bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sensationalist Literature and Expert Advice: Selling Sex And The Single Girl
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer
Published: November 2023

Regardless of Helen Gurley Brown’s flair for writing or David Brown’s connections in the publishing industry, Sex and the Single Girl would prove a difficult sell. None of the large publishing houses would touch it. One requested a “toned-down” version, but when the revised version also proved too controversial, David advised Helen that they should submit only the original and not give in until they secured a contract for the manuscript as written. He felt certain that anything short of that would damage both the book’s and the author’s integrity. David’s close friend Oscar Dystel, the head of the paperback publisher Bantam Books, kept the manuscript for several weeks, then turned Helen down over dinner. “I nearly choked on my lasagna,” she wrote about the experience years later. “You must never turn anybody down at dinner.” Both Helen’s mother and David’s father read the manuscript and requested that she abandon the idea of publishing it. “It may be a sensation and get a great deal of publicity,” Cleo wrote. “So do murder and rape!”
Packaging a Message— And a Messenger
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer
Published: November 2023

Helen Gurley Brown’s youthful longing for money, plenty of it, matured into an adult yearning for even more of it. “Work is where the money is—and money is lovely,” she wrote in an outline of her second book, Sex and the Office. “[I] am getting annoyed,” she continued, “with people who try to shush me about money. They’re making excuses for not having worked to hit the jackpot or are terribly rich already!” David Brown, encouraged by the phenomenal success of Sex and the Single Girl, equally desirous of seeing Helen earn tremendous amounts of money, and savvy to the commercial worlds in which they operated, set to work immediately to sell the message (single girls are sexy and wonderful) and the messenger (Helen Gurley Brown). “In a sense,” Helen would claim about David, “I’m a product of his imagination.” And David’s imaginings, when it came to branding Helen or the “Sex and the . . . “ theme, appeared limitless.
Two Writers Sharing: Sterling A. Brown, Robert Frost, and “In Divés’ Dive”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar
Published: November 2023

In the recent proliferation of conference papers, critical articles, and books discussing the pioneering innovation and enduring significance of Sterling A.Brown’s poetry, literary critics and historians have enthusiastically shown a propensity toward tracing the resonance of “influence” in his work. The persistence of this practice can hardly be faulted because, starting in the early 1960s, Brown began explicating himself to younger generations whom he felt were unacquainted with his seminal efforts to define the distinctiveness of African American literature and culture. In numerous formal and informal interviews, poetry readings, and public lectures, Brown professed an indebted- ness to precursing and contemporary writers, including English poets (Ernest Dowson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman).
Listen Br’er Sterling: The Critic as Liar [A Pre(r)amble to Essays on Sterling Brown]
Authors: Benston Kimberly W
Published: November 2023

Can a literary and critical reputation be built on the basis not just of what someone has written but also what s/he has said, on kaleidoscopic traces of the tongue gone pure? Anyone interested in the future of African-American literary and cultural understanding must trust so, as a store of discursive and methodological wisdom remains lodged in the memories, tapes, and inscriptions of Sterling Brown’s public presentations, extemporaneous tutorials, and other teacherly “rambles.” From his “telephone booth” room at Williams’ Berkshire Hall and his Lincoln University digs at “The Monastery” to the downstairs apartment at Fisk’s Spence House and nearby Gillie’s Barbershop, and finally at the Kearney St. house of the Howard years and untold lecture halls, libraries.
Sterling Brown: An Ethnographic Odyssey
Authors: Skinner Beverly Lanier
Published: November 2023

I would like to propose a method for reading the poetry of Sterling A. Brown in light of Brown’s complete oeuvre. My proposed method is informed by interdisciplinary inquiry, including recent ethnographic theory and qualitative research methodology and an emerging cultural studies discourse that I and others term black cultural critique. This approach is not intended to overlook any aspect of the aesthetic values or artistic achievement of Brown’s poetic output. Rather, this approach intends to offer an additional, interdisciplinary, theoretical con- text in which to appreciate Brown’s poetic achievement. My thesis is that Sterling Brown was a postmodern ethnographer who by the 1940s had pioneered solutions to three major problems with which today’s cultural anthropologists are grappling: (1) what form ethnographic writing should take, (2) what meth- odology can result in competent ethnographies of non-hegemonic, oral-based cultures, and (3) how the authority of native informants can be acknowledged in ethnographies.
Sterling A. Brown’s Literary Essays: The Black Reader in the Text
Authors: O’Meally Robert G
Published: November 2023

