bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Alison s House
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Even before Fugitive’s Return was released, Susan turned her attention to a completely new project. Mary Vorse, who was spending the summer in Provincetown, recorded her friend’s enthusiasm. “Seeing Susan in those days when she was first plunging her mind into Emily Dickinson’s story was seeing a creative force at work.” Vorse left by the end of August and did not return until the following summer, so if she were present at the genesis of Alison’s House, as she claims in Time and the Town, that means that Susan had already conceived of the idea as early as the summer of 1929, while she was alone, during Norman’s sail. By February 1930 she had completed the play, and sent it off to the Theatre Guild. In April she received the news that they had rejected it. “It was disappointing,” she wrote to Clark soon after, “but that disappointment was very much eased by your feeling about the play.” In the same letter she thanked him for suggesting that Samuel French, where he worked, might want to print it, but hesitated to do so until it was produced.
A Different War
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Susan returned to Provincetown in the summer of 1938 and appeared, in Edmund Wilson’s estimation, “much better for her years in the West,” although she “seemed to have resigned herself to become an old lady.”1 At sixty-two, she was grayer, more lined, and frailer than she had been in the early 1930s, but she was more determined than ever to work. She was also happy to reconnect with friends, particularly Katie and John Dos Passos, and she showed her old commitment to activism when, as one of her first acts, she formed a “defense committee” to block the local beach club from buying the house next to them and opposite her.2 If Susan had forgotten the sea and the special winds of the Cape during her time in Chicago, she was reminded of the potential fury of both in September, when one of the most severe hurricanes of the century slammed into land near New Bedford, throwing out all communication with the Cape. Many residents believed the Cape to have been flattened by the severity of the storm.
Completing the Circle
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Despite the disappointing reception in the first months of 1943 of Norma Ashe and war news that was growing more ominous, Susan was determined to keep working. She now threw herself into a project that she kept secret from her friends until it was completed. It had been thirteen years since she’d written for the theatre, and she decided that she needed to try her hand once more to see if she could still create dramatic plots and dialogue. “Springs Eternal” is the result, a comedy about war, in which three upper-middle class couples banter about love, faithfulness, raising children, philosophies of life, and only parenthetically the carnage abroad. In Norma Ashe, Susan had observed, “War could be gallant, but there was nothing gallant about the petty wars of so-called peace, this constant war between people, trying to get ahead of somebody else, when that someone else had a life a good deal like your own.”2 In her play she stages this “other war,” but instead of indicting big business or commercialism, she focuses her attention on the love lives and embroilments of her characters and the older generation’s moral failures. “We have entangling alliances; we are always busy breaking our pacts,” the central female protagonist, Margaret, claims.
“Old Man Mccorkle”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

It was over ten years ago that he stalked out of the past up the walk to my house. He wore a greenish “jim-swinger” coat, pipe-stem trousers a bit too short, large heavy-soled shoes, a piece of cloth folded around his neck, and a crushed old felt hat. His dark brown face, fringed with gray, had what some would call an aristocratic cast. He looked a little like Jefferson Davis. His hair was frizzled gray; his slightly receding mouth was nearly toothless. In gestures and manners he was truly aristocratic. He walked so erectly that he seemed to be about to topple backward. He had come to Missouri from far away North Carolina. We soon got to be friends. He announced himself as “an arrow in the quiver of Lord God Jehovah’s power,” and he was eloquent enough for such. After we had won each other’s confidence, he did not resent, he even welcomed, my taking notes on his talk. He ate heartily for all of his near toothlessness, stripping a pork chop with ease and neatness. He was a great drinker of strong coffee. He was eighty-four years old. He boasted that long before freedom he could read, learning partly from his mother whom his memories reconstructed into a superior person, partly from the questions in the catechism, partly from the grandson of the McCorkles, who were “kind to their colored folks.” Most of the other slave owners whom he recalled were hardly “rickommendable.”
“A Harvardian Goes South”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

He could not help speaking with the Back Bay Accent. He had been bred in Boston and educated at Harvard, majoring in the classics. Inevitably, of course, in order to get a job teaching he had been forced to come South. He was a goodlooking, brown-skin fellow, slight of frame and rather aristocratic—Harvard-Yardish—in bearing. So the odds were strictly against him when he stated to the gas-attendant that he had been short-changed fifteen cents. A Yankee was bad enough, but a brownskin Yankee was hated at compound interest. The gas man, over his first shock, said to a loafing kid, “Hand me my blackjack.” Then waving the ugly weapon, he said, “You get out of that car. Now unlock your gas tank.” The loaded blackjack hovered, ready. The gas tank was full. The attendant turned on the stream of gas, played it over the gas tank, over the rear of the fenders, over the spare. Some few drops struck the Bostonian’s well shined collegiate shoes. When the figures on the meter read fifteen cents the hose was turned off.
“I Look At The Old South”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

