature rank only four candidates, with all other candidates receiving zero points. Since at least 1991, tactical voting has been an important feature of the nominating process.
The Republic of Nauru became independent from Australia in 1968. Before independence, and for three years afterwards, Nauru used instant-runoff voting, importing the system from Australia, but since 1971, a variant of the Borda count has been used.
The Borda count has been used for non-governmental purposes at certain peace conferences in Northern Ireland, where it has been used to help achieve consensus between participants including members of Sinn Féin, the Ulster Unionists, and the political wing of the UDA.
The Borda count is used in elections by some educational institutions in the United States.
- University of Michigan
- Michigan Student Assembly
- Student Government of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts
- University of Missouri: officers of the Graduate-Professional Council
- University of California Los Angeles: officers of the Graduate Student Association
- Harvard University: officers of the Civil Liberties Union
- Southern Illinois University at Carbondale: officers of the Faculty Senate,
- Arizona State University: officers of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics assembly.
- Wheaton College, Massachusetts: faculty members of committees.
- College of William and Mary: members of the faculty personnel committee of the School of Business Administration (tie-breaker).
The Borda count is used in elections by some professional and technical societies.
- International Society for Cryobiology: Board of Governors.
- Tempo sustainable design network: management committee.
- U.S. Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative: members of Research Area Committees.
- X.Org Foundation: Board of Directors.
The OpenGL Architecture Review Board uses the Borda count as one of the feature-selection methods.
The Borda count is used to determine winners for Toastmasters International speech contests. Judges offer a ranking of their top three speakers, awarding them three points, two points, and one point, respectively. All unranked candidates receive zero points.
The modified Borda count is used to elect the President for the United States member committee of AIESEC.
The Borda count, and points-based systems similar to it, are often used to determine awards in competitions.
The Borda count is a popular method for granting sports awards in the United States. Uses include:
- MLB Most Valuable Player Award (baseball)
- Heisman Trophy (college football)
- Ranking of NCAA college teams
The Eurovision Song Contest uses a positional voting method similar to the Borda count, with a different distribution of points: only the top ten entries are considered in each ballot, the favorite entry receiving 12 points, the second-placed entry receiving 10 points, and the other eight entries getting points from 8 to 1. Although designed to favor a clear winner, it has produced very close races and even a tie.
The People's Remix Competition uses a Borda variant where each voter ranks only the top three contestants.
The Borda count is used for wine trophy judging by the Australian Society of Viticulture and Oenology, and by the RoboCup autonomous robot soccer competition at the Center for Computing Technologies, in the University of Bremen in Germany.
The Finnish Associations Act lists three different modifications of the Borda count for holding a proportional election. All the modifications use fractions, as in Nauru. A Finnish association may choose to use other methods of election, as well.
Application of the term
||This section possibly contains original research. (March 2011)|
It is debatable whether or not some of the systems explained above are accurately described as "variants" of the Borda count; the scores candidates receive in some of those systems are significantly different from those they would receive using a strict Borda count.
An example is the case of the voting to determine the winner of the Heisman Trophy: judges vote 3,2,1 for their top three choices – the vote weights are thus (3,2,1,0,0,0, ..., 0,0,0). By contrast, the Borda vote weights in, say, a fifty-candidate election would be (49,48,47, ..., 2,1,0), which is markedly different. Heisman-style voting, when there are more than a handful of candidates, is thus more similar to plurality voting, which has weights (1,0,0,0, ..., 0,0,0), than it is to Borda.
A form of the Borda count was one of the voting methods employed in the Roman Senate beginning around the year 105. However, in its modern, mathematical form, the system is thought to have been discovered independently at least three times:
- Ramon Llull (1232–1315) described the Borda count and Condorcet criterion (Llull winner) in his manuscripts Ars notandi, Ars eleccionis, and Alia ars eleccionis, which were lost until 2001.
- Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) in 1433 unsuccessfully suggested the method for electing the Holy Roman Emperor.
- Jean-Charles de Borda devised the system in June 1770, as a fair way to elect members to the French Academy of Sciences, and first published his method in 1781 as Mémoire sur les élections au scrutin in the Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, Paris. The method was used by the Academy from 1784 until being quashed by Napoleon in 1800.
- http://www.minelres.lv/NationalLegislation/Slovenia/Slovenia_ElecParl_excerpts_English.htm "Slovenia's electoral law"
- "Results of the General Election held on 19th June 2010". Parliament of Nauru. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- Reilly, Benjamin. "Social Choice in the South Seas: Electoral Innovation and the Borda Count in the Pacific Island Countries" (PDF).
- Voting Systems
- Emerson, Peter (2007) Designing an All-Inclusive Democracy. Springer Verlag,Part 1, pages 15-38 "Collective Decision-making: The Modified Borda Count, MBC" ISBN 978-3-540-33163-6 (Print) 978-3-540-33164-3 (Online)
- Heisman.com - Heisman Trophy
- "Finnish Associations Act". National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
- Emerson, Peter (2007). Designing an All-Inclusive Democracy - Consensual Voting Procedures for use in Parliaments, Councils and Committees. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-540-33163-6. (Print) 978-3-540-33164-3 (online)
- Reilly, Benjamin (2002). "Social Choice in the South Seas: Electoral Innovation and the Borda Count in the Pacific Island Countries". International Political Science Review 23 (4): 355–372. doi:10.1177/0192512102023004002.
- Saari, Donald G. (2000). "Mathematical Structure of Voting Paradoxes: II. Positional Voting". Journal of Economic Theory 15 (1). SSRN 195769.
- Saari, Donald G. (2001). Chaotic Elections!. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society. ISBN 0-8218-2847-9. Describes various voting systems using a mathematical model, and supports the use of the Borda count.
- Toplak, Jurij (2006). "The parliamentary election in Slovenia, October 2004". Electoral Studies 25 (4): 825–831. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2005.12.006.
- Adelsman, Rony M.; Whinston, Andrew B. (1977). "Sophisticated Voting with Information for Two Voting Functions". Journal of Economic Theory 15 (15): 145–159. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(77)90073-4.
- The de Borda Institute, Northern Ireland
- Complexity of Control of Borda Count Elections: thesis by Nathan F. Russell
- Scoring Rules on Dichotomous Preferences: article by Marc Vorsatz, mathematically comparing the Borda count to approval voting under specific conditions.
- A program to implement the Condorcet and Borda rules in a small-n election: article by Iain McLean and Neil Shephard.
- (French) Élections au scrutin: Borda's original French text (1781) in a high definition PDF file. |
From the invite: "It take a village to delve into the surreal world of Haruki Murakami. Every Monday starting on February 11, join us at KAZ Sushi Bistro as we take on various Japanese literary works, starting with Murakami's recent mind-bender, 1Q84. Japanese Reading Salon meetings will take place during our new Happiest Hour, with food and drink specials of only $4. Note: Lisa Markuson, who will be hosting the salon, does not have any special knowledge of Japanese literature, though she does know a fair amount about sake. #LetsBeFrank"
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Monatsarchive: Februar 2011
Die Stellungnahme des Plenums der Ökonomen wird in der FTD heftig kritisiert. Ich habe – mit 7 anderen Kollegen – mit “Nein” gestimmt. Dies war eine namentliche Abstimmung ohne Begründungszwang. Wegen des Medienechos lege ich kurz die Aspekte dar, die zu meiner Ablehnung führten.
Of the many effects of the global crisis, one that has received comparatively little attention is the effect on inequality. This column provides a theoretical framework for understanding the connection between inequality, leverage and financial crises. It shows how rising inequality in a climate of rising consumption can lead the poorer households to increase their leverage, making them especially vulnerable during crises.
The US has experienced two major economic crises during the last century – 1929 and 2008. There is an ongoing debate as to whether both crises share similar origins and features (Eichengreen and O’Rourke 2010). Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) provide and even broader comparison.
One issue that has not attracted much attention is the impact of the crises on inequality. In recent work (Kumhof and Ranciere 2010) we focus on two remarkable similarities between the two pre-crisis eras. Both were characterised by a sharp increase in income inequality, and by a similarly sharp increase in household debt leverage. We also propose a theoretical explanation for the linkage between income inequality, high and growing debt leverage, financial fragility, and ultimately financial crises.
Diverging incomes, rising debt
Figure 1 plots the evolution of the share of total income commanded by the top 5% of households (ranked by income) against household debt to GNP or GDP ratios in the two decades preceding 1929 and 2008. The income share of the top 5% increased from 24% in 1920 to 34% in 1928, and from 22% in 1983 to 34% in 2007. During the same two periods, the ratio of household debt to GNP or to GDP increased dramatically. It almost doubled between 1920 and 1932, and also between 1983 and 2008, when it reached much higher levels than in 1932.
Figure 1. Income Inequality and Household Leverage
In standard models, a persistent increase in the dispersion of income should be associated with a similar increase in the dispersion of consumption levels. However the data show that the increase in the dispersion of consumption levels over the last 25 years has been much more moderate. This implies that poor and middle-class households must have become more indebted, while rich households became less indebted.
Figure 2 plots the evolution of debt to income ratios for different income groups. In 1983, the top 5% exhibited a debt to income ratio of 80% and the bottom 95% a ratio of 60%. Twenty five years later, the situation is dramatically reversed with a ratio of 65% for the top 5% and of 140% for the bottom 95%.
Figure 2. Debt to Income Ratios
Borrowing and higher debt leverage appears to have helped the poor and the middle-class to cope with the erosion of their relative income position by borrowing to maintain higher living standards. Meanwhile, the rich accumulated more and more assets and in particular invested in assets backed by loans to the poor and the middle class. The consequence of having a lower increase in consumption inequality compared to income inequality has therefore been a higher wealth inequality.
The increase in debt leverage of the bottom group of the distribution has implications for both the size of the US financial industry and its vulnerability to financial crises. The increase in the reliance on debt for the bottom group and the increase in wealth of the top group generated a higher demand for financial intermediation. Between 1981 and 2008, the US financial sector grew rapidly, with the ratio of private credit to GDP more than doubling from 90% to 210%.
The share of the financial industry in GDP doubled as well, from 4% to 8%. As borrowers’ debt leverage increases, the economy becomes gradually more vulnerable to the risk of financial crises. When a crisis eventually materialised in the fall of 2008, it was accompanied by a generalised wave of defaults, with 10% of mortgage loans becoming delinquent, and a sharp output contraction.
The link between inequality, debt, and crises
The link between income inequality, household debt leverage, and crises has recently also been discussed in the books of Rajan (2010) and Reich (2010). But these authors do not make a formal case to support their argument. This matters because there is a debate as to whether high debt levels were primarily driven by the demand for credit, as in Rajan (2010), or by the supply of credit, as in Levitin and Wachter (2010).
In our work, a general equilibrium model allows us to reconcile both views, by way of a shock that simultaneously increases the supply and demand of credit. Our model has several novel features that are motivated by the stylised facts above.
- First, households are divided into a top 5% income group that derives all of its income from returns on its ownership of the economy’s capital stock and from interest on loans, while the remaining 95% earn income through wage labour. We refer to these groups as investors and workers.
- Second, consumption preferences are characterised by a subsistence consumption level that makes households resist very large drops in consumption.
- Third, wages are determined by a bilateral bargaining process between investors and workers that is subject to persistent shocks.
- Fourth, following the “capitalist spirit” specification of Carroll (2000), investors have preferences not just over consumption, but also over the ownership of physical capital and financial assets.1 This implies that investors will allocate any increase in income gained at the expense of workers to a combination of higher consumption, higher physical investment, and higher financial investment. The latter consists of increased loans back to workers, thereby allowing the latter to continue to maintain sufficient consumption levels to support the economy’s production.
The baseline results are shown in Figure 3. The horizontal axis represents time, with the shock hitting in year 1 and the final period shown being year 50. A slow-reversing shock to the distribution of incomes in favour of investors generates a gradual increase of the debt-to-income ratio of the bottom group.
In our closed economy set-up, the increase in leverage of the bottom 95% is made possible by the re-lending of the increased disposable incomes of the top 5% to the bottom 95%, resulting in consumption inequality increasing significantly less than income inequality. Saving and borrowing patterns of both groups create an increased need for financial services and intermediation. As a consequence the size of the financial sector increases. The rise of poor and middle income household debt leverage generates financial fragility and a higher probability of financial crises. With workers’ bargaining power, and therefore their ability to service and repay loans, only recovering very gradually, the increase in loans and therefore in crisis risk is extremely persistent.
In our model, a crisis materialises in period 30. It is characterised by large-scale household debt defaults on 10% of the existing loan stock, accompanied by an abrupt output contraction as in the 2007-2008 US financial crisis, which is modelled as a destruction of physical capital.
The crisis barely improves workers’ situation however. While their loans drop by 10% due to default, their wage also drops significantly due to the collapse of the real economy, and furthermore the real interest rate on the remaining debt shoots up to raise debt servicing costs. As a result their leverage ratio barely moves, and it in fact increases further later on so that by year 50 it is above its pre-crisis level, with a very slow reduction thereafter.
A number of factors could make the increase in leverage even worse.
- First, if capital owners allocate most of their additional income to consumption and financial investment rather than to productive investment, leverage increases much more because workers’ income does not benefit from a higher capital stock.
- Second, if the rate at which workers’ bargaining power recovers is even slower than in the baseline, then even a financial crisis with substantial loan defaults of 10% of all outstanding loans provides little relief, with leverage continuing to increase for decades post-crisis, and making repeated financial crises very likely.
- Third, if the subsistence level of consumption is significantly higher than in the baseline, households borrow more aggressively to avoid what they perceive as a catastrophic drop in consumption.
A chance of success
There are, however, two possibilities for a successful deleveraging of households.
- The first is an orderly debt reduction that is not accompanied by a large real crisis. This can be shown to reduce leverage much more powerfully than in the baseline because debt reduction is not accompanied by a significant income reduction. But, for an unchanged pattern of bargaining power, a trend towards higher leverage resumes after the debt reduction, and only reverses much later.
- The second possibility, which is illustrated in Figure 4, is a restoration of workers’ bargaining power and therefore income that allows them to work their way out of debt over time. Leverage drops immediately, but due to a higher income level rather than a reduced loan stock. More importantly, and unlike under a debt reduction, leverage goes onto a declining path that immediately starts to reduce the probability of a further crisis.
This line of research could be extended to an open economy setting. An increase in lending by high income households would then extend not just to domestic poor and middle income households, but also to foreign households. The counterpart of this capital-account surplus in the foreign country would of course be a current-account deficit. In other words, this approach provides a potential mechanism to explain global current-account imbalances triggered by increasing income inequality in surplus countries.
Carroll, CD (2000), “Why Do the Rich Save So Much?”, in Joel B Slemrod (ed.), Does Atlas Shrug? The Economic Consequences of Taxing the Rich, Harvard University Press.
Dynan, K, J Skinner, and S Zeldes (2004), “Do the Rich Save More?“, Journal of Political Economy, 112(2):397-444.
Eichengreen, Barry and Kevin O’Rourke (2010), “A tale of two depressions: What do the new data tell us?”, VoxEU.org, 8 March.
Kumhof, M and R Ranciere (2010), “Inequality, Leverage and Crises”, IMF Working Paper 10/268.
Levitin, AJ and SM Wachter (2010), “Explaining the Housing Bubble”, University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper 10-15.
Piketty, T (2010), “On the Long-Run Evolution of Inheritance: France 1820-2050″, Working Paper, Paris School of Economics.
Rajan, R (2010), Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, Princeton University Press.
Reich, R (2010), Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, New York: Random House.
Reinhart, Carmen and Kevin Rogoff (2009), This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton University Press.
Reiter, M. (2004), “Do the Rich Save too Much? How to Explain the Top Tail of the Wealth Distribution”, Working Paper, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
1 A large literature indicates that such a wealth accumulation motive is necessary to rationalise the saving behaviour of the richest households (Dynan et al. 2004, Piketty 2010, Reiter 2004). |
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- the Brahmins: priests, teachers and preachers.
- the Kshatriyas: kings, governors, warriors and soldiers.
- the Vaishyas: cattle herders, agriculturists, businessmen, artisans and merchants.
- the Shudras: labourers and service providers.
This quadruple division is the ancient division of society into "principal castes"; it is not to be confused with the much finer caste system in India based on occupation as it emerged in the medieval period.
The varna division is alluded to in the late Rigvedic Purusha Sukta. It has been theorised to reflect a much more ancient tripartite society, ultimately cognate with the western "estates of the realm" (viz. division into a priestly class, a warrior class, and a class of commoners or free farmers, apart from a population of unfree serfs excluded from society proper).
The relationship between occupation, varna, and social ordering in the Rig Vedic period was complex. In the varna ordering of society, notions of purity and pollution were central. The phenomenon of the upper classes living on the labour of tribesmen was just emerging, and was not ritualized or ideologically ratified until the Purusha Sukta. R.S. Sharma states that "the Rig Vedic society was neither organized on the basis of social division of labour nor on that of differences in wealth... [it] was primarily organised on the basis of kin, tribe and lineage."
The varna system became rigid in the later Vedic period. It was detailed in post-Vedic Brahmanism (in the Manusmṛti, the oldest of the Dharmashastras, compiled during the time of the Kushan Empire).
Etymology and origins
Varna is a Sanskrit term varṇa (वर्ण). It is derived from the root vṛ, meaning "to cover, to envelop" (compare vṛtra). The meaning of the word as used in the Rigveda has the literal meaning "outward appearance, exterior, form, figure, shape, colour" besides the figurative "colour, race, kind, sort, character, quality, property". In the Rigveda, the term can mean "class of men, tribe, order, caste", especially expressing the contrast between the āryas and dāsas.
The earliest application to the formal division into four social classes (without using the term varna) appears in the late Rigvedic Purusha Sukta (RV 10.90.11–12), which has the Brahman, Rajanya (instead of Kshatriya), Vaishya and Shudra classes emerging from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of the primordial giant, Purusha, respectively:
- 11. When they divided Purusa how many portions did they make?
- What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet?
- 12. The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made.
- His thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Sudra was produced. (trans. Ralph T.H. Griffith)
In the post-Vedic period, the division is described explicitly and in great detail in the Dharmashastra literature, later also in the Puranas and other texts. The Manusmriti is the oldest of the Dharmashastra texts, reflecting the laws and society of Gupta period India.
Rigvedic evidence of such a quadruple division of society has been compared to similar systems, especially with a view to reconstructing hypothetical Proto-Indo-European society. Such comparison is at the basis of the trifunctional hypothesis presented by Georges Dumézil. Dumézil postulates a basic division of society into a priesthood (Brahmins), warrior class or nobility (Kshatriyas) and commoners (Vaishyas), augmented by a class of unfree serfs (Shudras).
The varna idea evolved; since the Vedic corpus constitute the earliest literary source, it came to be seen as the origin of caste society. In this Brahmanical view of caste, the varnas were created on a particular occasion and have remained virtually unchanged. In the varna ordering of society notions of purity and pollution were central and activities were worked out in this context. Varna divides the society into four groups ordered in a hierarchy, the fifth being chandala (untouchable) and therefore beyond the pale.
The relationship between occupation, varna, and social ordering in the Rig Vedic period is complex. The phenomenon of the upper classes living on the labour of tribesmen was just emerging, and was not ritualized or ideologically ratified until the Purusha Sukta. R.S. Sharma states that "the Rig Vedic society was neither organized on the basis of social division of labour nor on that of differences in wealth... [it] was primarily organised on the basis of kin, tribe and lineage." The varna system became rigid in the later Vedic period.
Manusmriti assigns cattle rearing as Vaishya occupation, however there are sources in available literature that Kshatriyas also owned and reared the cattle and cattle-wealth was mainstay of their households. The emperors of Kosala and the prince of Kasi are some of many examples.
The Tantric movement that developed as a tradition distinct from orthodox Hinduism between the 8th and 11th centuries CE also relaxed many societal strictures regarding class and community distinction. However it would be an over generalization to say that the Tantrics did away with all social restrictions, as N. N. Bhattacharyya explains:
For example, Tantra according to its very nature has nothing to do with the [class] system but in the later Tantras [class] elements are pronounced. This is because although many of our known Tantric teachers were non-Brāhmaṇas, rather belonging to the lower ranks of society, almost all of the known authors of the Tantric treatises were Brāhmaṇas."
Varna and jāti
The terms varna (theoretical classification based on occupation) and jāti (caste) are two distinct concepts: while varna is the idealised four-part division envisaged by the above described Twice-Borns, jāti (community) refers to the thousands of actual endogamous groups prevalent across the subcontinent. A jati may be divided into exogamous groups based on same gotras. The classical authors scarcely speak of anything other than the varnas; even Indologists sometimes confuse the two.
In India and Nepal the sub-communities within a varna are called "jaat" or "jati". Traditionally, individuals marry only within their jati. People are born into a jati and normally it cannot be changed.
Critics point that the effect of communities (jatis) inheriting varna was to bind certain communities to sources of influence, power and economy while locking out others and thus create more affluence for jatis in higher classes and severe poverty for jatis in lower classes and the outcaste Dalit. In the last 150 years Indian movements arose to throw off the economic and political yoke of an inherited class system that emerged over time, and replace it with what they believed to be true Varnashrama dharma as described in the Vedas.
- Forward Castes
- Backward Class
- Four occupations – fourfold Confucian division
- Hindu reform movements
- Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar
- Flood, Gavin. "Hinduism - Hindu concepts". BBC Online. Retrieved 6 November 2014.
- Walter Hazen, (2003) Inside Hinduisum (Milliken Publishing company, St.Louis, Missouri, U.S.A) p.4
- Arun Kumar (2002). Encyclopaedia of Teaching of Agriculture. Anmol Publications PVT. LTD. pp. 411–. ISBN 978-81-261-1316-3. Retrieved 4 July 2011.
- Mark Juergensmeyer, (2006) The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions (Oxford Handbooks in Religion and Theology), p. 54
- Thapar, Romila (2004). Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. University of California Press. p. 63. ISBN 9780520242258.
- Ram Sharan Sharma (1983). Material culture and social formations in ancient India. Macmillan. p. 51.
- Sharma, Ram Sharan (1990). Śūdras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order Down to Circa A.D. 600. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. p. 10.
- Monier-Williams, Monier (2005) . A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages (Reprinted ed.). Motilal Banarsidass. p. 924. ISBN 9788120831056.
- Basham, Arthur Llewellyn (1989). The Origin and Development of Classical Hinduism (Reprinted ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 25. ISBN 9780195073492.
- Department of Global and International Studies University of California Mark Juergensmeyer Professor of Sociology and Director, Santa Barbara (12 October 2006). The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 27–. ISBN 978-0-19-972761-2. Retrieved 14 July 2013.
- Flood, Gavin, "The Śaiva Traditions" in: Flood (2005; paperback edition of Flood 2003) p.208
- N. N. Bhattacharyya. History of the Tantric Religion, p. 44-5.
- Dumont, Louis (1980), Homo hierarchicus: the caste system and its implications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 66–67, ISBN 0-226-16963-4
- Ambedkar, B.R. (1946) Who were the Shudras?
- Alain Danielou (1976). Les Quatre Sens de la Vie, Paris
- Sri Aurobindo (1970), The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust), ISBN 81-7058-281-4 (hardcover), ISBN 81-7058-014-5 (paperback)
- Ravi Batra, The Downfall of Communism and Communism: a New Study of History, Macmillan, New York, NY, USA, 1978
- Sohail Inayatullah, Understanding P. R. Sarkar: The Indian Episteme, Macrohistory and Transformative Knowledge, Brill Academic Publishers, 2002, ISBN 90-04-12842-5.
- Elst, Koenraad Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate. 1999. ISBN 81-86471-77-4
- Kane, Pandurang Vaman: History of Dharmasastra: (ancient and mediaeval, religious and civil law)—Poona : Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1962–1975
- "Brahmanotpatti-martanda" Harikrishna Shastri, (Sanskrit), 1871
- Jati Bhaskar, Jwalaprasd Mishra, (Hindi), published by Khemaraj Shrikrishnadas,1914.
- G. S. Ghurye (1961). Caste, Class and Occupation. Popular Book Depot, Bombay.
- G. S. Ghurye (1969). Caste and Race in India, Popular Prakashan, Mumbai 1969 (1932)
- Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar (1967) Human Society-2, Ananda Marga Publications, Anandanagar, P.O. Baglata,Dist. Purulia, West Bengal, India.
- Ghanshyam Shah, Caste and Democratic Politics in India, 2004
- Welzer, Albrecht. 1994. "Credo, Quia Occidentale: A Note on Sanskrit varna and its Misinterpretation in Literature on Mamamsa and Vyakarana". In: Studies in Mamamsa: Dr Mandan Mishra Felicitation Volume edited by R.C. Dwivedi. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
- Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, by Susan Bayly and Gordon Johnson.
- Lal, Vinay (2005), Introducing Hinduism, New York: Totem Books, pp. 132–33, ISBN 978-1-84046-626-3
|Look up varna in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.| |
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Over Basho: Who Japan Is Reading, and Why
Dialogue Between Jay McInerney and Haruki
Japanese writers are very aware of what we're doing on this side of the Pacific and very well informed about American fiction, about American culture," says the novelist Jay McInerney. "Yet we're terribly ignorant in this country of Japanese fiction, Japanese culture. It is, I think, far more accessible than we might imagine."
In an effort to correct this cultural trade imbalance, PEN, the writers' organization, brought Mr. McInerney together in New York with Haruki Murakami, a best-selling novelist in Japan, who is a visiting fellow in East Asian studies at Princeton University. Following are excerpts of the conversation between Mr. McInerney, whose novel Ransom is set in Japan, and Mr. Murakami, two of whose novels (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and A Wild Sheep Chase ) are available in English translations. Mr. McInerney and Mr. Murakami later expanded their observations for the Book Review.
Jay McInerney: I happened to pass the marquee of the play "Why I Hate Hamlet," which put me on a train of associations having to do with the anxiety of influence and patricide. And it made me think of the invitation we sent out that stated that Haruki Murakami was heir to Yukio Mishima. It's a notion that I've seen advanced before in American reviews and articles about Murakami's work, a notion that nicely represents, to put the mildest spin that I can on it, a relative innocence about recent developments in Japanese fiction.
Haruki Murakami resembles Mishima mainly by virtue of being Japanese, and after that the affinities get pretty tenuous. Mishima was on e of literature's great romantics, a tragedian with a heroic sensibility, an intellectual, an esthete, a man steeped in Western letters who toward the end of his life became a militant Japanese nationalist.
Even when he's writing about relatively fantastic subjects, like spirit possession in sheep, Haruki Murakami's sensibility is that, I think, of a skeptical realist. His narrator is inevitably Everyman, contemporary Tokyo edition, a kind of thirtyish urban male in a low-key, white-collar job, like advertising or public relations, a somewhat passive fellow who doesn't expect much out of life and who takes what comes to him with jaded equanimity.
His motto might be "No big deal" -- Like most Japanese, the typical Murakami protagonist believes himself to be a man of the middle, a product of, to quote from Mr. Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood, "a regular workaday family, not especially rich, not especially poor. A real run-of-the-mill house, small yard, Toyota Corolla."
Remarkable things do tend to befall these antiheroes of Mr. Murakami's fiction. Their girlfriends committee suicide. Their friends turn into sheep. Their favorite elephants disappear into think air. But they will be damned if they're going to make a big deal out of it.
Like the narrators of Raymond Carver's short stories -- and I should mention that Murakami is Raymond Carver's translator in Japan -- they are unremarkable men, less driven by the ethic to succeed and less enmeshed in the powerful webs of family and business and community than most Japanese. And in this, I suspect, may lie some of the tremendous power of Murakami's novels for Japanese readers. If I'm not mistaken, Norwegian Wood has sold in the neighborhood of four million copies in Japan.
Haruki Murakami: Actually, two million copies is the correct figure. Since readers in Japan dislike thick books, what would be sold in America as one volume is divided into two volumes when sold in Japan. So if you think of Part One and Part Two as one volume, then only two million copies have been sold. The reason Japanese readers dislike thick books is that they're heavy and hard to read on commuter trains. Also in Japan it generally takes three years for a book to come out in paperback after it is released in hard cover, so many people end up having to read the hard-cover edition. Well, even two million is an astounding number, at least to me.
McInerney: So I take it back. Actually Mr. Murakami is really not that popular, but I'm going to proceed as if he were.
Mr. Murakami's protagonists stand just a little apart and aside in a society that commands full participation of its members. Unlike the student radicals so visible on Japanese campuses, they don't want to destroy the system; they don't want to turn it upside down, they just want to drift along on the fringe of society. This refusal to join the group must be tremendously appealing to the contemporary Japanese reader. Which is not to say that his work is not the same way appealing to us all, but it clearly represents a break from the subject matter of Murakami's immediate predecessors, from, for instance, the bored esthetes of Yasunari Kawabata, the stiff aristocrats of Junichiro Tanizaki or the tortured young men of Mishima.
When you began your career as a writer, did you feel that you were in conscious revolt against older Japanese writers like Mishima? Certainly we're all familiar with the anxiety of influence and the notion of patricide among younger writers; the father must be slain in order to clear the ground for the son. Murakami:In Japan, the three main writers of the generation preceding mine are Mishima, Kobo Abe and Kenzaburo Oe. Among them I would have to say I like Abe best and Mishima least. I've hardly read Mishima at all so I don't think there is a resemblance between me and Mishima.
I am not all that conscious of rebelling against this preceding generation of writers or against writers like Kawabata and Tanizaki. If anything, I think it would be more accurate to say that what I have been doing is unrelated to these writers. I mean, until I began writing novels at the age of 29, I had never read Japanese with any real interest.
In the 1960's, when I was a teen-ager in Kobe, I found that I didn't like Japanese novelists much, so I made up mind not to read them. Since both my parents were teachers of Japanese literature you could say I was a rebel in that sense.
American culture was so vibrant back then, and I was very influenced by its music, television shows, cars, clothes, everything. That doesn't mean that the Japanese worshipped America, it means that we just love that culture. It was so shiny and bright that sometimes it seemed like a fantasy world. We loved that fantasy world. In those days, only America could afford such fantasies, I was 13 or 14, an only child. Alone in my room, I would listen to American jazz and rock-and-roll, watch American television shows and read American novels.
Kobe is a big port city with many used book shops, and I could find American paperbacks very cheaply and very easily. It was like opening a treasure chest. I mostly read hard-boiled detective stories or science fiction -- Raymond Chandler or Ed McBain or Mickey Spillaine. Later I found Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote. They were all so different from Japanese writers. They provided a small window in the wall of my room through which I could look out onto a foreign landscape, a fantasy world.
I think my experience must be like that of the Argentine writer Manuel Puig, who was brought up in an atmosphere of adulation for Hollywood movies and who then went on to write novels. When I read his novels I can see that he has felt the same things I have. McInerney: I think that there are general characteristics that define a younger generation of Japanese writers. I'm thinking of the writer who were born after the war, really. And I'm thinking of their international frame of reference. I feel an affinity with their writing that I also feel for writers from other countries, like Martin Amis in England, like Andrea De Carlo in Italy. It seems to me that we have a fairly common frame of reference, this reservoir of international pop culture -- Lionel Trilling would say low culture -- that for better or worse seems to be providing touchstones for Italian and Swedish and Japanese and American writers.
It seems to me that you're quite un-self-conscious about Western culture, high culture and low culture, in a way that your predecessors are not. In Tanizaki, for instance, you can hear the bass drums in the background whenever someone is wearing Western clothes. It's fraught with ominous implications of cultural pollution and miscegenation. But in your work, and in the work of other writers of your generation -- for instance, Banana Yoshimoto (I think just the name should be suggestive for those of you who don't her work), as well as, say Kyoji Kobayashi or Ryu Murakami -- a reference to, say, Rossini or the Beatles is really just background. You all seem to draw to some extent on the lingua franca of world pop culture, as well as European high culture -- perhaps even more conspicuously than younger American writers. I think there's still a certain self-consciousness that serious American writers face in deciding how topical to be about movies, television, rock-and-roll, influences that pervade our entire culture but that still seem a little anomalous to those who see themselves as the guardians of high culture.
I don't see this self-consciousness in the younger generation of Japanese writers who stud their fiction with references to Western culture. I wonder if this is in part due, paradoxically, to the island sense of isolation and difference that the Japanese have always felt. I sense a poignant urge to roll over Buson and Basho, two of Japan's greatest poets, and to crash through the cultural gap that separates Japanese to some extent from the rest of the world with the weapons that are most ready to hand. It seems that Madison Avenue and Hollywood and rock-and-roll have provided a kind of reservoir of cultural reference, which provides Japanese writers with a way to assert the scope of their concerns, to assert their presence on the international scene.
In "Norwegian Wood," for instance, I find besides the Beatles -- the title, of course -- references to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Salinger and Chandler and half a dozen other Western writers, and I found one Japanese cultural reference in the whole book, which was Osamu Dazai, something of a rebel himself.
Murakami: Yes, that's quite true. And in that sense there probably is a non-nationality about it, but it's not as though I am after a sense of non-nationality. I that were really what I was after, I think maybe I would have set my novels in America. It would be easy if I were really to have them take place in New York or San Francisco. You might call it the Japanese nature that remains only after you have thrown out, one after another, all those parts that are altogether too "Japanese." That is what I really want to express.
I think my novels will tend more and more in that direction from now on, in that sense, but in a very different sense from Mishima. I am after something Japanese. Why? Because, after all, I am a Japanese author writing fiction in Japanese. Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside. I think that is what will increasingly define my identity as a writer. By the way, do you know there is no equivalent in Japanese for the English word "identity"? That's why when we want to talk about identity, we have to use the English word.
When I was a teen-ager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese. But with my limited proficiency in English, that was impossible. It took a very long time before I could somehow write a novel in Japanese. That is why I wasn't able to write a novel until I was 29. Because I had to create, all on my own, a new Japanese language for my novels. I couldn't just borrow an already existing language. In that sense, I'm an original
Raymond Chandler was my hero in the 1960's. I read The Long Goodbye a dozen times. I was impressed by the way that his protagonists live by themselves and are very independent. They're lonely, but they're looking for a decent life.
As you know, Japan is such a group-conscious society that to be independent is very hard. For instance, when I looked for an apartment in Tokyo, the real-estate people didn't trust me because as a writer I was self-employed and didn't belong to any company. Many people, especially young people, would like to be more independent and on their own. But it is very difficult and they suffer form feelings of isolation. I think that is one reason why young reader support my work.