A realist not only by artistic and critical persuasion, but by temperament, Sterling A. Brown has shown concern throughout his career with poetry as an art of communication—not just among airy Muses and free spirits, but among real people in this world, actual writers and their readers. Publishers, editors, reviewers, and “blurbists” shape this communication process, as do those per- sons whose lives are depicted in literature. Brown’s critical writings deal mainly with the literary portrayal of Afro-Americans.
The Professor and the Activists: A Memoir of Sterling Brown
Authors: Thelwell Ekwueme Michael
Published: November 2023

A couple of years ago I attended a conference on Sterling Brown, organized by the English Department at Howard University. The event was part of the ongoing campaign being conducted by the estimable Eleanor Traylor, the department’s relentlessly resourceful chair and intellectual leader, to amass the wherewithal to endow a chair in literature in the poet’s name.
“Steady and Unaccusing”: An Interview with Sterling A. Brown
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Wright John S
Published: November 2023

Since the early 1980s a series of symposia, public and academic awards, and other recognitions have testified to continuing popular and scholarly interest in Sterling A. Brown, poet, literary critic, teacher, anthologist, and raconteur. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, for example, received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for 1980 from Saturday Review. The Modern Language Association, at its December 1981 meeting, paid tribute to Brown’s many years of distinguished service as a man of letters. A Black World special issue (September 1970) and Michael Harper and Robert Stepto’s Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979) became the first two of many anthologies, critical studies, and journal special issues dedicated to him, for his enduring poetic innovations and his pioneering cultural criticism. At Howard University, on Febru- ary 14, 1997, a symposium assessed the extent to which Brown’s thinking reflected and influenced African-American and American views on culture and literature. His sensitive creative work and astute analyses are captured in four published collections of poetry, six critical studies and anthologies, and over forty essays and speeches, together with the regular book review column he wrote in the early issues of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The following interview—conducted August 2, 1980, but unpublished until now—was one he hoped personally to extend and revise. Nevertheless it offers in retrospect, we think, more testimony that Sterling A.
Br’er Sterling and the Blues: An Interview with Michael S. Harper
Authors: Lock Graham , Harper with a preface by Michael S
Published: November 2023

Sterling Brown inscribed my copy of The Negro Caravan “For Michael, one of my very best fellow-poets, readers, and friends, from Sterling. Be seeing you soon, son. See you soon, June, 1975.” We were in Providence, Rhode Island; he had received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at Brown University’s com- mencement. I had met him in the fall of 1972 in New York City, where he was honored as Dean of African American Letters by the Black Academy. The novel- ist Ernest J. Gaines and I were seated at one of the head tables, Gaines for his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and me for my second volume of poetry, History Is Your Own Heartbeat. I was told by insiders that the judges were Jay Saunders Redding and John A.
Clarifying Philosophy: Sterling A. Brown and the Nonviolent Action Group
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar
Published: November 2023

The origins of the Nonviolent Action Group, known by its acronym, NAG, now seem shrouded in the mysteries of historical anonymity. Such a fate is undeserved for an organization that, through its association with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), played a significant role in funneling black student insurgency into the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. Even today, those who recall their own participation in the movement are hard pressed to state unequivocally names of founding NAG members, the organization’s actual birth date, its longevity, its precise site of origin, and the specific activities it engaged in. Despite such apocrypha, NAG once lived and thrived. In our postmodern world, where truth is not absolute but relative, an importance for NAG emerges from the collective memory of four individuals who gathered on a June afternoon in 2005 to relive their student experiences nurtured in the political activism of that era.
A Conversation with John H. Bracey, Esther Terry, and Mike Thelwell
Authors: Tracy Steven C
Published: November 2023

When I first arrived at the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst over a dozen years ago for a job interview, one of the first things I noticed was a large portrait of Sterling A. Brown in the office of department head Esther Terry. It sat on a table, propped up against the wall, directly across from Professor Terry’s desk, a reminder, perhaps, both that Brown was watching the proceedings with an expert and exacting eye and that he was there as a resource and for support in case (read: when) the road got rocky. Professor Terry always spoke in glowing terms about the experiences she and her husband had had with Professor Brown—those memories resided on hallowed ground. She smiled spontaneously when his name arose, with the pride of someone whose mentor was a hero of epic expansiveness, albeit unsung in the literary mainstream at the time.
Vernacular Recordings Relevant to the Study of Sterling A. Brown’s Southern Road
Authors: Tracy Steven C
Published: November 2023