I am not much of a sightseer, but since I was born and bred in Washington, I know my share of monuments and memorials. There are some that call up for me the antebellum and Civil War past: the old homes of Georgetown ranging from such beauties as Dumbarton Oaks to the cramped brick houses hugging the sidewalks; the groundworks of Fort Stevens where Lincoln curiously awaited Jubal Early’s raiders, Ford’s Theater where he was shot, all of the Lincolniana ending with the Lincoln Memorial. I have seen the old blank hulks, most of them gone now, that were said to have been slave jails for the thriving interstate slave traffic. One was across the street from the White House; another a stone’s throw from the Capitol. And I know neighboring Maryland: have followed the trail of John Wilkes Booth in the southern counties, have seen the window from which legendary Barbara Freitchie challenged Stonewall’s army; and over where Mary-land joins West Virginia, have stood truly moved before the scarred firehouse where the rifles of John Brown and his band of whites and Negroes spat angry defiance at the slave-power.
“Gone With What Wind”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

In Savannah, I had several talks with a patrician lady who was working on a book about coastal Negroes. Our talks led to recent fiction, finally to Gone with the Wind. She cavalierly dismissed my criticism that the novel was sinister in its implications about slavery and Reconstruction. “You musn’t be so sensitive,” she advised me. “That’s the way things were then. What I object to in Gone with the Wind is that Margaret Mitchell centers it about Atlanta and makes a heroine out of the upstart daughter of an Irish immigrant.” To Savannah and Charleston, Atlanta is as much an upstart as Scarlett O’Hara. Atlanta is not bothered. After all, to a money-minded metropolis, the payoff is that Atlanta’s novel has outsold any about Charleston, Savannah, or Natchez. To the drugstore literary trade, Peachtree Street has become more famous than Savannah’s Bull Street and Charleston’s Battery. It was from shops near Five Points that the craze for antebellum hats and frocks (somewhat streamlined, of course) swept the nation. As the pert hussy, Scarlett, strode brazenly past her more retiring older cousins, so Atlanta. From low beginnings as Marthasville, Atlanta became the industrial capital of the confederacy, and is now capital of the largest state east of the Mississippi and the busiest railroad center in the South: “Look, we have come a long way, in spite of fire, hurricane, or Sherman!” True to its go-getting spirit, Atlanta is not so enamored of the past as other cities. Sherman’s attacking and Hood’s departing armies (forerunning the “scorched earth” tactics) rid the city of what antebellum mansions it had. I saw decrepit houses, taller than the surrounding Negro slums but no prouder. They may have looked antebellum, but they merely aged too soon. The fancy scrolls and curleycews on their porches and gables dated from the General Grant period. Their favorite gray was overcast with soot from the soft coal burned in Atlanta’s furnaces. The elegant Southern style manor-houses, my friends told me, were of the twentieth century, built by the Coca-Cola and other dynasties who lived in Druid Hills, or along those winding drives like Paces Ferry Road, with strips of rolling woodland shutting out the prying passers-by. Statues of Henry Grady, advocate of an industrialized South, and of Tom Watson, populist champion, are respected in Atlanta as much as any statues of Confederate heroes. Both seemed to me to be caught in unfortunate poses: Grady looks as if he is reaching beneath his arm for a pistol as he faces the New South at Five Points, and Tom Watson as if he has just tossed a ringer in a game of horseshoes on the Capitol lawn.
“Meekness In Bronze”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

In Natchitoches, Louisiana, at Washington and Lafayette Streets, a famous statue was “Erected by the City . . . in Grateful Recognition of the Arduous and Faithful Service of the Good Darkies of Louisiana.” An old Negro, clad in a prince-albert, stands on a flower-decked pedestal. His shoulders are bent by age, his knees by servility; his head is bowed like Chesterfield’s valet; his misshapen hat is in hand, doffed politely. My Natchitoches friends were somewhat ashamed of this civic pride, and they took me to see it only at dusk. I repeated to them the folklore of the Louisiana Guide that “Plantation Negroes, inebriated after a spree in town, go to the statue to ask the way home and the Good Darky never fails to tell them the right direction.” “No such lie,” a friend, born and bred in Natchitoches, told me impatiently. “They are more likely to wake up Dr. Johnson or John C. Lewis. And borrow bus fare or a dollar or so.” From Virginia to this farthest South, I had seen the souvenirs and statues of the ex-slaves, or the preserved relics themselves, who were supposed to charm the tourists with tales that ran on like deep-grooved phonograph records. And I suspected, as in this instance my Natchitoches friends insisted, that much of the business was no such lie.
“The Little Gray Schoolhouse”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

