bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Deities, Themes, and Concepts
Authors: Lindow John
Published: November 2023

The name appears to be identical to a noun for “sea” in skaldic poetry, and that noun, or the name of the figure under discussion here, is the base word in many kennings. For example, “Æ’s horse” is a ship, and “daughters of Æ” are waves. In Skáldskaparmál, Snorri says that Rán is the wife of Æ and that they have nine daughters, most of whom bear names meaning “wave.” Since Rán is listed among the goddesses in the thulur and Æ has a peaceful relationship with the gods, his inclusion in the thulur as a giant seems questionable.
Introduction
Authors: Harlan Lindsey
Published: November 2023

Arrival Like many travelers in India, I have spent long hours in battered taxis bumping along single-lane highways. During the past ten years I have crisscrossed the state of Rajasthan many times on such highways and watched its rocky yellow landscape speed by as my intrepid drivers played chicken with oncoming cars, scattered inattentive pedestrians, and sliced through herds of sheep and sleepy buffalo. It is impossible to nap in these taxis: crackling radios blare popular film anthems, dusty air roars in through rattling windows, and high-pitched horns broadcast insults and indignation. And so I have watched the desert lands and parched farms stream by while slipping into fantasies about long cool showers and sweet hot tea.
Limits of Hatred
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

Catholics and Catholicism are at the receiving end of a great deal of startling vituperation in contemporary America, although generally, those responsible never think of themselves as bigots. Examples are far too easy to find. Recently, the notionally secular New Republic published an article on the wartime role of the papacy, in which Pope Pius XII was charged with directly serving the Antichrist. Somewhat less apocalyptically, writing in The Nation, dramatist Tony Kushner dismissed Pope John Paul II as a “homicidal liar” who “endorses murder.” Catholic bishops, meanwhile, are, to Kushner, “mitred, chasubled and coped Pilates.”
Teaching Freud in the Seminary
Authors: Bingaman Kirk A
Published: November 2023

Teaching Freud in the seminary! At first glance, it must seem like a supreme act of foolishness; the two hardly go hand in hand. After all, we all know by now that Freud was a reductionist, a positivist, and especially galling to the religious community, an avowed and unapologetic atheist. It was, as Freud himself saw it, his duty to agitate the sleep of humankind, and particularly the slumber of the religious believer.
Interview with Orson Welles
Authors: Bogdanovich Peter
Published: November 2023

Orson Welles: We expected it before it happened. What we didn ‘t expect was that the film might be destroyed. And that was nip and tuck; it was very close. Citizen Kane enjoyed a spectacular critical reception. American novelist John O ‘Hara, writing for Time magazine, said quite simply that it was the best motion picture he had ever seen. ‘ Other serious reviewers in this country didn ‘t debate whether or not it was unusually good, but whether or not it was a great, even revolutionary, achievement. Meanwhile, Kane was the subject of considerable controversy in Hollywood; it was nominated for nine Academy Awards but received only one, for best original screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, who were booed by detractors at the award ceremony.
Citizen Kane: From Log Cabin to Xanadu
Authors: Mulvey Laura
Published: November 2023

Although The idea of embarking on a new analysis of the most written-about film in film history is daunting, I am using Citizen Kane for a specific and experimental purpose. That is, I want to speculate about certain areas of overlap between psychoanalysis and history and use the film, as it were, as a guinea pig. I have two further excuses for this project. First, although the history in question here is primarily that of the United States, I have tried to approach that history from a European perspective which, I feel, illuminates aspects of the film that have been over-looked. Second, I am applying the film theory and criticism of my generation to this film, which has been put through the mill by each generation of critics since it appeared in 1941. The main influences on my thought have been psychoanalytic theory and feminism, and both have strongly inflected my analysis of Citizen Kane. Although the presence of feminism in this essay may not be obvious at first glance, the principles of feminist film theory have not only molded my way of thinking about cinema in general, but have necessarily informed my approach throughout this Citizen Kane enjoyed a spectacular critical reception. American novelist John O ‘Hara, writing for Time magazine, said quite simply that it was the best motion picture he had ever seen. ‘ Other serious reviewers in this country didn ‘t debate whether or not it was unusually good, but whether or not it was a great, even revolutionary, achievement. Meanwhile, Kane was the subject of considerable controversy in Hollywood; it was nominated for nine Academy Awards but received only one, for best original screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, who were booed by detractors at the award ceremony.
The Christ in Agony
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