The following list of commercial and field recordings, made primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, is intended to indicate the strong connections that a large number of Sterling A. Brown’s poems have to material in the African American vernacular tradition. After individual poems are listed recordings of African American vernacular materials that have reference to the style, subject matter, characters, attitudes, or language of that particular poem. The listings refer to the most currently available, or most recently available, CDs, LPs, 78 RPM records, or DVDs. The listings are not meant to suggest that Brown was familiar with that particular recording, though in some cases (such as “Back Water Blues”) he most likely was, and in other cases he was certainly familiar with the performers (“Big Boy” Davis and Ma Rainey, for example). Indeed, in some cases the recordings were made after the publication of Southern Road, though nobody would suggest that Brown’s poems were the source of the material recorded later. Rather, they suggest sources in the vernacular tradition with which Brown, in his extensive contact with that tradition, could have been familiar in one incarnation or another. The listings are also not meant to suggest that these are the only relevant recordings. Rather, they are meant to help supply a context for discussion both in the classroom and in print of Brown’s poetry as it draws on, modifies, or extends the tradition. Using such materials also frequently makes for a much livelier and enjoyable class for both students and instructors.
Introduction
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

This historical narrative is different from most other biographies because of what it attempts to undertake and the methods used. Neither Dred Scott nor his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, could read or write, and yet this book under-takes to be the biography of Harriet. There are no letters that reveal her innermost thoughts. Writing a biography of an illiterate person is daunting, but it must be done if we are to understand our common history, and particularly if we are to have any account of significant efforts by subordinate individuals to influence the circumstances of their lives. That, after all, was the point of the Dred Scott case. We must attempt to look at the case from their perspective. Both Dred Scott and his wife Harriet sued to establish their freedom and, derivatively, the freedom of their daughters. To win that freedom, they brought suit against one of the most commercially influential persons in the United States at the time.
1835: Arriving on the Frontier
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Water splashed regularly off the steamboat Warrior’s big paddle wheel propelling the ship up the Mississippi River as it carried a small slave girl deep into the North American interior. This new mechanical technology was a marvel. Travelers to remote western rivers no longer depended on the strong arms of young Creole voyageurs to paddle supply boats upstream. Steam engines had replaced the muscle of men.
Settling In
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

The arriving taliaferro party stayed at the commandant’s quarters in the fort while the mistress and servants set up the agency household. Each morning, the servants left the fort to walk through the village of teepees. The well-used hides that formed the exterior walls of the teepees carried symbolic markings and were darkened from smoke on the inside and dirt and grime outside. Small bundles of sacred beads and feathers called “medicine” dangled from the tepee door flaps to protect the inhabitants.
1836: Spring and the Change of the Guard
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

The indians awaited the first sighting of a crow in spring to let them know that they had survived another hunger season. The winter that seemed it would never end finally broke on March 24. The household awoke to gentle sun-shine. “The genial rays of the sun smile for once upon us this morning,” Taliaferro remarked. His journal records a “day so fine inhabitants and military are like bees and ants busy flying about and others sunning and thawing out after a long and tedious winter.” The fort’s massive walls released their captives to walk out and view again the prairie’s broad horizon. “Many straggling Indians also to be seen who are smiling at the prospect of spring and the appearance of wild geese and ducks.” The days grew perceptibly longer, quickening the pace of life and bringing the pleasure of renewed sensation.
1837: A Treaty Made before Her Eyes
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

That summer the prospect of a treaty drew many different people to St. Peter’s Agency, where the Minnesota River met the Mississippi. The official treaty party set out by steamboat from Dubuque to rendezvous with the Indians with the intent of buying the northern half of Wisconsin. The Ojibwa had been notified to arrive at the agency sometime between July 1 and 20. Taliaferro had sent runners with messages of invitation and small packets of tobacco to all the Ojibwa villages.
Traveling the Length of the River
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Just weeks after arriving in Louisiana, Dr. Emerson was already complaining and again seeking reassignment. His letters suggest that he made considerable effort to avoid being assigned to the swampy Sabine River, with its insects, snakes and malaria. Although his rheumatism had subsided in the warm climate, he now reported difficulty breathing, along with his usual chronic complaints of syphilis and liver disorder. “No other medical officer in the army would attempt to do duty if suffering as much as I have for more than twelve months. My distracted state of body and mind has entirely unfitted me for duty.” Much more to his liking, he was assigned to accompany a detached party destined for Natchitoches, an old French town in Louisiana, where he soon found a bride, despite his many ailments. The doctor was introduced to a sister-in-law of one of the officers, Miss Irene Sanford from St. Louis, who was visiting her sister, Captain Bainbridge’s wife. Irene Sanford and the Bain bridges would play major roles in the Scotts’ lives.
Taliaferro’s Last Stand
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

If harriet did attend to Taliaferro’s housekeeping that last summer, she would have walked the quarter mile to the agency house to clean and bring him meals each day. The weather had become so hot that the agent declined to ride out to the lakes. The master had no horse that summer, and even his black dog was missing. When the mail carrier arrived, he said he thought he had seen the master’s dog in the possession of a lumberman at the St. Croix camp.
Leaving Minnesota and Its New Tribunals
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