We slowed up by the school. It was small, weather-beaten gray, with a squat belltower. The roof sagged slightly and a few shingles were off. A pole in the beaten, grassless yard had a barrel hoop fixed against it; another hoop was on the stock of a pine tree from which the lower branches had been cut. These were basketball goals. Roots stuck up as extra hazards for the players. Two outhouses were in plain view about twenty yards back in the loblollies. Bullock glanced over at me. “So that’s the school,” I said, noncommittally. “That’s not one of the most bad ones,” he said. “At least it’s a building, and it has outhouses. There are plenty that don’t have them. I’ve got the statistics in the office at Atlanta.” As we drove off, he told me how often Negro elementary schools had to be housed in churches and fraternal lodges of the Negro community. His voice droned on as the gray concrete sped under our wheels. “So they went to the county commissioners and asked for a school. The head commissioner told them ‘no funds.’ They pitched in, fixed up a schoolroom on the upstairs floor of their lodge hall. They paid the teacher’s salary, such as it was. When winter came, they went to the commissioner again. They wanted a little money for coal to heat the room. You won’t believe what answer they got.”
“And Gladly Teach”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Church was a graduate student at Atlanta University; he was writing his Master’s thesis on some aspect of romantic poetry. Though young, he had taught in three Southern states: North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama. He believed that his experiences would make a good book, and this is the story as he told it. His first teaching job was in a North Carolina community of about six or seven hundred people. It was in tobacco and cotton country, not really near anywhere, well the nearest place that might be known was Hamlet on the Seaboard. There were more whites there than Negroes. The cracker class was numerous and ignorant; the whites of power treated them as badly as they did Negroes. There was a beautiful school for whites in the community. The Negro school, though brick, was only fair: there were no lights, the toilets were open earth, and a pump furnished the water. In the community itself only two Negroes had electric lights, and there were no such things as bathtubs or commodes. There was no Negro doctor, nothing like that, and no Negroes of any wealth. The one educated Negro there was an ex-policeman from Chicago, who came back to retire. As far as the morals of the Negro community were concerned, the people did anything they wanted to do, anything they were big enough to do.
“One Language, One People”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

As the time drew near for the meeting in Atlanta of the National Council of Teachers of English, both the white local committee and the Negro teachers of English in Atlanta became anxious. Believing the membership possibilities good in the South, the Council had voted, over some protest, to come to Atlanta upon assurance that provisions would be made for Negro participation. Unfortunately, the president of the Council, Robert C. Pooley of Wisconsin, did not ask to have the word “participation” specifically defined. A letter from Paul Farmer, chairman of the committee on arrangements, sent out a careful definition. He did this, regretting that “even a part of the privileges will be kept from the Negroes,” and sincerely hoping that Negroes would “manifest a generous spirit of understanding”: The precedent established here for Negro participation in such meetings; that is, Negroes would be admitted to all sessions with the exception of those of a social nature such as receptions, teas, breakfasts, luncheons, and the banquet; and would be seated, particularly in the large group meetings, in seats reserved for them.
“Count Us In”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

A young European scholar, back from a swift trip through the South, picked up from my desk a copy of Hal Steed’s Georgia: Unfinished State. A passage on the last page confused him. It read: “I would not say that the Anglo-Saxon is superior to other races, but that this race makes up nearly one hundred percent of the population of the South augurs well for unity—unity in political beliefs, in religion, in social problems.” The European was amazed at the figure—nearly one hundred percent Anglo-Saxon. “But I saw so many Negroes there,” he said. I could have mentioned other oddities in the enumerating of the Negro, from the adoption of the Constitution when a Negro slave counted as three-fifths of a man, to the present when a Negro is counted as a unit, a fraction, or a zero, according to the purpose of the counter. Instead I assured him that the evidence of his eyes could be trusted: the gatherings at one side of the depot to see the train go through, the hordes in the ramshackly slums of the cities, the crammed Jim Crow waiting rooms and coaches. Negroes were there all right. Even the publicists who excluded Negroes as part of the population would admit that they were there. Too much so, some might say ruefully, pointing out the large numbers of Negroes as the cause of the poverty and backwardness of the South, apologizing for the belt of swarming cabins engirdling the cities, hoping that the stranger might soften his verdict on the town until the business section around the depot slowly came into view. Too numerous, therefore Negroes had to be kept in their places, the argument might run. Such spokesmen would have a glib reply to reconcile the statistics of “nearly one hundred percent Anglo-Saxon” with the patent reality: “Oh, that’s easy to understand. By population, we mean the people that count.”
The Gospel of Judas: An Overview
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

Because of the vicissitudes of survival, some of the ancient Gospels that have been rediscovered in modern times are highly fragmentary—missing their beginnings and/or conclusions. This is the case, for example, with the Gospel of Peter, discovered in 1886.
The Gospel of Judas and Early Christian Gnosticism
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

As a scholar of early Christianity, I give a lot of lectures on Gnosticism. Over the years I have found that people—regular lay audiences—like to hear and talk about Gnostics in broad terms, because they can relate to the Gnostics’ basic idea of the world and our place in it. But people are not so interested in the details of the Gnostic texts, which are nothing if not detailed. The complexities of these texts can be a real turn-off, with their aeons, lumi- naries, archons, firmaments, Pleromas, and oddly named divine beings: Autogenes, Barbelo, Yaldabaoth, Saklas, Nebruel, and on and on. Reading these texts takes you into a different world, and without a map, it is nearly impos- sible to navigate your way through it. People tend to be more interested in the map than in the world it describes. The world of Gnosticism is complex and virtually impenetrable. But the map makes sense.
Jesus, Judas, and the Twelve in the Gospel of Judas
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