San Francisco de Qyito, founded in August, 1534, on the ruins of the ancient capital of the Scyris, is located on the western slope of Mount Pichincha or “mountain that boils,” and today has a population of 70,000. Mount Pichincha reveals to the curious gaze of the traveler two large craters, which are doubtless the result of its many eruptions. Three notable cones or vents can be seen, known as Rucu-Pichincha or Old Pichincha, Guagua-Pichincha or Young Pichincha, and Cundor-Guachana or Condors’ Nest. After Sangay, the most active active volcano in the world, which is also in what was once the land of the Scyris, near Riobamba, Rucu-Pichincha is undoubtedly the most terrible volcano in South America. History has passed on to us only the record of its eruptions in 1534, 1539, 1577, 1588, 1660, and 1662. Almost two centuries had gone by without its torrents oflava and violent tremors giving rise to mourning and desolation, and there were many geologists who believed that it was an extinct volcano. But then March 22, 1859, came to give the lie to the high priests of science, for the picturesque city of Qyito was very nearly destroyed at that time.
Drink, Father, It Will Keep You Alive!
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

Dona Ana de Borja, countess of Lemos and wife of the viceroy of Peru, was a great lady, more tempered than Toledo steel. She was found to be such by Her Majesty dona Maria of Austria, who govered the Spanish monarchy during the minority of Charles II, for on naming her husband viceroy of Peru, dona Maria provided him with a royal warrant that stipulated that in case the better service of the kingdom obliged him to leave Lima, he should place the reins of government in the hands of his consort.
The Countess Who Was Summoned
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

confess that among the many traditions that I have brought to light, none has caused me more trouble than the one that I am consigning to paper today. The plot of it is so thorny and delicate that the ink turns to sediment on the tip of my pen. But to Rome for everything, and may a good numen permit me to come through with flying colors and cover with a veil of decorum, although not a very thick one, this, my faithful account of an event that echoed all over Lima more resoundingly than the loudest nose blowing.
An Adventure of the Poet-Viceroy
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

The faction of the vicufzas, who were called that because its members wore vicufta hats, was getting the worst of it in the civil war that was raging in Potosi. For the moment, the Basques were winning because the corregidor’ of the imperial town, don Rafael Ortiz de Sotomayor, was altogether on their side. The Basques had taken over Potosi, for they held all the important public offices. Of the 24 town councilors, half were Basques, and even the two magistrates were of that nationality, despite the fact that this was expressly forbidden by royal decree. The Creoles, Castilians, and Andalusians formed an alliance to destroy or at least counterbalance this predominance of the Basques. Such was the origin of the open war that for many years made this region the stage of bloody slaughter, to which the ever-victorious general of the vicufzas, don Francisco Castillo, put an end in 1626, by marrying his daughter, doiia Eugenia, to don Pedro de Oyanume, one of the most important Basques of the town.
The Scapegoat
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

8

The Inca Titu-Atauchi, the brother of Atahualpa, was on his way to Cajamarca with a large retinue of Indians loaded down with gold and silver to add to the treasure for their sovereign’s ransom when he received the news that on August 29, 1533, the Spaniards had put Atahualpa to death. Titu-Atauchi hid the riches that he was bringing, and gathering warriors together, he went to join forces with Qyizquiz, the bravest and most experienced of the generals of the Inca empire who was the head of an army harassing the conquistadors.
Friars’ Work!
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