McInerney: It seems to me that of your work that I've read, A Wild Sheep Chase is a little bit different from your other books and yet your protagonist always has certain characteristics that I find to be similar to those of the classic Raymond Chandler hero. He's a skeptic, he's a cynic, he lives somewhat outside of society. But he wouldn't consciously call himself an outlaw. Was Wild Sheep Chase a conscious departure for you? This is a book, by the way, in which a man goes looking for a sheep, a very mysterious sheep. The sheep is the missing party that informs the plot of the book.
Murakami: Somebody called it "The Big Sheep." I don't think that book was unusual., From the stylistic level I have certainly borrowed a lot from Chandler. It's been 10 years since I wrote that book and I'd say I've changed a lot since then. But as a vehicle for the story I wanted to tell that style was necessary at that time. I must say it is a difficult thing to transpose Chandler's style into Japanese. To begin with, the cultural ideas informing Japanese and English are entirely different. But that is exactly what I was trying to do, to renew the ideas, while transposing the language.
My contemporaries and I are trying to create a new kind of Japanese language. If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.
Tanizaki has written that Japanese language is completely different from English or other Western languages, that it is special and in some ways superior to Western languages. He says that kind of beauty should be preserved very carefully, so he's kind of a nationalist. Tanizaki is a very brilliant novelist and a great man, but I don't agree with him, because there is no superiority of one language to other languages. It's just not true.
McInerney: But certainly Tanizaki's remark about the superiority of the Japanese language is not so unusual. The Japanese cultural debate is fairly obsessed with the notion of the uniqueness of Japan. Whether pro or con, a great deal of learned thought and discussion in Japan goes into the question of whether the Japanese bloodline is incomprehensible/superior/unique. It's by no means a minority. I think, of people in Japan who feel that there is something special about the Japanese character that simply doesn't compute among other people, that does not cross the translation barrier. And this feeling is often informed by a kind of cultural imperialism in the sense that Japan is a special place. One of the characteristics of your work and that of some of your contemporaries is a kind of rejection of this notion.
Murakami: Many Japanese think their language is so unique that foreigners cannot grip its essence, its beauty or its subtlety. And if some foreigner claims that he has grasped that essence, nobody believes him. One reason they think that way is because Japan is a very homogenous country that has not been occupied by other countries except for a brief period after World War II. Its culture was not threatened by other cultures. So the Japanese language has been isolated. It has been isolated for maybe 2,000 years. That's why Japanese are so certain about its uniqueness, its nature, its structure, its function.
I think what some young Japanese writers are doing is trying to break, to destroy, that stubbornness, to rebel against that certainty.
I lived on a Greek island for a couple of years and although it was a very small island, everyone I talked to said, "I drive a Nissan. It's a very good car." After a week I was tired of that, but I realized that Nissan, Casio, Seiko, Honda or Sony were the only Japanese words they knew, the only Japanese things they knew. They knew nothing about Japanese culture, Japanese literature, Japanese music or anything like that. So I thought we have to do something to break through the isolation the Japanese have cherished for so long.
I think what young Japanese writers are doing is trying to reconstruct our language. We appreciate the beauty, the subtlety of the language Mishima used, but those days are gone. We should do something new. And what we are doing as contemporary writers is trying to break through the barrier of isolation so that we can talk to the rest of the world in our words again.
There should be a midway place where we could go to exchange information with people from other cultures. People have to have pride and that pride comes from being able to express yourself freely to other people. The Japanese people have achieved material success all over the world, but they are not speaking to other people culturally, and as a result, they don't get back that feeling of pride in themselves. They have been wondering if there has been something wrong. Now they are starting to look back at themselves.
The Japanese Government and different organizations are very active in having programs of cultural exchange of introducing Kabuki and No to the rest of the world. But Kabuki and No, even though they are very excellent forms of art and tradition, belong to the past and are not really talking to the contemporary Japanese. I myself find No and Kabuki very boring sometimes, ordinary Japanese people find them very boring, and I don't blame Westerns for finding them boring.
McInerney: In Japan when you want to learn traditional discipline, whether it's karate or flower arranging or painting for that matter, you are expected to start at the very bottom and gradually work your way up. When I tried to apprentice myself to a karate teacher, he had me sweep the parking lot for two weeks before he would allow me to exercise with the rest of the class. A friend of mine who studied cabinetry in Japan had to spend six weeks learning how to sharpen chisels before he was allowed to touch any wood.
I imagine that in Japanese literature there would be a certain resentment against your popularity and your refusal to acknowledge certain traditions in Japanese literature. What do older and more traditional Japanese critics think of your work?
Murakami: It's simple. They don't like me.
There is a kind of generational struggle in Japanese letters. Yes, the old gatekeepers. They are just like leaders of the Communist Party in Eastern Europe. The Japanese literary world has a very strong sense of hierarchy and you have to go from the bottom gradually up. And once you are on the top, you are the judge of other writers. You read each other's works and then give each other awards. But the ones on top don't really care what they young, upcoming writers are doing. When I made my debut as a novelist, they said that Japanese literature was on the decline. It's not on the decline, it's just changing. Many people don't like the change. The older writers live in a very closed world. They don't really know what's going on.
"Harper's Bazaar," March 1993
"Publisher's Weekly." September 21, 1991
Boston Magazine, January 1994.
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Barua, Alokesh and Chakraborty, Debashis and Hariprasad, C. G. (2010): Entry, Competitiveness and Exports: Evidence from Firm Level Data of Indian Manufacturing.
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The industry and trade policy regimes in India have witnessed drastic changes since 1991. The dismantling of the industrial licensing system and thereby allowing free entry to and exit from the industry of firms in 1991 followed by the WTO induced trade liberalization leading to substantial reduction in tariffs and gradual softening of foreign investment regulations, particularly in the context of foreign direct investment since 1995, may have had significant impact on the state of competitiveness in India industries. In this paper an attempt has been made to evaluate the effects of trade and industrial policy changes on domestic competitiveness for select Indian industries during post-liberalization period. Though there exists a pool of empirical literature focusing on the state of competitiveness in India, the link between theoretical models underlying the empirical analysis is not often strong. Moreover, a section of the literature focuses on a combination of firm and industry data for drawing conclusions on firm behavior, which may not reflect the actual scenario. Given this background, the present paper attempts to provide a unified approach to examine the inter-relationships between entry and competitiveness within a consistent oligopolistic market framework. The empirical analysis of the present study, carried out on the basis of firm data for 14 sectors over 1990-2008, indicates that Indian industry have shown considerable changes over the last decade in terms of entry and competitiveness. An overall decline in concentration is witnessed between the two end points, which signify the importance of newer entry in the markets. The Price-Cost Margin however behaves differently for different sectors, which could be explained by the differing level of spillover of technical changes as a result of increased pressure of competition due to liberalization. Demand curve is generally found to be inelastic and declines over the period. The relationship between the size of the firms and their export volume turns out to be significantly positive.
|Item Type:||MPRA Paper|
|Original Title:||Entry, Competitiveness and Exports: Evidence from Firm Level Data of Indian Manufacturing|
|English Title:||Entry, Competitiveness and Exports: Evidence from Firm Level Data of Indian Manufacturing|
|Keywords:||Competitiveness; entry; industrial liberalization; trade liberalization|
|Subjects:||F - International Economics > F1 - Trade > F12 - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies
L - Industrial Organization > L5 - Regulation and Industrial Policy > L50 - General
|Depositing User:||Debashis Chakraborty|
|Date Deposited:||19. May 2010 15:39|
|Last Modified:||13. Feb 2013 08:10|
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I set a goal for myself earlier this year to read fifty books in 2014. As of right now, I’m four books shy of that goal. Not to worry; Christmas is fast approaching, which means I plan to devote large amounts of time with a book shoved up under my nose, slouched underneath three or four blankets, with my ragdoll kittens causing adorable ruckus not too far away. If I can’t see them knocking over nail lacquer bottles and devouring toilet paper, it’s not happening.
Amidst a slew of very “meh” books, I’m thrilled to report I’ve had the pleasure of acquainting myself with a few shining stars. Please consider adding the following volumes to your to-be-read pile. And, always, I’m open to hearing book suggestions.
.White Oleander by Janet Fitch.
I’m writing about this one first because I finished it only a couple days ago. Perhaps you’ve seen the movie with Michelle Pfeiffer and Renee Zellweger. Even if you haven’t, this book is a must-read, if only for the writing style. Janet Fitch is a force, let me tell you. As you come to know the characters, you come to know exactly what their reactions will be, and she absolutely delights or saddens you with the sharpness, delicacy, ease, and sheer poetry of her words. It’s very much a character-driven piece (rather than an action-driven one), at which my boyfriend Carson rolls his eyes (he’d rather have action).
In White Oleander, Astrid lives with her mother Ingrid, a cold, controlling, narcissistic woman, until Ingrid is convicted of murder. As Astrid then floats from foster home to foster home, she still keeps in touch with her mother from prison, for better or worse. You feel sorrow for Astrid as she slowly comes to realize the hold her mother has on her, and how much her mother has failed her in motherly duties. It’s also hard not to get pulled under Ingrid’s spell yourself. Definitely pick this one up to experience some incredible writing, as well as a great “villain.”
.Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.
After I finished this book, I looked like a deer in headlights for the rest of the day. I read it in just a couple days (which is uncommon for me; I tend to stretch out books and am prone to procrastinate) while on vacation at Myrtle Beach. This is the best book in the trilogy, no contest.
Talk about non-stop action and emotion! I don’t care if you’re Team Gale or Team Wrong–everyone loves Katniss, period. Everyone wants to see her make it. You’re right there with her as she experiences depression, flashbacks, near-constant danger, and walking on eggshells to protect those she loves. Complete thrill-ride from start to finish.
If you’re a newbie, it’s not too late to start this series. Just don’t talk to me about Mockingjay.
I’m no longer on Tumblr (in my opinion, the whole site brings new meaning to the phrase “dumb masses“), but I imagine that the Tumblrsphere went a little cuckoo when this book came out. I can say this with confidence: if you even slightly like John Green, you’ll love Rainbow Rowell. (This is the part, for my own protection, where I pretend to like John Green’s books).
This book takes place in 1980s suburbia, and follows Asian, X-Men-fanatic Park and redheaded outcast Eleanor. You already know they’re going to fall in love, right? That’s okay; you’ll still read it. The book is written with such nostalgia (80s references aside) and sweetness that you’ll get all schmoopy and want to cuddle something. By no means is the romance overkill. It makes you pine, even just a little, for high school simplicity. Gorgeous book. Even if you don’t like YA, pick it up.
.Room by Emma Donoghue.
Whoa. Nelly. That’s all.
One part mystery and one part emotional journey with mother and son, Room is told by a five-year-old boy who has spent his entire life in the same room with his Ma. While you read this book, you’re experiencing things on a very narrow, almost untrustworthy, plane. I mean, your narrator is a five-year-old. This gives you a stripped-down, simplistic view of the shocking and often horrific events in the book. If you’re anything like me, you’ll cry tears of both sorrow and triumph.
Get the audiobook if you can, too.
LOL. Who run the world? Oprah.
.Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter.
Nice to end on a children’s book, eh? Haters to the left, please; I believe adults can, and should, read children’s literature. Somehow, words of childhood are sweeter when they are read years after childhood has passed.
Pollyanna was (and still is) a free book on iBooks, an app which I strongly recommend you heavy readers utilize. I found it along the same lines, tone-wise, as Little Women. It’s sweet, sweet, sweet–but if you’re made of tougher stuff, it may be a bit too sentimental.
I, for one, adore Little Women, and I adore Pollyanna. It’s about an orphaned girl who goes to live with her austere Aunt Polly in an equally austere town. As child protagonists often do, Pollyanna changes each person with whom she comes in contact, declaring that she always tries to see the good in everything.
Sound schmultzy? It is. However, it is for children, and like I said, it’s along the same lines as Little Women. I really enjoyed it, even tearing up a few times at Pollyanna’s enduring sweetness.
What were your favorite books this year? I’d love to know.
Until next time, |
David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
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Journal of Business Ethics 83 (4):745 - 758 (2008)
The pharmaceutical sector, an industry already facing stiff challenges in the form of intensified competition and strategic consolidation, has increasingly become subject to a range of pressures. Crucially, in common with other large-scale businesses, pharmaceutical firms find themselves ‹invited’ to respond positively to the corporate ‹social’ responsibility (CSR) expectations of their stakeholders. Consequently, individual managers will almost certainly be obliged to engage in some form of stakeholder dialogue and this, in turn, means that they will have to make difficult choices about which practices to adopt. This real-world management predicament runs parallel to an academic interest in CSR stakeholder dialogue theory and models. Accordingly, the approach of this paper is to focus primarily on the academic debate surrounding stakeholder dialogue, by reviewing past attempts to research and theorise the subject, by identifying gaps and weaknesses in the literature, and by proposing a new analytical model. The central aim of the proposed new model is to offer a unified, structured, systematic, and comprehensive approach to CSR decision making whilst simultaneously providing a practical framework for CSR executives who face the challenge of responding in an effective manner to stakeholders. The model outlined here is currently being employed to conduct international comparative empirical research into stakeholder dialogue practices amongst UK and German pharmaceutical firms. In the longer term the intention is to use the model to undertake international comparative research encompassing a broader range of countries and industries.
|Keywords||corporate social responsibility pharmaceutical industry stakeholders stakeholder dialogue|
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Carmen Stoian & Rodica Milena Zaharia (2012). CSR Development in Post-Communist Economies: Employees' Expectations Regarding Corporate Socially Responsible Behaviour – the Case of Romania. Business Ethics 21 (4):380-401.
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Chapter Two: Scholarly Communication in Crisis
1 This is an early draft of the second chapter of my thesis, released as part of my Open Thesis approach. Download PDF: Heather Morrison Chapter Two Scholarly Communication in Crisis DRAFT Oct 29 2011
Chapter Two: Scholarly Communication in Crisis
From: Morrison, Heather. Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. Doctoral dissertation (in process), Simon Fraser University School of Communication.
In the September 2011 issue of Action Research, Tara Leigh F. McHugh of the University of Alberta and Kent C. Kowalski of the University of Saskatchewan published an article called “‘A new view of body image’: A school-based participatory action research project with young Aboriginal women”.
When faculty or students at either the University of Alberta or the University of Saskatchewan wish to view articles in this Sage-owned publication, access is as simple as going to the journal from a computer authenticated for university access, reading the abstract for free, and clicking on PDF to immediately download the full-text of the article.
Whenever anyone not associated with a subscribing institution tries to access the article, the abstract is still free. However, to access the full text in PDF form, the potential reader is given two options: a) to subscribe to the journal – at rates varying from $91 US for an individual subscription to $719-$799 US for an institutional subscription or b) “purchase short term access: Pay per Article - You may access this article (from the computer you are currently using) for 1 day for US $25.00”. (Sage Journals Online, 2011).
In other words, students and faculty at wealthy universities in the developed world have ready access to the results of this research, while for almost everyone outside of these institutions, the cost is a significant, if not insurmountable, barrier. A young aboriginal woman using a school computer or public access terminal at a public library, wishing to see the results of this research would be invited to pay $25 for one-time access, for one day, at one computer. School, public, and most government libraries cannot afford access to academic journal subscriptions in the $700 a year range, and so this article is practically inaccessible to teachers, parents, social workers, and government officials even in wealthy regions like Western Canada.
Taking advantage of the access I have through my own university, I can see in the acknowledgements that this research was conducted by doctoral students with support from two of Canada’s research councils, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The list of people who are invited to pay-per-article at $25 includes the taxpayers who fund the research councils and a significant portion of the university budgets, as well as the staff at the research councils. Outside the wealthy west, the economic barrier looms even larger.
It is ironic that participatory action research results are reported in a manner that is inaccessible to participants, those who are motivated to help the participants take action towards better lives, and those who funded the research. This is not the exception, but rather the norm in scholarship today. Scholars and those who fund them generally aim to extend the collective knowledge of humankind and to solve problems, then frequently freely hand over the results to a system designed to maximize profit. The remainder of this chapter will provide a brief overview of scholarly publishing, situate the scholarly publishing system within overall trends towards commodification and rationalization, and sketch out a few potential alternatives identified to date.
Scholarly Communication: A Brief Overview
From the perspective of the scholar-author, the scholarly communication system is largely a gift economy. Funded through university salaries and research grants, scholars give away their journal articles and provide peer review, and often editing as well, for free. This gifting of labour and the results of labour is conducted, not for monetary exchange but rather as a means of contributing to the collective conversation of scholars in a given field (and hence earning tenure and promotion). The result is a well of knowledge from which all draw as well as contribute. Royalties are common for scholarly monographs, and so scholars are likely to see monographs as a source of financial rewards rather than as a pure gift economy. Whether the sums involved really make sense as a financial incentive seems doubtful, given the small number of copies of scholarly monographs typically produced today. The scholarly communication system on the surface is free to the scholar in the developed world as reader. The journals and books are supplied by the library in a manner that conceals the underlying financial transactions between libraries, publishers, and suppliers.
The mission of the traditional scholarly society publisher is generally aligned with the gift economy. The purposes of a typical society are to serve scholarship, and often society in a broader sense. If there is a surplus of funds from publishing, this is used to fund other activities that are useful to scholarship, such as subsidizing conferences, educational activities, or graduate scholarships. Up until the end of the Second World War, the vast majority of scholarly journals were published by the not-for-profit sector. Mabe (2003, p. 194) characterizes the period from 1900 to 1940 as one in which almost all scholarly publishing was in the hands of the scholarly societies.
In the decades since the Second World War, there has been a steady increase in involvement by the commercial sector in scholarly publishing. At the same time, growth in the number of scholarly journals was exponential. This was not a new phenomenon. Research on the growth of scholarly journals over the centuries has noted a remarkably constant exponential growth rate of scholarly journals since the 1600’s (De Solla Price, 1963, p. 17), with just a slight increase in the decades immediately after World War II (Mabe and Amin (2001), Mabe, 2003). Mabe (2003) calculates the average annual scholarly journal growth rate at 3.46% per year from the 1600’s to the present day, with an increase to 4.35% from 1946 to 1976 and subsequent fall to 3.26% after 1976.
In the decades since the Second World War, there has been increasing involvement by the commercial sector in scholarly publishing and increasing concentration in the market, so that today a very substantial percentage of the world’s estimated 20-25,000 scholarly peer-reviewed journals are published by just four companies: Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and Informa.plc (also known as Taylor and Francis) (Crow, 2006). Three of these companies (Reed Elsevier, Wiley, and Informa.plc) are publicly traded corporations, while Springer is owned by private equity firms.
All are in the for-profit sector, and the profits are enormous. As reported in the Economist (2011): “ Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%”. Springer’s Science + Business Media (2010) reported a return on sales (operating profit) of 33.9% or € 294 million on revenue of € 866 million, an increase of 4% over the profit of the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, John Wiley & Sons (2011) reported profit of $106 million for their scientific, medical, technical and scholarly division on revenue of $253 million, a profit rate of 42%. This represents an increase in the profit rate of 13% over the previous year. The operating profit rate for the academic division of Informa.plc (2011, p. 4) for the first half of 2011 was 32.4%, or £47 million on revenue of £145 million, an increase of 3.3% over the profit of the previous year.
The U.K. Office of Fair Trading (2002, p. 12) noted that the profitability of commercial science, technology and medicine (STM) publishing was high, not only in comparison with not-for-profit publishers, but also in comparison with other commercial publishers, and that there would be substantial savings for customers if these publishers were to charge average profit rates.
The above-average profits of these large commercial publishers contrast with the present financial situation of universities and the academics who give these publishers their works and services. For example, in the U.S., the Association of American Universities (n.d.) has a website section reflecting the 2008 financial crisis, called Universities address the economic recession, which states that “many have taken such actions as furloughs or hiring freezes, pay cuts for senior administrators, and delays of capital projects”.
McMillan (2011) comments on discussions at the University of California system in May of 2011, where after three years of furloughs, layoffs, student fee increases and program cuts, the budget was predicted to include a further $500 million in cuts. The American Association of University Professors has a list of “Financial Crisis FAQs” on their website, which states that the current challenging financial situation is being used to justify a number of measures that impact on academics, including “hiring and salary freezes, furloughs, salary cuts, layoffs, nonrenewals, reduction and elimination of academic programs and colleges, revision of curricula, changes in academic policy, elimination of tenure, substantial changes in workload, and more”.
Prosser (2011, p. 60) notes the ‘brutal’ cuts to the U.K. higher education sector, including an announcement that over the next few years the state would withdraw altogether from funding teaching in the humanities and social sciences.
The effects of the global financial crisis are being felt to varying degrees everywhere. In 2010, the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) reissued its Statement on the Global Economic Crisis, reiterating anticipation of long-term cuts to budgets for libraries and library consortia and a call to publishers for restraint on pricing increases.
This is an inelastic market; changes in the abilities of customers to pay have little or no impact. There is no competition in the system, as noted by the U.K. Office of Fair Trading (2002) and the European Commission (2006), among others. One cannot substitute a cheap article on one topic for an expensive one in a must-have science journal that a researcher is depending on for research needed to obtain grants. If the only goal of scholarly communication were profits, this would be a healthy system.
However, from the perspective of serving scholarship, this system leaves much to be desired. The serials crisis has been well documented elsewhere (Association of Research Libraries, 1989), and will not be covered here in detail. In brief, the prices of journals, particularly in the science, technology and medical (STM) areas have been increasing at rates far above inflation over a period of decades, with the result that not even the largest research libraries can afford comprehensive collections anymore, resulting in a loss of access to the scholarly literature for research. The crisis is ongoing, as illustrated by the Research Libraries UK (2010) call to publishers for pricing restraint, stating that if prices are not reduced, some of the largest universities in the UK will need to cancel the ‘big deals’ of some of these journal publishers.
An open letter from the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2010) illustrates that the crisis is global in scope. If current trends continue, the effects will be particularly strong in the developing world. The National Science Library letter says, “To our dismay and anger, a few international STM publishers, using their monopolistic position, recently demand to raise the subscription prices for their full-text database at a yearly rate of more than 14% for the next 3 years”, and by 2020, to raise the prices for developing countries to the level of those of the developed countries.
While the for-profit sector has taken over a substantial portion of scholarly publishing, particularly journal publishing, there remains a mixed market of not-for-profit society and learned journal publishers and university presses, which are still involved in publishing over half of the world’s scholarly journals (Crow 2006, p. 1). This sector maintains a close affiliation with the mission of scholarship, and their journals are typically more cost-effective. For example, Bergstrom and Bergstrom (2006, n.p.) conducted a study comparing journal costs across a range of disciplines, concluding:
For example, in the fields of economics and ecology, the average institutional subscription price per page charged by commercial journals is about 5 times that charged by non-profit journals. These price differences do not reflect differences in quality as measured by number of recorded citations to a journal. For commercial journals the average price per citation is about 15 times that for non-profit journals. Similar price differentials are found across a wide variety of scientific disciplines.
The trend toward commercialization and consolidation in scholarly publishing was particularly acute in the early days of the transition to an online environment, roughly the 1990’s, as smaller and not-for-profit publishers did not have the resources to compete with the larger publishers. Today more affordable options are available, opening up the potential for a more competitive environment for smaller publishers, and, arguably, a renaissance of scholar-led publishing (Edgar and Willinsky, 2010).
While the profits of a few commercial STM journal publishers have grown to above average rates in recent decades and continue to grow even at a time of global financial crisis, other areas of scholarly publishing have experienced decline. Thompson (2005, p. 63) documents how the rise of powerful commercial players in STM has “squeezed the budgets of university libraries with dire consequences for academic publishers…”. In the 1970’s, a scholarly monograph publisher would typically print 4 – 5,000 copies of a hardback; by 2005, due to declining sales of monographs, this figure was reduced about tenfold, to about 400-500 copies (Thompson 2005, p. 93-4). One result of declining sales is that some disciplines or subdisciplines are less attractive to scholarly monograph publishers. Many scholarly monograph publishers are aiming to survive by moving into other areas such as textbook or trade publishing (Thompson 1980, p. 139).
Brown (2010) explains the dilemma of the university press in the U.S., perceived as outside of the core mission of the university, subsidized for the common good, receiving little by way of attention, opportunities to participate in planning, and resources. When the press is successful, subsidies are cut back. When the press runs a deficit, it is expected to cut back. Yet, Brown notes how the university press can balance a scholarly mission with profit in a way that the commercial press cannot. The university press is more likely to publish important scholarship that may not be of value in a commercial sense. As Thompson (2005, p. 17) notes, young academics need to publish specialist knowledge, while publishers are looking for books with broad appeal. In this sense, the ultimate goals of universities and the commercial sector may clash – for example, the university has a stake in looking for more cost-efficient ways of publishing to enable publication of more scholarship and new formats, while the focus of the commercial publisher is to maximize revenue.
Harley, Acord, Earl-Novell, Lawrence, and King (2010, p. xiv) express concerns about a monograph crisis which may be driving scholars in specialized subfields toward more readily marketable areas of scholarship, and making it difficult for scholars to publish in areas deemed by university presses to be less commercially viable. Withey, Cohn, Faran, Jensen, Kiely, & Underwood 2011, p. 3) note that the crisis of monograph publishing threatens many of the intellectual characteristics most valued by the scholarly enterprise itself: concentration, analysis, and deep expertise.
To summarize, scholarly publishing today is characterized by a small number of STM journal publishers enjoying above average profits in an inelastic market that reaps growing profit margins even at a time of severe cutbacks for the universities where most of the content sold by these publishers is written, reviewed and read by academics, at no cost to the publishers. Scholars and their university libraries are challenged by high and increasing prices and resulting loss of access to needed works. Meanwhile, other areas such as monograph publishing are experiencing crisis due to declining sales as an increasing share of library budgets go to the packages of the STM journal publishers. There are profound impacts of this system that undermines the ability of scholars in some specialties to publish their work, especially if the work is of extended length.
Productivity, or capture of science & scholarship by expanding capitalism
Marx noted how the key to capitalist production:
is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value…The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes toward the self-valorization of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. Marx (1976, p. 644)
De Solla Price describes a break between the period of ‘Little Science’, before the Second World War, and ‘Big Science’, after the war. According to De Solla Price, “…the most abnormal thing in this age of Big Science is money” (1963, p. 92). While the number of scientists was doubling every 10-15 years at that time, in constant dollars, expenditures on science were doubling every 5 ½ years, so that the cost per scientist was doubling every 10 years. De Solla Price calculated that the cost of science was “increasing as the square of the number of scientists” (p. 92). De Solla Price asks, if the first half of the century belonged to the lone, long-haired genius scientist, whether the period after World War II belonged to the scientist “honored in Washington, sought after by all the research corporations of the “Boston ring road,” part of an elite intellectual brotherhood of co-workers, arbiters of political as well as technological destiny”? (1963, p. 3).
Mandel (1980) has noted a likely reason for this expansion in investment in science: an inherent tendency of capitalism to continuously expand into new spheres. Mandel talks about rents from technological innovation becoming the main source of monopolistic surplus under what he calls “late capitalism”. Invention, according to Mandel, “ becomes a branch of business” only in late capitalism (Mandel 1980, p. 249). Technological innovation from a traditional Marxist perspective was a key driver of surplus profits or unusually high profit rates, generally short-lived until competitors catch up with the new technology.
Polanyi (1957) argues that one distinguishing feature of the market economy from all other economies is that it subsumes society. Prior to the emergence of the market economy, all societies had economic aspects, and many had markets, however markets and economy were subservient to other social relationships and needs. Labour is one of what Polanyi describes as the three fictitious commodities of the market economy, along with land and money. It is the transformation of labour and land, human society and the means of production, into commodities that creates the conditions that subsume human society and the earth itself into the economy.
Knowledge as property: the creation of a fictitious commodity
Today, we need to add to Polanyi’s list a fourth fictitious commodity: knowledge. The short-term nature of high profit rates from technological innovation is based on the classic notion that knowledge is a perfect public good, nonrivalrous in nature (if someone else knows what I know, this does not diminish my knowledge) and nonexcludable (Hess and Ostrom 2007) and Drahos and Braithwaite (2002, p. 215), among others. However, while knowledge in intangible form is nonexcludable, the tangible forms of knowledge, whether as books, scholarly journals, or bytes, are excludable. And exclusion is a temptation:
From the point of view of individual profit making, knowledge is the ideal object of propertization since it is non-rivalrous in supply. The same knowledge can be endlessly recycled to many generations of consumers, each new generation having to pay for its use. The incentives for individuals to seek profit through a redefinition of the intellectual property rules that form the basis of the knowledge economy are great (Drahos & Braithwaite 2002, p. 216).
The invention of “intellectual property”: enclosure of knowledge
The term “intellectual property” is relatively new, having entered into popular discourse only in the 1970’s (Vaidhyanathan 2004). The purpose of intellectual property, according to Vaidhyanathan (p. 87), is to create artificial scarcity.
Boyle (2003, p. 12) refers to a second enclosure movement, of the “intangible commons of the mind”. Hess and Ostrom (2007) situate the enclosure of knowledge within a broader context of new technologies which have made resources which were once open enclosable; not just knowledge, but also the deep seas, the electromagnetic spectrum, and outer space. While there is some truth to the statement that new technologies have enabled new enclosures, it would be more accurate to state that human beings have developed and/or shaped technologies in order to enable new enclosures. Feenberg (1992, 2002) and Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (1987) explain how technology is socially created. Numerous examples and cases study are provided by these authors. One such is Feenberg’s argument that sidewalk curbs are not immanent to sidewalk technology, but rather were developed as a result of concerted struggles by disabled persons. This is important to understand when examining scholarly communication. For example, while digital rights management (DRM) is a technological tool, it is one that was developed specifically to artificially create new forms of enclosure.
Mosco (1989) counters the common viewpoint that information technology is changing the world. His view is that we are witnessing a “pay-per” society that reflects ever-increasing commodification, and is part of an overall transition from feudalism to capitalism. The ability of information to permit “pay-per” (call, bit, etc.) makes possible an intensification of commodification.
Drahos and Braithwaite (2002) situate the gradual enclosure of information through intellectual property rights within their concept of an incomplete project of information feudalism, a movement away from capitalism. Superficially, Drahos and Braithwaite’s information feudalism is very similar to Mosco’s pay-per society, however it is interesting to note that their overall visions of the implications are very different. While Mosco’s pay-per society is an intensification of capitalism, Drahos and Braithwaite present information feudalism as a threat to capitalism; for example, they state: “Ironically, information feudalism, by dismantling the publicness of knowledge, will eventually rob the knowledge economy of much of its productivity.” (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002, p. 219).
Elsewhere, I have written about the potential impact of usage statistics (basically the pay-per model) on scholarly communication (Morrison, 2005). One concern is that usage-based pricing inevitably tends to discourage use. If every download of an article incurs a cost, it will be tempting for universities with limited funds to implement reading limits for undergraduates, discourage research assignments, or refuse to provide service to walk-in users. Another concern is that it is likely that researchers will find it difficult to publish in less popular fields, regardless of importance. For example, while the importance of the environment is broadly understood in our society, the potential readership of scholarly literature on any one of the species under threat of extinction will be limited (excluding the famous and cute species such as whales as koala bears). Since academics need to publish in order to work, this could impact what subjects are studied. Harley et al. (2010, p. xiv) note “concerns that publication challenges in specialized subfields [of history] may be driving scholars toward more readily marketable areas of scholarship”.
Scholarly publishing and the enclosure of knowledge
The non-scholarly content industries (music, movies, etc.) “have been clear about their intentions to charge for every bit of data…and crush libraries by extinguishing fair use” (Vaidhyanathan 2004, p. 53). Some people and companies in the scholarly publishing industry are also working to enforce the enclosure of knowledge. Van Leeuwen (1980, p. 266) notes that the common interests of international scientific publishers in fighting copyright policy was the chief purpose of a resolution proposed by Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press in July 1968 at the International Publishers’ Association which was the start of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).
Copyright and legal affairs remain key issue areas for STM. For example, STM’s CEO Michael Mabe, in a submission from STM to a consultation on the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, Mabe (2011, p. 2-3), argues that publishers require exclusive copyright so that the substantial investments they make in scholarly communication can be recovered, ostensibly to serve the public interest. Mabe does not address the question of how best to ensure that the public which provides the funding for most academic research, the authors, peer reviewers and research participants benefit from the results of the research. Giving exclusive copyright to any one party is arguably a disservice to all of the other parties who contributed to the research, or for whom it was conducted.
Two consequences of the movement of capital into the sphere of science are outlined by Mandel. The first is the growth of scientific intellectual labour, reflected in an explosion in universities after World War and in the proletarianization of intellectual labour. That is, “the more higher education becomes a qualification for specific labour processes, the more intellectual labour becomes proletarianized, in other words transformed into a commodity…”, and the more the price of this commodity tends to be forced down to its conditions of reproduction (Mandel 1980, p. 263).
The creation and popularity of the Edufactory group and journal, connecting activists within universities worldwide who are protesting growing proletarian conditions, supports Mandel’s prediction. The Edufactory Manifesto (2008) begins “As once was the factory, so now is the university”. Some scientists may be celebrated and influential in Washington and the Boston Ring Road as De Solla Price claims. But, today, typical science graduates are far more likely to be chasing down ever more elusive and precarious academic positions while simultaneously attempting to pay down mounds of unforgivable debt. For example, Cauchon (2011), quoting the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.S. Department of Education and private sources notes that student debt in the U.S. is anticipated to hit the trillion dollar mark before the end of 2011 – debt that can’t be shed in bankruptcy. Cauchon notes that “the credit risk falls on young people who will start adult life deeper in debt, a burden that could place a drag on the economy in the future”.
Brophy (2011, n.p.) explains the situation for today’s graduate students thus:
Graduate students, faced with diminishing prospects of a secure job in the academy are increasingly confronted with their status as relatively cheap and plentiful labor in the provision of undergraduate education, a factor that creates growing affinities with those whose service work keeps the lecture halls clean, the courses running on time, and the cafeterias pumping out food
and notes that in recent years there has been an increase in struggles in the post-secondary sector around the world.
The second consequence is the crisis of the classical humanistic university, above all for directly economic reasons, resulting from a shift in the main task of the university from developing men of judgment and property to developing intellectually skilled wage-earners (Mandel 1980, p. 261). Basken (2008) quotes Diane Auer Jones, who resigned as assistant secretary for post-secondary education in the U.S., as saying “the Education Department is controlled by advisers who have insufficient regard for the liberal arts and instead are intent on judging colleges largely by their ability to provide economically measurable talent for industry”. As discussed above, Prosser (2011) points out that part of the current situation in 2010 was plans to eliminate funding for humanities and social sciences in the U.K. university system altogether.