When scholars talk to nonscholars, they often tell them what they ought to be interested in. That’s not necessarily bad—in fact, it can be very good. Enormous chunks of a scholar’s time are devoted to research into mat- ters that most other people can think about only in passing, in the evenings or on the weekends. But one result is that scholars tend to have different perspec- tives from others and to emphasize different things. Most scholars coming to the Gospel of Judas, for example, will be interested in recondite questions concerning the relationship of this text to other documents from Christian an- tiquity and to the precise character of its form of Christian Gnosticism. Regu- lar readers are more likely to be interested in what the book has to say about its main characters: Jesus, the twelve disciples, and Judas. Both sets of concerns are completely legitimate.
The Gospel of Judas in Perspective
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

The newly discovered Gospel of Judas Iscariot has obviously sparked a new interest in understanding the betrayer of Jesus. Throughout this book we have seen how Judas is portrayed in our ancient writings—both those that made it into the New Testament and those of later times. We have also recon- sidered who Judas really was, what he stood for, what he believed, what he did in betraying Jesus to the authorities, and why he did it. But the center of our attention, and the ultimate object of our concern, has been the Gospel of Judas itself, one of the earliest surviving Gospels from outside the New Testament. In this final chapter I would like to take a step back and consider the overall significance of this unusual text, which portrays Judas not as a demonically inspired or money-grubbing betrayer of the cause but as the one disciple who both understood Jesus and did his will.
Legacies
Authors: Robertson Lindsay G
Published: November 2023

In their immediate objectives, both Johnson v. M’Intosh and Green v. Biddle were only partly successful. Virginia’s opposition to the Court did di minish in the wake of these decisions, but at the cost of Kentucky’s in creased hostility. The invalidation of the occupying claimant laws, which ought to have benefited Virginia landholders, failed to deliver as expected because Kentucky’s legislature and courts refused to follow the Green decision.1 The Virginia militia lands question, which ought to have been helped toward favorable resolution by Johnson’s elimination of the Indian title objection as a conceivable bar, was put on hold for a year while Kentucky at tempted yet again to garner Virginia’s support in protesting the Court’s usurpation of power in Green.2 When this was not forthcoming, Kentucky simply opted to ignore Virginia’s interests and started distributing the lands west of the Tennessee.
Activating the Multitude
Authors: Bratich Jack
Published: November 2023

To speak of active audiences today is an act that runs the risk of self-de-activation. What branch of media cultural studies has been so thoroughly pilloried as active audience studies? With the pendulum swing toward economic analyses over the last ten years, what does it mean to revisit reception, especially one as “excessive” as active audience studies? I turn to the “active audience” moment in reception and cultural studies (exemplified by Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the Gramscian culmination in John Fiske’s work) as a way of rethinking audience powers and of inquiring into an ontology of media subjects.1 I will argue that, while the active audience moment recognized the ontological level of audience powers, it took on a number of theoretical and political burdens that stopped it short of developing its own radical findings. These discursive and conjunctural limits included overemphasizing decoding (language, reading), inheriting the equation audience = consumer, and working within a constraining hegemonic politics of Gramscian power/resistance. Finally, I evaluate the backlash against active audiences, or the de-activation moment.
Art Deco
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

An experiment: in a History of Film class, 40 undergraduate students, shown Grand Hotel six weeks earlier, are asked to name the three moments they most readily recall from that movie. Here are the four most often chosen: These images suggest the importance of something that film theory has always struggled to define.
Manchester
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Everything depends upon news from Manchester. Waiting, waiting . . . I’ve been waiting for news from Manchester. The Saxonia Company will never sign unless your firm is definitely tied up with the Manchester people. “Deal with Manchester definitely off.” Is that some- thing bad? A man in the textile industry must know Manchester. Have you any connections with Manchester? Manchester—that’s what we want to know.
Pavlova
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Baum modeled the fading ballerina Grusinskaya on the Russian Ballet’s Anna Pavlova (1882–1931), who lived most of her life in hotels and trains. As her career wound down, she cut difficult sections and performed only less-demanding pieces. Her world- weary epigrams—”Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it,” “Happiness is like a butterfly that appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away”—seem to modern ears even more outlandish than Grusinskaya’s com- plaint about an evening without applause: “I was frantic!” Baum had presumably seen Pavlova in 1925, when the Russian had performed The Dying Swan in Berlin to a half-empty house. Pavlova was 43 then, 17 years older than Garbo during Grand Hotel’s filming. Indeed, Garbo was born in the same year as Pavlova’s official appointment to the rank of prima ballerina. Photographs of Pavlova as the swan clearly inspired Grand Hotel’s overhead shot of Grusinskaya removing her ballet shoes. This replication of bodies, however, seems unusual for classic Holly- wood, a period when the studios confidently advertised their stars’ individuality: Garbo, MGM insisted, could not be duplicated.
Underwear
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