After taliaferro left St. Peter’s Agency, the full void of his absence was felt. The center did not hold. People who had been part of the agency community for years began to simply drift away. The battles between the Mdewakanton Sioux and the Ojibwa had destroyed the stability of the settled farming communities at the lakes. The Sioux now feared a counterattack from the Ojibwa if they remained there. They gathered their corn, taking what they could carry and leaving what they couldn’t in storage with the Pond brothers. The agricultural communities, so patiently built over several years with Taliaferro’s encouragement, simply dissolved in the aftermath of the Indian battles. With no settled group of Indians at the lakes, it was pointless for the Pond brothers to stay there. Nonetheless, they had promised to care for the Indians’ farm animals over the winter, and the Ponds always kept their promises. Taliaferro’s now 11-year-old daughter also remained with them.
Black Social Life of St. Louis
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Although it’s fair to assume that the Scotts initially stayed at the Sanford farm, they weren’t necessarily well suited to the life there, and the farm did not need them. There were already six slaves and possibly an overseer on the place, and Mistress Irene’s added presence did not justify the efforts of two more adult slaves. As historian Eugene Genovese has noted, “slavery require[d] all hands to be occupied at all times. In a labor system based on compulsion rather than wages, idle workers are at once dangerous and uneconomical.” It was Dred whose labor was least needed at the Sanford farm. Other than being his mistress’s driver and a passable cook, there was little that a former valet was well suited for in the countryside, and at his age he was less adaptable than a younger slave. He had spent the previous decade in the light work of keeping his officer-master’s uniform brushed and boots blackened, chopping firewood, and helping out in the hospital, so he was neither accustomed to nor fit for the heavy demands of farm labor. Unless the household needed a butler, and his command over other servants was accepted (even more unlikely), it would have been difficult for him to become integrated into the farm’s working life. Nor would he expect to be. He was not a Sanford family slave. Everyone knew that he belonged to the absent Dr. Emerson, that he was there only temporarily—and that as soon as the doctor returned, he and Harriet would depart again. Still, Dred was an agreeable fellow, given to talk and conviviality, so he probably got on better with the other slaves than did the more reticent Harriet.
The Courthouse and the Jail
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

At some point, Harriet must have called upon the attorney, Mr. Murdoch, who took more than his share of freedom suits. He had filed Lucy’s initial papers. Murdoch had been centrally involved in the legal fall-out of the incident that shaped the region’s racial consciousness. As Alton’s city attorney during the Love-joy shoot-out, it was his task to prosecute both sides of the mob violence that resulted in Lovejoy’s murder, the pro-slavery and the abolitionist combatants. Several men bragged about killing the abolitionist, though the jury refused to convict them. Failing to get a conviction, Murdoch left Alton in the aftermath of the riots and crossed the river to settle in St. Louis—not as a broken man, but as someone now willing to represent slaves in freedom suits.
Other Matters at the Courthouse
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

While the scotts waited, Judge Krum had a pressing case on the docket. Authorities had arrested Charles Lyons, a free mulatto man, for the crime of being a free black residing in Missouri without a license, which Missouri law required. The sheriff was expected to apprehend and jail any unlicensed black person. Only certain classes of free persons of color—those with good reputations who could support themselves—were even eligible to be licensed to remain in the state. Under the statute, the court had little discretion; it was obligated first to fine them, if they could pay, or have them whipped if they couldn’t, and then expel them from the state. Since more free blacks lived in St. Louis than anywhere else in Missouri, the statute especially burdened the city’s black population. White persons, on the other hand, were never required to obtain licenses simply to reside in the state. Unless they were vagrants, they were usually simply left alone.
Filing Suit Again
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

From both town and county, slaves continued to take chances to run away. The newspapers announced the departures with tiny inked emblems of men carrying hobo packs and women carrying tied handkerchiefs, marching across the columns of the want ads: “$400 reward. Ranaway THREE NEGROES: one woman about 35 years old named Matilda: one mulatto boy and a small girl named Puss— black.” The ad identified Matilda as the mother and, ominously, indicated that all of her front teeth were knocked out. Bounty hunters pursued the runaways and many were caught and returned—first to the jail and then to their masters as provided by statute. Matilda, running with children, was probably recaptured. The web of enslavement did not require each slave to be continually locked down.
1849: Trial by Pestilence, Trial by Fire
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