In addition to commodification, publishing is also subject to an accompanying process of rationalization. Developing intellectually skilled wage-earners is an excellent example of behaviour carefully planned to achieve rationally calculated goals. Aspects of the system of scholarly communication described in this chapter exemplify modern times combining formal (calculating) rationality with substantive (goal-oriented) irrationality, a concept articulated by Weber (1968, p. 24-5, 85), or the cunning of unreason described by Leiss (1994, chapter 1) as the essential problem of rationality: human beings are not rational.
A participant with a long history working in senior positions for university presses provided the following example in a recent interview (Anonymous, 2011): many university departments expect scholars to publish books in order to achieve tenure. It is common for scholars to seek to turn their theses into a published book as a means of achieving the goal of tenure. In recent decades, academic library budgets have been diverted from purchase of monographs to purchase of journal packages in STM, as described above. In roughly the same time period, academic theses have become more readily available in universities, at first through electronic packages of theses such as the Proquest Dissertations and Theses database, and more recently through provision of open access theses through institutional repositories. Lacking funds to purchase every scholarly monograph of interest, university libraries instruct vendors to eliminate books developed from theses from approval plans, on the grounds that these are duplications. This erodes necessary financial support for a system that universities are relying on as part of the tenure process. Another result is gaming of the system, with publishers deliberately obscuring the connection between the thesis and book, through such means as eliminating acknowledgements of participants in the thesis process, such as supervisors and committee members. This practice diminishes the value of the work, and is contrary to the academic ethos calling for citation of sources. Each element of this process is rational in and of itself. However, these rational processes work towards incompatible goals. This is what Weber calls substantive irrationality. Colloquially, another way of expressing this is to say that the process as a whole simply does not make sense. That is, universities are relying on this system for tenure decisions, and, at the same time, defunding the system. Thompson (2005, p. 175-6) describes the paradoxical situation that universities are basically outsourcing tenure decisions in disciplines focused on monographs to academic presses, and especially to university presses, during the very same period of time when university economic support for scholarly monographs and university presses was diminishing.
Universities, as a whole, are the source for the above average profits of a small group of commercial STM journal publishers, even when universities themselves are facing brutal cuts. The means to this dysfunctionality for universities exemplify instrumental rationality, defined by Weber (1968, p. 24-5) as behaviour that is “determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings” which are “used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends”.
To return to the McHugh and Kowalski article at the beginning of this chapter, it is perfectly rational for the authors to seek to publish in a journal that will be highly regarded by tenure and promotion committees, serving the instrumental value of career advancement. However, publishing in a journal that is not accessible to people who could use the information discovered through this research, is contrary to the value of helping people implicit in this kind of research – substantive irrationality, where behavior that is formally / instrumentally rational is not compatible with our basic values.
Sage, Elsevier, Wiley, and other commercial publishers are behaving rationally in pursuing actions to maximize profit, the purpose of existence of their organizations. Universities in times of decreasing revenues quite rationally seek to contain costs through such means as cutting subsidies to university presses. To see how individually rational approaches add up to a system that is arguably dysfunctional for the universities it is meant to serve, it is necessary to consider the whole picture rather than individual elements.
Another aspect to the increasing tendency to formal rationality of assessing scholarly work involves a focus on quantity. For example, more competition for academic jobs means that scholars are expected to publish two books instead of one to obtain tenure; this rush to publish is in contrast with the time it takes to write scholarly books (Thompson 2005, p. 176-7). Harley and Acord (2011) note that one of the results is a growing glut of low-quality publications, and recommend that we “encourage scholars to publish peer-reviewed work less frequently and more meaningfully. Limit the quantity of work that can be reviewed to remove the incentive for over-publication” (p. 7), including eliminating the requirement of two published books to achieve tenure.
The Georgia State copyright case is one illustration of the irrationality of the system. The case involves publishers seeking higher rents from use of their works by universities; it is ironic that two of the publishers prominently involved are university presses, Cambridge and Oxford. As Kevin Smith, one of the interviewees in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2011, May 30) puts it:
As it becomes clear that the three publishers who have initiated the lawsuit in search of higher profits are willing to attack the very heart of the system by which scholars live, academic authors will rightly feel betrayed. The plaintiffs are, after all, asking the judge to fundamentally change the copyright rules for higher education. If the rules in the proposed injunction were widely accepted, fair use in this field of endeavor, supposedly favored, would actually be more restricted than in any other activity. Yet the works at issue in the lawsuit are mostly written by scholars for the use of other scholars and students. If those uses become impossible or exponentially more expensive, which today is the same thing, academic authors will need to reconsider whether they are receiving sufficient benefits for the free labor they contribute to scholarly publishing.
Cambridge and Oxford, unlike U.S. university presses, return a profit to their universities (Thompson 2005, p. 87). This is an example of a system developed through rationality that becomes irrational – a system meant to help universities harms them instead. This illustrates what Marcuse (1964) and Leiss (1994) discuss as the tendency of instrumental rationality, designed to dominate nature, in the end, dominating man. In scholarly communication, the quest for simple metrics to assess quality in academia (the impact factor, # of books published, by which presses), initially meant to help achieve the goals of the academy, instead become the goals themselves.
It is important to consider the tendency toward rationalization in our society along with commodification. There is some overlap in the two tendencies, and it can be difficult to distinguish between the two, but the roots are different and the remedies may well be different, too. Both are often present in the same situation. The nonprofit university press is a good example, subject to expectations of cost-recovery (rationalization), which in turns leads to pressure to focus on the market value of scholarly materials (commodification). The overall remedy to the substantive irrationality of this system, I would argue, is the kind of systemic analysis presented in this chapter and several of the works cited in this chapter. A university press may find a variety of ways to combat commodification, for example advocating for subsidies, or developing commodified product lines designed to provide income to subsidize the publication of scholarly monographs.
The concept of the commons, once in general use to refer to land shared in common, has re-emerged and expanded in recent decades to include immaterial commons such as the information commons or knowledge commons (Lessig (1999), Hess and Ostrom (2007), Boyle (2003) and Bollier (2007)). Boyle (2003) and Bollier (2007) point out that there is a need to articulate the concept, similar to the need for articulation of the concept of the environment. Boyle argues for the proactive creation of a concept of commons as public domain, a reification of the negative to protect this space. Bollier (2007) sees the rise of the commons paradigm in scholarship as a needed alternative to the market and the state. Bollier also discusses the idea of inalienability (some things belong to all), and also public trust doctrine, from Roman law; the idea is that some things belong to the public, and are administered by the state as a trust. Bollier points out that commons and market are not incompatible; in fact business needs a commons (e.g. roads, telecommunications).
Whenever the commons is discussed, it is important to be aware of a group of arguments against the possibility of a commons collectively known as the free-rider problem. Ostrom’s book (2007) Governing the Commons explores in depth relevant theories and presents case studies of physical commons or collectively shared resources such as fish or water. Acknowledging that commons are not always successful, Ostrom provides important arguments that explain why the free-rider problem is by no means inevitable, even with physically limited resources (Ostrom 2007, p. 6-7). The free-rider argument per se, based on an article by Hardin, is often cited but has never been examined empirically, and Ostrom presents many counter examples of successful sharing of resources in common. One example is the Huerta irrigation institutions in Spain; formal rules were written up for these institutions in 1435, however they were not new at this time. Through significant monitoring and enforcement, cheating rates in these institutions have been remarkably low in spite of significant temptation; in medieval Castellon, the cheating rate was below 1%. A related argument, the prisoner’s dilemma, a game which appears to show that people do not cooperate, is based on the assumption that people do not communicate, an unrealistic assumption outside of actual prisons.
Immaterial commons such as knowledge or information commons are nonrivalrous in nature, and many exemplify “the cornucopia of the commons” in which more value is created as more people use the resource and join the social community (Bollier 2007, p. 34). The article by McHugh and Kowalski cited at the outset of this chapter is a great deal more valuable if it is read by other researchers, young aboriginal women, social workers, teachers, and government officials.
My vision of the knowledge commons is one where humankind’s collective knowledge is readily available to anyone, anywhere. A similar vision focusing on the area of medicine and the life sciences was articulated by the Public Library of Science (2001) in their Open Letter to Scientific Publishers, signed by thousands of researchers around the world. From my perspective, key to development of a knowledge commons is open access to scholarly literature, a concept that will be discussed in depth in the next chapter.
Many of the suggested alternatives focus on cooperative solutions, similar to the concept of the commons, to make it possible for smaller and/or not-for-profit publishers to benefit from the advantages of scale available to the large commercial publishers, so that they can compete. Brown (2010) recommends a cooperative solution across universities for university presses. Crow’s (2006) discussion paper for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) on publishing cooperatives provides in-depth analysis of the potential for, benefits of, and logistics for starting publishing cooperatives.
Emerging new publishers: libraries and independent scholar-publishers
While university presses are in dire straights, university libraries are increasingly becoming involved in publishing. Hahn (2008) reports on a survey of Association of Research Library members which found that the majority of respondents either were involved in publishing activities, or had plans to get involved in publishing, within the next few years. Library publishing services described are different from traditional university press publishing services in that libraries tend to focus on electronic-only publishing, to focus on technical support and hosting rather than editing, and to favor open access business models. Library publishing services are more likely to focus on journals, although some also publish monographs and conference proceedings. Unlike university presses, library publishing services are not isolated in their institutions, but rather tend to be part of larger initiatives that include similar activities such as digital repository services. Similarly, Taylor, Morrison, Owen, Vézina, and Waller (2011) found that most university libraries in Canada were hosting open access journals as of spring 2010, with more planning to offer such services in the near future.
Willinsky (2006) and colleagues in the Public Knowledge Project have been instrumental in making library and scholar journal publishing a possibility through development of the free, open source journal publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS). Edgar and Willinsky (2010, in press) conducted a survey of over 900 journals using OJS and found that many were led by independent scholars; they conclude that OJS may be facilitating a renaissance of scholar-led publishing.
Need for theory and analysis
Development of new approaches such as the commons requires careful exploration of theoretical perspectives, often definitions and analysis of real-world implications. In particular, macro level and critical approaches are necessary to sidestep the problems associated with formal instrumental rational approaches that can easily lead to substantive irrationality.
One example is my work on the implications of basing decisions about library collections on usage statistics. It is tempting to use such easily gathered quantitative information to aid in making difficult decisions, however if this will lead to such unintended consequences as discouraging reading and important areas of scholarship, the sooner we understand this, the better.
Open access and its intersections with scholarly communication is another area in need of thoughtful theory and analysis. As we shall soon see, this exciting remedy to the problem of commodified scholarly communication is now being avidly pursued by commercial interests – in some cases the very same commercial interests responsible for the present crisis. The implications of this need careful examination.
Dramatic growth of open access
To assess progress towards a knowledge commons through open access, it is necessary to grasp how much scholarly literature is produced, and how much is open access. A recent repeated citation of an error illustrates the ongoing need for this research. Walters and Linville (2011) repeat an error based on a publication by Morris (2006). Morris, then Chief Executive Office of the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), did an analysis of start years in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and concluded that open access publishing had peaked in 2001, with new journal start-ups decreasing after that time. One major problem with this approach is failure to account for delay in including new titles in DOAJ; because of the DOAJ vetting process, new titles are not included on first publication, but rather after they have established at least some track record for publishing. Then, too, DOAJ has limited staff, so there can be a backlog in including new titles. Recent research (see the chapter on The Dramatic Growth of Open Access) illustrates that open access publishing is growing. It is important to be aware of this trend. Libraries and scholars need to be aware of the growing OA resources in order to know to point to these. Publishers need to be aware of the trends to make informed decisions about business models for the future.
Economics of transition
Shifting from a system increasingly devoted to profits to one that can prioritize knowledge will require an economic transition. This chapter will examine the economics of scholarly publishing at a macro level as well as current and potential new approaches to scholarly communication economics.
The patterns of scholarly communication can vary widely from one discipline (or sub-discipline) to another. Some disciplines rely more on monographs, others on journal articles. Some disciplines are more dominated by commercial interests than others. This thesis will report on a preliminary investigation of the state of scholarly publishing in the discipline of communication.
Scholarly communication at present is a complex system characterized by expansion of capitalism into scholarly publishing and a process of rationalization that at times leads to irrational results in conflict with the basic goals or values of scholars. The increasing enclosure of knowledge and information through the concept of intellectual property is key in the process of commodification of resources once considered a classical public good as nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. Alternatives identified to date include the commons, cooperative approaches, open access and emerging new publishers such as libraries.
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This is an article by Camille Paglia about Michel Foucault and the Post-structuralists called ‘What I hate about Foucault’. I am not going to critique it yet. I just want you to read it yourselves, and tell me what you think.
I never met or saw Foucault in the flesh. (He died in 1984.) My low opinion of him is based entirely on his solipsistic, mendacious writing, which has had a disastrous influence on naïve American academics.
I miss no opportunity to throw darts at Foucault’s scrawny haunches because he is the last standing member of the Terrible Triad of French poststructuralists, whose work swept into American universities in the 1970s and drove out the home-grown radicalism of our own 1960s cultural revolution. I militantly maintain that the intellectual gurus of my college years — Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Ginsberg — had far more vision and substance than did the pretentious, verbose trinity of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault.
Derrida’s reputation was already collapsing (thanks to the exposure of his ally Paul de Man as a Nazi apologist) when I arrived on the scene with my first book in 1990. Lacan, however, still dominated fast-track feminist theory, which was clotted with his ponderous prose and affected banalities. The speed with which I was able to kill Lacanian feminism amazes even me. (A 1991 headline in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera blared my Achillean boast, “I and Madonna will drive Lacan from America!”)
Though much diminished with the waning of the theory years, Foucault still survives, propped up by wizened queer theorists who crave an openly gay capo in the canon. I base the rhetoric of my anti-Foucault campaign on Cicero’s speeches in the Roman Senate against the slick operator and conspirator Catiline (“How long, O Catiline, will you continue to abuse our patience?”). Greek and Roman political history — about which Foucault knew embarrassingly little — remains my constant guide.
Yes, I have indeed written at length about my objections to the grossly overpraised Foucault, in a 78-page review-essay, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” published in 1991 by the classics journal Arion and reprinted in my first essay collection,
“Sex, Art, and American Culture.” One of my observations was that Foucault’s works are oddly devoid of women. Shouldn’t that concern you as a feminist? It is simply untrue that Foucault was learned: He was at a loss with any period or culture outside of post-Enlightenment France (his later writing on ancient sexuality is a garbled mishmash). The supposedly innovative ideas for which his gullible acolytes feverishly hail him were in fact borrowed from a variety of familiar sources, from Friedrich Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim and Martin Heidegger to Americans such as sociologist Erving Goffman.
Foucault’s analysis of “power” is foggy and paranoid and simply does not work when applied to the actual evidence of the birth, growth and complex development of governments in ancient and modern societies. Nor is Foucault’s analysis of the classification of knowledge particularly original — except in his bitter animus against the Enlightenment, which he failed to realize had already been systematically countered by Romanticism. What most American students don’t know is that Foucault’s commentary is painfully crimped by the limited assumptions of Sussurean linguistics (which I reject).
As I have asserted, James Joyce’s landmark modernist novel “Ulysses” (1922) contains, chapter by chapter, far subtler and more various versions of language-based “epistemes” inherent in cultural institutions and epochs.
I’m afraid I bring rather bad news: Over the course of your careers, your generation of students will slowly come to realize that the Foucault-praising professors whom you respected and depended on were ill-informed fad-followers who sold you a shoddy bill of goods. You don’t need Foucault, for heaven’s sake! Durkheim and Max Weber began the stream of sociological thought that still nourishes responsible thinkers. And the pioneers of social psychology and behaviorism — Havelock Ellis, Alfred Adler, John B.Watson and many others — were eloquent apostles of social constructionism when Foucault was still in the cradle.
A massive work like W.E.B. DuBois'”The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study” (1899) shows the kind of respect for empirical fact-gathering and organization of data that is completely missing from Foucault, who selectively tailors his material to fit a monotonous, rigidly dualistic a priori thesis. For those in the humanities, where anti-aesthetic British cultural studies (shaped by the out-of-date Frankfurt School) has become entrenched, I recommend “The Social History of Art” (translated into English in 1951), an epic work by the Marxist scholar Arnold Hauser that influenced me in graduate school. No one in British or American cultural studies has Hauser’s erudition, precision and connoisseurship.
Foucault-worship is an example of what I call the Big Daddy syndrome: Secular humanists, who have drifted from their religious and ethnic roots, have created a new Jehovah out of string and wax. Again and again — in memoirs, for example, by trendy but pedestrian uber-academics like Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt and Brown’s Robert Scholes — one sees the scenario of Melancholy, Bookish, Passive, Insecure Young Nebbish suddenly electrified and transfigured by the Grand Epiphany of Blindingly Brilliant Foucault. This sappy psychodrama would be comic except for the fact that American students forced to read Foucault have been defrauded of a genuine education in intellectual history and political analysis (a disciplined genre that starts with Thucydides and flows directly to the best of today’s journalism on current events).
When I pointed out in Arion that Foucault, for all his blathering about “power,” never managed to address Adolph Hitler or the Nazi occupation of France, I received a congratulatory letter from David H. Hirsch (a literature professor at Brown), who sent me copies of riveting chapters from his then-forthcoming book, “The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism After Auschwitz” (1991). As Hirsch wrote me about French behavior during the occupation, “Collaboration was not the exception but the rule.” I agree with Hirsch that the leading poststructuralists were cunning hypocrites whose tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of their and their parents’ generations in Nazi France.
American students, forget Foucault! Reverently study the massive primary evidence of world history, and forge your own ideas and systems.
Poststructuralism is a corpse. Let it stink in the Parisian trash pit where it belongs!
Camille Paglia SALON | Dec. 2, 1998 |
Maybe I just have a generally permissive nature, but when I read about the latest Harvey Nichols mail shot causing outrage I was rather surprised. For those of you who have not seen it there are a few different versions showing models wearing designer clothes with wet patches as if they have had an ‘accident’, and the text, ‘Try to contain your excitement’ advertising the Harvey Nichols sale.
When I received one in the post I did not even really look at it properly (the words sale are enough no?), I just cast it aside with all the other such literature I receive in the post. It was only when I was reading about it that I dug it out, and had a closer look.
So yes it is a little ‘controversial’, but I still cannot see how so many people are outraged, and offended by it. It is a light hearted touch of humour. It is a little bad taste, but I do not think it goes too far, and I see a lot worse adverts that receive less criticism. If it offended you then I think you are far too easily offended. In the words of Mae West, ‘Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often‘.
At the end of the day whether you love it, or hate it Harvey Nichols are laughing. I do not think they could have imagined how viral their campaign would go – they are certainly going to have a good sale. No publicity is bad publicity, and all that. It is not often a sale gets such national newspaper coverage!
What did you think about Harvey Nichols advert campaign? Were you actually genuinely offended? |
Voke, a new art education research platform, is accepting proposals for visualized research objects to include in its inaugural issue, to be released this October. Proposals should include a 250-word abstract describing the proposed project’s area of research and the proposed form the research object will take. Proposals may also include images or links to prior visual work by the author, or sketches/prototypes of the proposed project – though the project proposed must not have been previously published elsewhere. A portfolio of prior visual work is not necessary, however, and we welcome non-artist researchers to propose collaborations with visual artists. Proposals accepted for publication and completed for the issue will receive a stipend. Please send proposals to email@example.com .
If accepted, your proposal will be assigned to two members of the editorial board, who will provide initial feedback on your proposal and ongoing support in the realization of the project and its integration into the site. Your final textual literature review, and a draft version of your object, will be due by July 1st, 2013, and your assigned board members will provide feedback on the piece. The final version of the project will be due September 9th, 2013.
What is Visualized Research?
By emphasizing the art in art education research, a field historically characterized by written scholarship, Voke aims to engage a diverse audience and facilitate dialogue among researchers, artists, teachers, and students. Our goal is to present fresh ideas in artistic forms that reflect and inspire provocative thought. Contributions require two main components: a citation-driven literature review, and a visualized research object articulating and expanding upon that body of research. These pieces take full advantage of digital media to offer readers alternative means of encountering information. Short films, interactive documents, procedural artwork, podcasts, screencasts, poetry, games, and photography are all possible examples of visualized research; they creatively represent research in an effort to challenge surface-level interaction with ideas.
For examples of visualized research projects, look at some of the projects on the Voke frontpage, or at the examples on Kairos, a technology and rhetoric journal which presents similar work of a different disciplinary bent.
What is Voke?
Voke honors emerging voices in the field of art education by providing an online platform that encourages dialogue, poses provocative questions and reevaluates the boundaries of academic thought and its presentation.
Our aim is to provide a versatile digital platform for provocative research by emerging and experienced art education professionals, presented in a visual way that reflects the field’s engagement with contemporary media culture and takes advantage of the breadth of expressive forms art practitioners can employ to present research. To this end, Voke is interested not only in soliciting visual research but in scaffolding traditional researchers’ development of heterodox modes of presentation of their work, and fostering productive partnerships between traditional researchers and art practitioners to develop engaging visual articulations of pertinent research. |
Finding and Verifying Quotes
Whether for the annual Inspirational Quotes Contest or finding quotes for a paper or speech ... Choose quotes that can be verified.
To verify a quote, one needs to have who said it, where it was said and when it was said so readers can find the original quote.
Most people turn to free Web sources or "quote a day calendars" to find quotes. Usually these types of sources attribute the quote to an individual, but do not give enough information to check if the quote is correct. Verifiable quotes have citations to help find the original quote.
Here are two quotes with citations from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Sixth Edition (2004):
"Ev'ry corner that you turn you meet a notable
With a statement that is eminently quotable!" (Ira Gershwin, 'Of thee I sing' (title of song and show, 1931)
". . .It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." (Winston Churchill, My Early Life (1931) ch. 9)
With the citations given, one can locate the lyrics of the Gershwin song or the book and chapter by Winston Churchill and check if the quotes are correct.
Finding and Citing Quotes
One can always take a quote directly from a book, song, speech, interview, etc. and then cite it using MLA, APA, or other citation formats. If you want quotation sources that are collections of quotes that give good citations and can be searched by author or topic, try one of the selected sources below.
Print Sources in the Library
Quotation Books On the Reference Shelves (upstairs):
- Cassell Dictionary Of Contemporary Quotations
- Dictionary Of Quotations,
- Bartlett's Familiar Quotations : A Collection Of Passages, Phrases, And Proverbs Traced To Their Sources
- The international thesaurus of quotations
- Magill's quotations in context,
- The Oxford dictionary of modern quotations
- Simpson's contemporary quotations
- The Macmillan book of proverbs, maxims, and famous phrases
- The Oxford Dictionary Of English Proverbs
- Webster's New World Dictionary Of Quotations
- The Home Book Of Quotations, Classical And Modern
- The Oxford Dictionary Of American Quotations
- The Yale Book Of Quotations
Quotation Books In the General Collection (downstairs):
- Familiar Quotations : A Collection Of Passages, Phrases, And Proverbs Traced To Their Sources In Ancient and Modern Literature
- The Oxford Book Of Aphorisms
- The Great Quotations
- Political quotations : a collection of notable sayings on politics from antiquity through 1989
Online Quotation Books Through the Databases
Credo Reference Book Collection contains eight online quotation books. Find them under the quotation subject list of books. They can be searched by keyword or subject. Cite the quotes through a link to EasyBib. Books included:
- Bloomsbury Biographical Dictionary of Quotations
- Bloomsbury Thematic Dictionary of Quotations
- Chambers Classic Speeches
- Collins Dictionary of Quotations
- Rawson's Dictionary of American Quotations
- Respectfully Quoted
- Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
- Simpson's Contemporary Quotations
Be careful! Most free Websites do not have adequate citations.
The Bartleby site http://www.bartleby.com/quotations/ verifies quotations with citations from the following online books:
- Bartlett, John. 1919. Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. Including over 11,000 quotations, the first new edition of John Bartletts corpus to be published after his death in 1905 keeps most of his original work intact.
- Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989. The 2,100 entries in this eminently researched collection form the constellation of collected wisdom in American political debate.
Furman University's, Mathematical Quotations Server. Well cited quotations in mathematics.
Westfield State College's Mathematical and Educational Quotation Server. Well cited quotations on mathematics and education.
Garson O’Toole's, Quote Investigator, blog investigates quotes. Search the bolg for investigated quotes or request new investigations.
The Phrase Finder. Many quotes are actually restated old sayings and expressions. Use the Phrase Finder to look up phrases, sayings, idioms and expressions.
Summer 2014 LMS |
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WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH GRANT PROPOSAL
TITLE: INTERACTIONS BETWEEN ESTUARINE MICROBIAL BIOFILMS AND TRACE LEVELS OF CADMIUM, AND THEIR COMBINED EFFECTS ON OYSTER LARVAL SET AND METAMORPHOSIS.
FY '96 FEDERAL FUNDS: $22,000
FY '96 NON-FEDERAL FUNDS: 44,600
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR AND INSTITUTION:
Ronald M. Weiner
Department of Microbiology
University of Maryland, College Park
CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT WHERE WORK WILL BE PERFORMED: MD-03
STATEMENT OF CRITICAL REGIONAL OR STATE WATER PROBLEM:
It is well documented that many marine microbial biofilms are comprised primarily of anionic exopolysaccharide (EPS), that such films cover nearly all marine surfaces, are a significant part of neritic sediments, and that such biofilms sequester numerous cations with varying affinities. It also accepted that microbial biofilms are beneficial to benthic fertility, flora and fauna, including invertebrate set - i.e. microfouling precedes macrofouling. Metals of concern such as cadmium are bioconcentrated on surfaces that are also important for benthic larvae to initiate metamorphosis, a process that has been shown by several laboratories to be extremely sensitive to the presence of heavy metals. This study will help determine the fates and effects of dissolved Cd in the presence of microbial biofilms and Crassostrea larvae as an indicator organism, so that water resources can be more knowledgeably managed.
STATEMENT OF RESULTS, BENEFITS OF INFORMATION:
We have determined that dissolved Cd is bound and concentrated by reference pure culture prokaryotes and by autochthonous estuarine biofilms in Chesapeake Bay, and we are investigating whether existing or potential levels of these metals in Chesapeake Bay may disrupt oyster (bioassay species) development in benthic biofilrns. Results of this study will be included in progress/final reports, workshops, at least one international conference (e.g. Microbial Ecology) and in peer review literature (e.g. J. Shellfish Res.; Appl. Environ. Microbiol.). Together with other studies from the Maryland Water Resources Research Center, the data would become a basis for management and regulatory decisions.
U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey
Maintained by: John Schefter
Last Updated: Wednesday March 23, 2005 9:17 AM
Privacy Statement || Disclaimer || Accessibility |
Ever wondered how on earth you are going to start your literature review? That’s right: first of all you need to be able to assess other people’s work. In today’s post, Ben from Literature Review HQ shares some excellent advice on how to develop your own skills at critical reading and writing. I am sure you’ll find it very useful. Thanks a lot, Ben!
Bio I’m Ben the writer from Literature Review HQ. I’m an early career researcher who developed my website as a resource for anyone who needs help with their literature review. I write weekly blog posts as well as providing a Literature Review Toolbox for anyone who signs up to receive my emails. If you need more tailored help, I also offer 1:1, or group training over the Internet. You can contact me via Twitter (@LitReviewHQ) or email (Ben@LiteratureReviewHQ.com).
Hands up if you find criticizing other people’s writing tough. As grad students it’s especially hard because we are expected to criticize our peers while we are still learning our craft. Furthermore, our peers are normally world-leading experts in the field. How are we, as lowly grad students and early career researchers supposed to criticize Professor Big-Shot and their enormous research group?
Errrr…I don’t know!
Sorry folks. While I was writing my thesis and my blog, I developed a lot of ways to cope with many different aspects of writing. However, critical reading and writing was something that I just couldn’t seem to crack. So, what did I do? I went around and asked other people and read up about critical reading and writing. It turns out there are some pretty clever people out there who have some really good advice on how to be critical. So my first piece of advice is…
…Interact with other people
You can read an article until you are blue in the face and not find any ways to critique it. However, if you and a friend (or your supervisor) have read the same paper and you have a 5-minute discussion, you’ll be amazed what will come out. If you read relevant papers together you will pick out points you can use in your writing, however, by regularly interacting with people, you will quickly learn how to draw critical conclusions of your own. I’m a strong advocate of journal clubs, whether they be in person or online. I think this is a great way to learn the skill of being critical. Join a journal club this week if you have one, or start one if you don’t. My second piece of advice comes from an interview I did with Alison Wray and Mike Wallace who have written a very good book on how to be a critical writer…
Many people have their own way of doing this and you can develop your own way too… or copy someone else’s! It doesn’t make that much difference but if you can tailor a systematic approach to your own circumstances then I think you will benefit more. What exactly am I talking about? I’m talking about question asking and note taking. For every paper you read, you should develop a set of questions that you can ask of the paper to try and tease out any flaws and criticisms. There are several lists of questions available online and I would start by downloading the question sheet from this blog. You should answer the questions and find a way to store the answers with the paper, either electronically or physically, so that you can easily access your notes with the paper and use them or alter them as needed. Some good critical questions to ask are:
- What are the main findings?
- How does this work relate to the central theme of my literature review?
- What does this work claim?
- How do they back up their claims?
This brings me nicely onto my third point that I stole from Alec Fisher and Stephen Toulmin.
The Claim vs The Evidence
Firstly, I have to say that Fisher and Toulmin present great methods for critical analysis that aren’t the same. However, it would take too long to go through them both here so I will talk about the similarities and the general principle behind their methods. To put it simply, any article that you read will make not just one, but many claims. They will state that something is true based on evidence that they SHOULD present. To understand this is a powerful tool to unlock the floodgates of critical analysis – it’s so powerful, that you could end up being too critical!
The crux of these methods is to analyze the claims that articles make and then check that the evidence for these claims stacks up and is present in the first place. This is where you can really take advantage of being new to a field because you can more easily unpick assumptions that people too familiar with the work might make. Do the authors have sufficient evidence to make that claim? Have they misinterpreted the evidence they have? Have they assumed too much?
When I first discovered these methods I went a bit crazy and I found that most academic articles were flawed in some way. I needed to rein in my critical reading rampage. It was then that I discovered some more advice on critical writing from the amazing writer Pat Thomson.
The Literature is a conversation
When you are reading and writing, you are interacting with the literature as if it were a conversation, not an argument or a blazing row. This is an important distinction. Your goal in critical writing is not to tear other literature to pieces but to effectively engage with it in an interesting and appropriate way. The way Pat puts it is to imagine you are inviting the authors of the papers in your literature review to a dinner party. How are you going to interact with them? You’re not going to agree with everything they say (boring) neither are you going to tear them to pieces and shout at them (antisocial). You’re going to be somewhere in the middle. You are going to identify with some things that people say and contradict others. However, you are going to do all of this in a civilized way.
So that’s how I critically read and write now. I’m lucky to have interacted with some great people to help me on the way. I know I still have a long way to go but I get better every week. This raises another important point, which is…
Practice makes perfect
The more you read and practice the art of critical analysis, the better you will get. This will happen over the course of your career but also over the course of a project. Not only will you have more experience, but also you will have more context in which to set all of the articles you are reading.
I hope this guide helps; I’d love to hear your thoughts, either in the comment or on Twitter (@LitReviewHQ). |
The Association for Computational Linguistics invites the submission of papers for its forty-first Annual Meeting to be held in Sapporo, Japan. Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to:
Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included.
Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees.
A paper accepted for presentation at
the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other
meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are
being submitted to other conferences or workshops must indicate this on
the title page, as must papers that contain significant overlap with
previously published work. Click here for more
The reviewing of the papers will be
blind. Reviewing will be managed by an international Conference Program
Committee consisting of Area Chairs, each of whom will have the
assistance of a set of Program Committee members. Final decisions on
the technical program will be made by the Conference Program Committee.
Each submission will be reviewed by at least three reviewers.
Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference.
Several files are supplied below that describe the formatting for ACL'03 submissions. Note that full paper submissions are restricted to 8 pages, while short paper submissions are restricted to 3 pages.
A description of the format is available in acl03.ps in case you are unable to use these style files directly.
Note also that as reviewing will be
blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and
affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's
identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be
avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed
(Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to the requirements
above are subject to be rejected without review.
All papers must be submitted electronically at the same web address. The papers must be submitted no later than 11 p.m. Central Time February 26, 2003 (Midnight Eastern time Feb. 26 2003; 5 a.m. GMT on Feb 27, 2003). Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed: (Note that we no longer require early registration for papers.)
Please consult the submission page for detailed description of the submission procedures.
Questions regarding the submission
process should be directed to email@example.com.
ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from regions of the world where English is not the language of scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to read the scientific literature in English, have little or no experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the ACL meetings. They may also have some trouble with the style of the presentation of the material that is expected for ACL.
The service will be arranged as follows. A set of potential mentors will be identified by Martha Palmer who has agreed to organize this service for ACL'03. An author who would like to take advantage of this service must send a draft of his/her paper to:
Martha S. Palmer
The author must send ONE copy of the paper (HARD COPY by regular mail or by FAX) by no later than January 9, 2003. The author should try to make the draft as complete as possible in order to get the best advice. An appropriate mentor will be assigned to your paper and the mentor will get back to the author at least two weeks before the deadline for the submission to ACL'03 program committee.
Please note that this service is for the benefit of the authors as described above. It is not a general mentoring service for authors to improve their papers.
If you have any questions about this service please feel free to send a message to Martha Palmer. |
- Today political science is often said to be ‘descriptive’ or ‘empirical,’ concerned with facts; political philosophy is called ‘normative’ because it expresses values. But these terms merely repeat in more abstract form the difference between political science, which seeks agreement, and political philosophy, which seeks the best.
- A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy (2001), p. 6
How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)
- The self is a simplification of the notion of soul, created to serve the purposes of the modern sciences of psychology and economics, both of which want you to be happy in a simple, straightforward way they can count.
- Science wants the fruits of science, and it does not tolerate much doubt about the goodness of those fruits. ... Scientists had a bad conscience about making the atom bomb, it’s fair to say, but their doubts were not prompted, still less endorsed by their science.