Until a little more than twenty years ago, two wooden crosses set into a wall could be seen in the Plaza Mayor of Lima. One of them was above the arch of the gate leading to the callej6n de Petateros. Opposite it were the scaffold and the post for victims’ heads. It is thus our Christian supposition that the object of the aforementioned cross was to console those condemned to death with the sight in the last moments of the emblem of our redemption.’ The other cross was located where Palacio and Correo Streets meet, and below the balconies of the house of Nicolas de Ribera the Elder, the first mayor and member of the town council after Pizarro founded the city. When and why was that cross placed there? Here, kind reader, is what I have discovered thanks to extensive historical research.
Don Alonso the Brawny
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

The story is told of the Venezuela general Paez,’ the hero of the plains, that in the days of the war to the death with Spain, he took captive a stout Spanish soldier who enjoyed the reputation of being a man of herculean strength. The leader of the patriots said to him: “Listen, you clumsy fellow: I’ll spare your life if you succeed in throwing me to the ground.” The prisoner smiled and accepted the challenge, believing victory was certain, but Paez, who for this sort of fight had more cunning and agility than physical strength, managed after two minutes to pin the Spaniard to the ground.
Margarita’s Wedding Dress
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

It is likely that some of my readers have heard old women of Lima remark, when they wanted to think over how much the price of something had gone up: “Good heavens! Why, that’s more expensive than Margarita’s wedding chemise.” I would have been left with a lingering curiosity as to who that Margarita was whose wedding dress was the talk of the town, had I not come across, in the Madrid newspaper La America, an article signed by don Ildefonso Antonio Bermejo (the author of a noteworthy book on Peru), who, although he touches only lightly on the girl and her wedding dress, put me on the right path to disentangling the skein and getting the story that you are about to read straight.
Abascal’s Clever Trick
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

That His Excellency Viceroy don Fernando de Abascal y Souza, Knight of the Order of Santiago and marquis of Concordia,’ was a man of great skill is a point on which friends and enemies who managed to meet him are in accord. And in case a contemporary of mine should question the fact, in order to oblige him to strike his flag it will suffice for me to tell of an incident that happened in Lima at the end of 1808, that is to say, when Abascal had been viceroy for scarcely a year and a half. The senior member of the town council of this City of Kings2 was ... who? I do not record the name for fear of finding myself involved in another dog and cat fight of a lawsuit. Let us call him sefior de H.... His Lordship the town councilor belonged to the scallion species. His head was white and the rest was green; that is to say that despite his white hair and his complaints he still showed off like a peacock and feasted his eyes on the great-great-grandnieces of Adam.
Friar Gomez’s Scorpion
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

In diebus ii/is, I mean to say when I was a boy, I often heard old women exclaim, on pondering the beauty and price of a piece of jewelry: “That’s worth as much as Father Gomez’s scorpion!” I have a young daughter, as good as they come, a flower of grace and the salty froth of wit, with eyes saucier and more mischievous than a couple of notaries:'Principio principiando; / principiar quiero / por versi si principiando / principiar puedo.
The Protectress and the Liberatrix
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

I, the collector of traditions, must have been 13 or 14 years old, and a pupil in a preparatory school. Among my schoolmates was a boy of the same age, the only son of don Juan Weniger, the owner of two valuable shoe stores in the callede Plateros de San Agustin. Alejandro, for that was the name of my schoolmate, a fine young fellow who some years later died with the rank of captain in one of our disastrous civil wars, hit it off with me, and on holidays we used to get into mischief together.
The King of the Camanejos
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

THE sacristy of the church of La Merced, in Arequipa, has two .1. rooms: one in which the friars don vestments to celebrate Mass, which differs little or not at all from that of any monastery in Christendom; and the other, which might be called the antesacristy and is the only passageway between the church and the monastery. Like the rest of the building, the sacristy is made of stone masonry. In the center of its vault there is a clerestory, identical to the one in the Penitentiary of San Pedro in Lima, and near it a hole through which there passes the rope of the church bell by which the faithful are summoned to Mass. The furniture is scarcely deserving of notice, since it is limited to a rough wooden bench and two confessionals of the same sort.
Two Excommunications
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