On new year’s day, 1849, the city engaged in the usual holiday entertainments, and a traveling circus company, driven from New Orleans by a cholera panic, came to town to add to the festivities. The circus was in town, but the cholera was trailing not far behind.
Declared Free
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Although the scotts were declared free, there was a good chance that the widow’s attorneys would appeal. So, pending a possible appeal, they remained in custody. As long as D. N. Hall, their lawyer continued to hire Dred, he could avoid jail. Harriet remains unaccounted for. The Scotts were probably at greater liberty to organize their own work under this arrangement. The two girls, now reaching early adolescence, were never mentioned in these hiring contracts, nor in the state court papers.
Woodshedding Basics
Authors: Nathan Amy
Published: November 2023

Learning to practice productively is something everybody struggles with,” says Evie. This teen cellist admits she used to waste practice time “racing through things” or playing a piece over and over without really thinking about it. Doing the opposite can also be a time waster—playing just once each item you’re supposed to practice. It’s hard to figure out on your own how to practice well, how to “woodshed,” which is musician slang for heavy-duty practicing. Evie turned to her teachers for pointers. That’s the way many musicians crack the practice puzzle: A teacher or experienced musician shows them how. Pro clarinetist Richard Stoltzman was in high school when a teacher finally set him on a good practice path. For pianist André Watts, it wasn’t until he’d already started his pro career that he found a teacher who taught him to make the most of practice time.
Policing in the Old Regime
Authors: Walton Charles
Published: November 2023

Standing before the National Convention on February 5, 1794 (17 Pluviôse, Year II), Maximilien Robespierre delivered his most famous speech, “On the Principles of Political Morality.” “The moral force of popular government in times of revolution,” he declared, “is both virtue and terror.” Few statements express so succinctly the pathological spirit of the Terror.
Imagining Press Freedom and Limits in the Enlightenment
Authors: Walton Charles
Published: November 2023

On December 27, 1788, Louis XVI’s Director General of Finances, Jacques Necker, announced the agenda for the upcoming meeting of the Estates-General. Among the many reforms to be discussed, Necker included press freedom, in these terms: “Your Majesty is impatient to receive the opinions of the Estates-General concerning the just measure of freedom that the press should be accorded for works or the publicity of works concerning public administration, government, or any topic of public concern.”
From Lèse-Nation to the Law of Suspects
Authors: Walton Charles
Published: November 2023

On October 5, 1789, as hungry Parisians marched to his palace at Versailles, Louis XVI signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Free speech was thus ratified, representing one of the most important achievements of the French Revolution. But deputies in the National Assembly had no time to celebrate. France was seething with calumny, and pressure to work on the fine print of Articles 10 and 11—defining abuses—mounted quickly.
From Local Repression to High Justice: Limits in Action
Authors: Walton Charles
Published: November 2023

On August 25, 1792, little more than a week before the September prison massacres broke out in Paris, crowds of angry sans-culottes left town. Rumors about their number varied, but by the time they reached their destination, Or léans, they were reported at fifteen hundred. Recruited among the city’s sections and the visiting National Guard from Marseilles, they formed into two groups.
The Pianist as Designer
Authors: Katz Martin
Published: November 2023

Having resolved issues of rhythmic ensemble, the pianist can now begin to immerse himself in some very enjoyable, more subjective challenges of collaboration. One might say, having baked the cake, it is now ready for frosting and decoration. The task of delivering the text correctly and expressively—while simultaneously making music—is not limited to the singer; without question, the pianist bears an equal measure of this responsibility. Together, the collaborators are the joint custodian of the music and the text; the pianist’s role, however, extends to the implications of the text, the subtext, if you will. The voice describes something; the pianist amplifies and expands that information and experience.
Is there Life after Singers?
Authors: Katz Martin
Published: November 2023

It comes as no surprise to anyone that my own career has centered principally on the vocal repertoire; indeed, if my name is known at all, it is for anything and everything that has to do with singers. But I hasten to add proudly that my student years were equally divided between partnering instruments and voices, and with equal amounts of enthusiasm and personal reward on my part. Accompanying the classes of luminary Jascha Heifetz for two years not only was thrilling (and intimidating), it has proved to have been nothing less than a cornerstone of my artistic development, certainly as much as any of my endeavors in the worlds of opera or song. Indeed, one of the benefits of becoming a professor and working within a fine music school has been the reactivation of this instrumental repertoire in my daily activities, both performing it myself and helping my students to understand and succeed in this branch of collaboration too.
What Is a Teaching Artist?
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

There is no consensus definition of teaching artist in the evolving field of arts education. Five years ago, even the term would spark arguments from those who preferred the traditional labels of visiting artist, resident artist, or even artist educator. Part of me hopes there will never be a consensus definition for a practice so varied and dynamic. There are no consensus definitions of the words creativity or art either. For very good reason—sometimes there is no single term to capture a deep truth. (Leonard Bernstein said his definition of art was that it had three attributes: it holds a complex and profound truth; it cannot be expressed in any other way; and the world would be worse without it.) Perhaps a term like teaching artist must be sounded, gestured, drawn, or performed in a room with engaged learners to capture its genuine connotation. And the world would be worse without teaching artists.
Balancing the Two Economies of Today’s Musician
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