At least three of Grand Hotel’s actors—Beery and, more provocatively, Crawford and Garbo—appear at certain points in their underwear. This casual eroticism suggests the movie’s precise date, during the brief four-year period (from 1930 to 1934) when the industry’s self-censoring Production Code had not yet acquired its enforcing agency. As film historian Thomas Doherty puts it, this was the pre-Code era, “when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it.” Grand Hotel implies a chic, modern attitude about sexuality while also managing a certain discretion about it: we only see Grusinskaya and the Baron on the morning after. For the most Hotel suggests how much Thalberg admired some aspects of von Stroheim’s work and sought to reproduce it in more fiscally responsible and more marketable conditions. Thus, Grand Hotel amounts to an early example of commercial entertainment’s fantastic powers of recuperation, which reach one peak with the late 1960s ads “The Revolution is on Columbia Records!” Thalberg, himself, appeared unapologetic about what he had taken from von Stroheim.
Zigaretten
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

This word, appearing as a stenciled sign on a lobby window, reminds us of Grand Hotel’s setting. In fact, such cues appear infrequently in the movie. Of the main characters, only Preysing has a German accent, a result less of some conscientious verisimilitude than of Beery’s demands for a showier part. Historical events, unfolding contemporaneously with the movie’s making, shifted the connotations of its crucial signifiers, Berlin and Germanicity, terms which now required repression or displacement into the vaguer, safer notions of “the continental.” Thus, if the film can only rarely pronounce the word Berlin, it must deploy an occa- sional sign to replace it. The movie’s realism, as a result, is intermittent, like a radio signal broadcasting a familiar tune, whose melody is inferable from a few notes. Here, the note is partially jammed, first appearing backward (NETTERAGIZ), thereby further disguising its newly pejorative associations.
Contracts
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Roland Barthes used S/Z to argue that, in a market society, which converts even art into “merchandise,” popular fiction depends on an implicit contract obligating its authors to resolve every enigma and to honor conventional wisdom. Thus, Balzac will eventually have to reveal the source of the Lanty fortune and La Zambinella’s real identity. Similarly, his “reference codes” (“dark as a Spaniard, dull as a banker”) will adhere to the “already-written.” As heir to the nineteenth-century novel, classical Hollywood will maintain this regimen, showing no tolerance for open-ended plots (à la Antonioni’s L’Avventura) or surprising characterizations. And yet, as Barthes demonstrated, popular stories often produce contradictory mise-en-abymes in which characters openly repudiate contracts to which they had previously agreed. In Sarrasine, Barthes’s case study, the contracts between La Zambinella and Sarrasine and between the narrator and his lover both get broken. And by spending a year repeatedly rereading the story, Barthes himself was refusing Balzac’s proposition to move on to another book.
Grant
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Cary Grant, according to David Thomson, “was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema.” Inevitably, the Academy ignored him. Of The Philadelphia Story’s four principals, only Grant failed to receive even an Academy Award nomination. (James Stewart and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart won; Hepburn, Cukor, and the picture itself were nominated.) Recognizing this slight, the film’s producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, wrote to Grant: Whatever success the picture is having . . . is due, in my opinion, to you in far greater proportions than anyone has seen fit to shout about. your presence as Dexter, and particularly your sensitive and brilliant playing of the role, contribute what I consider the backbone and basis of practically every emotional value in the piece. I can think of no one who could have done as well or given as much.
Omelet
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Tracy’s first words in The Philadelphia Story amount to a simple question: “How do you spell omelet?” Her mother doesn’t know (offering ommelet), and neither does Tracy: “I thought there was another l.” This latter joke is a sophisticated variant (you have to know how to spell omelet to get it) of a contemporary Jack Benny radio routine: after Rochester worried that he had misspelled Happy Birthday on Jack’s cake, Benny consolingly advised, “That’s OK, you can always add a p.” “Add one?” Rochester moaned. “I’ve gotta take one out.” The word omelet, of course, and the gift for which Tracy is thanking someone (an omelet plate) are both what Barthes’s S/Z croaks “Over the Rainbow,” the viewer infers that, last year, these characters must have seen At the Circus and The Wizard of Oz. Dinah and Mike, in other words, don’t inhabit a nonexistent, made-up universe; they live in the same world we do, and like us, they go to the movies.
Q The Quaker Girl
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