Blessed be the nineteenth century, in which the principle of equality before the law is dogma, with no talk of laws or privileges. The fact that dogma is frequently proven false in practice is none of my business. It is always a consolation to know that it exists in written form and that we are exercising our right when we loudly protest against the arbitrary acts of those in power.
Consolacion
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

Reader, are you hunchbacked? If, to your misfortune, the hand of the Creator has placed on your shoulders that bulky sugar loaf known as a hump, throw away this page without reading it, and I swear to you that you will not have lost much. It has always been said that hunchbacks are sarcastic and evil-minded, and that the protuberance they carry about is a depository of venomous satires and biting blasphemies. God keep me from accepting such an opinion, since I am someone who has known one of these unfortunates who had the heart of an angel buried beneath so rough and deformed an exterior. Andres was like a beautiful diamond mounted in an iron setting.
Introduction
Authors: Moore Genem
Published: November 2023

And this also, “ said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” If there is a moral to Heart of Darkness, it lies perhaps in these words, with which Marlow breaks the silence of a little yacht becalmed on the Thames estuary awaiting the turn of the tide. Marlow then proceeds to tell the entire story of Heart of Darkness in miniature, as the tale of a young Roman sent off to the blank edges of the known world “nineteen hundred years ago—the other day,” there to confront the “utter savagery” of a primeval England. London has been one of the dark places; the swamps of the Thames were a Congo for the Romans; and the final words of the story drape the entire modern world in a brooding projection of its darkness: “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
The Feast, by J*s*ph C*nr*d
Authors: Beerbohm max
Published: November 2023

The Hu Tin which slept the white man was on a clearing between the forest and the river. Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. Mahamo lay rigid and watchful at the hut’s mouth. In his upturned eyes, and along the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.
Narratological Parallels in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
Authors: Cahir Linda costanzo
Published: November 2023

The theme of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is, as his character Charles Marlow states, the “fascination of the abomination” (31). The novella is a frame-story, wonderfully entangled by a narrative within a narrative, a flashback within a flashback, a series of quotes within quotes. It is a bildungsroman, an initiation into darkness and chaos, calmly framed by a prologue and an epilogue.
Heart of Darkness Revisited: The African Response
Authors: Zhuwarara Rino
Published: November 2023

The standing of Joseph Conrad as a major novelist of his time has been for a long time unassailable. F. R. Leavis certainly regards Conrad as rightfully belonging to the “Great Tradition” of English literature—minor misgivings notwithstanding. It is argued that he is one of those artists who have extended the frontiers of the novel and created more space and more possibilities for the exploration and depiction of human experience.
A Chat with Joseph Conrad
Authors: Clemens Cyril
Published: November 2023

My reply was that since I had been rereading Lord Jim on the ship coming over I would like very much to meet its author.

“That’s easy,” returned Walpole, “Jessie and Joseph Conrad are two of my best friends. It won’t be necessary for me to write any letter of introduction. Just tell them you are a friend of mine that I sent you along.
Who Gets to Create the Lasting Images? The Problem of Black Representation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Authors: Cantave Sophia
Published: November 2023

For late-twentieth-century teachers, the significance of Harriet Beecher Stowe as a white woman creating a national space for an “empathetic” discourse on the slave experience raises several questions. For instance, why didn’t Mary Prince’s exposé of slavery in the West Indies, The History of Mary Prince (1831), or Harriet Wilson’s account of de facto slavery in the American North, Our Nig (1859), become the proverbial “shot heard around the world”? What enabled Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin and begin a national and international literary exchange on slavery? The novel invented the modern idea of a “best-seller,” and many of Stowe’s characters became national stock types and icons. Even today, readers cry at the right places and express horror, relief, or disbelief where textually appropriate. Most important, Stowe’s text allows whites to talk to other whites about the personal and national issues surrounding the slave experience and establishes the character types usually associated with African Americans. Indeed, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and then the early twentieth century, Stowe’s novel provided the nation with a shared cultural context for its discourse on slavery, offering reductive images, phrases, and symbols that quickly became the accepted norm.
Up to Heaven’s Gate, Down in Earth’s Dust The Politics of Judgment in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Authors: Bellin Joshua D
Published: November 2023