Monofocused America seems to live and die by its economic ups and downs. People in the arts suffer because we seem peripheral to this economic monomania; we feel battered and reactive—dependent on its goodtimes largesse, fearful of the economic crunches, powerless to make much of an impact on either. We read of advocacy research that argues the enormous economic impact of the arts in this country, but it sadly seems to trickle down to few of us. In recent years I have noticed people who run arts education organizations following the ups and downs of the stock market closely. It certainly isn’t because they have large personal investment portfolios. They know that when the market slides, their support from wealthy individuals is going to dry up. A recession means deep cuts in their services to children, including arts experiences. It breaks our hearts—the Dow Jones Industrial average drops too much, and young lives get even more desiccated.
The Essential Skills of the Twenty-First-Century Artist
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

The headline might read: “Conservatory Top Dogs Talk to One Another.” That would be news, but not front-page news because no one got bitten. In 2002, leaders from ten major conservatories, from the major arts service organizations, and from large foundations, and some young artists, spent three days in a cushy conference setting answering this question: How are we developing artists for the twenty-first century? I was designated to facilitate this herding of the cats sponsored by the Kenan Institute for the Arts (my role fell somewhere between that of Charlie Rose and Jerry Springer), and a blind goat would have recognized that this was an ensemble that had never played together before.
Creating the Playground
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons took center stage at a Harvard lab. In the experiment, psychologists Helen Langer and Sophia Snow randomly gave adults one of three tasks involving a stack of pages from a Far Side calendar. One task was a simple categorization into odd or even days, months, and counting totals. The two more complex tasks were to change a word or two to give the cartoon an entirely different meaning, and to recategorize the cartoons by some scheme of the participant’s invention.
The Entry Point Question: Where to Begin?
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

David Shookhoff (my first teacher at Lincoln Center Institute back in the late 1970s and now director of education at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York) illuminated the entry point concept for me on my first day. In a workshop for prospective teaching artists of all artistic disciplines, he demonstrated how to introduce inexperienced the atergoers to a complex play by leading us through a preparation for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He didn’t pick ten important ideas of the play to tell us about; he didn’t have us read from the play; he didn’t even teach us about a few key characteristics of Shakespearean drama (such as iambic pentameter or soliloquy structure).
Mentoring: Myths and Mission
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

I took a walk in the woods. This was a needed break from developing a training curriculum for the first cohort of mentors in the Juilliard Mentoring Program. My head was full of thoughts about mentors—the ones I had wished for but had never found in my own artistic life and those I had heard about who had changed my colleagues’ lives. I’d been studying the research on mentoring, frustrated that it is used as a necessity to developing leaders in many professions but is used only haphazardly in ours.
Blind Dates, Steady Dating, and Musical Marriages
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

Education loves its buzzwords, and education in the arts is no exception. For music teaching artists who have lived through the rhetorical epochs of “standards,” “authentic assessment,” and “arts-integrated lesson design,” we are now in the “era of partnerships.” Partnerships of all kinds are proliferating throughout arts education—it is a veritable Reverend Moon marriage ceremony out there.
Articulation
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

First, verify that the tongue is correctly positioned in the mouth while playing. Make your most beautiful sound on an easy note. If we imagine the mouth cavity as having a spherical shape, the tip of the tongue should be in the center of that sphere, gradually arching back toward the roof of your mouth. From this position, it’s a simple motion forward to touch the reed. If the tongue does not feel like it is moving forward— directly forward—to strike the reed, it is in the wrong place and must be repositioned. Some players hold the tip of the tongue under the tip of the reed (some even place the tongue as far forward as the lower teeth), which is incorrect. The correct tongue placement is important for focusing the tone as well as for facility in articulation. It should remain in this position regardless of whether the music requires tonguing or not.
Expression
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

Expression is not wholly the result of inspiration. It is also the result of study, practice, and the lifelong acquisition of taste. Many students are confused by what it means to play “musically. “ This chapter is intended to explain some basic concepts of intelligent musicianship and to provide tools that anyone can use to make his or her playing more expressive and convincing.
Practice
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

The most important thing to learn is how to practice. If you learn how to practice, you will certainly learn how to play. Many students (and professionals too, for that matter) don’t like to practice, don’t do it enough, and don’t use their practice time productively. Many students don’t even know what to do when they are supposed to be practicing. A lot of doodling and messing around masquerades as practicing. We all know players who assert that they practice three or four hours a day, and yet they are rarely prepared for lessons, much less concerts. This chapter is intended to help with these problems. While reading this, some may feel that the suggestions are excessively strict and that there must surely be some sort of a shortcut. On the contrary, these suggestions are the shortcut. Anything else will take longer and not work as well.
Extended Techniques
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