- The way out from complication and doubt is to reduce the good to pleasure, something close to the body, or to utility, something useful to the body. ... The body is considered as a factor all human beings have in common, hence an easy basis for generalization.
- Identity is as foreign to science as the good, and just as the good is reduced to something palpable, one’s own is raised to something vaguer but shareable.
- Self-interest, when simple, is universal; I would do the same as you. I would be propelled toward an obvious good, or toward a good I thought obvious. If self-interest is obvious, it is not really your very own; it has been generalized, perhaps artificially.
- People want to stand for something, which means opposing those who stand for something else. In the course of opposing they will often resort to insults and name-calling, which are normal in politics though never in your interest. The demand for more civility in politics today should be directed toward improving the quality of our insults, seeking civility in wit rather than blandness.
- The notion of thumos tells us further that politics is about protection, not primarily about gain. The reason you assert in your defense protects you and people like you that are included in the argument you advance. In an assertive, political argument you assume that you are perfectly OK. You are not apologizing for your self or your soul. The problem lies in things outside you, accidents that have happened or might happen, or the faults of others besides yourself. You therefore want to be protected in your self-satisfaction.
- The simplified notion of self-interest used by our political and social science cannot tolerate the tension between one’s own and the good, for that tension leaves human behavior unpredictable. One cannot penetrate into every individual’s private thoughts, and there is no clear way to judge among different conceptions of the good. So in order to overcome the tension, science tries to combine one’s own and the good in such a way as to preserve neither. It generalizes one’s own as the interest of an average or, better to say, predictable individual who lives his life quantifiably so as to make its study easier for the social scientist. And for the same purpose it vulgarizes the good by eliminating the high and the mighty in our souls (not to mention the low and vicious), transforming our aspiration to nobility and truth into personal preferences of whose value science is incognizant, to which it is indifferent.
- Sociobiology reduces the human to the animal instead of observing how the animal becomes human.
- Having eliminated the soul, modern science cannot understand the body in its most important aspect, which is its capacity for self-importance. Modern biology, particularly the theory of evolution, is based on the overriding concern for survival in all life. This is surely wrong in regard to human life. If you cannot look around you and must insist on indulging a taste for the primitive, you have only to visit the ruins of an ancient people and ponder how much of its GNP was devoted to religion, to its sense of the meaning of human life rather than mere survival.
- Science for its part speaks against the special importance of any object of science, including human beings. ... Science as opposed to religion recognizes nothing sacred either outside man or within him. But collectively, science is the assertion of man over non-man, surely an unembarrassed claim to importance and rule. Yet as individuals, scientists are anonymous factors in the scientific enterprise, each one substitutable for another. For all science cares, scientists could as well be numbered as named.
- Science, according to science, ought to be the most important attribute of human beings.
- The social sciences are in a special difficulty because they cover the same field of human behavior as literature. As science, they must claim to improve upon the prejudice and superstition of common sense, and are therefore compelled to restate the language of common sense, full of implication and innuendo, in irreproachable, blameless, scientific prose innocent of bias or any other subtlety.
- Literature ... seeks to entertain — and why is this? ... The reason, fundamentally, is that literature knows something that science does not: the human resistance to hearing the truth. Science does not inform scientists of this basic fact. ... The wisdom of literature arises mainly from its attention to this point. To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth. |
"A [preacher] who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they are necessarily reflected in his [preaching]." — BXVI
Travel has been perfect! All my flights were on time. I arrived in MS exactly on time. Amazing. I give thanks to God and to all of who prayed for me.
The family is doing well.
I'm in Irving, TX right now.
I've been working away on my book. My editor tells me that it will be out in August 2009 if (IF!) I can get a manuscript to her by May 8th. So, add prayers against procratination and equipment failure to your daily supplications.
I arrive back in Rome on Feb 15th and begin second semester on the 16th. This will be a difficult semester b/c all of my license-level classes will be in Italian. Fortunately, I will be able to take exams in English.
I've received permission from the Provincial to live in Irving for the summer (July-Sept), so I will be teaching literature and theology at U.D. second summer term.
A few new books have made it onto the WISH LIST. These would be very helpful in finishing up my own prayer book. I already have an idea for a second book!
God bless and keep those prayers going. . .Fr. Philip, OP |
Comments and Corrigenda in Scientific Literature
How self-correcting is the written record of scientific and engineering endeavors?
Because human knowledge is by definition fallible, correction remains a necessity. An understanding of how error correction works in the scientific literature helps rebut fears that the veracity of the literature is declining and may suggest changes to enhance the correcting process.
Scholarly publishing has a relatively short history in its present form. It is interesting to note that journal articles have explicitly referenced other articles only since the mid-19th century, thereby enabling citation impact factors—lamentably, some might say. The first large tranche of about 400 journals were founded in the latter part of the 18th century around the time of the American Revolution. Many early journals published articles on any subject, but they restricted submissions to members of a royal academy (which served as a kind of peer review) or to faculty of a university (which traded its journal gratis with other schools, a continuing practice). The modern research university with a comprehensive library of current publications developed in the 19th century. As these universities employed growing numbers of increasingly specialized researchers, they created audiences for the journals that predominate today: addressing a single discipline and drawing submissions from authors not affiliated with the publisher. About 2 million articles were published in the whole 19th century, while roughly that number have been published annually in recent years (see the top graph at right). |
This resource is no longer available
On-demand Podcast: How ISVs can Successfully Transition a to SaaS Application Delivery Model
Many independent software vendors (ISVs) are transitioning to Software as a Service (SaaS) application delivery in addition to or instead of on-premise options in order to take advantage of the cloud's economies of scale.
However, for most ISVs, building, deploying, and managing cloud applications is uncharted territory with many unknowns, and it can be difficult to find useful information and best practices amidst the wealth of literature out there aimed at enterprises— not ISVs.
This in-depth, three-part podcast teaches specific considerations for ISVs hoping to successfully leverage a SaaS application delivery model, covering:
- Motivations for ISVs to offer SaaS applications
- Differences in requirements for ISVs vs. enterprises, and how they affect what you need to worry about when transitioning to a hosted model
- How the data architecture of your application has a significant impact on the functionality you’re able to offer to your customers
- And best practices to optimize data hosting.
Listen to this first segment to discover the benefits that your ISV peers are seeing from moving to SaaS application delivery.
SpeakerEric Farrar Senior Product Manager SAP, SQL Anywhere
Eric is a Senior Software Product Manager for SAP and is responsible for direction and life cycle management of SQL Anywhere, the leading data management and enterprise synchronization solution for applications that operate outside the traditional data center. He has many years of experience delivering product demonstrations, technical and industry presentations, and authoring many articles. Eric holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. |
Nov 18 2013
by Adam Douglas
Always go out with a bang.
When you’re learning the dos and don’ts and ins and outs of creative writing, one piece of advice always seems to rise to the top no matter who is teaching the class:
Always leave them wanting more.
But unless you’re planning on being a one-and-done, there’s gotta be a follow-up act. The band has to get back together and take the stage once more.
But when you’ve crafted the perfect piece, how can you ever hope to reach such heights again?
This pop-culture phenomenon is so common I’ve decided to diagnose, dissect, and discuss how its permeated its way through every form of fiction we’ve got.
Ladies and gents, submitted for the approval of the Unreality Magazine Society, I present “The Jackie Brown Effect.”
In 1994, everyone’s favorite six-syllabled film auteur Quentin Tarantino released Pulp Fiction. Not much new I can say about it. It was nominated for Best Picture, snagged the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, very well may have changed the entire landscape of film as we know it, and got me to buy a certain wallet. You know the one.
It was more than a hit, it was a sensation. Even the most hardened critics of Tarantino cannot deny the impact that Pulp Fiction had. When The Simpsons spend a whole episode parodying you? You, my friend, have made it.
It was the unfollowable act.
So what the hell do you do after that?
In 1997, Tarantino released Jackie Brown, an adaptation of the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. Suffice to say, it was no where near the happening that was Pulp Fiction. In fact, many Tarantino fans were incredibly turned off by the flick. Quite simply, they wanted another Pulp Fiction, and this more coolly paced, less pop-culture saturated, introspective piece of film was definitely not that.
But if you ask me, that’s a good thing. If Quentin gave us another Pulp Fiction, he would just be making Pulp Fiction for the rest of his life. Remember that incredibly human moment at the very end of Kill Bill Volume 2 where the Bride is just there on the bathroom floor laughing and crying simultaneously? That bizarre moment of pure humanity would have a hard time finding its place in another Pulp Fiction. We owe Jackie Brown more than we realize.
Still though, the argument exists, and there is no clear answer. Did Jackie Brown fail, equal, or exceed its predecessors? Cases could be made for each, and I believe we’ll be left wondering.
But while Jackie Brown is nearly impossible to determine, I’m gonna try my hand at a few other follow-ups to the unfollowable act and see how they fared.
SUPER MARIO WORLD VS. SUPER MARIO WORLD 2: YOSHI’S ISLAND
Super Mario World was a lot of people’s first video game. It was a bright, colorful, cheery adventure through a presumably new corner of the Mushroom Kingdom: Dinosaur Land. It was here that Mario met his now classic companion (pet? Sidekick?) Yoshi, where we learned capes come from flowers, and still get that 16-bit flurry of satisfaction watching so many millions of colored blocks fly from the various switch palaces.
Many have claimed that Super Mario World is a perfect game. It’s easy to see why, and hard to argue why not.
So how could one ever hope to one-up that?
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was a pioneer in the not-at-all-completely-cheap method of releasing a prequel as a sequel. The story goes that on the way to deliver the Baby Mario brothers, a stork was attacked by Bowser’s forces. The baddies got away with Baby Luigi, whilst Baby Mario fell (safely, remarkably) onto an island in the middle of the ocean full of colorful creatures called Yoshis. These diligent dinosaurs decided to be the heroes the Mushroom Kingdom needed, and reunite the future plumbers and deliver them home safely.
Yoshi’s Island was a pretty shocking departure from its predecessor. Aside from the shift in protagonist(s), the game had a radically different design scheme, going more for a 2nd-grader’s refrigerator art come-to-life style that not only worked beautifully, but also made the game wholly unique still to this day.
Gameplay underwent a phase shift as well, making the players make use of the various Yoshi functions from egg-throwing, tongue-lashing, and the now Mario game staple ground-pounding. Items and weapons were not a new concept in the Mario series, but no longer would you find fire-flowers and mushrooms. This time around we had seeds and magnifying glasses, and eggs, always eggs. Everything was new!
But was everything better?
It’s almost unfair to compare video games like this, as titles later in a console’s lifetime are typically superior. Developers have had more experience designing for the system, more time to see how players react, and more time to simply play their own games and learn from there. This is the best case scenario. Unfortunately, though, it’s not always perfect and sometimes we get Resident Evil 6.
But not this time.
There is not one aspect of Yoshi’s Island that I would say did not exceed Super Mario World. The gameplay is tremendously more varied, the design is surprisingly complex for what first appears to be a childish art style, and the final boss battle? Come on.
Hell, there’s even a level where Yoshi drops acid.
All this and so much more contribute to my decision that Yoshi’s Island surpasses Super Mario World. They’re both great games and I love them dearly, but at the end of the day, my Yoshi’s Island cartridge has gathered significantly less dust than Super Mario World. And, yes, I know, Baby Mario’s wails haunt all our dreams, but that just further proves how memorable a game Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island truly is.
LONESOME DOVE VS. STREETS OF LAREDO
I hated Westerns.
I grew up in Texas during the height of the Dallas Cowboys where cowboy hats covered every other head and everyone said (and still says ((sigh, including me))) “y’all.”
Despite the smothering of cowboy culture I still couldn’t be bothered to be interested in the genre. I loved space and super heroes. There was no room for horses and dusty plains. I read Animorphs. I watched Pokemon. Sure, Woody the Sheriff was cool, but in that world I’dve begged for a Buzz Lightyear, too.
I was and am a big reader. I’d take home a towering stack of books from my local library and polish them off within the week. I read just about everything. Just about, except Westerns.
My mother begged me for years to read Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove She would extol its virtues to no end, always adding the signature, “I guarantee you you’ll love it.” She read the book when she was pregnant with me, she would also remind me. As if I was cosmically bound to the text.
After so many years of the same old song I relented and picked up the book.
And when I set it down, after I wiped the tears away, I called Mom up and told her she was right.
Lonesome Dove wasn’t just a great book, or even just great literature, it was and still is the best book I’ve ever read. Hands down. Very few come close, but Lonesome Dove still stands surpreme.
If you’re like me and you really have no taste for Westerns, Lonesome Dove is the novel for you. It’s not a Western. It’s a romance, it’s a comedy, it’s an action film, it’s a character drama, it’s none of these, it’s everything.
It’s art. Beautiful, unforgettable, timeless art.
You like George R.R. Martin? Friends, you are going to LOVE Lonesome Dove (and Larry McMurtry in general.) The way that George can tell you an entire story about someone you never even really meet in the novel but you’re still completely captivated? He took more than a few notes from Larry. Especially when it comes to BUTCHERING the characters you love the most.
When I finished Lonesome Dove, I wished I could have forgotten every word I’d read, and taken the journey with the Hat Creek Cattle Company all over again. But since that was about as foolish a wish as bringing a couple of pigs up to Montana, I’d have to settle for the sequel: Streets of Laredo.
And settle is pretty much the perfect word.
Look, Streets of Laredo is a great book, too. But that’s just about it. It’s a great book. I would never call it great literature, and it certainly wouldn’t stand in my pantheon of greatest novels of all time.
We all have that wish at the end of a great story to know what happens after. What happens to these people we fell so deeply in love with. These humans we laughed and cried and cursed and spat with. More often than not, we never find out.
Maybe that’s for the best.
For every Wrath of Khan there’s an Insurrection. For every time the Dark Knight returns, there’s a time he strikes again. Thankfully, that’s not the exact case with Streets of Laredo.
If you loved Lonesome Dove, you will enjoy Streets of Laredo. Seeing where the (surviving) characters are years later is interesting, surprising, and generally welcomed. The story is sharp, the ending satisfying, and the experience worth taking.
But I didn’t shed a single tear walking the Streets of Laredo.
CLERKS VS. MALLRATS
Kevin Smith is why I’m a writer. And I doubt I’m alone.
Say what you will about his current output, his rise to fame is inspiring for any wannabe artist growing up in the middle of nowhere. An early-20s whatever goes from clerk to feature-film director relatively overnight? We’ve all dreamed that dream.
Kevin did what all young artist aspire to do: express. He brought to life the nuance in the tedium of retail life, he attacked the demons that start hatching when one is first labeled an “adult”
, he confronted the true questionable morality of Death Star construction methods. He presented his life in its plainness and its vulgarity in pure, fluorescent, black and white light.
And we listened.
Clerks became the rallying cry for many despondent Gen-Xers. It was Fight Club before Fight Club. It became the indie film Cinderella story and lit the fuse for many would-be writers, including this guy right here.
And then things got wacky.
Following the surprise success of Clerks, Kevin was approached by Universal Studios to write and direct what they wanted to call a “smart Porky’s.” They wanted a new racy and raunchy comedy sensation and who better at the helm than Mr. 37 himself?
I actually remember seeing a poster ad for Mallrats at, of all places, my local mall. I remember it had Jay and Silent Bob in the corner, with the majority of the poster being a (choo choo! All aboard the 90s Nostalgia Train!) Magic Eye puzzle. With a Magic Eye puzzle being a key component of the Mallrats plot (which tells us more about the film’s quality than we realize), the ad made sense.
It made even more sense, because as hard as it was for many people to see the image in a Magic Eye, it was even harder for audiences to see the film. Mallrats was poorly marketed, oddly released, and quickly forgotten. Critics hated it, and even Kevin himself admitted it was a mistake, which he later claimed was a joke, but who knows.
Mallrats was actually my first foray into Kevin’s work. I had read about him in (what’s that? The 90s Nostalgia Train has returned?!) Wizard Magazine and was intrigued. I went to (RIP) Blockbuster to rent Clerks, but since it was checked out, I picked up Mallrats instead.
And then I watched it. And then I watched it again. And then again.
I was enamored. I laughed my balls off and immediately did everything within my power to be as Brodie as possible. I memorized both Cousin Walt stories and tried to pass them off in public as true. I couldn’t get enough of the film, and was such a fan that when I finally did watch Clerks, I didn’t like it. I wanted more Mallrats!
As my tastes matured, I came to realize the genius of Clerks and what exactly it meant. But still, I liked Mallrats more. I recognized its humor was cheaper, its pop-culture admiration much more forced, and, yes, the topless scene is entirely unnecessary.
But still, the heart wants what the heart wants.
I had a very difficult time reconciling myself with the fact that critics simply hated something that I loved so much. Could it really be that bad? Was it really that much of a departure? Every sign seemed to point to yes.
But as Brodie would say, “Sign schmign.”
While obviously a very personal film, Clerks is also very much a Valentine to many filmmakers that inspired Kevin. Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” is typically the film Kevin points to when talking about his inpsiration for Clerks. In the credits for Clerks he identifies Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch for leading the way. You honestly want to tell me Clerks doesn’t take cues from “Do The Right Thing?” The parallels between these directors and others are easily apparent in Clerks, and the work only benefits from it.
And the same is true for Mallrats.
The studio wanted “smart Porky’s” and while they may not have gotten the box office they wanted, the product was exactly that. Kevin has expressed in podcasts/interviews/etc his fandom for the wild and naughty cinematic comedies that permeated the 70s and 80s: “The Blues Brothers”, “Animal House”, “Revenge of the Nerds”, just to name a few. And where Clerks is a Valentine to the esoteric examinations of everyday life you found in the films of Hal Hartley or early Martin Scorsese, Mallrats pays homage to the titillating and ribald comic schlock flicks that came before it. And it does so perfectly.
Look, gun to my head, one film gets put in the national archives, it’s gonna be Clerks. But when viewed through the prism of what the artist was trying to achieve, Kevin succeeded. Sure, it won’t maybe change your life like Clerks might, but it’ll take you on an adventure that a lonely day in a tiny convenience store never could.
That’s it for this volume of the Jackie Brown Effect. Agree? Disagree? Let’s hear it.
Adam Esquenazi Douglas is a playwright who was born in Texas, grew up in Arkansas, was raised by a Jewish man and a Cuban woman, and, somehow, he doesn’t have an accent. He is co-host of two podcasts, The JimmyJew Podcast Extravaganza and Schmame Over, which can be found at http://jimmyjew.libsyn.com/ and http://schmameover.libsyn.com/ respectively, as well as on iTunes. He is a contributing writer to www.GamersSchmamers.com. He currently lives in Brooklyn where he drinks far too much coffee
More Unreal Posts |
From August 2012 until May 13, 2014, Vegan Outreach was one of our two top-recommended organizations.
What does Vegan Outreach do?
Vegan Outreach (VO) engages almost exclusively in a single intervention, leafleting on behalf of farm animals, which we consider to be among the most effective ways to help animals. They produce a large number of leaflets each year that are distributed by VO staff and volunteers, as well as by other organizations. They do most of their work in the US, but also have smaller programs in Canada, Mexico, and Australia.
What are their strengths?
VO has an exceptionally long track record (over 10 years) of carrying out their leafleting program, and our estimates show it to be cost-effective, in the same range with other organizations we have reviewed at this level of depth. They work cooperatively and share information with other groups to reduce duplication of efforts, and they cooperated fully with our requests for information. They look to appropriate sources of information when planning changes to their leaflets or distribution programs, including nutritional guidelines and studies on effective animal advocacy. We’re confident they can continue to use funding at their current level at least as effectively as they have in the past, and they have plans for expansion that would allow them to use increased funds nearly as efficiently.
What are their weaknesses?
We have some concerns that VO relies too heavily on anecdotal evidence to determine the overall level of effectiveness of leafleting as compared to other interventions. Relatedly, we’re not certain that they would be willing to consider shifting significant resources to other programs unless leafleting stopped working, even if there were good evidence that those programs were more cost-effective than leafleting. Finally, VO is currently undergoing a leadership transition; while we do not see any specific cause for concern about the transition, it does limit our ability to understand how the current leadership will guide the organization.
Why didn't VO receive our top recommendation?
At this time we do not recommend VO as a top charity mainly because of our concerns about the way they view evidence. In this round of recommendations we are placing more weight on openness to significant change, and the factors that would cause change, than we have in the past. We are more aware of what we don’t know about which interventions have the greatest ability to effect change. (We also hope that at some point in the future we will know more about this and be able to compare interventions to each other with more certainty that we know which are more effective. At that time, we would increase the weight we placed on engaging in specific activities, and decrease the weight we placed on openness to change.) It is possible that in the future we will know more about leafleting’s effectiveness relative to other interventions and be able to recommend VO despite our current reservations. It is also possible that the current leadership transition will result in VO demonstrating more or less openness to change than it has in the past, which could also affect our decisions in the future.
How Vegan Outreach Performs on Our Criteria
Criterion #1: The Organization Has Concrete Room for More Funding and Plans for Growth
VO has limited room for additional funding for its most central program, distributing leaflets on large, public college campuses in the United States. Present funding levels allow coordinators and volunteers to leaflet once or twice per semester on most of the campuses they cover, and VO has found that leafleting more frequently in the same locations has diminishing returns, based on leafleter experience. However, this program is not in danger of ceasing to be effective once all target locations have been covered, as new students enter college each year. VO has not found diminishing returns when they return to a campus where they leafleted during the previous semester or year.
VO has plans for growth, and therefore room for increased funding, by expanding their operations in Canada, Mexico, and Australia. In the past, VO employees based in the US have occasionally taken leafleting tours in Canada or Mexico. These operations have been more expensive than leafleting at similar schools in the US because of the need to ship leaflets internationally, and sometimes there have been other problems related to the fact that coordinators needed to travel to and work in another country. However, if they expand these operations, they will be paying leafleters who are based in the country where they are working and may be able to reduce printing and shipping costs by printing locally or shipping in larger batches. VO’s operations in Australia are very recent; this year they started printing some leaflets in Australia, because shipping rates to Australia are too high. They are paying a local activist to distribute them. So far she reports success similar to leafleters in the US. By expanding their operations in Australia, they could print leaflets there at a lower cost per leaflet, possibly making overall printing and distribution cost similar to the cost in the US.
We think that VO can continue to use funding at the current yearly level about as efficiently as it has in the past. However, we’re not sure about how efficiently they could use a higher level of funding. Right now, all their international programs are more expensive to run than their US programs, per leaflet distributed. We think their programs in Australia and Canada will probably remain slightly more expensive than the US program, because of being at smaller scales in countries where the population is more spread out and the cost of living is similar or higher. The Mexico program may in time be cheaper to run because of lower labor costs. However, right now we aren’t sure whether each leaflet will have a similar impact to a leaflet distributed in the US, or whether the impact will be greater or smaller. We also have similar questions regarding Canada and Australia, but cultural and economic differences between these countries and the US are not as great, so we believe that information gathered in the US is more likely to be applicable to these programs.
Criterion #2: A Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation Finds the Organization is Cost-Effective
VO runs only one major program, printing and distributing leaflets. Although leaflets may have varying effects by the type of distribution (including whether at a college or at another venue), the area in which they were distributed, or the concentration in which they were distributed through a population, we don’t know enough about these differences to work them into our cost-effectiveness estimate with any reliability. Therefore, in order to estimate VO’s cost-effectiveness as an organization, we consider their total expenses compared to the number of leaflets they produce and distribute. We then estimate how many animals are affected using information about leafleting generally.
From July 2012 to June 2013, VO distributed a total of 2,540,617 leaflets with a budget of $800,398. This works out to a total cost of around 32 cents per leaflet. The marginal cost of producing and distributing additional leaflets is lower, since some costs, including the design and development of new literature, do not scale directly with the number of leaflets printed. VO ships copies of its most popular leaflets to interested individuals for a suggested donation of 11 cents per leaflet at the time of this review. We believe that this is a good representation of the marginal cost of printing a leaflet in a large batch (as is typical for VO) and shipping it to a final destination as part of a relatively small batch (but not individually). This is probably lower than the marginal costs of printing and fully distributing a leaflet, since many VO leaflet distributions are organized or entirely conducted by paid staff of VO or other organizations.
To consider the full costs of distributing the leaflets, including additional distribution costs for leaflets shipped to and distributed by paid staff of other organizations, we used the statistics on Adopt A College to estimate the number of leaflets distributed by organizations other than VO during the 2012-2013 fiscal year. We reviewed the top 100 leafleters for each of the time periods during this year, and marked those that gave an organization name other than “Vegan Outreach” or “VO” as either their name or the organization they were affiliated with. In total, these people and groups distributed 809,894 leaflets during 2012-2013. We take this as the estimated number of leaflets that VO printed and shipped, but whose final distribution costs were partially covered by other groups. For these leaflets, we estimate that VO covered about ⅔ of the total printing and distribution costs, based on a conversation with David Coman-Hidy of The Humane League, which distributed 768,665 VO leaflets in 2013. Using these estimates, the total cost of printing and distributing an average VO leaflet is about 35 cents. Again, the marginal cost would be lower than this average cost, due to economies of scale.
We can use our estimates about the effectiveness of leafleting in general to convert these costs to a number of animals affected per dollar. This eases comparison between groups working with very different methods. However, doing so introduces many additional sources of error, and such estimates should be used with caution. Our Leafleting Impact Calculator is based on the rates at which subjects in a study conducted by Farm Sanctuary and The Humane League reported discontinuing consumption of certain animal products after receiving a leaflet similar to those distributed by VO. It also takes into account elasticities of supply and demand estimated by economists. Using a cost of 35 cents per leaflet together with that calculator, we estimate that VO spares around 1.87 animals from life on a factory farm per dollar in its budget. However, due to uncertainty around both the effects of leaflets on diet choices and the market elasticities for animal products, the bounds around our estimate are wide, ranging from .1 animals/dollar to 20.05 animals/dollar. From this we conclude that VO is working within a good range of cost-effectiveness, comparable to other charities we have reviewed at this depth. Due to the wide error bounds and numerous unconsidered factors on this and other cost-effectiveness estimates, we must also consider other criteria seriously when determining which group to support.
Criterion #3: The Organization is Working on Things That Seem to Have High Mission Effectiveness
VO works primarily on leafleting college campuses in the US to promote awareness of farm animal suffering and encourage young people to act on this awareness by changing their diets. Focusing on farm animals, which are the easiest group of animals to help cheaply at a large scale, is likely to be very effective. We think individual outreach, of which leafleting is one variety, is a necessary precursor to many possible systematic changes. Targeting young people also has high expected effectiveness, since they are more receptive to new ideas and, if they adopt new ideas, will have a long time to put them into practice and attempt to spread them to others. In colleges specifically, young people also have many opportunities for leadership and for influencing relatively large social groups.
VO leaflets do not emphasize additional approaches to helping farm animals beyond changing one’s diet individually or encouraging friends and family to do the same. As such, the effectiveness of leafleting may be hampered because even people who are strongly affected by the leaflets influence animals primarily through changes in their diet and potentially in the diets of a few other people. Other activities which specifically attempt to leverage the connections and abilities of people they reach, or to target particularly influential individuals, may have higher effectiveness for this reason.
Criterion #4: The Organization Possesses A Robust and Agile Understanding of Success and Failure
VO measures the success or failure of their leafleting efforts largely through the spontaneous reports of individual leafleters and recipients of leaflets. This method does provide continuous updates on the state of operations, since leafleters gather impressions of their own success at every leaflet distribution. VO is also beginning to supplement this source of evidence with other streams, such as the results of the Farm Sanctuary/The Humane League study on leafleting and the Humane Research Council’s work regarding the reading level of animal advocacy materials. These sources allow some access to aspects of success or failure that may not occur within the direct perception of leafleters.
We have substantial concerns about measuring the impact of a program informally through the feedback of the people conducting the program. Because leafleting is a physically and emotionally demanding task, volunteers and staff who engage in a large amount of leafleting are likely to be heavily self-selected for qualities that would cause their perception of leafleting’s effects to be positive. For instance, they may be optimistic people who focus heavily on positive responses and do not notice negative ones. They may also have high expectations about how likely recipients of leaflets are to change because of the leaflets. The act of leafleting can reinforce these high expectations, as recipients of leaflets who did change their diets after receiving them are more likely to approach leafleters and tell them than are recipients of leaflets who did not make any changes.
Without a systematic attempt to track the experiences of all (or a representative sample of) leafleters and leaflet recipients, the most positive reports will therefore receive the most weight. Leafleters with very much experience naturally have more perspective on any given event, and therefore their opinions will be taken especially seriously. However, leafleters who have doubts about the effectiveness of their activities are unlikely to continue those activities or increase their involvement in them, so the opinions of experienced leafleters will almost always be unusually positive. Similarly, recipients of leaflets who did not appreciate receiving a leaflet or experience a change because of it are unlikely to seek out the organization that gave it to them to say so.
An additional concern with applying this method to leafleting in particular is that, although VO tracks the number of people who approach leafleters to say they have changed their diet because of receiving a leaflet, most of the feedback they get is from leafleters, not from leaflet recipients. Leafleters, in turn, mainly notice how willingly people take leaflets and whether they are interested in reading and discussing them immediately after receiving them. They have little access to information about the ultimate intended effects of the leaflets.
We are encouraged that VO is moving towards an understanding of the success or failure of their efforts that takes into account more types of information. However, they have yet to establish a track record of using these types of information, particularly where they conflict with the prevailing reports of leafleters. For instance, in explaining the development of the new Your Choice booklet, VO cites the opinions of leafleters that existing materials were beginning to look dated for a young audience, the findings of the Farm Sanctuary/The Humane League study, and the findings of the Humane Research Council’s work on readability as all being in support of the changes between the new booklet and other VO materials. This is promising for the design of the new booklet, but it does not indicate what VO would do if sources offered conflicting or apparently conflicting information. For instance, if no leafleters had voiced concerns about existing materials, we're not sure whether or how quickly VO would have responded to the implications of these studies.
Criterion #5: The Organization Possesses a Strong Track Record of Success
VO has a long and solid track record of producing and distributing leaflets that advocate for farm animals, against industrial agriculture, and for a vegan diet. Statistics on the Adopt a College site show a pattern of generally increasing distribution from 2003 through the present, which is one of the longest track records we’ve seen, particularly when it comes to a track record of engaging in a specific program.
As is the case for any group attempting to influence individuals’ behavior, it is extremely difficult to establish how strong VO’s track record is with regard to its ultimate impact upon animals. Individual behavioral changes are very difficult to measure and track, particularly when contact is limited, as it is between VO and the recipients of its leaflets. The wealth of the available anecdotal evidence is enough to be suggestive that VO has had a positive effect, but it is not enough to determine the magnitude of that effect. Recent studies have also found positive effects of leafleting and have attempted to determine the approximate magnitude of these effects, but there is still significant uncertainty that may not be feasible to resolve.
We consider VO’s track record of accomplishments strong overall. While groups influencing government and corporate policies are able to more concretely demonstrate their short term effects on animals, ultimately we believe that spreading changes in the way individuals think about and behave towards animals is extremely important. While we do our best to give all available evidence appropriate weight, we do not want to penalize groups engaging in this work because of the inherent difficulties of measuring its effects.
Criterion #6: The Organization Has Strong Organizational Leadership and Structure
VO has recently undergone a significant leadership transition with the departure of its Executive Director and Director of Development, each after several years in their position. The current Executive Director, Jack Norris, was one of the co-founders of the organization and has been involved in leadership roles since 1993. However, it is difficult to assess the strength of a leadership team that has recently changed composition significantly.
VO has a highly developed method for dealing with turnover and training new employees and volunteers at lower levels. Volunteers are encouraged to leaflet on their own using instructions provided on the website, but are also added to a list and contacted by outreach coordinators when they plan to visit a college or even in the appropriate area, so that they can leaflet with an experienced leader if they want. Outreach coordinators are usually hired after acquiring significant experience with leafleting, either as a volunteer for VO or in some other way. They also receive a handbook detailing how to approach their responsibilities.
Criterion #7: The Organization is Transparent
VO maintains a roughly average level of transparency among the organizations we have reviewed at the same level of depth. They produce an annual report containing financial and basic organizational information, and will distribute it to anyone who asks. They also work cooperatively with other animal advocacy organizations and share some information about what they find successful and unsuccessful on their website. They were cooperative and prompt in responding to our requests for information, which required more detailed and more sensitive information than is available online.
2There are several possible sources of error in this estimate. First, as with the total number of leaflets distributed, we rely on self-reports by leafleters here; some distributions may not have been recorded on the Adopt a College site and some may have been recorded with approximate or erroneous numbers of leaflets distributed. Second, we did not use all available data, as there were 328 leafleters in each school semester and 288 leafleting other venues in the period we considered. The data we considered accounted for 2437824 leaflets in total. Third, leafleting totals at non-school venues are aggregated by calendar and not by fiscal year; we used the 2012 calendar year because a substantial amount of such leafleting occurs over the summer, but this is not perfectly synchronized with the other time periods we are considering. Finally, some leafleters we marked may have been participating in distributions organized by Vegan Outreach or for which there were no costs to entities besides Vegan Outreach (no paid staff or travel expenses), and some leafleters we did not mark may have been participating in distributions organized by paid staff of other organizations.
3Not including the costs of printing, it costs [THL] 2¢ to distribute a Veg Starter Kit and 4-6¢ to distribute a leaflet." and "Factoring in both groups’ costs for THL distributing Vegan Outreach leaflets, the cost per leaflet rises to about 12¢."
4For instance, here we have taken our estimate of leafleting's effectiveness in producing diet change from a single small study using self-reported data. This estimate is corroborated by our own, even smaller, study. However, even in combination this is not enough information to conclusively determine leafleting's effectiveness. We also apply those studies, both done on and around college campuses, to all Vegan Outreach's leafleting efforts, although many leaflets are distributed at concerts and other venues. Both studies surveyed participants only once and asked about only a few months of their experience, but we apply data from other sources to estimate the length of time they will maintain any diet changes; these findings may not be valid for this situation. Both studies also found high rates of change relative to the changes expected from similar interventions designed to elicit other behaviors; it is not yet clear whether this reflects an unusually good combination of target audience and message or problems in the study designs. We did not consider possible long-term effects of leafleting, such as a general spreading of concern for farm animals not reflected immediately in eating habits. Leafleting is one of the better-studied interventions used by the animal advocacy movement to change individuals' behavior, and this is only a partial list of factors we did not account for in this estimate, so all our estimates must be taken as general guides only. |
The flags carried the logo of the terror group Hezbollah. The rhetoric was the kind you'd normally hear in Tehran or Gaza.