In her introduction to the 1878 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that “the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her.” But this illusion of authorlessness or powerlessness—she would come to claim that God had written the book—is at odds with the passionate declaration with which Stowe is said to have commenced her novel, at her sister-in-law’s urging: “I will write something. I will—if I live!” These two moments in the mythos of Uncle Tom’s Cabin illuminate two conflicting energies within the novel itself: the power of the individual human will and the powerlessness of the individual in a universe controlled by God. In its attack on slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin fluctuates between these two alternatives, dramatizing not only the struggle of humans seeking to respond to and resist the slave system, but also the struggle of humanity seeking to negotiate and comprehend its proper role in God’s design.
Introduction
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

Perhaps you are a college or graduate student in the United States, and you want a taste of what law school might be like (at its best). Or perhaps you believe that learning the rudiments of legal culture is necessary for a proper education in economics, history, or philosophy.
Legal Reasoning
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

When we talk about “reasoning,” we are never entirely clear about whether we mean to refer to internal mental processes or to public argument and justification. Lawyers argue conflicting points of view. Judges decide disputes and write opinions justifying their decisions in light of the prevailing legal sources (statutes, cases, scholarly commentary). Both engage in internal ratiocination, as well as interactive efforts to persuade others. Both lawyers and judges engage in mental and verbal efforts properly called “legal reasoning.”
The Alternative Constitution
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

This chapter is more complicated than most, and therefore we present you with an outline of the materials in advance: All of these themes revolve around the central question of whether there is an alternative Constitution, what it means, what its sources are, and whether it has ultimately triumphed in American law. First we need to explain the concept of an alternative Constitution.
Equality Prevails
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

The civil rights cases led to eighty years of de facto apartheid in the United States. The legitimation of racial discrimination came in 1898, when the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), upheld racially segregated railroad cars as “separate but equal” and therefore consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment. Only after World War II, after blacks and whites fought again side by side (though in separate units), did the country undertake a systematic effort to realize the aims that Justice Harlan thought were imperative in the 1880s.
The Triumph of Equity
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

Developed over centuries, in response to specific problems, the common law forms of action are multiple and overlapping. Even a system as seemingly unified as the estates in land is hardly a system of logical unity. The estates in land are complicated and do not resolve all interests in property; other rules—for instance, to govern warranty by the owner in sales or leases—were not resolved by the common law until prompted by modernizing statutes in the twentieth century.
Contemporary Property
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

It is difficult for an outsider to grasp the importance of private property in American legal and political culture. Private property was at the core of the founders’ vision of a new society; it was critical in the Civil War, when a plantation-based, slave-owning South sought to defend its way of life; and it remains a foundation of the American understanding of what makes democracy work. The centrality of private property in the Constitutional structure became evident when the framers redrafted the famous line in the Declaration of Independence that all men “are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the prior draft, the right to pursue happiness had been a right of property. The final language of the latter phrase impressed the drafters of the postwar Japanese Constitution so much that they included it as a way of expressing the new orientation toward individualism in Japanese culture.
Introduction: On Claimed Verse Forms
Authors: Caplan David
Published: November 2023