Over the past few decades, music has ventured beyond the traditional arrangement of notes and rhythms into realms of sound requiring new techniques of tone production. Books by Peter Veale, Libby Van Cleve, and Bruno Bartolozzi give a comprehensive picture of the possibilities.1 I cannot improve on these, but I can offer a few practical suggestions for the novice.
Reed Evaluation and Adjustment
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

There are at least two, and maybe three, golden rules of oboe reed making. The two 24-karat ones are: Sharpen your knife. Don’t make any mistakes. Early in my career, I remember reading a statement by Ray Still asserting that it takes thirty years to learn how to make reeds.1 Of course, I devoutly hoped he was mistaken—that there was some possible shortcut that he had overlooked—but it turned out that he was nearly correct. After twenty years or so, I started to feel like I could make a reed whenever I needed one. I could make reeds in the interim, too, but it did take about twenty years for the process to become reliable and consistent. So I reflected: what had I learned? Apart from the experience of making thousands of reeds, which counts for a lot, the only things I had really learned, taken to heart, and become slightly obsessive about (unusual for me), were the two statements listed earlier.
Instrument Selection, Care, and Adjustment
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

Buying an oboe or English horn is a little different from making a major domestic purchase like an appliance, and even a little different from buying a more popular wind instrument like a saxophone or a clarinet. Before moving to more specific tips for buying an oboe, let me make a few points right at the outset. If you only read the rest of this section, you’ll already do well with your selection and purchase. Include your teacher in the purchase process. Unless you are an experienced oboist, you should never buy an instrument without advice from a teacher or professional player. In my experience, every time a young student (or a well-meaning parent buying a Christmas gift) has bought an instrument without seeking advice, they did not find the best instrument at the best price. Include your teacher in the purchase process. If you don’t have a teacher, get advice from an oboe professional. Some experienced consumers feel confident in their research capabilities and think that they can make a wise oboe purchase based on their investigations alone. While this will almost certainly work when purchasing an automobile or a television, oboes have a musical component which only oboists are qualified to evaluate. Find a trustworthy
Selection and Care of Tools and Equipment
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I will describe basic standards for the oboist’s tool kit, along with some recommendations for care and feeding of these often expensive and fragile items. I will not make recommendations favoring specific brands; this would be unfair to the many other makers who also provide quality items. Nor will I mention specific dollar figures, as these fluctuate (mostly upward) pretty regularly. Since the oboe market is small, nobody will sell enough of anything to get rich. And there is no luxury market of oboe goods, where makers justify very high prices by maintaining a certain prestige for their merchandise. In other words, you almost always get what you pay for. Costlier items are better than cheaper ones. But they may not be better in a way that matters to you, so be smart in your purchases. If you have never made reeds before, buying expensive gold-plated staples individually machined to very close tolerances won’t make any difference to your results yet. I do suggest avoiding the least expensive of anything, not because I think the vendor wants to cheat his customers, but because there has to be a reason for the very low cost.
Euripides Trojan Women
Authors: Shapiro Alan , Burian Peter
Published: November 2023

Among surviving Greek tragedies only Euripides’ Trojan Women shows us the extinction of a whole city, an entire people. Despite its grim theme, or more likely because of the centrality of that theme to the deepest fears of our own age, this is one of the relatively few Greek tragedies that regularly finds its way to the stage. Here the power of Euripides’ theatrical and moral imagination speaks clearly across the twenty-five centuries that separate our world from his. The theme is really a double one: the suffering of the victims of war, exemplified by the woman who survive the fall of Troy, and the degradation of the victors, shown by the Greeks’ reckless and ultimately self-destructive behavior. It offers an enduring picture of human fortitude in the midst of despair. Trojan Women gains special relevance, of course, in times of war. It presents a particularly intense account of human suffering and uncertainty, but one that is also rooted in considerations of power and policy, morality and expedience. Furthermore, the seductions of power and the dangers both of its exercise and of resistance to it as portrayed in Trojan Women are not simply philosophical or rhetorical gambits but part of the lived experience of Euripides’ day. And their analogues in our own day lie all too close at hand. This new powerful translation of Trojan Women includes an illuminating introduction, explanatory notes, a glossary, and suggestions for further reading.
The Earth Is Still Hot and Mobile
Authors: Officer Charles , Page Jake
Published: November 2023

People in Maryland knew something was up when the snows of late spring were brown, blue, even red. It was 1816, an unusually cold year. Brown snow fell in Hungary that year, and for the citizens of Taranto in southern Italy, where any snow is unusual, the red and yellow snows that season caused consternation and alarm. The world had gone awry. “During the entire season,” wrote one observer, “the sun arose each morning as though in a cloud of smoke, red and rayless, shedding little light or warmth and setting at night behind a thin cloud of vapor, leaving hardly a trace of its having passed over the face of the Earth.”