Yet the scene occurred in Washington, D.C, just minutes from the White House.
"We must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel--if possible by peaceful means," Kaukab Siddique said. "Perhaps, like Saladin, we will give them enough food and water to travel back to the lands from where they came to occupy other people."
Siddique is an associate professor of English at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
He used his time outside the classroom over Labor Day weekend to address radical Muslims and leftists at an anti-Israel rally in Washington, D.C. marking "Al Quds Day."
"For the Jews, I would say see what could happen to you if the Muslims wake up," Siddique warned. "And I say to the Muslims, dear brothers and sisters, unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism."
The Investigative Project on Terrorism captured footage of Siddique's Washington rant.
"This is not a one off deal, this event Labor Day weekend," IPT Executive Director Ray Locker told CBN News. "This is something he has said at similar events over a period of at least a dozen years, as far as we can tell."
CBN News found e-mail exchanges posted online in which Siddique called the Holocaust "a hoax" that was "invented," saying there is "not even one document" to prove it happened.
He's also written that Jews have "taken over America" by "devious and immoral means."
Despite a history of anti-Semitic statements, Siddique maintains a job teaching literature at Lincoln University and sits on at least two school committees.
Lincoln is the nation's oldest historically African-American college. Since 2003, it's received almost $200 million in Pennsylvania state money towards various projects.
Lincoln University administrators declined to appear on camera with CBN News. But the school's executive vice president, Michael Hill, told us they in no way agree with or support Siddique's comments on Israel. However, Hill added that Siddique is tenured and has freedom of speech, and the school cannot control what he does or says on his time as a private citizen.
Siddique has also advocated for two convicted terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda -- including the cleric behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
"It's one thing to have strong beliefs," Locker said. "It's another to advocate violence and go to bat for people who are established terrorists."
Hill told CBN News the school will make sure that Siddique's political comments are not part of his classroom curriculum.
Siddique declined a CBN News request for an on-camera interview. But in an e-mail response to our questions, he denied that he was anti-Semitic and said his "speaking out" about Israel, "conform(s) to the ideals and principles that founded Lincoln University."
He added, "When I refer critically to the 'Jews' I am referring to the current leadership of the 'State of Israel' and to their major supporters, not to the Jewish race as a whole."
Siddique's recent statements in Washington, however, appear to suggest otherwise.
"The Koran says drive them out from where they drove you out," he declared. "There's no question of just dismantling the settlements. These settlements are only the tentacles of the devil that resides in Tel Aviv." |
Overview for Delights From Goa
Goans are masters in the culinary art. They are born viveurs and sumptuous meals are served on every feast and occasions. A visit to Goa and a taste of their wide range of delicious curries, Vindaloos, Sorpotels and Ballchows can turn you a life time lover of this cuisine. Now you can cook all these appetizing delicious meals yourself. Aroona Reejhsinghani brings to you the sweets and dessert, fishes and prawns, pickles and chutneys from this coastal region.
Aroona Reejhsinghani (Author)
Aroona Reejhsinghani is an intellectual luminary of international repute and a human dynamo of hard work and unstinted service. Aroona belongs to the ebullient, efficient and efflugent generation and has earned rich laurels in the role of literature, social activities and social work. She is prolific writer and has been regularly contributing articles to variuos prestigious magazines, newspapers and periodicals on diverse subjects such as cookery, health, beauty care, child care, nutrition, poetries, short stories, children's stories. To her writing has been more than a career and a profession. She considers it has a "Sacred Sadhana" she has volumes of articles and writings to her credit and is a writer of 150 books. Sincere and steadfast services rendered in a spirit of dedication has brought in its wake a number of spontaneous and prestigious awards in quick succession like petals of rose. At the age of 10, she won the first award for writing organized by the most prestigious magazine, "Spectator", published from USA. At the age of 15, won the most outstanding dancer award from her school Mount Mary's Convent, Bandra. At the age of 18, she won the best student award from her college Kibbinchand Chellaram Colelge, Bombay. Her first book Woman's World came out when she was 18 and since them she has not looked back. She is a consulting editor of many prestigious poetry magazines, published from Mangalore and Uttar Pradesh. She is on the governing council and on the editorial board of "International Socio-Literary Foundation". She was editor in chief of Cuisine, India's first and most prestigious magazine on food for some time. She was founder editor of her own magazine "Aroona's world of food", which she ran successfully for some years. She was a columnist for hindi magazine, "Monorama, "Free Pres Journal", Navbharat Times and Deccan Herald". In 1991, she entered the Limca Book of Records. Guiness Book of World Records has also congratualted her on her unique achievements. Her biography was included in 1976 in the directory of Great Indian women, where all the leading great women of those days were listed. She entered american Book of Honour in 1980. She was nominated for the prestigious title of being the most outstanding personality of the last 100 years by the American Biographical Institute in 1999. Her name was included in the book "International Directory of Distinguished Leadership", USA. She was awarded the AFGA National Award for excellence in appreciation for her contribution in the field of freelance journalism in 1993. She was declared as an International Personality of 2001 was honoured with Winged Word Award in 2001 by International Socio-literary Foundation, chennai. She was also given the 21st Century Award for Achievement" in recognition for her outstanding contribution to literature. She was nominated as the "International woman of the year", in 2001 by Cambridge, England. Today she is featured in numerous sites on the internet. |
Bound to Please Book Club: Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
Date and Time:Tuesday, April 26, 2011 - 2:00pm–3:30pm
Description:Share your thoughts and opinions about great pieces of literature with fellow enthusiasts. Books are available for checkout at the librarys customer service desk.
Registration is not available for this event. |
[FOM] naive continuum metaphysics
spitters at cs.kun.nl
Wed Mar 3 02:38:50 EST 2004
On Tuesday 02 March 2004 16:14, William.Piper at colorado.edu wrote:
> Following up on Steven's question regarding the continuum as a non-set:
> I was wondering if anyone on the list has seen mathematical or
> philosophical work on the continuum being a fundamental unity? To consider
> the continuum as a pointless entity where the reals are in some sense
> indiscernable from one another was proposed to me by a friend. This person
> regards the CH as a fundamentally meaningless question and claims that we
> make the mistake of thinking of the continuum as composed of objects
> (points or reals) when it is really a single, "solid" entity. Has anyone
> seen any writing on this or perhaps written something on this themselves?
You may want to have a look at the intuitionistic literature on the continuum.
Similar questions motivated Brouwer to develop his intuitionistic mathematics.
Heyting's book is a nice introduction, other standard reference include
Troelstra/van Dalen and Beeson.
For a more "modern" approach (consistent with classical mathematics) you may
want to look at pointfree (aka pointless) topology. For instance, the work on
formal topology (http://www.math.unipd.it/~logic/rgl/frame.html) or the
literature on locale theory (Johnstone's Stone spaces is a standard
Regarding CH, in intuitionistic mathematics on can look at it as follows:
It is not meanless (as your friend states), but only not formulated precisely
enough. In intuitionistic mathematics, there are several ways of making this
precise. Some are provable, some are not.
See, Gielen, de Swart and Veldman, W, The continuum hypothesis in
intuitionism, J. Symbolic Logic,46,1981,1,121--136
I hope this is of any help.
Department of Computer Science, University of Nijmegen.
P.O.box 9010, NL-6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
e-mail: spitters at cs.kun.nl Phone: +31-24-3652631.
Fax: +31-24-3652525 Room: A5024
More information about the FOM |
Ilan Eshkeri is an English film composer.
Eshkeri was born in London. During his childhood, he learned to play the violin and guitar and later went on to play in a rock band. Eshkeri attended Leeds University where he studied music and English literature. During this time he also worked with fellow film composers Edward Shearmur, Michael Kamen and music producer Steve McLaughlin.
Eshkeri got his break following his work on Back to Gaya. He was asked to score Layer Cake, and he later received a nomination for Discovery of the Year at the World Soundtrack Awards. He has since collaborated with the director of Layer Cake, Matthew Vaughn, on a number of other films, including Stardust which earned Eshkeri a nomination for Breakout Composer of the Year and won him the International Film Music Critics Association award for Best Original Score'. Eshkeri and Vaughn's most recent collaboration was the film adaptation of Kick-Ass.
Eshkeri's other notable works include The Young Victoria, which was nominated for this year's Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Score; Warner Bros' martial arts epic Ninja Assassin, Dino DeLaurentiis' Hannibal Rising, and producing the BAFTA-nominated score to Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Eshkeri has also collaborated with various songwriters including Annie Lennox and David Gilmour, and has worked with Take That.
In 2012, Eshkeri was commissioned by Keith H. Yoo to write a composition for Yoo Byung-euns photo exhibition in the Tuileries Garden of The Louvre in Paris. The twelve-part tone poem titled "Through My Window" was pre-recorded in Abbey Road Studios by the London Metropolitan Orchestra, the 46 minutes composition played alongside the exhibition, and it was later released on Blu-ray Disc.
- Trinity (2001)
- Layer Cake (2004)
- Ring of the Nibelungs (2004)
- Hannibal Rising (2007)
- Straightheads (2007)
- Strength and Honour (2007)
- Stardust (2007)
- Virgin Territory (2008)
- Telstar (2008)
- The Young Victoria (2009)
- Ninja Assassin (2009)
- From Time to Time (2009)
- Centurion (2010)
- Kick-Ass (2010)
- Blitz (2011)
- Johnny English Reborn (2011)
- Coriolanus (2012)
- I Give it a Year (2013)
- Austenland (2013)
- Justin and the Knights of Valor (2013)
- Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)
- 47 Ronin (2013)
- The Invisible Woman (2014)
- Get Santa (2014)
- Still Alice (2014)
- Black Sea (2014)
- Survivor (2015)
- Colosseum: A Gladiator's Story (2003)
- Colosseum: Rome's Arena of Death (2003)
- The Banker (2004)
- Trial & Retribution XX Siren (2008)
- Trial & Retribution XXI Ghost Train (2008)
- Trial & Retribution XXII Shooter (2008)
- The Snowman and The Snowdog (with Andy Burrows) (2012)
- Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond (2014)
2007 International Film Music Critics Association nomination for Best Original Fantasy Score: Stardust
2008 Malibu Film Festival Winner for Best Soundtrack: Strength & Honour
2010 BAFTA nomination for Best Music: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (music producer)
2010 Ivor Novello nomination for Best Original Film Score: The Young Victoria
- "Biography". ilaneshkeri.com. Retrieved 4 July 2014.
- "World Soundtrack Academy — History". Retrieved 2009-08-15.
- Ian Sapiro (16 July 2013). Ilan Eshkeri's Stardust: A Film Score Guide. Scarecrow Press. pp. 14–. ISBN 978-0-8108-9166-1.
- "Through My Window: A Tone Poem in Twelve Parts". Ilaneshkeri.com. Retrieved 2014-06-09.
- "record a symphonic suite with Ilan Eshkeri.". LMO. 2012-07-09. Retrieved 2014-06-09.
- "Ahae Through My Window (Blu-ray)". Ahaeproducts.com. Retrieved 2014-06-09.
- Greening, Chris (May 25, 2014). "Ilan Eshkeri scores The Sims 4 with the London Metropolitan". Game Music Online. Retrieved June 9, 2014.
- "2007 Award Winners Announced By International Film Music Critics Association". SoundtrackNet. 2008-02-20. Retrieved 2009-08-15. |
Jews and Christmas
How does one respond to the late”and highly respected”Jakob Petuchowski’s eloquent critique of those Jews who oppose the display of religious symbols on public property (“A Rabbi’s Christmas,” December 1991)? Not easily. But let me try.
The story has been told that, shortly after the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, a professor of theology at Princeton rebuked Alexander Hamilton because, in the document they drafted, the founders of the republic failed to espouse Christianity. Hamilton is said to have replied, “Well, I declare, we forgot.” Of course, the founders didn’t forget at all. What they did was remember. They remembered that this country had been settled mainly by Christians”Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, Huguenots, Mennonites, and many others”who were fleeing oppression in Europe at the hands of other Christians who controlled the machinery of government, who had read the Gospels, and who sincerely believed they were doing the Lord’s will when they savagely persecuted dissident minority sects, both Christian and Jewish. They remembered also what had happened in this country to religious dissenters in the Puritan theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and under the Anglican establishment in Virginia.
Precisely because the founders remembered, in the entire body of the Constitution they framed there is no mention whatever of Jesus or Moses, or even of God. Does that mean that they were anti-religious? Of course not. Did the founders, therefore, in Rabbi Petuchowski’s critical words elsewhere in his article, “‘establish’ the religion of Secularism as the official religion of the United States”? Again, of course not. But even though they surely didn’t ponder the question of crèches or menorahs on public property, they surely did reject the concept of fusion of religion and government. Clearly, they wanted the two to remain separate . . . .There is, of course, nothing in the U.S. Constitution which says that religions cannot play a vital, visible role in American public life. They certainly can, and they certainly should. Separation of church and state has never meant separation of church and society.
With regard to crèche and menorah displays, is there any religious need to place sacred symbols of any faith at the seats of government? Once again, of course not. There is certainly no dearth of private spaces readily available for the public display of sacred symbols”churches, synagogues, religious schools, private lawns, and store fronts . . . .
To some very well-meaning people, the constitutional principle of separation of religion and government is just so much idle banter. (The late Marshall McLuhan, for example, one remarked that the whole issue of separation of church and state had outlived is uselessness .) In the cogent words of the Williamsburg Charter, however, “Far from denigrating religion as a social or political ‘problem,’ the separation of Church and State is both the saving of religion from the temptation of political power and an achievement inspired in large part by religion itself. Far from weakening religion, disestablishment has, as an historical fact, enabled it to flourish.”
As Rabbi Petuchowski well realized, most American Jews are indeed staunchly “separationist””and for good historical reasons. Some of them also believe that it is their civic responsibility to articulate their beliefs and, if need be, to advocate them robustly in courts of law in specific situations. Were it not for such activists. Passion Plays with anti-Semitic undertones, for example, might still be staged at Easter time in public schools in Dade County, Florida. Nor, contrary to Rabbi Petuchowski’s views, is it a proper function of government under our Constitution to compose or to sponsor prayers (even nondenominational prayers) for American school children to recite. The U.S. Supreme Court has made that quite clear. With all due respect to the late Rabbi Petuchowski, it is fair to say that he did not really believe very strongly in the principle of separation of religion and government.
If, God forbid, the United States should ever become, in Rabbi Petuchowski’s words, “a totally Godless society,” it will not be because some people feel deeply, for another example, that the only symbol that properly belongs on a public firehouse is the American flag, not the Cross of Christ. Having said all of this, this writer (as did Rabbi Petuchowski) also “rather likes the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the tastes of Christmas,” and “continues to wish his Christian friends a heartfelt ‘Merry Christmas’ at Yuletide.” In sum, let thousands of crèches”and menorahs”bloom! But out of symbolic respect for constitutional principle, let them be publicly displayed on or at other than government property.
American Jewish Committee
New York, NY
Jakob J. Petuchowski’s “A Rabbi’s Christmas” expresses friendly feelings toward Christians who publicly display religious Christmas symbols, and resentment toward those persons, apparently mostly Jews, who, like Grinches, want to do away with such wholesome celebration.
One thing wrong with the article is that it uses the term “public observance of Christmas” and equivalent terms in an ambiguous way. Christmas pastry, crèches, and carols”found in and around stores, homes, and churches”are in no way at issue. Only late in the article does it touch on the real issue”not “public observance” and not “spontaneous expression” but religious displays, songs, and presumably prayers that are supported or sponsored by local governments. The examples are “a crèche at City Hall . . . or a Christmas carol at a public school assembly.”
But city halls and public schools belong to a public that consists not merely of Christians but of Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, and, of course, Jews. According to the principles of American tradition and of basic fairness, such public institutions should not give the impression that some one religion is the established religion of the country, and therefore superior to all others . . . .
I do not think that thoughtful Christians demand tax-supported opportunities for their religious observances. After all, they have the use of their homes and churches, inside and outside, the places most suitable for the manifestation of their deepest beliefs. They no doubt do not feel so spiritually weak as to require government sponsorship of their faith.
The second thing wrong with Rabbi Petuchowski’s argument is that it libels Jews when it claims that they harbor “Jewish animosity” toward “public celebration of the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth.” It goes on to suggest that a high proportion of Jews are “secularists” who hate all religions and who “want to denude the ‘public square’ of every last trace of religious influence.”
In my experience . . . the vast majority of Jews have no such animosity; and the claim that they have sounds as if it comes from someone who does not like Jews. At the same time, Jews, like adherents to other non-Christian religions, may with justice object to their children in school being forced either to sing or to pretend to sing of “Christ the Lord.” Moreover, the many “secularists” I have known, far from hating all religion, usually think so little of religion that they for the most part merely ignore it . . .
Referring to the Talmud and to expediency, “A Rabbi’s Christmas” warns Jews not to annoy Christians by demanding justice. As for me, I prefer the prophet Amos’ advice: “Let justice roll down like waters” (5:24).
Professor Emeritus of English
University of Colorado at Boulder
Dissent on Reagan
Nothing so confuses me as the defense by so many writers in First Things of Ronald Reagan (James Nuechterlein, “Reagan’s America, America’s Reagan,” December 1991). Whenever the word is not taken as a synonym for libertarian or racist . . . I can pass any test for “conservative.” But, unlike Mr. Nuechterlein’s friend who saw Reagan on TV and said “He’s good,” every time I see Ronald Reagan I am reminded of Mark 9:42: “If anyone gives scandal, it is better for that person that a millstone be tied around his neck and he be tossed into the sea.” It would be a great help if we had some list of characteristics of Ronald Reagan that are taken by his Christian admirers to be admirable. Let me make a list of what those Christians who so dislike him find contemptible.
1. Christ’s First Commandment. People like myself are stunned that Mr. Nuechterlein can be unaware that Ronald Reagan so rarely (never?) goes to church. Contrary to the quote from Reagan that appears in the article, he was infrequently in church and was often asked about his absence by reporters during press conferences. The reason he gave for not being there (safety) was not used by his predecessor or successor . . . .
2. Christ’s Second Commandment. When he ran for President, Mr. Reagan’s income tax returns were made public. His contributions to charity were considerably less than 1 percent of his income. He regularly appointed officials . . . who testified unashamedly to their lack of interest in the poor. Mr. Carter’s Christian support of Habitations for Humanity need not be Ronald Reagan’s interest. But there should be some evidence somewhere of his concern . . . .
3. Mr. Nuechterlein assures us that Ronald Reagan was “hurt by the charge of racism so regularly raised against him.” Can Mr. Nuechterlein offer us any evidence that Ronald Reagan was interested in any way in racial justice or participated in any effort to advance it?
It isn’t the “liberals” who are so confused about claims made for Ronald Reagan. It is the Christians.
Finally, although “liberalism’s near-obsessive concern with the distribution of income [may be] . . . a matter toward which Americans have been mostly indifferent,” it was not a matter toward which Jesus Christ was indifferent. I do not jump to the conclusion that income redistribution will work, but I wonder more than Mr. Nuechterlein seems to do what Jesus had in mind as a proper attitude for Christians about income distribution.
Defenders of Ronald Reagan have been able to ignore these honestly felt and easily documented concerns. I hope First Things will not. History will not.
Reforming the Trinity
In “The Grammar of Baptism” (December 1991) the Rev. Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. argues with considerable ingenuity against the efforts of feminists to “reform” the name of the Holy Trinity, from its current benighted state of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” in the direction of “non-gender-specific terms.”
A more direct approach would be simply to admit that it is finally time for Christians to have done with “feminism.” Feminists don’t care about religious truth. They are motivated instead by nothing more than the desire to see a particular political agenda prevail, but they pretend to be the bearers of some mighty revelation, vouchsafed to them alone, leading one and all to a bright new world of greater inclusiveness and sensitivity.
Let us rather say lo the feminists, “We eschew inclusiveness and sensitivity. These are pseudo-virtues, which you try to shame us into accepting, by directing a polemic against the Church, whose moral force is due simply to its use of certain radical chic cliches that we were all taught to grovel before back in the 1960s. Your critique is fundamentally anti-theological in nature. It is based upon a radical egalitarian political teaching that insists on the subordination of revealed truth to your version of political orthodoxy. As such it is worse than heresy, it is blasphemy. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the name of the Triune God, revealed to us by the incarnate Word Himself and the Holy Spirit, through Holy Tradition and Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the first seven Ecumenical Councils. You have nothing to offer against these but your own insatiable desire for ‘equality and social justice,’ and the force of your demonic anger.”
It is a waste of time to argue with feminists, or to think up clever replies to the cowards who tell us that we are “challenged with being faithful to the credal tradition of the church, while . . . naming the God who is ‘One in Three and Three in One’ in non-gender-specific terms.” This is nonsense. No serious Christian will listen to this pathetic drivel, or have any patience with people who use “words” like “non-gender-specific.”
Scott R. Stripling
North Andover, MA
While sharing Alvin F. Kimel’s concern relative to the “language revisers,” I found his article rather bemusing. If the titles “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” are so critical in baptism, why did not the Apostles use them? The first-century church always baptized in the name of Jesus, never in the triune titles Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5). Baptism in the name of Jesus was so well-established and accepted that Paul used it as a basis of his anti-schism argument in 1 Corinthians 1:13.
Jesus was God incarnate (2 Cor. 5:19; Col. 2:9) and the Church did everything in his name”preaching and teaching (Acts 4:18), healings (Acts 3:6), exorcisms (Acts 16:18), and baptisms. The invoking of his name was so pervasive that the sons of Sceva thought it was an incantation (Acts 19:13).
If the Church had retained the emphasis on, and the use of, the name of Jesus in all its activities (Col. 3:17), the current battle over revising the language of the Church would be pretty much dead in the water. Could anyone argue that invoking the name of Betty (or some other name) is the equal of invoking the name of Jesus?
The current language debate is just one more indicator of how much the church lost when it got caught up in the philosophical/theological Christology debates, and replaced the name of Jesus with the titles Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Forrest H. Scott
I have noticed that as some women grow older, they tend to shift toward a more conservative position on the issue of abortion. By the time such women have completed their “analytical odyssey,” to use Stephanie Moussalli’s pompous term (“Abortion on Second Thought,” December 1991), they are often beyond the normal years of childbearing. Many younger women who disapprove of abortion nevertheless do not want the legal option to be closed off because they realize that circumstances may conceivably arise in which they might need to exercise the abortion option, but beyond a certain age threshold there is probably diminished empathy with less “analytical” younger women, who should now, their elders conclude, be compelled by the State to carry an accidental pregnancy to term. Some feminists would call these coerced younger women “pregnancy slaves,” which is not quite the same analogy between slavery and abortion that Stephanie Moussalli belabors.
Science and Truth
Paul Liben’s fine article “Science Within the Limits of Truth” (December 1991) explains why scientific claims to objectivity are threatened by the naturalistic metaphysic that has seduced so many scientists. The Nobel laureate biochemist Arthur Kornberg insists, for example, that “mind, as part of life, is matter and only matter.” If scientific thinking itself is only the product of material causes (or cultural prejudice, if you prefer), then science itself is a prime candidate for deconstruction. Scientific realism thus presupposes an investigating mind that has some degree of independence from the grip of material or cultural causation.
Liben also says that creation is a topic outside of science, and that creationism can play only the negative role of denying that there is sufficient evidence for evolution. The point requires an important qualification. Natural science cannot study a supernatural Creator, but it does study life, which may be the product either of materialistic evolution or of intelligent creation. The difference between these two theories of origin has tangible scientific consequences. For example, Michael Polanyi has written that living organisms contain and transmit information, which in principle cannot be explained solely by reference to the laws that govern its physical and chemical embodiment. Polanyi’s view has been sharply rejected by materialists like Francis Crick, “who is convinced that all life can be ultimately accounted for by the laws of inanimate nature.” That rejection stems from the materialist commitment to Darwinism. As Polanyi explained, “The question is whether or not the logical range of random mutations includes the formation of novel principles not definable in terms of physics and chemistry. It seems very unlikely that it does.”
The difference between Polanyi and Crick/Kornberg is of great practical importance for the design of research strategies. We can’t understand Shakespeare by learning everything there is to know about ink and paper, and we can’t understand a computer program by explaining the electronic medium in which it is expressed. As I point out in Darwin on Trial, molecular biologists even now use the language of intelligent communication (information, libraries, translation) because there is no other way to depict what they are seeing. I am advocating that scientists consider intelligent creation seriously because this concept allows them to discard ideological blinkers and recognize the reality that is staring them in the face.
Phillip E. Johnson
University of California
School of Law
Some comments on the Paul Liben article, “Science Within the Limits of Truth,” by a retired college professor of social studies and religion.
Mr. Liben has correctly identified a serious challenge to human welfare, a tendency to regard individuals as puppets of “society,” and therefore without moral responsibility for their conduct. He is wrong in attributing this to a wrong use of “science” largely by “academics.”
One error is a failure to recognize that “science” has different meanings. The discussion sees science as a body of conclusions about some limited area of “truth.” But science also means a critical examination of opinions and values by continual “checking up” on the evidence. In this sense, science should have no “limits of truth.”
A second question is “Who is to blame for this distorted appeal to ‘Science’?” Mr. Liben implies that it is the academics. I am familiar with social scientists and their writings, and know that this is not the case. The trouble arises from pundits who write popular articles . . . .
Today, the main champions of “society is to blame” movements have been ethnic groups who have eagerly seen themselves as “victims” as a device to avoid personal responsibility for their plight and the liberal “Utopians” who aid and abet them.
Sylvanus Milne Duvall
. . . In his excellent article, Paul H. Liben defines science as the study of nature. I disagree. While this statement is descriptively true, it is not an adequate definition. The Greeks were aggressive students of nature. They postulated the heliocentric theory of the solar system (Aristarchus of Samos) and suggested the atomic theory of matter but finally settled for the far more reasonable explanations that the Sun went around the Earth and that all things were composed of earth, air, fire, and water.
The distinguishing feature of modern science is its limiting requirement that findings be repeatable. It is the repeatability factor that has made science such a powerful tool in the search for truth and has given science the reputation that is so coveted by non-scientific disciplines. Even a sociologist asserting that poverty correlates with crime must show repeated examples. He cannot simply point to a poor criminal. A good working definition of modern science might be the study of those things in nature that are repeatable and only those things that are repeatable.
One of the few disciplines called a science and not subjected to the repeatability standard is the study of origins. “Why,” we should ask the evolutionist, “should you be exempt?” We may not get an acceptable answer but at least the problem of separate standards is made explicit. Until the student of origins can produce repeated examples of spontaneous generation (living organisms created entirely from non-living matter) followed by an evolutionary process, his speculations remain in the realm of philosophy and outside the strict standards of modern science.
Science can, of course, provide evidence for a philosophical debate. The creationist has the laws of thermodynamics, the absence of any known case of spontaneous generation, and a fossil record “filled” with missing links. The evolutionist has the ongoing process of adaptation throughout nature. But neither side has any scientific proof.
New scientific hypotheses are proposed every day. Many are tested. Of those tested the vast majority go quickly to the garbage can for lack of repeatable results. Yet the theory of evolution has been with us for one hundred years. If the goal of the evolutionist is to replace God with a mechanistic model, he is doomed in more ways than one. What model exists to explain what would have been the greatest quantum change in the history of the universe, namely the first cell?
It is also worth remembering that there is no such thing as a scientific fact. The most that any valid scientific finding has ever proven is that the old well-tested theory was wrong. See, for example, what Einstein did to the rock-solid certainty of Newtonian physics. Yet the enlightened modern man is told by so-called scientists to “believe” in the theory of evolution . . . .
My main point is that the best defense of true science can often be found in its own axioms. People who love science need to boldly proclaim these axioms and challenge those who would abuse science’s good reputation, to explain why they should be exempt from the rules that created that reputation.
Baton Rouge, LA
Readers can thank Francis Canavan for his masterful exposition (“The Popes and the Economy,” October 1991) of the place of Centesimus Annus in the social magisterium. So far as contemporary U.S. life-styles are concerned, one point he makes deserves special emphasis. As a high-tech version of the ancient vice of avarice, consumerism is indeed a monstrous evil. But such a vice is not an essential, necessary characteristic of capitalism, not ( pace Karl Marx) the inevitable psychological consequence of alienation in the capitalist work place. With private property initiatives and market incentives kept in place, appropriate cultural changes (“a great deal of educational and cultural work,” CA No. 36) can be introduced to purge capitalism of consumerism and thereby bring the market economy to a higher level of moral perfection.
There are, however, places in Fr. Canavan’s analysis which indicate that the theologians haven’t yet got John Paul II’s message. Fr. Canavan suggests three ways”(i) minimum wage legislation; (ii) obligatory collective bargaining; and (iii) “other means not beyond . . . human intelligence””for dealing with the case when a firm finds it “economically unfeasible to pay a living wage.” The unusual short-case justification for the first two options assumes that shifting the balance of power in favor of labor can force a redistribution of income from capitalist bad guys to worker good guys and thereby achieve a living wage for the firm’s employees. Such an argument has great populist appeal; trade union demagogues love it. But it should be noted that the axiomatic base of such analysis is a bit of flat-earth superstition explicitly rejected by Pius XI”the Marxian labor theory of value and its purportedly “scientific” corollaries, the theory of surplus value and worker exploitation.
A non-Marxian and more insidious justification for reliance on minimum wage legislation to achieve distribution equity is founded on a twisted interpretation of traditional scholastic teaching on economic justice. Through a highly idiosyncratic reading of the Summa Theologica, R. H. Tawney bequeathed to the critics of capitalism the notion that the just price of a commodity”the justum pretium which serves as the central concept of St. Thomas’ teaching on market relationships”was to be determined by the “status” of the producer. The just price of shoes should provide a living wage for shoemakers; the just price of milk should preserve the family farm. To apply such a principle to a market economy, the law should first specify the wage required to maintain the worker in his social position as the price of the commodity he produces should then adapt to the cost structure so established. Such analysis had great appeal to writers (Chesterton) who would romanticize the medieval world. Such an understanding of market relationships undergirds John A. Ryan’s classic work on distributive justice (an analysis, be it noted, that was quietly but definitively rejected in the U.S. Bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy).
As research by Schumpeter, Langholm, and others has demonstrated, the notion that the scholastic justum pretium was to be determined by producer “status” does not reflect an accurate understanding of medieval teaching on economic justice. As the latter was developed by the later scholastics, the just price of a commodity was said to be determined by its usefulness to a typical buyer and is identified by society’s communis estimatio as reflected in the market. It is this latter conception of exchange justice that is implied in John Paul II’s endorsement of the market, especially in his assertion ( CA, No. 32) that the price of a commodity is determined by contractual agreement between buyer and seller.
However, though purveyors of capitalist ideology would deny it, the principle that the just price of a commodity is determined by supply and demand can indeed give rise to a moral dilemma. What happens when the consumer’s right to buy at the just price collides with the worker’s right to a living wage? Students of the social magisterium might note this hard case was explicitly dealt with by Pius XI ( Quadragesirno Anno , Nos. 72, 73).
Pius XI sets up the case carefully, noting that a firm with up-to-date technology, progressive management, and good labor relations, selling its product in a fair market, may nevertheless find itself unable to pay a living wage. In such a “grave crisis,” he concludes, “it must finally be considered whether the business can continue or the workers be cared for in some other way.” Fr. Canavan’s third option for dealing with the firm unable to pay a living wage is here identified. Such a firm is to be closed down, the workers to be “cared for in some other way””e.g., through unemployment compensation and retraining allowances. Unlike minimum wage and collective bargaining solutions that would keep the workers in place (and eventually require public sector subsidies to keep the otherwise bankrupt firm in business), the plant closure plus retraining option facilitates and humanizes, rather than obstructs, the working of the market process.
Those who try to find (mistakenly, as Fr. Canavan rightly affirms) an abrupt change in direction in Centesimus Annus might reflect. This deep-level understanding of the market system and identification of plant closure with retraining as the solution for a basic problem was spelled out by Pius XI in one of the classic documents of the social magisterium half a century ago.
Stephen T. Worland
Professor Emeritus of Economics
University of Notre Dame
Dissent on Euthanasia
I like your magazine and appreciate what I have read.
However, I have serious reservations about your editorial on euthanasia (“Euthanasia: Final Exit, Final Excuse,” December 1991).
You write of “the ominous advances made by the campaign for euthanasia.” You then criticize Derek Humphry’s Final Exit as a manual for killing.
Let us look at Webster’s definition of euthanasia: “An act of putting to death persons suffering from incurable and distressing disease.” Is that not quite different from “killing”? Killing is a highly negative term used eighteen times in your editorial, but only once (page 50) in Final Exit.
Look again at the purpose of Final Exit as stated at the bottom of page 19: “It is aimed at helping public and health professionals achieve death with dignity for those who desire to plan for it.”
You imply that euthanasia is running rampant in our society. Read again Derek Humphry’s caution on page 33: “I cannot emphasize strongly enough that people (doctors included) should help each other to die if there is a bonding of love and friendship and mutual respect.”
I agree that “a body is owned, body and soul, by God”created and destined for God.” Do we have a right to use mechanical means to keep that soul, entombed in a non-functional physical body, from returning to its Maker?
You indicate that our choice now is between healing and killing. Rather, when healing has reached its limit, should not death with dignity be accepted as part of life”eternal?
Could not money used to keep dysfunctional bodies alive be better used to feed, clothe, house, educate people who are alive”and want to live creatively?
J. Albert Clark
Minister in the United
Church of Christ
Body and Mind
I tip my hat to John Crosby for his wonderful article “Education and the Mind Redeemed” (December 1991). An incarnational theology that limits the significance of the earthly appearance of the second person of the Trinity to the salvation of our souls from a world of iniquity and eternal damnation must, inevitably, terminate in a devaluation of everything terrestrial. Hence, in answer to Tertullian’s query “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the Christian whose understanding of the incarnation is so circumscribed will either embrace the one (Jerusalem) and hate the other (Athens) or try in vain to unite what can only remain strange (and strained) bedfellows . . . .
While Crosby’s interest in this article is limited to Tertullian’s quandary (and our own) of relating the elements of the Christian university, that is, philosophy, literature, history, and the liberal arts, to the life of redemption and faith, the underlying issue at stake seems easily to extend beyond intellectual culture. What we are really dealing with here is the legitimacy of any Christian vocation whose end seems, and perhaps is, unambiguously terrestrial.