The challenge to contemporary poetry would seem to be a pair of unhappy alternatives: either to contrive new schemes of empirically meaningful repetition that reflect and—more importantly—transmit the color of contemporary experience; or to recover schemes that have reflected the experience of the past. To do the first would be to imply that contemporary experience has a pattern, a point that most post-Christian thinkers would deny. To do the second would be to suggest that the past can be recaptured, to suggest that the intolerable fractures and dislocations of modern history have not really occurred at all, or, what is worse, to suggest that they may have occurred but that poetry should act as if they have not We yield now to the one demand, now to the other, producing at times a formless and artistically incoherent reflection—accurate in its way—of some civil or social or psychological reality, and at times a shapely and coherent work of art which is necessarily an inexact report on the state of affairs, not to mention the state of language and meaning and coherence, in our time. —Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Formcontemporary metrical verse surprises many learned readers simply by existing. For all the reasons that Fussell summarizes and for a great number more, much of the liveliest recent scholarship concludes that literary and cultural history dooms this poetry to failure, irrelevance, or political and aesthetic conservatism. “[T]he pentameter is a dead form,” Antony Easthope notes, “and its continued use . . . is in the strict sense reactionary.” Many other commentators agree, calling contemporary “neo-formalism” “a dangerous nostalgia,” “the new conservatism in American poetry,” and a Reaganite “return to old values.”
On the Contemporary Ballad
Authors: Caplan David
Published: November 2023

in 1972 dorothy and x. j. kennedy founded an improbable journal. In a period dominated by free verse, Counter / Measures: A Magazine of Rime, Meter and Song published only poetry that used those unfashionable techniques. A quintessential small magazine, it failed to achieve a wide circulation. (It did receive a remarkable number of submissions: more than 3,700.) After the third and final issue, subscribers with unfulfilled balances received refund checks. For nearly three decades unsold back issues languished in the Kennedys’ garage until the editors finally carted them to the town dump. Short lived and largely forgotten, Counter / Measures remains more than a historical curiosity. It published the early work of many poets who, in the late 1980s, would spearhead the new formalist movement, such as Timothy Steele, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Charles Martin. It mixed these new voices with well-established figures of midcentury metrical verse, including Anthony Hecht, J. V. Cunningham, and Richard Wilbur. It did so in a spirit at odds with much discussion of verse technique. “[P]lease believe,” the editors implored, “that in confining this magazine to poetry that embodies meter and/or rime, we have nothing against poetry that doesn’t. We try merely to question the rumor that meter and rime are no more.”
The Gravity of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Authors: Telotte J P
Published: November 2023

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has provided us with one of the most frequently noted transitions in film history, the match cut that takes viewers from “The Dawn of Man,” as the film’s first sequence is titled, to the year 2001 (figures 3 and 4). That cut matches a bone cast into the air by a shrieking hominid, one of those on which the opening sequence focuses, to a space station, similarly thrust into space by the modern humans who dominate the succeeding sequences. It is a wonderfully ironic piece of editing, suggesting how, for all of our technological advances—advances attested to by the complexity of the space station, the other satellites we glimpse, and the civilized strains of a Strauss waltz that accompany this shift—we have fundamentally progressed very little. We continue to fling our bits of technology into the air, higher and faster, of course, but with a similar sort of exultation, of self-conscious pride, as we strive to overcome one of the fundamental laws that weighs us down, governs human life, and constrains our ambitions: gravity. It is on gravity that this chapter focuses, in part because the film itself, perhaps simply with a desire to be faithful to the scientific laws governing space travel—which are often selectively ignored by earlier science fiction films—frequently reminds us of its operation and emphasizes how in various ways it impinges on us.
How Poets See the World
Authors: Spiegelman Willard
Published: November 2023

Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, “irrelevant descriptions of nature” in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the “new way of looking” that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls “the way things look each day.” The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets’ own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.
Charles wright and “the metaphysics of the quotidian”
Authors: Spiegelman Willard
Published: November 2023