As a child, George Cukor was inspired by Ina Claire’s performance in The Quaker Girl (1911), a play turning on plot elements strangely similar to The Philadelphia Story’s. Disowned by her family for drinking champagne, the “Quaker girl” cavorts with a French princess before having to choose among three different men, one of whom she bribes with love letters. Champagne, “Frenchnicity,” three suitors, blackmail—all of these devices will reappear in The Philadelphia Story. References to Quakerism recur throughout The Philadelphia Story. Mrs. Lord has “the old Quaker spirit” when she gamely decides to welcome the Spy journalists; Kittredge is the general manager of Quaker Coal, a company in which Seth Lord owns the controlling interest; a librarian surprises Mike with her antique Quaker diction (“What is thee wish?”). These moments, of course, draw on the codes of “Philadelphianess,” established by the opening credits’ drawing of the Liberty Bell. Their repetition also suggests the paucity of signifiers for Philadelphia, whose skyline offers no immediate trademark as obvious as San Francisco’s bridges or New York’s skyscrapers. In fact, however, except for Boston, New Orleans, Miami, and Hollywood, almost no other American cities would prove any more capable of ready identification. With homogenization having depleted the store of regional signifiers, cities will have to be named, not merely implied.
Weidler
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The brief career of Virginia Weidler, who plays The Philadelphia Story’s precociously sentient Dinah, suggests the vagaries of Hollywood star- dom. Appearing in movies by the age of 4, Weidler arrived at MGM in 1938 when she was 12 and already a veteran of 17 pictures. She proved a perfect foil for the studio’s biggest juvenile, Mickey Rooney, appearing with him in Love Is a Headache, Out West with the Hardys, Young Tom Edison, and Babes on Broadway. She could sing (in what is reported to have been a “husky voice”), dance, and wisecrack, and she always seems alert, intelligent, and funny. Yet after 1943’s Best Foot Forward (a musical with a score by Meet Me in St. Louis’s Martin and Blane), she would never make another film. She was only 16, and at 40, she would be dead of a heart attack. Luck had been against her. In the studio system, stardom always depended on a complex calculus of roles and performers. Although MGM was the company most committed to the kinds of movies best suited to Weidler, it was also the one most stocked with young female talent, especially Lana Turner and Judy Gar- land. Then, near the end of 1940, with Weidler emerging from prominent roles in four top 10 box-office hits (Out West with the Hardys, All This, and Heaven Too, The Women, and The Philadelphia Story), MGM would sign Shirley Temple, almost exactly Weidler’s age, and the number-one movie attraction from 1935 to 1938.
Archer’s Murder
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Archer’s murder at Bush and Stockton is the only scene that does not appear in Dashiell Hammett’s novel, John Huston’s script, or either of the two previous film versions. (Responding to preview audiences’ request for more exposition, Jack Warner had ordered the shot’s inclusion.) Although often described as the only moment in The Maltese Falcon when the viewer receives information before Spade, in fact it anticipates another: as the detective leaves Gutman’s hotel room, his hand shaking from his feigned anger, he enters an elevator without spotting Cairo getting off another. Retroac- tively, this event will explain what at the time seems utterly gratuitous, Spade’s drugging. “Cairo got in touch with me,” Gutman will reveal.
Honolulu
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