In New England, 1816 was called “the Year Without a Summer” and also, with Yankee wryness, “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” As the spring wore on into summer, there were successive cold waves and frosts every month. We know just how cold because the presidents of Yale University during this period—a succession of clergymen and scholars— were willing to rise each morning at 4:30 to read and record the temperature. In June 1816, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit below normal for the preceding years and those that followed. The temperature fluctuated wildly: from a low of 35 degrees at sunset on June 7 to a high of 88 at two in the afternoon on June 24.
. . . With the Potential for Equally Great Changes on a Global Scale
Authors: Officer Charles , Page Jake
Published: November 2023

In the summer of 1988, the ozone was in the wrong place. There was too much of it in American cities and not enough over Antarctica. Unusual weather, in combination with auto and other emissions, had led to the highest ozone concentrations in ten years in many cities. The American public raised a hue and cry for tougher clean air regulations, many of which had been relaxed in the past decade. Fortunately, the 1970 Clean Air Act and its subsequent amendments have produced the desired effects: emissions of some toxic gases have dropped more than 90 percent. Despite the fact that the United States leads the world carbon dioxide emission, recent improvements have disproved the notion that the American public is lethargic on certain environmental matters. Indeed, in both the matter of ozone in urban air and the ozone hole in the stratosphere, the public led its leaders.

About 97 percent of all of the ozone in the atmosphere is found in the upper reaches of the stratosphere, where it absorbs otherwise dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, thus providing an effective blanket for life. The ozone layer presumably has existed throughout much of geologic time, and the Earth’s flora and fauna, including the human species, have evolved without having to contend with extreme doses of ultraviolet radiation. A marked thinning of the layer would cause, at the least, a corresponding increase in skin cancers, along with adverse effects on other forms of life.
Erotic City
Authors: Sides Josh
Published: November 2023

Since the 1960s, San Francisco has been America’s capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars. In this highly original book, Josh Sides explains how this happened, unearthing long-forgotten stories of the city’s sexual revolutionaries, as well as the legions of longtime San Franciscans who tried to protect their vision of a moral metropolis. Erotic dancers, prostitutes, birth control advocates, pornographers, free lovers, and gay libbers transformed San Francisco’s political landscape and its neighborhoods in ways seldom appreciated. But as sex radicals became more visible in the public spaces of the city, many San Franciscans reacted violently. The assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were but the most brazen acts in a city caught up in a battle over morality. Ultimately, Sides argues, one cannot understand the evolution of postwar American cities without recognizing the profound role that sex has played. More broadly, one cannot understand modern American politics without taking into account the postwar transformation of San Francisco and other cities into both real and imagined repositories of unfettered sexual desire.
Patient-Centered Care
Authors: Brody Howard
Published: November 2023

Sylvia Stultz, who died of a rare form of disseminated sarcoma in June, 2006, was a clinical psychologist who taught social skills to autistic children. As she went in and out of hospitals and clinics while seeking treatment for her cancer, she discovered a new calling. She found her- self trying to teach social skills to health-care workers instead. As recounted by her friend Susan Okie, a journalist and contrib- uting editor to the New England Journal of Medicine, Ms. Stultz on one occasion visited the surgical oncology clinic at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She reported to the clinic, as she had been instructed, at 10:15 a.m. When, after waiting several hours, she began to ask for estimates of when she might be seen, the staff seemed puzzled that she would ask such a question. She finally met the specialist she was supposed to see at 3:30 p.m.
Evidence-Based Medicine and Pay-for-Performance
Authors: Brody Howard
Published: November 2023

Over roughly the past fifteen years, there has been a revolution in how both academic physicians and medical practitioners view medical knowledge. This in turn has led to a revolution in how physicians and hospitals are reimbursed. Both revolutions have considerable potential to alter the face of medicine and how it treats patients. If one were to peruse the bioethics literature during this period, one would have to conclude that neither revolution occurred. When I began working on the project that has led to this book, I did a PubMed search on “ethics” and “pay-for-performance” and retrieved no articles.1 Bioethics, during this time, has remained occupied with old issues, such as contro- versial aspects of end-of-life care, and new issues, such as neuroethics and nanotechnology. Why bioethics has found evidence-based medicine (EBM) and pay-for-performance (P4P) so unworthy of its attention should give us pause. I will offer some hypotheses at the end of the chapter.