This problem is particularly acute in the evangelical community. If our terrestrial purpose is that of evangelism and the salvation of souls, how are we to justify any vocation whose end is not directly, or indirectly, so oriented? What invariably emerges in such circles is the kind of thinking that impels evangelical Christians into missions, the pastorate, or a career whose financial remuneration contributes to these eschatological vocations. An alternative evangelical view of vocation is a utilitarian one, namely, that the reason we need Christians occupying a variety of positions in a multiplicity of “secular” fields is in order to proclaim the gospel to the unbelievers who inhabit those universes of discourse. Such views, however, not only invariably devalue the terrestrial, but what’s worse is that in their very devaluation they fail to apprehend the magnitude and universal scope of God’s redemptive and re-creative work in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a truly cosmic work to which Scripture bears testimony.
It strikes me that an incarnational humanism of the kind posited by Crosby (and a position articulated by many thinkers of the Reformed persuasion) need not threaten in the least the evangelistic fervor of those of us who count ourselves among American evangelicals. The evangelistic mandate recorded in the twenty-eighth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew does not, and should not, issue forth in a devaluation of the terrestrial. The biblical picture seems rather to be that the destiny of humanity and all creation is the destiny of Jesus Christ. Human flourishing in all of its various dimensions accurately mirrors the kingdom of God. Certainly the writer of Psalm 72 anticipated a king whose kingdom would be characterized by terrestrial flourishing. As the blessed receivers of God’s promises, should we not embrace the terrestrial as that which is included in the universal redemptive and re-creative act of God in Christ? Is it not time to acknowledge that contributing to human flourishing, exemplifying Christ as the telos of humanity, is not just a humanistic nicety, but constitutive of the very gospel we proclaim? . . .
New Haven, CT
One of our readers points out that the review by Kevin Flannery of Roger Scruton’s The Philosopher on Dover Beach (December 1991) misquotes Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The lines should read thus: “the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back , and fling” (emphasis added), and not “suck back,” a rather unlikely alternative. |
Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos in Gutenberg! The Musical!
Despite a paper-thin plot, Gutenberg delivers
By Scott Harrah
Corny, silly, historically inaccurate, shamelessly politically incorrect and undeniably hilarious, the two-man spoof Gutenberg! The Musical! is more like a long stand-up comedy routine or cabaret act than an off-Broadway musical. Bud Davenport (Christopher Fitzgerald) and Doug Simon (Jeremy Shamos) play two wannabe Broadway show writers doing a reading of their purported musical biography of printing-press inventor Johann Gutenberg for what they hope is a theater full of potential producers. Bud and Dougs vocal abilities are as paper-thin as the plot of their convoluted tale, but they more than make up for their shortcomings with charm and wit. The show, which originated at Chelseas Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and had a successful run last winter at the Jeremy Street Theater in London, was mounted at the New York Musical Theater Festival in September, 59E59 Theater in December, and received such critical and audience acclaim that it has been brought to the Actors Playhouse in the West Village for a limited engagement through March 25th.
The narrative is as inane and intentionally insipid as anything by Mel Brooks, and the wacky skewering of Gutenbergs life story has all the campy elements of one of Brookss mock retellings of history, complete with tasteless Nazi and Jewish jokes, sexist humor about the female anatomy, and absurd songs. According to Bud and Doug, Gutenberg grew up in the Medieval German hamlet of Schlimmer and got his start working as a wine presser. He was dumbfounded by the high rate of illiteracy in the town. To illustrate just how bad things are, Bud and Doug act out a scene in which a womans baby dies because she cant read a prescription bottle and mistakenly gives her sick child jellybeans instead of medicine. (The two wear a multitude of baseball caps with peoples names written across the front to let us know when theyre portraying a different character.) Gutenberg falls in love with his assistant, a blonde airhead named Helvetica (just like the typeface wink, wink). She works as a grape stomper, has large breasts, and not much in the brain department. Her show-stopping ballad is all about how she cant read words or Gutenberg himself. He soon has an epiphany and realizes that he could turn his wine press into a printing press so that everyone will have more access to printed literature and, thus, learn to read.
Theres just one problem: only monks in the local monastery can read, and they want to keep it that way so that only they can read the Bible and interpret it for the masses. Although there may be a shred of historical truth to this, its doubtful that monks in the Middle Ages had electric pencil sharpeners, but Bud and Doug love to throw in such nonsensical details for a laugh. Along the way, the two lampoon everything from over-the-top Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals to anti-Semitism. (One of the characters is actually called Anti-Semitic Flower Girl, and shes certainly nothing like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.)
Although the humor is strictly lowbrow schlock, it is never dull and always clever, and Fitzgerald and Shamos do a superb job of portraying the many different characters. The only problem here is that, for a 90-minute farce, there really isnt a need to break the story into two acts. But since Bud and Doug comment on the futility and disappointing aspects of second acts in musical theater, its all part of the show anyway. Gutenberg! The Musical! will thrill anyone who loves the American musical theater and isnt afraid to see it lovingly satirized. |
Eco-friendly TV: Which 37″ LCD televisions are the most efficient?
Time to talk TV’s, and their power consumption. Today we will look specifically at the power consumption of 37″ LCDs. This is a typical television that many of us hang on the wall in our kitchen as part of the home remodel project.
Before we get to the TVs, let’s discuss power consumption for a moment. There are two parts of power consumption when talking televisions. The first is Standyby Power Consumption (when your TV is turned OFF), and the second is On Mode Power Consumption (when you TV is turned ON)
Standby Power Consumption is what ENERGY STAR uses to rate TVs today. This is the energy your TV uses while it is just sitting there during the day. It is the lowest power consumption mode that cannot be switched OFF by a homeowner. To qualify for ENERGY STAR a television must not exceed 1 watt of power consumption in Standby Mode. The Department of Energy says, that Standby power consumption of an ENERGY STAR compliant TV uses about 30% less energy than standard sets.
As of today, there is NOT an ENERGY STAR rating for On Mode Power Consumption. On Mode is the one we are probably most aware of…you know, this is the mode our kids like to use when they leave their rooms and run outside. In September 2008, ENERGY STAR will produce ratings for television On Mode power consumption (this is really great). Right now it looks like a 37″ LCD like the ones we present below, would be allowed to consume no more than 190W of On Mode power – estimate.
Today, don’t let an ENERGY STAR logo fool you. This is only a logo for Standby Mode. How misleading can this be? Well, the most efficient television on the ENERGY STAR list is from Hewlett-Packard (HP) with a Standby Mode consumption of 0.3W, but in On Mode this TV consumes 220W – the highest consumption device on the list! Not good.
So if ENERGY STAR doesn’t rate On Mode power consumption, what can YOU do? Where can you find your TV’s power consumption? Well, you dig on the internet, you dig into manuals, and you troll through datasheets and marketing literature…for hours. Typically the last line on the datasheet, or the last page in the manual will give you power consumption. Or, you come to GetWithGreen.com, because we do the dirty work for you
This week, here is what are trolling dug up for you on 37″ LCD TVs that qualified for ENERGY STAR in Standby Mode (in order of best Standby Mode):
Manufacturer Model Standby On Mode
Hewlett-Packard LT3700 0.3W 220W
Hewlett-Packard LC3772N 0.3W 220W
LG LB5DF-UC 0.3W 170W
LG 37 LB4DS-UA 0.4W 165W
LG 37 LC7D-UB 0.5W 177W
Philips 37PFL5332D/37 0.75W 190W
Philips 37PFL7332D/37 0.75W 200W
Sharp LC37GP1U 0.9W 165W
Samsung LN-T3732H 0.9W 180W
Sharp LC37D62U 0.9W 198W
Sharp LCC3742U 0.95W 185W
Sharp LC37D43U 0.95W 185W
Sharp LC37D42U 0.95W 185W
The LG’s give a GetWithGreen.com green thumbs up!!
We want you to know that there are other models (and manufacturers) that qualify for ENERGY STAR, but these other models do not offer homeowners, and consumers On Mode power consumption on the internet in a way that easy to find. So either they have something to hide, or they are not concerned with offering us the information. Or are they just concerned with getting the ENERGY STAR logo because it is good marketing??? So we made an editorial decision to leave them off, because we feel that On Mode power consumption is extremely important to make public — this is the mode that hits our environment the hardest.
Note: If you are a manufacturer, and you want GetWithGreen.com to update our list with your product, then please provide us (and our audience) with your specs!
Finally, we want to give a green round of applause for the Sharp team who makes power consumption information the most readily available and discoverable for homeowners. We need to give a GetWithGreen.com green thumb down for Samsung where finding On Mode consumption is hard, and in most cases utterly impossible to find.
Check back soon, as we translate the power savings into dollar savings for you. Sign up for our free product Newsletter and you won’t miss it! |
A typical sales pitch for a prepaid funeral might sound like this:
No one wants to leave the burden of decision-making on their children in their time of grief ... prearranging your funeral brings you and your family peace of mind.
Or like this:
Protect yourself against inflation — prearranging your funeral gives you today's prices for your service in the future.
Each technique plays on anxieties near and dear to the American heart — the effect your death will have on your family; rising prices — and each is misleading. "Preneed"* funerals may not cover every item of service you and your family expect, and there's often no guarantee the money you pay today will keep up with inflation to pay the cost of the service you've picked out. Read more below the fold. . . .
*A note on terminology — the term "preneed," as used by the industry, means a funeral purchased before death. Funeral directors often use this term interchangeably with "prearranging," but prearrangement can be and is frequently done without prepaying.
At least one-third of the complaints we receive have to do with prepaid funerals. Some of the most common are:
— The funeral director told me the casket dad picked out was no longer available and we'd have to buy another (more expensive one)"
— I've had to move in with my children in another state, and the funeral home says my prepaid money can't be transferred to another funeral home"
— My mom now wants to be cremated, but the funeral director said the plan can't be changed”
Add to this the confusion of laws among the states governing preneed funeral contracts. Many state laws don't offer much protection for your prepaid funeral money. Hawaii, for example, requires funeral directors to put only 70 percent of your prepaid money in trust. What happens if you change your mind, or move out of the area?
Other states, such as Florida, allow funeral directors to charge interest on installment payments toward preneed plans. Why should you pay the funeral home interest for goods and services you haven't used yet? Florida also allows constructive delivery, a legal fiction that allows a funeral seller to consider prepaid merchandise (such as a casket) sold to you as "delivered" and not subject to refund or cancellation.
Only New York and New Jersey get close to truly consumer-friendly preneed laws. New York requires 100 percent of your money to be deposited in trust. The consumer has the right to a full refund, with interest, on a revocable plan, and irrevocable plans are transferable.
There are two main types of preneed funerals: insurance-funded plans and trust-funded plans. In a trust-funded funeral, the customer pays in to the trust either in installments or in a lump-sum.
While insurance is usually portable, you may get less back than you paid in if you change your mind and cash out. Insurance plans can have all sorts of restrictions, too. Many will not pay the full benefit — or anything at all — during the first few years you pay premiums.
Trust-funded plans can be revocable or irrevocable. An irrevocable trust is one that can't be cashed out. Medicaid allows people to set aside certain amounts of money in irrevocable trusts for funeral expenses. This way, that money won't be taken away if you go into long-term care paid for by Medicaid.Revocable trusts, on the other hand, may be cashed out or changed at will, but are subject to seizure by Medicaid if Medicaid is paying for your care and other assets have been depleted.
If you're concerned that you may have to go on Medicaid and you want to shelter money for your funeral, you may want to consider establishing a private irrevocable trust. While you would be unable to change or cash out the trust, you could designate a trusted family member or friend as the beneficiary, rather than giving control of your money to a funeral home. Call your Medicaid department to see if they’ll accept such a private irrevocable trust as a legitimate way to shelter funeral assets. And remember, don’t buy an irrevocable funeral plan “just in case” you should ever go on Medicaid — wait until you have to. If you never need Medicaid, you will have closed down all your options and locked your money away for no good reason.
As with any other major purchase, we advise people to shop around and discuss funeral planning thoroughly with family and friends. Making your wishes known to them — and listening to what they might need — is probably the most important task in planning your funeral arrangements.
Funeral Consumers Alliance has affiliates around the country that can provide you with price information from various funeral businesses. We also have a wealth of literature that can help you navigate the often complicated process funeral planning.
As for making sure money is available for your funeral, one of the best vehicles we know of is called a Totten Trust, or pay-on-death account. This is a trust fund you set up at a bank. You choose the beneficiary (we don't recommend naming the funeral director) and deposit any amount of money you wish.
When you die, the money is immediately released to the beneficiary rather than being tied up in probate. Totten trusts remain in your name, they are portable, and the interest accrues in your account. |
Children with Disabilities: Global Priorities
Prepared 2001 by Rehabilitation International (RI), a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the UN (ECOSOC), ILO, WHO, UNICEF and regional entities including the Organization for African Unity, the European Union, UNESCAP and the Organization for American States.
In preparation for the UN Special Session on Children, RI has reviewed current statistics, literature and international policy statements, and consulted with specialists in childhood disability. The following findings from these materials are sobering and underscore the urgency of raising the inclusion of children and youths with disabilities to a high priority in all proposed actions and programs to implement the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
During the last century in most countries, disabled children were often overlooked, excluded, hidden away or exiled to institutions. In the 21st century, RI envisions "a world where equal opportunities for disabled people becomes a natural consequence of enlightened policies and legislation supporting full inclusion to and access to all parts of society."
RI Charter for the New Millennium, adopted London, 1999
"The rights of students with disabilities to be educated in their local mainstream school is becoming more and more accepted in most countries, and many reforms are being put in place to achieve to this goal. Further, there is no reason to segregate disabled students in public education systems. Instead, education systems need to be reconsidered to meet the needs of all students."
Inclusive Education at Work: Students with Disabilities in Mainstream Schools, OECD, Paris, 1999
"The principle of inclusion in the 1994 (UNESCO) Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education means that ordinary schools should accommodate all children, regardless of their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, linguistic or other conditions."
It's a Matter of Attitudes, Report of Hasselby Seminar, Swedish Organizations of Disabled Persons International Aid Organization (SHIA), 1999
"An estimated 170 million of the world's children are malnourished, often at a cost of developmental disabilities . . . and 1 of every 10 children has serious disabilities."
Carol Bellamy, Executive Director, UNICEF, address to Organizations for African Unity, Cairo, May 2001
Early Detection and Stimulation
"There has been remarkable documentation in the last decade to confirm that the first five years of a child's life either positively or negatively affect growth and development for a lifetime. Experts agree that the most critical period is from conception to three years. During this period the foundation of a child's intelligence, physical development, personality and social behavior are laid . . . It is of utmost importance to identify impairments as early as possible. Simple interventions and modes of care-giving can prevent or minimize cognitive, behavioral, emotional and health problems."
Rima Shore,Rethinking the Brain: New Insights into Early Development, Families and Work Institute, 1997
"When infants are held and touched in soothing ways, they tend to thrive. Warm, responsive care seems to have a protective function . . . But the brain's malleability during these early years also means that when children do not get the care they need, or if they experience starvation, abuse or neglect, their brain development may be compromised."
The State of the World's Children 2001, UNICEF
Education for All?
"Disabled people have lower education and income levels than the rest of the population. They are more likely to have incomes below poverty levels and less likely to have savings and assets than the non-disabled population. These findings hold for both developing and developing countries."
Poverty & Disability: a Survey of the Literature, World Bank, 1999
"We must focus on the needs of those most disadvantaged and excluded from learning, both in and out of school-girls, working children, children of ethnic minorities, and children affected by violence and conflict, disabilities and HIV/AIDS."
Carol Bellamy, Executive Director, UNICEF, Address to World Forum on Education for All, Dakar, April 2000
"The United Nations estimates that the literacy rate worldwide for people with disabilities is around 3%, with the rate for disabled women and girls hovering around 1%."
The UN Decade of Disabled Persons: a Decade of Accomplishment: 1983-1992- UN, New York, 1992
"It is important to note that throughout history, some children and adults with disabilities have been 'casually integrated' (without special programs or additional expense) into education, community and family activities. In fact, several small field studies conducted in Africa and Asia suggest that anywhere from 2 to 13% of children in ordinary schools have some sort of impairment."
M. Miles,Children with Disabilities in Ordinary Schools, Peshawar Mental Health Centre for Government of Pakistan, 1985 (ERIC ED265711)
"The issue of naming children and youth with disabilities as a specified target group has once again been the topic of heated discussion and advocacy leading up to, during and following the World Forum on "Education for All by 2015" held in Dakar, Senegal . . . Once again, the rights and needs of children with disabilities are not specified . . . This is in clear contrast to the clear specification of the special emphases on girls, gender equity, adult literacy and the HIV/AIDS pandemic . . .
"How will the progress of children and youth with disabilities . . . be monitored when they are not specified as a key target group in the national plans and education programs of their countries? Will we sit here in 2015 and say there has been significant progress in gender equity in education, that the levels of adult illiteracy have dropped, but that we have limited or no data on the progress in equity in education for children and youth with disabilities because we did not name them, did not plan for them and did not monitor their progress?"
Penny Price,RI Education Commission, Ethics and Inclusion: Diversity and Equity, keynote paper, RI World Congress, Rio de Janeiro, August 2000
"Approximately 2 million children have been killed by conflict over the last 10 years, 12 million have been made homeless and 6 million have been injured or disabled."
Growing Up Alone, UNICEF, 2001
"Women and children receive less than 20% of rehabilitation services, such as prosthetics and orthotics."
Relief and Rehabilitation of Traumatized Children in War Situations, UNICEF 1990
Disabled Children at Risk
"Disabled children are always at great risk of discrimination and are particularly vulnerable when there is a shortage of resources. An estimated 97% of disabled children in developing countries are denied even the most rudimentary rehabilitation services . . . Disabled children suffer more violence and abuse than other children - they are imprisoned in institutions, cupboards and sheds and, all too often, starved to death. Even in the wealthy and 'enlightened' developed countries, the birth of a disabled child is almost invariably viewed as a 'tragedy'."
Report of Rights for Disabled Children, a project coordinated by Disability Awareness in Action, inSeen and Heard, International Disability & Development Consortium, October 1997
Damaging Effects of Institutions
"Research in child development and the experience of . . . countries around the world have demonstrated that children experience developmental delays and potentially irreversible psychological damage by growing up in a congregate environment (institution). This is particularly true in the earliest stages of child development (birth to age 4) in which the child learns to make psychological attachment to parents (or substitute parents). Even in a well-staffed institution, a child rarely gets the mount of attention he or she would receive from . . . parents. Consequently, institutionalization precludes the kind of individual attachments that every child needs."
Children in Russia's Institutions: Human Rights & Opportunities for Reform, Findings and Recommendations of a UNICEF-sponsored Fact-Finding Mission, 1998, published by Mental Disability Rights International, Washington, D.C. 1999
Needs of Deaf Children
The position of the World Federation of the Deaf is that "deaf people are a cultural and linguistic minority with a right to their native sign language as their mother tongue; and that deaf children have a right to bilingual education in sign and written language."
Reaffirmation of Human Rights and Self-Determination for all Deaf People, WFD Resolution of its XIII World Congress, July 1999
Needs of Blind Children
The World Blind Union has found that, "less than 10% of the world's blind persons are literate and fewer than 15% of all visually disabled children ever have access to education." WBU asserts that, "Every blind person has the right to access written communication: Braille empowers blind persons to become active communicators, to receive an education and to have access to employment."
Factsheet on Literacy, World Blind Union, http://umc.once.es
"Disabled children have the same basic needs as all children: adequate food, shelter, security, nurture and social contact . . . They also need to be able to play, take risks, have triumphs and experience mishaps. They need support, but also to have expectations placed on them to prepare them for adulthood.
"Most disabled children will become disabled adults, but few of them know this . . . many disabled children believe they will grow up to become non-disabled. As they progress through childhood and prepare for their future, it is important for them to have appropriate role models. They need to learn the skills demanded of disabled adults . . . For this reason is it is important that disabled children meet disabled adults from their own societies."
Beverly Ashton, Action on Disability & Development,Perspectives on Disabled Children, Promoting the Rights of Disabled Children Globally, International Disability and Development Consortium, 1999
Powerful Influence of the Mass Media
"In newspapers, books and magazines, on television and in the cinema, on stage and through the airwaves, the media exert a uniquely powerful influence on how individuals come to understand the changing world around them" . . . In a great many countries, efforts are underway to bring children with disabilities from the margins into the mainstream of society. The pace of this process can be quickened and supported by the natural inclusion of disabled children in media designed to inform, educate and entertain the public. Disabled children need to see themselves reflected in the societal mirror that the mass media provides-so that they too can envision a future.
Improving Communications about People with Disabilities, United Nations, New York, 1982 andMass Media and Disabled People, proceedings of an international symposium, Polish Society for Rehabilitation of Disabled People, Warsaw, 1990. |
Chatham University recognizes that learning is accomplished beyond the formality of the classroom through organized academic activities and the activities of student organizations. Hence, the University provides opportunities for students to organize and to participate in group activities intended to broaden the scope of general learning, to extend knowledge of specialized areas, and to serve their professional, cultural, social and recreational interests.
The Office of Student Activities serves as the main contact for all student organizations at Chatham University and provides numerous services to help students excel in their organizations including:
Student Organization Policies & Procedures
- Student Organization Policies & Procedures Manual - A complete guide on all the policies and procedures related to student organizations (how to reserve a room for an event, chalking, food services, publicity ideas, and much more). A current copy can be downloaded on myChatham.
- Each semester student organizations participate in several sessions to review Chatham policies and procedures and to connect with the Office of Residence Life & Student Activities - Student Affairs staff members.
- Beginning this year, student organizations will enroll in the Student Organizations Policies & Procedures Moodle site to stay up to date on the latest Chatham policies and procedures, ask and answer questions, and share organizational tips.
Student organizations receive a monthly email from the Office of Student Activities sharing updates and leadership opportunities to maintain an open line of communication.
Each semester, the Student Activities Fair occurs where student organizations can recruit members and participate in fun events!
Student Leadership & Student Organization Recognition Program
In April, we celebrate accomplishments with student leaders and student organizations through a leadership awards dinner. Student organizations and individuals can apply for student awards for a chance to be recognized for their hard work and contributions to the Chatham community!
Student Organizations are a great way to get involved on campus. Please read about the organizations listed below to find one or many that you would be interested in joining. Students who would like to connect with an organization can contact the Office of Residence Life & Student Activities - Student Affairs at email@example.com or 412-365-1281.
Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society
This service-based student organization is for non-traditional students ages 24 and older who have earned 24 credit hours at Chatham University and have a GPA of 3.2 or higher.
The purpose of the organization is to promote and advocate for the basic rights and freedoms of all people, and to raise awareness about cases in which these rights are being infringed.
The purpose of the organization shall be to exhibit student work throughout Chatham’s main campus as well as host events and meetings to engage students in the visual arts on and off-campus.
Beta Beta Beta
This group functions as an honor and professional society for students of the biological sciences.
Beyond the Page - An Unconventional Book Club
The purpose of the organizations shall be to further connections between English and Creative Writing majors as well as to include any individual who is interested in expanding their love and knowledge of literature. The organization will also foster an appreciation of literature and the arts through discussion and awareness of issues pertaining to the world of books.
Black Student Union (BSU)
This organization provides programs to meet the academic, cultural, political and social needs of black students. The BSU also sponsors programs that promote diversity and cultural awareness.
Blue Key Honor Society
The Blue Key Honor Society is dedicated to inducting balanced and all-around excellence in scholarship, leadership, and service. Each member must have a GPA of 3.0 or higher and earned 60 credit hours.
Chabad House at Chatham
Chabad House at Chatham is the place where Judaism comes alive through a variety of social and learning opportunities.
Chatham Activities Board (CAB)
This group serves as the primary activities planning board on campus which oversees major traditions such as Battle of the Classes, Eggnog and Holiday Ball, and many more.
Chatham Christian Fellowship (CCF)
Chatham Christian Fellowship (CCF) aims to provide fellowship among those who share a common faith and to educate others about the Christian faith.
Chatham Criminology Club
This group provides opportunities to explore various fields that constitute modern forensics, which encompass natural and social science application of law and legal services at the local, national and global levels.
Chatham Marketing Association
This group fosters the scientific study and research in the field of marketing.
Chatham Music Club
The Chatham Music Club presents an artistic approach that allows students to express and share their interest, creativity, and/or talent musically.
Chatham Student Government (CSG)
This is the official governing body for the undergraduate student body. CSG provides leadership through policy development, programming, and working with student organizations, and the University administration.
Chatham University of American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) Student Chapter
This organization wishes to inspire students by promoting the value of interior design.
Chatham University Nursing Honor Society
This society recognizes superior achievement and leadership qualities, while fostering creative work high professional standards.
Chatham University Drama Club
The purpose of the organization will be to produce theatrical works, as well as workshops such as compositions and to attend productions outside of Chatham University.
The Communiqué is Chatham's student newspaper which contains campus news, information on events and activities, and local and national news of interest to the Chatham community.
Creative Writing Club
The purpose of this club is for writers to help each other develop their skills as writers and to strengthen the writing community.
Education Club of Chatham University
The mission of the group is to help students gain a better understanding of the education field as well as helping to enrich the young community around the University. They also advocate for quality public education, and promote networking and professionalism as well as being a voice for the education field.
Feminist Activists Creating Equality (F.A.C.E.)
The purpose of Feminist Activists Creating Equality (FACE) shall be to promote women empowerment, address discrimination issues based on gender, and lastly, raise awareness of crimes targeted to women, including but not limited to, sexual assault, harassment and reproductive issues.
The purpose of this group is to celebrate, advance, and learn about film.
Gateway Student Association (GSA)
This group will act as a resource for non-traditional adult students to enjoy a full campus experience through social and educational programs and activities, as well as a liaison to the Chatham community to present the interests and concerns of its members.
Graduate Film Society (GFS)
The purpose of this group is to provide a group in which members have the opportunity to further explore film in its creative and academic connotations.
Graduate Student Assembly
The Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) is the governing board for the graduate student body. GSA strives to work with student representatives from each graduate program to represent graduate students with the University administration, initiate social and educational programs, and oversee the GSA budget.
The purpose of the organization shall be to educate students about and advocate for environmental issues.
Her Campus Chatham
The purpose of the Her Campus Chatham organization is to provide an online hub for Chatham’s women by providing content that is both a resource and a source of entertainment, highlighting campus news, events, interesting students, faculty, alumni, campus photos, and fashion and lifestyle content specifically tailored for women at Chatham.
Legerdemain: The Chatham University Juggling Club
This group shares the joys of juggling with Chatham community.
MFA Writing Council
This organization promotes the creative writers of the Chatham community and beyond.
This literary magazine serves as a creative channel for an individual's literary and artistic expressions.
Mortar Board: Hood & Tassel Chapter
Mortar Board is a National College Honor Society which is dedicated to upholding the principles of scholarship, leadership, and service. Only students expecting senior standing in the next semester and with an overall QPA in the top 7% of their class in their department are eligible to be invited to become members.
Muslim Student Association
The purpose of this organization shall be to spread awareness and tolerance of the Islamic religion on the campus of Chatham University.
Omicron Delta Kappa Honor Society
Omicron Delta Kappa recognizes and encourages achievement in scholarship; athletics; campus or community service, social and religious activities, and campus government; journalism, speech, and the mass media; creative and performing arts. The organization places emphasis upon the development of the whole person, both as a present member of his/her college community and as a prospective contributor to a better society.
Peer Educators at Chatham in Health (PEACHES)
The purpose of this organization is to provide activities and programs on campus promoting awareness, wellness, and health education to the Chatham community.
Phi Alpha Honor Society
The purpose of this chapter is to recognize and promote scholastic achievement among students and faculty involved in the undergraduate social work program.
Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society
Membership in Phi Beta Kappa shows commitment to the liberal arts and sciences, and to freedom of inquiry and expression.
Physician Assistant Student Extracurricular Activities (PA-SEA)
The purpose of this organization shall be to provide all of its student members with activities and extracurricular events for Physician Assistant students to attend interact, and network with each other to further promote our common goal of becoming excellent medical practitioners.
The purpose of this organization shall be to support students interested in pursuing a career in medicine, and provide a learning environment that facilitates an ongoing dialogue about the field of medicine.
Pre-Physical Therapy Club
The purpose of the organization shall be to bring future Physical Therapy Students together in a safe, welcoming environment. The Pre-Physical Therapy Club will also offer help to undergraduate students in learning about graduate programs, how to apply for graduate programs, along with the changes going on in the field of Physical Therapy.
Pre-Physician Assistant Club
This group seeks to provide information and experience in health professions, focusing on the Physician Assistant profession.
Psi Chi Honor Society
This group encourages stimulating and maintaining excellence in scholarship and advancing the science of psychology.
Psychology of Gender Student Research Team
The research team is dedicated to better understanding the implications of gender in mental health and well-being. Our team conducts a number of research studies exploring people’s experiences of masculinity and femininity and examining how these constructs impact individuals and communities.
Residence Hall Council (RHC)
The Residence Hall Council (RHC) will be established in each individual residence hall/apartment and consist of students who are dedicated to programming, addressing the concerns of residents, and who strive to improve the quality of living for their communities within the residence halls/apartments at Chatham University.
Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society
The purpose of the organization is to foster all aspects of the discipline of English, including literature, language and writing.
The purpose of the organization shall be to connect students from all departments of Chatham University and the greater Pittsburgh community in the celebration and awareness of good, clean, and fair food.
Social Work is Real Life (SWIRL)
This organization encourages social awareness and community involvement, allowing students to have a glimpse of the versatility of the social work profession.
Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM)
One of the objectives for this organization is to provide Chatham University students with the opportunity to gain knowledge and insight into the effective management of human capital in the field of Human Resource Management.
Student Academy of the American Academy of Physician Assistants (SAAAPA) Chatham University Chapter
The purpose of this organization is to establish a student chapter of the Student Academy of the American Academy of Physician Assistants (SAAAPA) at Chatham University. Members of this student chapter will be eligible for additional scholarships, as well as representation of Chatham University students at the national meetings of the American Academy of Physician Assistants.
Student Athletic Advisory Committee (SAAC)
This group fosters positive, exciting, educational, and rewarding experiences for students interested in athletics. It also raises awareness of athletic related issues.
This is me! – Gay Straight Alliance
This is me!, in accordance with the vision and values of Chatham University, will actively bridge Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender (GLBT) students and their straight allies together by serving as a constructive medium which encourages the campus community to explore their relationship with humanity and gain acceptance for diversity.
The purpose of the organization shall be to teach students how to play basic songs on the ukulele and serve as a musical group for social involvement.
United States Green Building Council (USGBC)
One of the purposes is to foster scientific study and research in the field of environmentally sustainable building. |
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International Journal of Differential Equations
Volume 2011 (2011), Article ID 193813, 19 pages
Slip Effects on Fractional Viscoelastic Fluids
1Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences, GC University, Lahore 54600, Pakistan
2Department of Mathematics, NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi 75270, Pakistan
3Department of Mathematics, University of Karachi, Karachi 75270, Pakistan
Received 23 May 2011; Accepted 7 September 2011
Academic Editor: Wen Chen
Copyright © 2011 Muhammad Jamil and Najeeb Alam Khan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Unsteady flow of an incompressible Maxwell fluid with fractional derivative induced by a sudden moved plate has been studied, where the no-slip assumption between the wall and the fluid is no longer valid. The solutions obtained for the velocity field and shear stress, written in terms of Wright generalized hypergeometric functions , by using discrete Laplace transform of the sequential fractional derivatives, satisfy all imposed initial and boundary conditions. The no-slip contributions, that appeared in the general solutions, as expected, tend to zero when slip parameter is . Furthermore, the solutions for ordinary Maxwell and Newtonian fluids, performing the same motion, are obtained as special cases of general solutions. The solutions for fractional and ordinary Maxwell fluid for no-slip condition also obtained as limiting cases, and they are equivalent to the previously known results. Finally, the influence of the material, slip, and the fractional parameters on the fluid motion as well as a comparison among fractional Maxwell, ordinary Maxwell, and Newtonian fluids is also discussed by graphical illustrations.
There are many fluids in industry and technology whose behavior cannot be explained by the classical linearly viscous Newtonian model. The departure from the Newtonian behavior manifests itself in a variety of ways: non-Newtonian viscosity (shear thinning or shear thickening), stress relaxation, nonlinear creeping, development of normal stress differences, and yield stress . The Navier-Stokes equations are inadequate to predicted the behavior of such type of fluids; therefore, many constitutive relations of non-Newtonian fluids are proposed . These constitutive relations give rise to the differential equations, which, in general, are more complicated and higher order than the Navier-Stokes equations. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain exact analytical solutions for non-Newtonian fluids . Modeling of the equation governing the behaviors of non-Newtonian fluids in different circumstance is important from many points of view. For examples, plastics and polymers are extensively handeled by the chemical industry, whereas biological and biomedical devices like hemodialyser make use of the rheological behavior . In general, the analysis of the behavior of the fluid motion of non-Newtonian fluids tends to be much more complicated and subtle in comparison with that of the Newtonian fluids .
The fractional calculus, almost as old as the standard differential and integral one, is increasingly seen as an efficient tool and subtle frame work within which useful generalization is quite long and arguments almost yearly. It includes fractal media, fractional wave diffusion, fractional Hamiltonian dynamics, and biopolymer dynamics as well as many other topics in physics. Fractional calculus is useful in the field of biorheology and bioengineering, in part, because many tissue-like materials (polymers, gels, emulsions, composites, and suspensions) exhibit power-law responses to an applied stress or strain [6, 7]. An example of such power-law behavior in elastic tissue was observed recently for viscoelastic measurements of the aorta, both in vivo and in vitro [8, 9], and the analysis of these data was most conveniently performed using fractional order viscoelastic models. The starting point of the fractional derivative model of non-Newtonian model is usually a classical differential equation which is modified by replacing the time derivative of an integer order by the so-called Riemann-Liouville/Caputo fractional calculus operators. This generalization allows one to define precisely noninteger order integrals or derivatives. In general, fractional model of viscoelastic fluids is derived from well-known ordinary model by replacing the ordinary time derivatives, to fractional order time derivatives and this plays an important role to study the valuable tool of viscoelastic properties. We include here some investigation [10–18] in which the fractional calculus approach has been adopted for the flows of non-Newtonian fluids. Furthermore, the one-dimensional fractional derivative Maxwell model has been found very useful in modeling the linear viscoelastic response of some polymers in the glass transition and the glass state . In other cases, it has been shown that the governing equations employing fractional derivatives are also linked to molecular theories . The use of fractional derivatives within the context of viscoelasticity was firstly proposed by Germant . Later, Bagley and Torvik demonstrated that the theory of viscoelasticity of coiling polymers predicts constitutive relations with fractional derivatives, and Makris et al. achieved a very good fit of the experimental data when the fractional derivative Maxwell model has been used instead of the Maxwell model for the silicon gel fluid. Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that Palade et al. developed a fully objective constitutive equation for an incompressible fluidreducible to the linear fractional derivative Maxwell model under small deformations hypothesis.