“Mother and Father are in Honolulu,” Brigid tells Spade, explaining the urgency of finding her supposedly missing sister. “It would kill them; I’ve got to find her before they get back home.” In Hammett’s novel, “Mama and Papa are in Europe.” As with The Philadelphia Story’s transfer of Junius from London to Buenos Aires, intervening events have forced the revision: the outbreak of World War II, otherwise unmentioned by the movie, excludes European vacations. (Ironically, by relocating Brigid’s “parents” to Hono- lulu, The Maltese Falcon, opening just two months before Pearl Harbor, inadvertently puts them in a new harm’s way.) The address change assumes that both audience and characters must inhabit the same immediate present, despite the novel’s 1929 publication. Thus, the movie must be fine-tuned to avoid any “dated” references that would challenge verisimilitude. The result is an asymptotic process attempting to align the diegetic and actual worlds, as if two axes were coming together.
Intuition (Women’s)
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Brigid, of course, will prove to be anything but “all right”; the movie’s plot will reveal her as a liar, seducer, betrayer, thief, and murderer, thereby discrediting Effie’s woman’s intuition, a staple of popular fiction. Barthes’s S/Z suggests just how unexpected this move is. Commercial narratives, Barthes proposed, continually refer to conventional wisdom, deployed as the guarantor of a story’s verisimilitude. Balzac’s Sarrasine, for example, casually describes one character in terms of unquestioned stereotypes (“dark as a Spaniard, dull as a banker”) and its hero with the romantic clichés of artistic impetuosity.
O 1001
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Brigid’s apartment number evokes The Thousand and One Nights and their heroine, Scheherazade, who invents stories to stay alive. Like The Maltese Falcon, The Arabian Nights begin with a betrayal, the cuckolding of King Shahryar by his servants. Determined to prevent further infidelities, the king settles on a plan: leaving an apartment building for Kim Novak, until you realized you were looking at Effie Perine. That moment occurs in Vertigo, when an uncredited appearance by Lee Patrick, The Maltese Falcon’s Effie, grown matronly and haute-bourgeoise, refers us to another place, another story, another time, outside Hitchcock’s film.
Meet Me in St. Louis”
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The film carefully omits the song’s verses, which clash with the movie’s values. As sung by the Smiths, “Meet Me in St. Louis” evokes families and home; the missing verses depict infidelity and restlessness. When they resurface on the soundtrack CD (as the ghost in the machine), they seem casually vulgar, blatantly indiscreet. When sung by Garland, the suppressed verses confirm to New York,” she tells John, “we could still work something out”), Tootie’s weeping attack on her own snow people expresses what the others have refused to acknowledge: moving is a kind of death. Meet Me in St. Louis marks the existence and eventual recuperation of the surrealist ethic; it is invigorated by Tootie’s murderous logic.
St. Louis
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Why St. Louis? The easy answer: St. Louis was the setting for The Kensington Stories, the movie’s source. But the symbolic value of St. Louis also contributes to the movie’s effect. Removed from the suspect coasts (New York and Hollywood), near the country’s geographic and population centers, and situated on its greatest and most mythic river (see Mark Twain), St. Louis embodies what Roland Barthes would have called “Americanicity.” Already the country’s fourth-largest city in 1903, St. Louis had become even more prosperous by 1944. “St. Louis,” therefore, exists as a sign with a dual purpose. On the one hand, it represents the idealized turn of the century, modernity’s innocent childhood. On the But the opening image of a red motor car, turning down a street in a movie set at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the year that Henry Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company, reminds us that this world is dying.
Undergarments
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Esther’s comic struggles with a corset might prompt some obvious thematic extrapolations: how the two sisters are on the brink of fashion revolution, but they cannot see it coming (in just eight years, Paul Poiret would launch his “Oriental look,” abolishing the petticoat, wide skirt, and corset); how the corset is an emblem of Judy Garland’s tragedy (most of her problems originated from the need to appear thinner onscreen). But the sequence also demonstrates some vital points about cinematic performance.
A Cultural History
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

Culture regulates all human behavior, including physiological processes: sex, eating, elimination, comportment, eye behavior—indeed, everything our bodies do. How we look at each other begins as instinct but quickly takes its place alongside other natural bodily functions as a carrier of social meaning. In this sense, all visual behavior, especially the intense urge to stare, has a cultural history.
Faces
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

We stare with and at faces. The face is the “focus of human interaction,” apprehending the world and revealing us to it (Yu 2001, 1). Faces are the first part of a human embryo to differentiate. By eight weeks we have lips and eyelids; by five months come eyebrows, tiny ears, and a distinct face ready to recognize and be recognized (Sims 2003, 48–49). Newborns prefer to look at faces more than any other object, and infants of a few months will smile while gazing at another face (McNeill 1998, 205; Johnson and Morton 1991). Children draw stick figure bodies attached to huge animated faces. We recognize each other through facial distinctiveness captured in mug shots, classic portraits, picture IDs, or exaggerated cartoon caricatures. We see faces even where they are not—in the moon, the clouds, the mountains. The face is the most usually unclothed part of human bodies, ready to look and be looked at. Alert to the dynamics of communication and recognition, we are perhaps most alive to one another when we are face-to-face.
Breasts
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

Breasts are ubiquitous cultural icons. From the sacred fount of the Maria Lactans, the titillating cleavage of Miss America, the ample bosom of Mammy, to the erotic blast of the Playboy centerfold, the sight of breasts signifies woman. As both symbol and flesh, no other bodily mark of sexual identity is so routinely or ritualistically offered up to the public eye. Even though the penis and vagina carry perhaps equal cultural significance, representations tend to finesse the way we see these parts of our bodies. The penis stands in for phallic power but seldom shows itself in public. Michelangelo’s famous statue, for example, expresses David’s masculinity through his commanding demeanor and musculature, not the incidental bit of flesh between his potent thighs. Phallic forums, such as the Washington Monument, are stylized rather than mimetic representations of penises. Vaginas appear even less often in respectable representations. Artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Judy Chicago, or Eve Ensler rework the vagina’s image as a dark, secret snare into flamboyant flowers, dinner plates, or storytellers. Symbolic hotspots as they are, penises and vaginas for the most part demurely decline stares. Breasts, by contrast, are in your face.
Bodies
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

Perhaps the most spectacular form of visual novelty that can prompt stares are breaches of the common human scale and shape. Characters with unusual forms and sizes abound in our folktales, literature, art, and material culture. Diminutive creatures such as dwarfs, elves, fairies, gnomes, goblins, hobbits, imps, leprechauns, and Lilliputians, for instance, have large roles in our shared stories. These miniature versions of average sized people range from delightful to spiteful, from Santa’s Elves, Munchkins, Brownies, Rumpelstiltskin, Thumbellina, Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, Dickens’ Tiny Tim and Quilp, Shakespeare’s Puck, to Poe’s Hop-Frog. On the more threatening side of unfamiliar size are the enormous creatures such as giants, cyclopses, dragons, ogres, titans, and trolls which stretch through cultural myths from the classical to contemporary. Atlas, Prometheus, Goliath, Leviathan, Swift’s Brobdingnagians, Rabelais’ Gargantua, Paul Bunyan, Bigfoot, King Kong, The Jolly Green Giant, the Incredible Hulk, and Shrek overwhelm our attention with their impressive scale. The miniature delights and titillates, for the most part. We have a few gentle giants, but mostly the exaggerated scale of our imaginary giants thrills or terrorizes.
Beholding
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

We all stare. Sights that stimulate our eyes—the magic show extravaganza, the burning Towers, the twisted cars on the freeway—lead to wonder, horror, or just thrills. When we stare at one another, as we have seen, things get more complicated. We are all potential starees as well as starers, and between people, staring is a communicative gesture. Between strangers, staring is uncomfortable, especially the intense, prohibited, baroque staring that does not disguise itself. That discomfort can be positive, however, rather than oppressive. A stare is a response to someone’s distinctiveness, and a staring exchange can thus beget mutual recognition, however fleeting. In this way, how we look at one another can be a productive aspect of our interpersonal, even our political, lives. If all this is so, then the question for starers is not whether we shouldstare, but rather howwe should stare. The question for starees is not whether we willbe stared at, but rather howwe will be stared at. As a productive, albeit volatile social relationship, staring necessarily brings with it these ethical dilemmas.
Introduction
Authors: Lamb Matthew L , Levering Matthew
Published: November 2023

The Second Vatican Council stands out as one of the most important religious and ecclesial events in the twentieth century. It was certainly the most extensively covered by the mass media. Pope Benedict XVI calls attention to the theological difficulties in implementing the reforms of Vatican II. He sees that commentators have distorted the teachings of the Second Vatican Council by means of a ‘‘hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture.’’ The ‘‘spirit’’ or ‘‘style’’ of the council was often severed from, or set in opposition to, the texts promulgated by the council. The pope mentions that, for some, the texts were wrongly interpreted as ‘‘compromises’’ that contain ‘‘many old and ultimately useless things that had to be dragged along’’ in order to ‘‘make room for the new.’’ This way of interpreting the council, the pope asserts, found ‘‘favor among the mass media’’ and in some sectors of contemporary theology.
The Universal Call To Holiness
Authors: Soujeole Benoit-Dominique De La
Published: November 2023

The Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, aims at teaching at length the mystery of the Church. It seeks to provide an ecclesiological synthesis. In spite of a difficult beginning, the final document constitutes an undeniable success. The text is very unified, with its many parts forming a harmonious whole. The framework that organizes the entire subject matter is the first teaching of the constitution, which comprises two major parts. The first (chapters 1– 4) presents the Church as a single, Catholic, and apostolic body. The second (chapters 5–8) concerns various aspects of the Church’s holiness. The document can be outlined as shown in the following sections.
The Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, Christus Dominus
Authors: Ferme Brian
Published: November 2023

Christus Dominus was approved on October 28, 1965, by a vote of 2,139 placet, 2 non placet, and 1 invalid vote and was approved immediately by Paul VI. The decree was the result of the integration of two schema: De cura animarum and De episcoporum munere pastorali and reflected the work of the commission De episcopis. Unlike the other documents of Vatican II, Christus Dominus 44 concludes with a specific reference to the proposed revision of the Code of Canon Law: ‘‘This most sacred synod prescribes that in the revision of the Code of Canon Law suitable laws be drawn up in keeping with the principles stated in this decree.’’ This general directive underscores not only the particularly practical nature of Christus Dominus but also its essential link with the revision of the Church’s canon law. On January 25, 1959, John XXIII, after a solemn celebration in the Patriarchal Basilica of Saint Paul outside the walls, announced his intention of holding a synod for the diocese of Rome, of celebrating an ecumenical council, and of revising the (1917) Code of Canon Law. It is thus not without some historical relevance that the present Code of Canon Law was promulgated on January 25, 1983. In the apostolic constitution Sacrae disciplinae leges, with which John Paul II promulgated the code, the pontiff stated that ‘‘In so doing, my thoughts go back to the same day of the year 1959 when my predecessor of happy memory, John XXIII, announced for the first time his decision to reform the existing corpus of canonical legislation which had been promulgated on the feast of Pentecost in the year 1917.’’
The Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis
Authors: Mansini Guy , Welch Lawrence J
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we show the continuity of the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests with prior, principally doctrinal tradition. Therefore we focus especially on Presbyterorum ordinis, article 2. We recall some of the history of the composition of that key article and interpret it against the background of prior Catholic tradition. Although the decree is novel in conception and expression relative to much modern theology of the priesthood, this originality functions to assert more important continuities with the greater breadth of scripture, the ancient liturgy, and the fathers.