A general view of the literature shows that the slip effects on the flows of non-Newtonian fluids has been given not much attention. Especially, polymer melts exhibit a macroscopic wall slip. The fluids exhibiting a boundary slip are important in technological applications, for example, the polishing of artificial heart valves, rarefied fluid problems, and flow on multiple interfaces. In the study of fluid-solid surface interactions, the concept of slip of a fluid at a solid wall serves to describe macroscopic effects of certain molecular phenomena. When the molecular mean free path length of the fluid is comparable to the distance between the plates as in nanochannels or microchannels, the fluid exhibits non-continuum effects such as slipflow, as demonstrated experimentally by Derek et al. . Experimental observations show that [26–28] non-Newtonian fluids, such as polymer melts, often exhibit macroscopic wall slip, which, in general, is described by a nonlinear and nonmonotone relation between the wall slip velocity and the traction. A more realistic class of slip flows are those in which the magnitude of the shear stress reaches some critical value, here called the slip yield stress, before slip occurs. In fact, some experiments show that the onset slip and slip velocity may also depend on the normal stress at the boundary [26, 29]. Much of the research involving slip presumes that the slip velocity depends on the shear stress. The slip condition is an important factor in sharskin, spurt, and hysteresis effects, but the existing theory for non-Newtonian fluids with wall slippage is scant. We mention here some recent attempt regarding exact analytical solutions of non-Newtonian fluids with slip effects [30–36].
The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, is to give few more exact analytical solutions for viscoelastic fluids with fractional derivative approach, which is more natural and appropriate tool to describe the complex behavior of such fluids. Secondly, is to study the slip effects on viscoelastic fluid flows, which is important due to their practical applications. More precisely, our aim is to find the velocity field and the shear stress corresponding to the motion of a Maxwell fluid due to a sudden moved plate, where no-slip assumption is no longer valid. However, for completeness, we will determine exact solutions for a larger class of such fluids. Consequently, motivated by the above remarks, we solve our problem for Maxwell fluids with fractional derivatives. The general solutions are obtained using the discrete Laplace transforms. They are presented in series form in terms of the Wright generalized hypergeometric functions and presented as sum of the slip contribution and the corresponding no-slip contributions. The similar solutions for ordinary Maxwell fluids can easily be obtained as limiting cases of general solutions. The Newtonian solutions are also obtained as special cases of fractional and ordinary Maxwell fluids. Furthermore, the solutions for fractional and ordinary Maxwell fluid for no-slip condition also obtained as a special cases, and they are similar with previously known results in the literature. Finally, the influence of the material, slip and fractional parameters on the motion of fractional and ordinary Maxwell fluids is underlined by graphical illustrations. The difference among fractional Maxwell, ordinary Maxwell, and Newtonian fluid models is also highlighted.
2. The Differential Equations Governing the Flow
The equations governing the flow of an incompressible fluid include the continuity equation and the momentum equation. In the absence of body forces, they are where is the fluid density, is the velocity field, is the time, and represents the gradient operator. The Cauchy stress in an incompressible Maxwell fluid is given by [10, 11, 14–17] where denotes the indeterminate spherical stress due to the constraint of incompressibility, is the extrastress tensor, is the velocity gradient, is the first Rivlin Ericsen tensor, is the dynamic viscosity of the fluid, is relaxation time, the superscript indicates the transpose operation, and the superposed dot indicates the material time derivative. The model characterized by the constitutive equations (2.2) contains as special case the Newtonian fluid model for . For the problem under consideration, we assume a velocity field and an extrastress tensor of the form where is the unit vector along the -coordinate direction. For these flows, the constraint of incompressibility is automatically satisfied. If the fluid is at rest up to the moment , then and (2.1)–(2.3) yield the meaningful equation where is the nonzero shear stress and is the kinematic viscosity of the fluid.
The governing equations corresponding to an incompressible Maxwell fluid with fractional derivatives, performing the same motion in the absence of a pressure gradient in the flow direction, are (cf. [4, 15, 17]) where is the fractional parameter and the fractional differential operator so-called Caputo fractional operator is defined by [37, 38] and is the Gamma function. In the following, the system of fractional partial differential equations (2.6), with appropriate initial and boundary conditions, will be solved by means of Fourier sine and Laplace transforms. In order to avoid lengthy calculations of residues and contour integrals, the discrete inverse Laplace transform method will be used [10–18].
3. Statement of the Problem
Consider an incompressible Maxwell fluid with fractional derivatives occupying the space lying over an infinitely extended plate which is situated in the plane and perpendicular to the -axis. Initially, the fluid is at rest, and at the moment , the plate is impulsively brought to the constant velocity in its plane. Here, we assume the existence of slip boundary between the velocity of the fluid at the wall and the speed of the wall, and the relative velocity between and the wall is assumed to be proportional to the shear rate at the wall. Due to the shear, the fluid above the plate is gradually moved. Its velocity is of the form (2.3) 1 while the governing equations are given by (2.6). The appropriate initial and boundary conditions are where is the Heaviside function and is the slip strength or slip coefficient. If , then the general assumed no-slip boundary condition is obtained. If is finite, fluid slip occurs at the wall, but its effect depends upon the length scale of the flow. Furthermore, the natural conditions have to be also satisfied. They are consequences of the fact that the fluid is at rest at infinity, and there is no shear in the free stream.
4. Solution of the Problem
4.1. Calculation of the Velocity Field
Applying the Laplace transform to (2.6) 1, using the Laplace transform formula for sequential fractional derivatives [37, 38], and taking into account the initial conditions (3.1) 1,2, we find that subject to the boundary conditions where is the image function of and is a transform parameter. Solving (4.1) and (4.2), we get
In order to obtain and to avoid the lengthy and burdensome calculations of residues and contours integrals, we apply the discrete inverse Laplace transform method [10–18]. However, for a suitable presentation of the velocity field, we firstly rewrite (4.3) in series form where we use the fact that Inverting (4.4) by means of discrete inverse Laplace transform, we find that In term of Wright generalized hypergeometric function , we rewrite the above equation as a simpler form where the Wright generalized hypergeometric function is defined as In order to justify the initial conditions (3.1) 1,2, we use the initial value theorem of Laplace transform Furthermore, to justify the boundary condition (3.2), we have It is easy to see that the exact solution (4.7) satisfies the boundary condition (3.2).
4.2. Calculation of the Shear Stress
Applying the Laplace transform to (2.6) 2 and using the initial condition (3.1) 3, we find that where is the Laplace transform of . Using (4.3) in (4.11), we find that in order to obtain under the suitable form, we write (4.12) in series form Inverting (4.13) by means of the discrete inverse Laplace transform, we find the shear stress under simple form or equivalently
5. The Special Cases
5.1. Ordinary Maxwell Fluid with Slip Effects
5.2. Fractional Maxwell Fluid without Slip Effects
Making into (4.7) and (4.15), we obtain the solutions for velocity field and the associated shear stress they are equivalent to the known solutions obtained in [42, 43] for Sokes’ first problem of fractional Maxwell fluid.
5.3. Ordinary Maxwell Fluid without Slip Effects
5.4. Newtonian Fluid with Slip Effects
Finally, making into (4.3) and (4.12), the solutions for a Newtonian fluid with slip effects are obtained in which is the Wright function . Using the definition of Wright function and the series expression of error function, we can easily prove that Substituting (5.7) into (5.5), we can reduce to where are classical solutions for Stokes’ first problem of Newtonian fluid [42, 44].
6. Numerical Results and Conclusions
In this paper, the unsteady flow of fractional Maxwell fluid over an infinite plate, where the no-slip assumption between the wall and the fluid is no longer valid, is studied by means of the discrete Laplace transforms. The motion of the fluid is due to the plate that at time is suddenly moved with a constant velocity in its plane. Closed-form solutions are obtained for the velocity and the shear stress in series form in terms of the Wright generalized hypergeometric functions. These solutions, presented as a sum of the slip contribution and the corresponding no-slip contributions, satisfy all imposed initial and boundary conditions. The corresponding solutions for ordinary Maxwell fluids are also obtained from general solutions for . In the special case when , the general solution reduces to previously known results for Stokes’ first problem.
In order to reveal some relevant physical aspects of the obtained results, the diagrams of the velocity field and the shear stress have been drawn against and for different values of , material constants , , slip parameter , and fractional parameter . From all figures, it is clear that increasing the slip parameter at the wall the velocity decreases at the wall. Figures 1 and 2 are prepared to show the effect of time on velocity and shear stress profiles with and without slip effects. It is clear that velocity and shear stress (in absolute value) are smaller when slip parameter is nonzero. It is also noted that velocity on the whole flow domain while the shear stress (in absolute value) on large part of flow domain are increasing functions of time . Figures 3 and 4 are sketched to see the influence of slip effects on fluid motion for two different values of . It is noted that velocity and shear stress (in absolute value), as expected are decrease when slip parameter and increase. The influence of relaxation time and kinematic viscosity on fluid motion are presented in Figures 5–8. As expected, the two material parameter have opposite effects on fluid motion. For instance, the velocity and shear stress decreases with respect to . More important for us is to see the effects of fractional and slip parameter on fluid motion. It is observed that velocity and shear stress either slip effects present or not are increasing functions of fractional parameter, as shown in Figures 9 and 10. The effect of slip parameter is clear from Figure 11.
Finally, for comparison, the velocity field and the shear stress corresponding to the three models (fractional Maxwell, ordinary Maxwell, and Newtonian) are together depicted in Figures 12–14 for three different values of slip parameter and the same values of and of the material constants. It is clearly seen from Figures 12 and 13 that the ordinary Maxwell fluid swiftest and the fractional Maxwell fluid is the slowest near the moving plate for slip parameters and . However, the monotonicity is change on large part of the flow domain. The shear stress corresponding to ordinary Maxwell fluid is highest near the moving plate. For higher values of slip parameter the fractional Maxwell fluid is swiftest and the ordinary Maxwell is slowest and shear stress corresponding to fractional Maxwell fluid is largest on the whole flow domain as it is clear from Figure 14. It is important to note the difference between fractional and ordinary Maxwell fluid that, when slip effect is not present, the ordinary Maxwell fluid have oscillating behavior near the moving plate as shown in Figure 12, which is the natural one, ordinary Maxwell fluid being the viscoelastic fluid. However the fractional Maxwell fluid have no oscillation. The units of the material constants in all figures are SI units.
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the editor and referees for their careful assessment and fruitful remarks and suggestions regarding the initial version of the paper. M. Jamil is highly thankful and grateful to the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences, GC University, Lahore, Pakistan, Department of Mathematics, NED University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi 75270, Pakistan, and also Higher Education Commission of Pakistan for generous support and facilitating this research work. The author N. A. Khan is highly thankful and grateful to the Dean of Faculty of Sciences, University of Karachi, Karachi 75270, Pakistan for generous support and facilitating this research work.
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Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 936191, 10 pages
Comparison of Shared Reading versus Emergent Reading: How the Two Provide Distinct Opportunities for Early Literacy
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
Received 28 February 2013; Accepted 9 April 2013
Academic Editors: B. W. Baldwin, R. Martens, and M. Recker
Copyright © 2013 Stephanie M. Curenton and Symonne Kennedy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This study examined mother-child interactions across two types of reading interactions—shared reading versus emergent reading—in order to determine (a) if mothers and children provide the same amount of language input across the two interactions, (b) if the socioemotional quality is consistent across the interactions, and (c) if the language input and socioemotional quality across the two interactions are differentially associated with children’s scores on early literacy assessments. Twenty-five mother-child dyads participated in both interactions. Children were given a standardized test of early reading and an emergent reading score based on a rubric designed particularly for the book they were reading. Results indicated that during the shared reading mothers provided more language input (i.e., they talked more), but children increased their amount of talk during the emergent reading, making such input effects null. Overall, socioemotional quality was consistent across the two interactions, except mothers provide more literacy feedback during shared reading. Both language input and socioemotional quality were associated with higher scores on early literacy assessments, but the contribution of these factors varied depending across the type of reading interaction. Results are discussed in terms of education implications for literacy practices at home and school.
Before young children can actually read, they possess a body of knowledge pertaining to reading and writing that teachers, developmental psychologists, and researchers refer to as early literacy skills. These skills include meaning-based and code-based skills related to vocabulary, morphosyntax, listening comprehension, print awareness, and phonological awareness (for a detailed discussion of skills see ). Early literacy skills are developed through repeated exposure to language and literacy activities at school and home, and two of the activities we explore in this study are typical shared reading and emergent reading. In this study, typical shared reading between a parent and child is characterized by a one-on-one interaction in which an adult reads a story to the child and encourages the child to be actively involved by asking questions and allowing him/her to share their ideas and opinions about the story. In comparison, we define emergent reading as a one-on-one interaction between a parent and child in which a child uses the pictures of book, along with what they remember about that book, to retell the story perhaps with guidance from the parent in the form of questions and encouragement. Both typical shared reading and emergent reading have been shown to be significant predictors of children’s later literacy skills, namely their reading and narrative comprehension [2–7].
Work by Kaderavek and Sulzby has compared emergent readings and oral narratives, but to date, no study has compared typical shared versus emergent readings in terms of how parent-child interaction might differ across the two reading contexts, specifically as it relates to the language input provided by each participant, how the socioemotional quality of the interaction might vary across the readings, and how the two might be uniquely related to children’s early literacy skills. The purpose of this small-scale descriptive study was to compare these two reading interactions and to provide evidence of the quantitative and qualitative differences between the two interactions.
2. Shared Reading versus Emergent Reading
Both in shared and emergent reading interactions parents are able to cater to the interests and developmental needs of the child, and by doing so the parent is attempting to make the interaction enjoyable as well as educational . Prior research indicates that mothers who have positive views of shared reading (e.g., mothers who believe reading interactions should be educational, enjoyable activities in which the child is actively engaged) have children with better literacy skills . Therefore, we know that the socioemotional quality of the interaction is an important factor to consider when studying reading interactions. The question posed by this study is whether the socioemotional quality would be the same across the two reading interactions. One could hypothesize that the quality would be better during the emergent reading versus the shared reading given that during the emergent reading the child is the main “storyteller,” which provides many opportunities for mothers to provide praise and encourage children’s nascent literacy skills.
Another important aspect to investigate is the language input across the two interactions. One fundamental goal during reading interactions is to engage children in a dialogue around a text. In fact, there is a well-known body of research confirming that if parents and teachers are properly trained to use specific dialogic techniques there will be gains in children’s literacy skills [10–12]. Although there is literature on such specific intervention programs, the field still needs information about the language input parents and children provide naturally without intervention training, especially during those instances like emergent reading, when the child is taking the lead in telling the story. To our knowledge, only a few studies have contrasted emergent reading with other narrative/storytelling interactions. Kaderavek and Sulzby in their comparison of emergent reading with oral narrative production provide some evidence that children do indeed provide different language input across these two narrative contexts. For example, they found that children’s language input was better during the emergent reading narratives versus the oral storytelling narratives: Children’s emergent reading narratives included a greater number of utterances and utterances that were more grammatically complex, and children were more likely to use literate language features, such as reported speech and character dialogue. Their study provides detailed information about how children’s language input is different across context, but there is still a gap in the knowledge regarding how mothers’ language input might be different when comparing emergent reading with shared reading interactions. The work of Curenton et al. is a study in which emergent reading was actually compared to shared reading, and their results indicated that although mothers talked more and used more grammatically complex talk than children during shared reading, there were no differences between the mothers’ and children’s talk during emergent reading. Lastly, Martin-Chang and Gould compared mother’s language input across the reading interactions of shared-reading (when the mother read to the child) and a child’s reading (when the child actually “read” to the mother), and they found mothers focused more on the text when the child was reading to her but more on the illustrations when she was reading to the child. Thus, in these situations in which children are actually “readers,” mothers’ input changes from being meaning-based focused to code-based focused; other researchers have found similar results during parent-child interactions with first graders .
In sum, these prior studies indicate that there is something special about emergent reading compared to other storytelling/reading interactions in that children demonstrate better skills during emergent reading than they do during other storytelling interactions and that children are able to converse at a level equivalent to that of their mothers when they are engaged in emergent reading versus other types of narrative interactions . Such findings lead one to hypothesize that children will produce more language input during the emergent reading versus the shared reading interactions in the current study.
Finally, there is a need for more research that compares reading interactions in terms of how they are related to children’s literacy outcomes. One study has addressed such a comparison among teachers. In the work of Lonigan et al., they trained research assistants to deliver dialogic reading and typical shared reading in preschool classrooms with small groups of children; they concluded that both reading interactions have overall positive effects on children’s literacy skills but that shared reading had more favorable effects on children’s listening comprehension and their phonological awareness. Lonigan and colleague’s study provides important information about the outcomes associated with the two types of readings in their study, but it does not provide information about how shared reading might compare with emergent reading. Given the prior results from Lonigan et al.’s study, it would be difficult to hypothesize whether shared versus emergent reading would have stronger associations with children’s early reading skills since their research says that both are effective. Therefore, we propose no a priori hypothesis for the association with early literacy outcomes.
3. Present Study
The purpose of this small-scale descriptive qualitative study was to compare mother-child dyads engaged in a shared reading versus an emergent reading interaction in order to investigate if the mothers and children behaved differently in terms of the their language input during the interactions (i.e., the number of utterances, the mean length of the utterance [MLU], and number of questions) and whether the socioemotional quality of the interaction is different across the two interactions. We also investigated which of these language and socioemotional aspects of the emergent versus the shared reading are more strongly associated with children’s concurrent early literacy skills, as measured by performance on a standardized test of early literacy as well as an emergent reading task.
The sample consisted of 25 mother-child dyads with 12 boys and 13 girls. Children in these dyads ranged from 37–63 months old ( months, ). The racial breakdown of the sample was such that 16 of the children were black (64%), 7 were white (28%), 1 child was Latino (4%), and 2 children were Asian/Native American/Biracial (4%). In terms of general language ability, all the children were in the normative range of two-standard deviations from the mean as evidenced by Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-III; ) scores of (, range 80–124).
The ages of the mothers in the sample ranged from 23 to 41 years old ( years, ). Most of the parents in these dyads either had a bachelor’s Degree or went to graduate school (68% of sample), while the rest of the parents had at least some college level education or went to trade/vocational school beyond high school (24%). All but one of the mothers reported that they were currently working for pay. Mothers, on average, were very literate as indicated by Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT3; ) reading scores equivalent to either high school or post-high school level, which are among the highest literacy levels for the test (, , range of 92–118). In terms of income, the sample was primarily middle class, with the majority of mothers reporting that their annual income was on average between $40,000 and $50,000. To further assess the income level of the families, an income-to-needs ratio was created by dividing income by the poverty guideline for family size. The range of the income-to-needs ratio was from 1 to 5 with a mean of 2.77 (, ). Any ratio greater than 1.8 is above poverty. There were only 4 mothers whose income-to-needs ratio placed them as being at/below (ratios < 1.0) or near poverty (ration > 1.0 to 1.8). This ratio has been widely used in other studies to assess family SES (see [19–21]) and has been used as an eligibility indicator for federal and state public assistance programs.
Families were recruited via letter and in-person sign-ups at their child’s preschool or child care facility. Parents who agreed to participate were then scheduled for a 60-minute “family visit” within a laboratory setting at a communications disorder department on a southern university campus. A group of ethnically diverse research assistants interviewed children and mothers separately for the first portion of the visit (approximately 45–50 minutes), and during the last portion of the visit (approximately 10–15 minutes) the dyad was brought together to be videotaped engaging in the reading interactions in an observation room setup like a living room with a camera that was visible. During the separate children’s portion of the visit, assessments of children’s language (i.e., PPVT-III) and literacy skills were administered, and the interviewer read The Snowy Day to children. During the separate parent portion of the visit, information about the family background and mother’s literacy was taken. All data about the interaction quality were based on ratings of the dyad during the reading interaction; these ratings were conducted by the new research assistants who had not been involved in data collection and took place once the entire data collection period was completed.
4.2.1. Reading Interactions
This study focuses on the first two reading interactions from Curenton et al. . Parents were presented with two books and instructed to allow their child to “pretend” to read The Snowy Day book that had just previously been read to them and then to read Peter’s Chair to their child. Parents were told to read to their child the way they normally would and to make themselves feel comfortable. They were reassured there was no right or wrong way to do this and that the purpose was to get a sense of what the dyad normally did when they read together.
The Snowy Day is a story about a boy’s adventures in the snow; while the character is out playing in the snow, he makes a snow angel, drags a stick through the snow to make a track, avoids a snowball fight, and makes a snow ball that eventually melts in his pocket. This is a popular children’s book that has been used in various other studies to assess children’s narrative abilities [23–25]. Peter’s Chair is about a boy who struggles to accept the birth of his younger sister. The plot provides opportunities for mothers to make comments about emotions (e.g., by talking about Peter’s feelings of anger and jealousy), misbehavior (e.g., Peter’s decision to take his belongings and run away), and resolution (e.g., when Peter decides to allow his furniture to be passed down to his younger sister). This book has also been used in other studies that examined children’s narrative skills . Peter is the main character in both of the books. The Snowy Day reading is hereafter referred to as the emergent reading, and Peter’s Chair is hereafter referred to as the shared reading. There were a total of 25 emergent reading interactions and 24 shared reading interactions.
Two graduate level research assistants first individually transcribed the interactions verbatim into the child language analysis (CLAN) program ; then they each independently listened to the tapes and checked each other’s transcriptions for accuracy. Corrections to the transcript were made when discrepancies were observed. After the interactions were transcribed and checked for accuracy, the first author and a graduate assistant deleted repetitions, irrelevant remarks (e.g., questions to the experimenter about the procedures, repetitions within utterances, filler words, and comments not related to the story), and as well as any of the mother’s comments that were verbatim readings of the text for the shared reading (see ). Interrater reliability for the deletion procedure was determined for 12% ( = total of 6 (3 per reading interaction) out of 49) of the transcripts and was calculated by dividing the total number of agreements by the total number of item comparisons and multiplying by 100. For the shared reading, the interrater reliability averaged 93% (ranging from 91% to 95%) and interrater reliability averaged 96% (ranging from 89% to 100%) for the emergent reading. Disagreements were resolved through discussion.
4.3.1. Language Input
Utterances within the transcript were segmented into communication units (C-units; ). The guidelines for segmenting the narratives are described by Curenton and Lucas . Typically, a C-unit must adhere to a clausal structure, meaning it must contain a subject and a verb. Given that the story interactions take place in the form of a conversation and that people sometimes do not adhere to a clausal structure when speaking in a conversation, allowances were made for including utterances that did not follow a clausal structure yet contained key information about the story or the story interaction. Inter rater reliability ( per reading interaction) averaged 93% (ranging from 91% to 95%) for shared reading and 96% (ranging from 92% to 100%) for emergent reading. All disagreements were resolved via conferencing. CLAN was then used to calculate the number of utterances and the mean length of utterance (MLU) for the mother and child, resulting in an individual score for each across the two reading interactions.
Questions were coded by hand by the first author, and this consisted of a two-step process. First, the transcripts were scanned for all interrogative statements, next each interrogative statement was scrutinized to evaluate whether it was a question that related to the specific content of the book. Only those questions that were specifically related to the content of the book, or a related conversation around the book, were counted as true questions. Any questions related to the procedure/flow of the task (e.g., “Will you let me read this book to you? Are you listening?”) or questions used simply to maintain the flow of the interaction (e.g., “Huh? Hmm?”) were not counted. Questions related to managing children’s behavior during the task or questions about the experimental procedure (e.g., “What is that camera for?”) were not counted either. The total number of questions that were specifically related to the book or a conversation pertaining to the book were summed, resulting in four scores: total number of mother’s questions for shared reading (, , range = 0–38), total number of child’s questions for shared reading (, , range = 0–16), total number of mother’s questions for emergent reading (, , range = 1–37), and total number of child’s questions for emergent reading (, , range = 0–5).
4.3.3. Early Reading Scores
Each child’s early reading abilities were assessed using the Test of Early Reading Ability-Third Edition (TERA-3; ). Only 20 children in the sample were assessed using TERA-3 because five of the children within our sample fell below the age cut-off of 3 years, 6 months for the assessment. The average TERA-3 score was 100.80 (, range = 76–119). Based on the interpretation of the TERA-3 reading quotients presented in the manual (p. 26), our sample was broken down into 16 children who had average/above average scores and 4 children who had below average/poor reading scores. Therefore, there was variation across the sample in terms of children’s reading scores.
4.3.4. Emergent Reading Score
Successful emergent reading strategies include accurately describing the pictures, using vocabulary or phrases from the book, describing key events from the book, and incorporating prior knowledge and experience (see [5, 31, 32]). An emergent reading rubric modified from Valencia and Sulzby’s rubric, but also based on the strategies Elster , Sulzby, and colleagues described, was developed to assess children’s level of success at emergent reading. The items for the rubric along with their scoring criteria are detailed in Table 1. Items on the rubric included whether children used any of the actual vocabulary words from the text, whether they accurately described key events in the story (i.e., items 4–6 that refer to the action landscape of the story (see )), whether they made any reference to Peter’s thoughts or feelings (e.g., what Curenton would refer to as the consciousness landscape of the story), and whether they used certain key phrases common during reading a story (e.g., “once upon a time” or “the end”). Items 4, 5, and 6 were scored in relation to the content of the present page, meaning in order to receive credit for an item the child must be reading from the page in which the event occurred. The emergent reading score ranged from a possible 0 to 7 points with higher scores indicating that children had better emergent reading skills (, , range of 0–7). Cronbach’s alpha for the scale was .85. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between children’s age and their performance on this measure (, ), which indicates the scale can consistently assess age-related developmental progress, and between children’s performance on this measure and their scores on the standardized TERA-3 (, ).
4.3.5. Socioemotional Quality
Five qualitative ratings for each reading interaction were used to characterize socioemotional quality. The ratings were based on categorical scores consisting of 1, 3, or 5. Examples of these ratings are included in Table 2. Three of these codes rated the mothers’ behavior during the interaction, literacy feedback, balanced control, and redirection, and two of the codes rated children’s behavior, task orientation and compliance. A trained undergraduate research assistant coded all of the interactions from the videotapes, and the first author double-coded 12% of the videotapes ( per interaction) to check for interrater reliability. Interrater reliability was assessed based on the total percentage of point-by-point agreement for each rating and was 94%. Cronbach’s alpha for these ratings was across all the ratings.
5.1. Differences in Language Input
In order to answer the questions regarding differences in language input paired samples -test were performed on the log transformed (The log transformation of these values was used in the analyses because the variables were not normally distributed.) values for mothers’ and children’s language input across the reading interactions. Results for these analyses are described in Table 3, and they indicate that, as expected, mothers talked more than children (i.e., used more utterances), used more complex grammar (i.e., had longer MLUs), and asked more questions than their children during the shared-reading. However, during the emergent reading, although mothers still asked more questions than children, they did not talk more, and there was a trend (To avoid inflating Type I error associated with conducting multiple -tests, the value .05 was divided by the number of -test conducted (i.e., 6), resulting in an acceptable value of .008 for significance of each test) for children to use more complex grammar during the emergent reading.
An interesting post hoc, qualitative aspect to describe is the type of questions mothers asked across the two readings. Mothers were more likely to ask questions that required high-level reasoning during the shared reading versus the emergent reading. For example, in dyad A, four (out of seven) thought-provoking questions between a mother and her 5-year-old son during the shared reading were, for example, “So why do you think [Peter] wants to run away?” and “Why do you think [his mother] thought that?,” compared to only one (out of four) thought-provoking questions during the emergent reading, “You remember when we made snow angels?” Another example from dyad B between a mother and her 3-year-old daughter shows that the level of the questioning even varied for the children; during the shared reading, the child asked four (out of ten) why questions (e.g., “Why he run away?” and “Why is his mom being mean?”) compared to zero questions during the emergent reading. Thus, such qualitative examples show that shared reading has an advantage over emergent reading when it comes to using questions that promote higher-level reasoning.
5.2. Differences in Socioemotional Quality
In order to answer the question of whether or not the socioemotional quality of the interaction differed across the two reading, Friedman’s tests were conducted for each interaction rating, again correcting for Type I error with a corrected value of .01. A Friedman’s test was chosen as the analytic method because the socioemotional ratings represent repeated-measures nonparametric ordinal data. The test comparing median differences in literacy feedback across the two readings was significant (, , , Kendall’s ), indicating that mothers provided higher-quality literacy feedback during the shared reading than they did during the emergent reading. All the other aspects of socioemotional quality remained consistent across the two readings, and the data in Table 4 illustrate the categories in which the majority of the dyads were rated.
5.3. Associations with Early Literacy Skills
For this study, two tests of early literacy skills were administered; one was the standardized TERA-3, and the other was the emergent reading score created by the authors and based on children’s reading of The Snowy Day. Interestingly, none of the language input variables were associated with children’s TERA-3 scores, but socioemotional ratings during The Snowy Day such as balanced control (Spearman’s , , ) and literacy feedback (Spearman’s , , ) were positively associated with children’s performance on this test.
As expected, because the emergent reading score was based on children’s performance during the interaction, there were several significant associations between that test and the language input and socioemotional quality during the emergent reading interaction. For example, number of children’s utterances (Pearson’s , , ) and children’s MLU (Pearson’s , , ) was associated with their emergent reading scores. There were also several socioemotional quality ratings associated with children’s performance, such as mother’s balanced control (Spearman , , ) and children’s task orientation (Spearman , , ) and compliance (Spearman , , ).
The purpose of this small-scale, descriptive study was to examine the quality of mother-child interactions across two types of reading interactions—shared reading versus emergent reading—in order to determine (a) if mothers and children provide the same amount of language input across the two interactions, (b) if the socioemotional quality is consistent across the interactions, and (c) if the language input and socioemotional quality during the interactions is differentially associated with children’s scores on early literacy assessments. In this study, shared reading was defined as a book reading interaction in which the mother was instructed to read a relatively unfamiliar children’s book the way that she “normally” would with her preschooler; almost all of these interactions took the form of the mother reading the story and asking the child questions as she was reading. On the other hand, for the emergent reading the mother was instructed to allow her child to “pretend to read” to her using a book that a research assistant had just previously read to the child; the tone of these emergent reading interactions was quite different in that mothers encouraged children to tell the story by frequently asking the child to describe what had happened on a particular page. Across all of the emergent readings, only one mother actually read from the text of the book, and even when she did it was just for one page.
Therefore, shared reading interactions can be qualitatively described as the typical shared reading interaction in which the mother reads from the text and creates a dialogue around the book. In contrast, the emergent reading can be described as a nontraditional reading in which the mother allows the child to create the story using the pictures in the book and shapes her dialogue around the information the child provides. It is no mistake that mothers interpreted their role during the two interactions quite differently, and there was a systematic difference between the language input and socioemotional quality that was provided during the interactions. In addition, we found that different aspects of the interactions were associated with children’s performance on early literacy tests. Each of these results is discussed in turn.
6.1. Language Input
Results indicated that during the shared reading interaction mothers took on the common role of “leading” the interaction in that she talked more, spoke in a more grammatically complex manner than the children, and asked more questions. These results are contrasted with those found during the emergent reading. During the emergent reading, a null result indicated that no significant difference existed between how much mothers and children talked. It is evident when comparing the means for the number of utterances that these null results were not a matter of mothers talking less during the emergent reading interactions but instead were a matter of children talking more. Children talked 50% more during the emergent reading than they did during the shared reading. Mothers did continue to ask more questions during the emergent reading, but the grammatical complexity of children’s talk during the emergent reading increased because children started to speak using longer utterances. Overall, these changes in children’s language input suggest that children are actually attempting to “craft” a story during the emergent reading. A qualitative example from dyad C when a 4-year-old girl engages in emergent reading is presented in the appendix.
6.2. Socioemotional Quality
Although we had hypothesized that there were would be differences in terms of the socioemotional quality of the interaction, the results did not support this hypothesis. In fact, the quality of the interactions remained quite consistent across the two readings, and overall these interactions can be described as high quality. The majority of dyads were categorized as providing Literacy Feedback that would extend a child’s knowledge and as having an interaction that was “balanced,” meaning that the dyad engaged in productive turn taking. Most of the mothers used a variety of redirection techniques when children became distracted, but in general, the majority of the children were on task and compliant during both of the readings.
The only socioemotional rating that varied was the amount of literacy feedback that mothers provided. During the shared reading, mothers provided more high-level feedback about the book compared to during the emergent reading when she switched her feedback to more low level, such as prompting the child to focus on the pictures to tell the story. This change in literacy feedback is a natural adjustment that mothers made in response to the task: children were tasked with using the pictures to tell a story, and therefore, many mothers focused on trying to direct their child’s attention to these stimuli. Otherwise, the way in which mothers managed the interaction and children’s behavior remained the same despite the demands of the task. The fact that all of the other aspects of the socioemotional quality remained consistent is actually a positive testament that indicates children were engaged and eager to participate in both reading interactions.
6.3. Association with Children’s Early Literacy
Correlations were conducted to investigate whether there was an association between children’s performance on tests of early reading skills and the dyad’s behavior during the interaction. In terms of the standardized assessment of early reading results indicated that children from dyads that display higher categories of balanced control and literacy feedback had higher TERA-3 scores. Interestingly, none of the language input variables were associated with children’s TERA-3 scores.
On the contrary, using the emergent reading score as an early literacy assessment, showed there were several aspects of the child’s language input and socioemotional behavior during the emergent reading that were positively associated with their scores. For instance, children who talked more and used more complex grammar had higher scores on emergent reading. Also, those children who were rated as being more compliant and on task had higher emergent reading scores. Similarly, as was found with the TERA, the way the mother balanced control during the interaction was associated with children’s emergent reading score, meaning that dyads that were classified in the higher category of balanced control had children who scored higher on emergent reading. Although preliminary due to the small sample size, such correlations provide promise in our understanding of the importance of observing children’s language input and socioemotional behavior during reading interactions. The important aspect to observe in terms of mothers’ socioemotional behaviors seems to be how she manages to share control of the reading interaction with her child and the quality of her literacy feedback.
6.4. Research Contributions
This work makes a significant contribution to the literature because it is the first study to use a primarily middle-class African American sample to investigate how mothers and children navigate two different types of reading interactions. It is important to study the language and literacy development of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse children, particularly middle-class African Americans, because the majority of the knowledge base around African American children’s development confounds ethnicity and socioeconomic status (see [35–37]). The sampling in this study will contribute to the body of literature on African American children’s language and literacy development in which ethnicity and socioeconomic status are not confounded. Another contribution of this work is the detailed quantitative comparison and post hoc qualitative descriptions of the shared reading and emergent reading interactions. Although emergent reading is a popular education practice used both at home and school, no studies have actually examined how it might differ from shared reading.
Despite these important contributions, there were several limitations to the current work. The first limitation concerns the modest sample size () which was due to the labor intensive nature of repeated transcription and coding across the two reading conditions. However, prior seminal studies that contrasted emergent reading with oral narratives had a similar sample size (see ); therefore, we know that reliable and meaningful results can be obtained with such a sample size.
6.5. Educational Implications
Although much of the education policy suggestions emphasize the importance of parents reading to their children, this work indicates that there may also be promise in amending these suggestions to encourage parents to allow their young children to “read” to them as well. This suggestion is especially important given that our data show that children talk more during these interactions. Therefore, emergent readings may provide an opportunity for children to shine as story tellers and to practice their expressive language skills as well as stay engaged.
Emergent Reading of Snowy Day from a 4-Year-Old Girl
(C = Child, M = Mother). In certain places the transcript has been modified to for clarity of presentation; the transcript is broken down by pages in order to facilitate the reader’s understanding of the child’s narrative and to see how her story lines up with the events from the book is taken from a 51 months old who attended private child care in a small southern city. She lived in a middle-class family with an average annual income of $75,000, and her mother had a bachelor’s degree and worked as an insurance specialist. The daughter had average language abilities (PPVT-III score = 99; TERA-3 = 104) as measured by standardized assessments.
Title Page C: The Snowy Day. [Repeats the title.] The Snowy Day. M: Good.
Page 1 C: One day I woke up and everything [restarts], the snow had fallen on everything.
Page 2 C: And I put on my snow shoes. And I went outside to play. M: Oh! [Mom acts surprised and excited about the child’s story]. C: And I had a xxx [word could not be heard clearly]. M: Hmmm?
Page 3-4 C: And him saw footprints. Him toe went that way. See! [pointing to the book]. M: I see. C: And him toe went this way. M: Mmhm. C: And him toe went every way.
Page 5-6 C: And then him saw some track. But him saw a new track right there. M: He saw a new track, huh?
Page 7-8 C: It was come from a stick. And you know what? It was time xxx.
Page 9 C: Then a snowball fell on him head and him makin(g) more tracks.
Page 10 C: And then big boy(s) were throwing [mother interrupts] M: Snowballs. C: Snowballs. M: At him? Oh, that was fun. C: But he want to join in, but he wasn’t very big enough. M: Oh, he was still small? C: Uh huh. I think we missed that page [Child skips a page but turns back.]
Page 11-12 C: And him make a happy snowman. M: Oh. C: And him make a snowman too [corrects herself], a snow angel. M: A snow angel. That’s right.
Page 13-14 C: And him climb up a big mountain and then him slide down [Mom laughs].
Page 15-16 C: But then him roll his snowball up and then xxx. And then him put in him pocket. And then take off him dirty socks. [Corrects herself.] Him mom take off him dirty socks.
Page 17 C: And (he) taking a bath. M: Gave him a bath.
Page 18 C: And before him went to bed him look and he see a snowball was in his pocket but they were all gone. Snow cannot just stay in your pocket. They need cold. M: Right. C: To help them. M: That’s right. What happens … [Restarts] What is it the snow turns into when it melts? C: Melt, melt, melt. M: But when it melts what does the snow turn to? Do you remember? Remember we filled the cup with water and then we put it in the freezer. C: Ice. M: Ice. So when ice and snow melts what does it turn into? C: Warm. M: When it gets warm what does it turn into? Do you remember? [Waits for child to answer then moves on once she sees the child does not remember] Not really. C: Unh unh.
Page 19-20 C: And him thinkin(g) about (how it) won’t be there [Mom interrupts] M: Right. C: In the morning. M: Mmhm. Because the sun melts it. And it turns back to water.
Page 21 C: That’s all of Snowy Day. And him call out him friends and him went to play with them. M: Good job! C: The end.
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Beth Farmer, Esquire
Kevin O'Connor, Esquire
Dear Ms. Farmer and Mr. O'Connor:
On behalf of the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, I am pleased to submit comments on the August 20th draft of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines of the National Association of Attorneys General ("NAAG").
The publication of the first-ever joint Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Guidelines marked a substantial step toward harmonized enforcement at the federal level. As you know, the Department and the FTC worked very hard to adopt a set of Guidelines that are both analytically sound and workable in practice. We believe that the DOJ/FTC guidelines reflect the policy choices necessary to interdict those mergers that threaten competition without unduly impeding transactions that pose no competitive risks. We hope that these comments will assist NAAG in formulating sound enforcement policies. The revision of the NAAG Guidelines provides an opportunity to continue the process of harmonizing federal and state antitrust enforcement efforts.
The August 20th draft reflects an effort in some ways to sharpen analytical principles, improve clarity and to harmonize federal and state approaches. In several places, however, the draft tends to adopt over-simplified standards that exclude consideration of the complex nature of competition in our economy. As a consequence, adoption of the draft in its present form could result in challenges to procompetitive transactions and the failure to challenge transactions that threaten real harm to competition. We believe that the draft could be significantly improved through changes that would:
The Department will comment in two distinct ways. In the remainder of this letter, we offer general comments, based in large part on the thematic issues listed above. We also provide a separate appendix setting forth our line-by-line commentary.
Section 2 of the August 20th draft sets forth a view of the purposes and goals of merger enforcement based on a perception of the original intent of the drafters of Section 7 of the Clayton Act, as modified by the Cellar-Kefauver amendments. The August 20th draft asserts a strong Congressional intent to arrest industrial concentration and argues for a very specific interpretation of the efficiency goals originally intended when the merger statutes were enacted.
In fact, the legislative history of our merger laws is rich with conflicting opinions as to their purposes and goals. The various floor statements and reports can be read to accommodate widely differing interpretations of legislative intent. The legislative history, however, has no meaning separate and apart from the statute that actually was enacted. Although many who participated in the policy debate presaging the enactment of Section 7 may have spoken of issues such as the risks of concentration, protection of small business and a host of other policy goals, the statute that actually was enacted focuses exclusively on harm to competition. For this reason, we are concerned about Section 2 of the August 2 0th draft, which attempts to draw from the legislative history a strong Congressional direction to prohibit the formation of concentrated markets, as though prevention of market concentration is itself an appropriate goal under the statute, regardless of any individual transaction's impact on competition.
The Department is equally concerned about the draft's suggestion that the drafters of Section 7 held specific views as to the treatment of merger-related efficiencies, such that one can read the statute as specifically prohibiting wealth transfers and subordinating concerns about productive efficiency to concerns about market concentration. Concepts such as wealth transfer and allocative efficiency have obtained very specific meanings in the modern legal and economic literature surrounding antitrust policy. It is doubtful, however, that the drafters defined, used, or even considered, those concepts in the same ways we do today. Neither the statute nor its legislative history sets forth a clear legislative direction with respect to efficiencies.
Finally, we are troubled by the suggestion in this section of the August 20th draft that the states also may consider consequences of mergers "that are relevant to the social and political goals of Section 7." Section 7 contains a simple direction to prohibit mergers that may tend substantially to lessen competition. No goals, beyond the protection of competition, are suggested or endorsed in the statutory language. The statement that the states may attempt to further other social or political goals -- particularly, the protection of small or regional businesses -- would likely undermine the credibility and legitimacy of state merger enforcement.
We would suggest that the introductory sections of the NAAG guidelines simply state that the purpose of Section 7 analysis is to determine the impact on competition. This is the approach we took in the DOJ/FTC guidelines, and we would encourage NAAG to do likewise.
Market definition is an area that provides NAAG with the opportunity to move its approach into closer alignment with the federal enforcement agencies. The August 20th draft, however, retains the 75 percent rule and continues to insist upon historical evidence of substitution as a basis for including products in the relevant market. Although the draft offers the federal market definition methodology (the 5 percent test) as a possible alternative approach, it does not suggest any specific criteria for deciding which approach might be applicable in a given case. Nor does the August 20th draft specify criteria for rationalizing the two approaches when they produce different results. Thus, the suggestion of two alternative approaches does very little to improve certainty in transactional planning, and may indeed produce greater uncertainty than currently exists. We would urge NAAG to adopt the approach in the DOJ/FTC guidelines or, at the very least, to adopt a test that takes proper account of the dynamic forces of actual and potential competition.
The NAAG market definition methodology, as set forth in Section 3 of the draft, suffers from a number of basic flaws. As an initial matter, the 75 percent test sets up an arbitrary standard that bears no practical relation to the underlying purposes of market definition in merger analysis. The purpose of market definition is to determine the group of products and geographic area over which a firm or firms might exercise market power -- i.e., elevate prices above the competitive level. The 75 percent test, however, does not account for the impact prices of one product might have on prices of, or demand for, other products. Depending on margins, substitution patterns and other factors, an attempted anticompetitive price increase may be defeated by the loss of far fewer than 75 percent of sales.1 Because the 75 percent test is not grounded in practical economics, it is most likely to produce overly restrictive markets in some cases, and overly broad markets in others.
Second, the August 20th draft exacerbates the problem by precluding any rebuttal of markets presumed under the 75 percent test, except through evidence of past substitution. Merger analysis under Section 7 is by its nature a forward-looking exercise. The requirement that demand substitution be proven solely by historical evidence of prior demand shifts ignores the dynamic forces at work in many markets and significantly understates the impact of potential competition. The mere fact that demand substitution has not occurred in the past is not indicative of the likelihood of future demand substitution under significantly altered market conditions. Exclusive reliance on historical evidence can also lead to allowing anticompetitive mergers.2 The Department's experience since issuance of the 1982 Merger Guidelines indicates that modern investigative techniques can identify and test probable demand responses to changes in relative prices. Accordingly, there is no basis for the skepticism about such responses that apparently underlies the draft's "empirical evidence" requirement.
Third, the sections addressing potential competition, expansion of output and sources of additional supply are, in our view, overly restrictive. As you know, the DOJ/FTC guidelines take cognizance of the full range of possible demand and supply responses. The DOJ/FTC Guidelines define the market on the basis of actual and potential demand substitution and identify as participants firms presently supplying the market, as well as firms that quickly and profitably likely would make additional supply available through production substitution, product extension and uncommitted entry. The August 20th draft, however, focuses only on firms that have spare capacity.
Certainly, the existence of spare capacity in and around the relevant market can be an important source of competitive discipline. The NAAG Guidelines, however, should acknowledge other potential sources of supply, including those that might involve shifting productive resources or adding new capacity to the market. Firms with divertable capacity that quickly and profitably can be brought to bear on the relevant market -- so-called "hit and run entrants" -- can have the same impact as firms that utilize excess capacity. This, of course, requires an analysis of those firms' capabilities and economic incentives. Our experience has been that such potential supply responses can be identified and evaluated.
The approach taken in the August 20th draft represents a substantial change from the existing NAAG Guidelines and a marked movement away from the DOJ/FTC approach. The existing NAAG Guidelines address production flexibility and quick entry in the section on market definition, while the new draft moves those concepts into the section on entry. Treating these supply responses exclusively as questions of entry is troublesome for two reasons. First, tacking these supply responses onto the end of the entry section has the effect of creating two classes of possible new entry,, with no real basis for distinguishing between them, except the fact that one class employs a two year test of timeliness and one employs a one year test. This temporal distinction is not explained anywhere in the draft.3 Second, eliminating these possible supply responses from the market definition process will have the effect of artificially inflating concentration calculations. This is particularly problematic in the context of the analytical approach proposed in the August 20th draft, which is grounded almost exclusively on concentration and expressly states that nonstructural evidence is both suspect and unlikely to overcome a structural presumption.
The DOJ/FTC guidelines attempt to include as market participants all firms that have a material impact on existing price levels. This approach is consistent with the underlying purpose of the market definition -- to assess whether a merger is likely to create market power or facilitate its exercise. The 1992 DOJ/FTC guidelines make only minor changes to the market definition methodology that has worked very well and gained widespread acceptance since it was first articulated in the 1982 DOJ guidelines. We would urge NAAG to reconsider whether to continue employing a different market definition test.
Section 4 of the August 20th draft sets forth the general standards for the treatment of market concentration. Standing in isolation, this section is an improvement over the existing NAAG Guidelines. We endorse, for example, NAAG's decision to move away from the unrealistic "likely to challenge" language that both DOJ and NAAG once employed. Nevertheless, several elements of the revised Section 4 raise concerns, particularly when considered in the context of the August 20th draft as a whole.
As an initial matter, we question the decision to impose a presumption with respect to mergers in markets that are only moderately concentrated. The experience gained in applying the DOJ Guidelines since 1982 indicates that mergers in the moderately concentrated range seldom pose competitive problems. Such transactions merit some level of antitrust scrutiny, but there is no basis for presuming that they will be harmful.
Second, Section 4.4, which sets forth special rules for transactions involving what the draft terms leading or new, innovative firms, is problematic. One problem we see with this section is the evidentiary standard it employs. Unlike other sections where the draft guidelines would have the parties "demonstrate" mitigating factors, Section 4.4 requires evidence that "clearly compels the conclusion that the merger is not likely substantially to lessen competition." We know of no credible economic evidence that transactions falling into these concentration ranges are so inherently problematic that they should face such an imposing evidentiary burden. Moreover, there is no reason that the acquisition of a "new, innovative" firm by a firm of arbitrary size, here 20 percent, should be presumed to be anticompetitive, particularly in markets that are only moderately concentrated. The fact that a firm is new or innovative does not necessarily mean that it exercises a special disciplinary force on the market. Indeed, blanket rules barring mergers with such firms could actually be anticompetitive because a merger may permit innovative firms to take advantage of additional capital, marketing or other strengths of the acquiring firm.
Third, we are very concerned about the suggestion in this section that the structural presumptions will strengthen as market concentration increases. As you know, the question of the inclusion of a so-called "sliding scale" was debated vigorously when we consulted NAAG in formulating the DOJ/FTC guidelines. The sliding scale was rejected for several reasons.
There is no inherent reason why certain mitigating factors -- entry in particular -- are likely to be less potent forces in more highly concentrated markets than in less concentrated ones. Moreover, there is no principled basis on which to calibrate the sliding scale. Even those economic studies that purport to find a meaningful correlation between concentration and economic performance generally stop short of making fine distinctions between markets based on relatively small differences in concentration. There is no practical way to implement the sliding scale, except on an impressionistic basis. Focusing again on entry as an example, how does one go about measuring the adequacy of an entry claim relative to the level of market concentration? Does one need to have more documentary evidence of likely entry in a 1350 HHI case than in a 1250 HHI case? Concentration and entry are two distinct aspects of the analysis and, in devising an enforcement policy, should be treated as such.
The sliding scale has the effect of transforming merger analysis into a one-dimensional exercise in which evidence of high concentration always can trump any reasoned analysis of actual competitive conditions. It also gives the government almost unfettered discretion continuously to adjust the burden of proof, without the slightest indication of the basis for the adjustments. We believe that an analysis that relies on the evaluation of the unique conditions actually present in a market will lead to more accurate enforcement decisions than one that relies on generalized, largely theoretical assumptions about the impact of market concentration. Accordingly, we urge the states to abandon the sliding scale in favor of a more rigorous analysis of actual market conditions.
The evaluation of nonstructural evidence is the area in which the August 20th draft diverges most fundamentally from federal merger enforcement policy. Since publication of the DOJ Guidelines and the FTC Statement in 1982, both federal agencies have examined a wide range of factors relevant to whether a particular merger is likely to create market power or facilitate its exercise. The 1992 Guidelines merely explain the process through which we analyze such factors by requiring in every case a detailed evaluation of actual market conditions in the context of specific anticompetitive scenarios. With respect to each scenario, the new guidelines explain how various market factors might influence the analysis. In this manner, the new guidelines provide effective guidance to the business community as to both the nature of our competitive concerns and the market factors that influence our enforcement decisions.
The August 20th draft, on the other hand, rejects any consideration of market conditions other than concentration and ease of entry. After expressing the view that current economic techniques have not advanced to a point of relevance to government merger analysis, the August 20th draft states that the only way to overcome the structural presumption is with evidence of ease of entry. Although the draft states that NAAG also will consider collusive behavior and efficiency, neither of those sections offers any way to overcome the structural presumption . under the NAAG framework. If anything, they operate to eliminate those considerations. With respect to collusive behavior, the August 20th draft merely asserts that states will not consider ease of entry if they find indications that collusion or oligopolistic behavior presently is occurring in the market.4 With respect to efficiencies, the NAAG draft says efficiencies will be considered if they prevent prices from increasing. The very next sentence, however, presumes that a price increase will tend to result from a merger in a concentrated market. Thus, the draft appears to presume away the one factual circumstance in which efficiencies will be considered.
Market conditions other than concentration and potential entry can be very important in the evaluation of the likely effects of a particular merger. However, concentration data, interpreted only in light of the potential for new entry, is not predictive of anticompetitive behavior. The experience in applying federal enforcement standards since 1982 indicates that the evaluation of actual market conditions present in the market improves our enforcement effort. Performing this type of analysis generates greater confidence in our prosecutorial decisions and enables us to make more reasoned presentations of our views in the courts. Thus, we would urge NAAG to allow for a broader consideration of market factors other than concentration and entry.
The August 20th draft measures concentration based on historical patterns of supply and demand, and then presumes that mergers in moderately or highly concentrated markets are anticompetitive. The only recognized mitigating factor is ease of entry. The remaining provisions of the NAAG draft guidelines largely serve to bolster the primacy of structural evidence or to exclude other types of evidence that might bear upon the actual competitive impact of the proposed merger. In this sense, the August 20th draft Guidelines take a static view of relevant markets and would ground enforcement decisions almost exclusively on the theory that concentrated markets are inherently prone to anticompetitive behavior. Such an approach, divorced as it is from actual conditions in particular markets, runs the considerable risk of impeding potentially beneficial mergers, thereby diminishing the competitiveness of firms subject to U.S. merger law. By the same token, this approach would in some instances cause the states to ignore transactions that are likely to harm competition.
The 1992 Horizontal Merger Guidelines reflect the best judgement of the Department and the FTC as to how to interdict anticompetitive mergers without unduly impeding transactions that are unlikely to produce adverse effects. Consistent with that objective, the DOJ/FTC guidelines adopt a wide-ranging and balanced inquiry into the full range of factors that influence competition in a particular market.
In providing these comments on the August 20th draft, we do not mean to suggest that the formulations contained in the DOJ/FTC guidelines are the only correct approaches to the difficult issues involved in merger enforcement. We do believe, however, that there are certain basic elements that are essential to any reasoned approach to these issues, based on the statute, the case law and enforcement experience. Key among those basic elements are: (1) a methodology for market definition that focuses on the potential for market power and recognizes the full range of potential supply and demand responses; and (2) a framework for a balanced assessment of both structural and nonstructural conditions in the relevant market as they affect the likelihood of anticompetitive behavior. The NAAG draft could be materially improved with respect to both elements.
We appreciate the opportunity to comment on the August 20th draft. Needless to say, we would be happy to provide comments on subsequent drafts and would welcome the opportunity to engage in further consultation as your drafting process moves forward.
cc: Janet D. Steiger (Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission) Lee Fisher (Attorney General of Ohio) Richard Blumenthal (Attorney General of Connecticut) Laurel A. Price (Deputy Attorney General, New Jersey) Michael L. Denger (ABA Antitrust Law Section Chair)
1. The 75 percent test is also problematic because it is only applied to one substitute at a time; it cannot consider a combination of substitutes. Thus if consumers consider two or more alternative products to be close substitutes for the product produced by the merging firms, (e.g., 50% of consumers would shift to substitute A and 50% to substitute B) , the draft's market definition methodology would fail to include any of them in the market.
2. For example, in United States v. Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. , 695 F.Supp. 1000 (S.D. Iowa 1987), rev'd. 866 F.2d 242 (8th Cir. 1988) defendants' empirical evidence helped convince the judge that sugar was in the relevant product market. The court of appeals, however, placed this evidence in the proper context and delineated the market on the basis of sound principles applied to other objective facts.
3. The DOJ/FTC guidelines distinguish these two types of entry on the basis of sunk costs, treating as market participants those firms that can respond quickly without substantial sunk cost expenditures. A shorter time frame is employed with respect to such firms because we are attempting to assess their immediate impact on pricing behavior in the relevant market.
4. The characteristics the August 2 0th draft describes as being indicative of oligopolistic behavior can also be present in competitive markets. Thus, if the NAAG guidelines are going to use indications of oligopolistic behavior as a basis for precluding entry analysis, they should adopt a more precise manner for identifying such indications. |
7/7 Conspiracy Theories and Connecting the Dots
We are on the eve of the 7th anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in which 56 people, including the alleged culprits, were killed. In that time, numerous theories have been put forward as to what really happened and who was truly responsible. The official theory, that four young British Muslim men radicalised each other into a fanatic religious rage that they chose to express through the medium of suicide bombing, is perhaps the best known. It is, naturally, a conspiracy theory, though because it is officially sanctioned it does not tend to get given its true name. It claims that the four men conspired, with malice aforethought, to murder over 50 people.
Refuting the official conspiracy theory has been a painstaking process for those sections of the independent research community, but is has been a thoroughly successful one. 7/7 is, at its simplest, a horrible crime. In investigating that crime we can look at it in relatively conventional terms of means, motive and opportunity.
Exactly what means were used to kill the victims of 7/7 has never been established. The official cause of death in each case is ‘injuries suffered in an explosion’, but the actual explosive used has never been determined. At the July 7th inquests into the deaths of the 52 (excluding the alleged bombers), explosives expert Clifford Todd admitted that they found no trace of the main explosive at any of the bomb sites.
This presents several potential scenarios. It is possible that the forensic examiners were utterly useless. The record of such scientists in this country is quite terrible. It is possible that the explosive used was exotic, unknown to the existence investigative science in this area. It is possible that they did figure out what explosive was used and it had nothing to do with the organic peroxide-black pepper/powdered Masala concoction supposedly used by the alleged bombers, and therefore they hushed it up. It is possible that the explosive used was of a very sophisticated kind that left little or no trace, consuming all the explosive substance in the chemical reaction.
In any case, since we don’t know the means that were used to kill those people, asserting that the alleged bombers had that means is absurd.
The supposed motive has never been formally established. No one who knew any of the alleged bombers suspected they would become mass murderers. None were known as being particularly political or religious. None had a serious criminal record. Though rumours of radicalising terrorist masterminds have floated around in the press, these have always been officially denied. Cod psychologists outlining the possible group dynamics of a ‘cell’ of ‘self radicalising terrorists’ remains an unconvincing explanation.
Without formally establishing motive, to talk of the alleged bombers having the motive to carry out such awful crimes is almost meaningless.
The alleged bombers probably did have the opportunity, at least in a generic sense. But in that sense, so did almost every other person in Britain. To make homemade explosives is not that difficult, and if one were so inclined, gaining access to a London underground train and blowing oneself up would not be much of a challenge. The question is, specifically, were the men actually there, blowing themselves up? The only witness who remains at all certain that he saw one of the alleged bombers is Danny Biddle, who remembers an Asian man with a small rucksack on his lap, not a large rucksack on the floor as the official version would have it. All the other witnesses are either vague or simply unreliable and self-contradictory.
None of the alleged bombers were pronounced dead at the bomb sites. The process by which bodies were recovered and identified was ruled beyond the scope of the inquests by the coroner Lady Justice Heather Hallett. As such, we know very little about the way in which the alleged bombers’ remains were found, identified, and concluded to be those of suicide bombers. What we do know is that the descriptions of forensic anthropologist Dr Julie Roberts, who determined that the alleged bombers were close to the bombs at the time of the explosions, do not match the descriptions of the disintegrated pieces of the alleged bombers supposedly found at the scenes.
If the alleged bombers were not on those trains and that bus then they could not have had the opportunity.
A fuller breakdown of the myriad problems with the official account is provided by the July 7th Truth Campaign and my films 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction and 7/7: Crime and Prejudice. So, to the alternative theories. The most commonly believed alternative theories revolve around Peter Power, former counter-terrorism Met Police officer turned crisis management consultant/pundit. Power went on national radio and television on the day of the attacks to announce that at half past 9 that morning he’d been running an exercise based on a scenario of simultaneous bombs going off at the same railway stations where the real bombings took place.
Unsurprisingly, this has spawned a number of exaggerations, speculations, and entire theories of what happened on 7/7, all based on a few minutes of media interviews. It has been claimed, for example, that Peter Power’s exercise involved 1000 people, on the scale of Operation Osiris II (link) or Operation Horizon (link). What Power actually said is that he was running the exercise ‘for a company of a thousand people’, who we later found was Reed Elsevier. According to Power, the exercise was a glorified powerpoint presentation for a small room of people, where he chose the scenario but the client chose the date and time. The scenario itself, and indeed mock news broadcasts, appear to have been lifted from the notorious 2004 Panorama: London Under Attack programme.
What this has become in the minds of some alternative conspiracy theorists is that Power was actually an integral part of the attacks, and that the alleged bombers were recruited to play the roles of terrorists in his exercise. There is absolutely no evidence substantiating this hypothesis, but the film 7/7 Ripple Effect has popularised it. Indeed, 7/7 Ripple Effect’s hypothesis is that the alleged bombers were lured to London as part of the exercise, and then realised they’d been duped at the last minute and ran off to Canary Wharf, where they were shot by police snipers.
Aside from the inherent implausibility of the police simply shooting the men dead on the street, rather than arresting them and making them disappear some other way, the evidence in favour of this hypothesis is thin. There isn’t a single witness to the presence of police snipers at Canary Wharf, or to shootings, let alone the shootings of the alleged bombers. However, what many fans of 7/7 Ripple Effect are apparently unaware of is that many of the key components of this alternative theory, and indeed several other alternative theories of 7/7, were predicted by mainstream fiction TV shows.
As I explained in two conversations with the incomparable James Corbett, one on 7/7 and one specifically on predictive programming, the BBC programming before 7/7 pre-empted not just the official conspiracy theory, but also many of the alternative conspiracy theories. The first season of Spooks has an episode where Islamic terrorists take control of the Turkish embassy in London, but this is used as a cover by an ex-MI5 agent so he can hack into MI5′s secret bank. This is far from the only example of false flags.
Continuing the theme, in the final episode of season one, MI5 fake a (non-fatal) attack on a train station in London to trick some Irish terrorists they are colluding with into thinking their planned attack has been successful. The Irish terrorists then give up valuable information on some Muslim terrorists who are trying to blow up a nuclear power station. The Muslim terrorists are shot dead.
In the second series, a Muslim suicide bombing is depicted in episode two, but MI5 have a double agent who has infiltrated the group behind the bombing. The double agent fails, and is killed in the explosion. This is, in dramatic form, the official version of 7/7, where intelligence failings lead to a Muslim suicide bombing. That said, the inquests concluded that there was no intelligence failure.
Three episodes later, on July 7th 2003 (exactly two years prior to 7/7), the fifth episode of the series features an MI5 training exercise that coincides with a real major terrorist attack on London. Along very similar lines, the 2004 made-for-TV movie Dirty War begins with a large-scale emergency exercise, and concludes with a real attack that is just like the scenario for that exercise. Predicting the official conspiracy theory of 7/7, the film depicts a team of four Muslim suicide bombers attacking London – two at Liverpool Street tube station, no less. Predicting the alternative Canary Wharf conspiracy theory, the other two are shot dead by police marksmen.
Indeed, all the major components of the popular alternative conspiracy theories, from exercises that go live to Israeli false flags, to bombs planted underneath the trains, were predicted either before 7/7 even happened, or before they became popularised by 7/7 Ripple Effect. Indeed, virtually the entire story imagined by the makers of 7/7 Ripple Effect appears to have been lifted from episodes of Spooks and similar shows. It is entirely possible, if not probable, that the Peter Power exercise theory was fuelled by the predictive programming, and that the whole exercise question is part of a pre-planned disinformation campaign.
That is not to dismiss the relevance of exercises with regards to other attacks, such as 9/11, at least some of the attacks under the Operation Gladio umbrella, and the CIA’s anti-Castro operations in the 1960s such as Zapata and Northwoods. It is simply to raise a distinct interpretation of the Peter Power exercise, one that is valided by a lot more evidence than the interpretation that he recruited the alleged bombers as dummy terrorists.
So where can we turn for a possible alternative explanation for what happened on 7/7? If the Peter Power exercise is a deliberate distraction, a boil in the bag conspiracy theory cooked up by the security services, then we need to go elsewhere. The question remains, if the alleged bombers are innocent then how were they manipulated into doing things that the state has used to make them look like terrorists? After all, Sidique Khan and Shezad Tanweer were the trustees of the Iqra charity bookshop and youth outreach organisation that appears to have been a hub for the distribution of ‘extremist’ Islamic media. Sidique Khan apparently went to a terrorist training camp in Malakand, Pakistan in 2003, and to at least one ‘training camp’ in the Lake District in 2001. Khan and Tanweer were both surveilled repeatedly in contact with convicted terror suspects. Khan is even on tape talking about terrorism over a year before 7/7.
The answer to this question of why the alleged bombers did these things appears to be a network of spies or provocateurs working, we assume, for the British security services. The man running the Iqra bookshop and the Lake District ‘training camps’ was Martin McDaid. He was a former Special Boat Service soldier (or so he said), who had converted or reverted to Islam and become a radical. As revealed by Newsnight, one man who got involved in the activities at Iqra was a youth worker named Mark Hargreaves, who suggested that McDaid might have had a hidden agenda that involved ‘grooming’ young Muslim men.
McDaid was the subject of several security service surveillance operations and investigations, but, at least officially, ‘intelligence failures’ meant that MI5 never discovered his relationship with Sidique Khan. This story is laden with untrue and implausible claims, as I detailed in my presentation to the March 2012 Crimes of the 1% Conference.
The events with McDaid and Iqra bookshop are only half of the story. In the other half there was Operation Crevice, which, on the face of it, was a massive counter-terrorism operation inside the UK. In reality, it was an international sting/entrapment operation extending from Britain to North America and Pakistan.
In Pakistan Crevice centred around Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-American Al Qaeda trainer and facilitator turned FBI co-operator. In Britain, Crevice began as an investigation into ‘Q’, Mohammed Quayyum Khan, an alleged Al Qaeda facilitator in Britain. Unlike Babar, but like McDaid, ‘Q’ was never arrested and never appeared as a trial witness.
Following the 2007 trial (R vs Khyam et al), a lot more information about Operation Crevice became available, including how MI5 came across two of the alleged 7/7 bombers while investigating those around Q and Junaid Babar. This story was summed up, on the evening of the guilty verdict in the trial, by Panorama in an episode called Real Spooks:
That was what was known in 2007, and as you will see from the video even the BBC were suggesting that Q and Babar were spies, working for the security services all along. In Babar’s case this was all but confirmed in a 2012 BBC documentary called Modern Spies, where Babar was described as ‘a human source that intelligence services dream of’, and ‘an individual who had both the access and the capability to get into groups that simply would not have existed without him’.
If Babar was someone who the FBI (and/or CIA and/or MI5) had no relationship with until they approached him outside his NY home in April 2004, and he then became an co-operator, then he didn’t have access to any groups. He was a terrorist facilitator and trainer who turned into a co-operator. This new description very much indicates that he was a spy all along, possibly from as early as him joining Al Muhajiroun in New York in 2000.
As for Q, there is a document strongly suggesting that the British security services had a provocateur within the ‘cell’ being investigated during Crevice. As part of Crevice, an ‘Executive Liaison Group’ was formed. The purpose of the Executive Liaison Group was that officers from MI5 could meet their police counterparts and share information and intelligence on a near-live basis as the operation went on.
In a meeting in mid February 2004, just as Crevice was really hotting up, the security services discussed how the operation was to progress. The minutes of the meeting, which can be downloaded here, say:
We still have no indication of target or timing for any attack, though mid March appears to feature as a significant time period. We should seek to develop the evidence and intelligence, and consider drawing other targets into the conspiracy.
How could they actively seek to draw other targets into the conspiracy unless they had someone in a role of influence inside the conspiracy? This may possibly refer to Omar Khyam, the convicted ringleader of the plot, but it might also refer to Q, the apparent mastermind and overlord of the plot, who never even saw the inside of a police cell (as far as we know).
Connecting the Dots
So what does all this add up to? At every point that the four alleged bombers connected up to something larger, something like Al Qaeda, and therefore at every point they did something that could later be used to make them look like potential terrorists, they connected and acted via and through three probable state agents.
As such, when people came knocking on MI5′s door after 7/7 asking ‘what did you know and why didn’t you stop these guys?’ their answer was ‘well, we knew this, this and this that makes them look like terrorists, which is convenient’. As to why they didn’t stop the men their story has been one of failures to share information, or to realise the significance of information they already had. However, given that they have told at least a dozen different versions of this story, most of which is contradicted by their own records, we have no reason to believe them.
Instead, these ‘failures’ had the effect not just of failing to ‘uncover’ the alleged bombers, but of positively obscuring the connections between them and the three probable intelligence assets. These connections are, as far as we can tell, the reason why the alleged bombers did such things as being trustees of an Islamic charity that apparently spread extremist literature, or going to a terrorism training camp in Pakistan, or repeatedly met with people who would wind up as convicted terrorists.
We need to connect these dots, and with that in mind I have begun working on a linkchart outlining who knew who, who was connected to what and where, and how the three likely provocateurs were involved at critical junctures.
A hi-resolution, annotated version of this linkchart, which is a work in progress, can be downloaded here (PDF, 2.44MB). The likely spies are coloured red, the alleged bombers in dark blue, other significant figures in light blue, possible informants in pink and key locations in yellow. It is, necessarily, an abbreviation of the information available, but viewed alongside the videos available on this page it provides the basic structure of what was going on in the years leading up to 7/7. |