The creative impulse always arises from an aching inner void, a longing for completion that only art can provide. Thus Wallace Stevens: “And not to have is the beginning of desire” (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”). We speak of expression and fulfillment as equivalent terms even though they are linguistically opposed to each other, one an outpouring and the other an influx. But the first can produce the second and consequently stand in its place: we fulfill ourselves by self-expression. Likewise, the aesthetic and the erotic are at least in part overlapping, and sometimes virtually synonymous. From the story told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium down to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, most Western mythographers have based their versions of Eros on some dream of finding, in a sensuous or aesthetic quest, one’s better half, the “partner in your sorrow’s mysteries” (Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”). In Shelley’s neo-Platonic allegory “The Sensitive Plant,” the titular figure “desires what it has notthe Beautiful.” It is no wonder that this central “character” has often been.
“A Space For Boundless Revery” Varities of Ekphrastic Experience
Authors: Spiegelman Willard
Published: November 2023

To write of painting, or the fine arts in general, in a book about description in poetry, seems so natural as to be obligatory. An author risks thematic redundancy and the practical overexposure of already familiar terrain. Of the central poets in this book, Charles Tomlinson is a sometime painter, and the other four have all written poems about looking at pictures. In addition, the theory and practical criticism of ekphrasis have been expanded recently by the work of James Heffernan, John Hollander, W. J. T. Mitchell, Grant Scott, and others, all of whom build on the earlier pioneering studies of Jean Hagstrom and Murray Krieger.1 For these reasons I have limited myself in this chapter to three experiments or subgenres of ekphrasis that have been more or less scanted by the critics above. First, Recoveries, a book-length dramatic monologue by Theodore Weiss, whose speaker is a figure in a painting; second, Irving Feldman’s title sequence from his 1986 collection All of Us Here, about a show of George Segal plastercast sculptures; and last, a sampling of the very few ekphrastic poems about Abstract Expressionist or nonrepresentational painting made by American poets in the past fifty years. In all three cases, visual art promises what Weiss calls “a space for boundless revery,”2 which has tempted all ekphrastic poets since Homer to dream of, through, or within the confines of a visible or imaginary material depiction. That ekphrasis is generally taken as a “verbal representation of visual representation”3 needs some modification when one contemplates, as Weiss does, at a double remove (he imagines himself into the mouth of a figure within a picture); or as Feldman does by meditating.
Criminal Law Films
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

It used to be easy to define law films: They were dramas featuring a heroic, white male lawyer who solved the mystery and settled other dilemmas in the course of a trial. But changes in taste, in attitudes toward law, and in understandings of the nature of law itself have eroded this traditional definition. For better or worse, contemporary audiences have little patience for lengthy courtroom debates and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the lives of virtuous country lawyers. Thus, movies today tend to embed a short trial scene in a longer adventure story that also offers bedroom action and gun battles. Moreover, responding to lawyers’ declining status and to increasing public skepticism about the efficacy of legal systems, contemporary films seldom depict lawyers as heroes on the grand scale or courts as places where fundamental social and moral issues are settled. Finally, scholars have realized that there is a large group of movies, including Rashomon (1950), Do the Right Thing (1989), Falling Down (1993), Eye of God (1997), and Mystic River (2003), that comment on legal issues without referring to lawyers or law, and that these films not only provide information on popular attitudes toward law but themselves constitute legal discourses. One result has been a probing debate among law-and-film scholars over how to define the law film. While as yet inconclusive, this debate has produced a new awareness of the legal subtexts of films long held to be “about” something else.
The Heroes of Crime Films
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

Of the many reasons for the popularity of crime films, the most potent lies with the nature of their heroes. Viewers delight in watching characters who can escape from tight spots and outsmart their enemies, all the while tossing down scotch and flipping jibes. Good-guy heroes please us by out-tricking the tricky, facing down psychos, solving impossible mysteries. Bad-guy heroes appeal by being bolder, nastier, crueler, and tougher than we dare to be; by saying what they want, taking what they desire, despising weaklings, and breaking the law with impunity. Both good-guy and bad-guy heroes operate on the basis of austere, unambiguous moral codes that are as bracing as they are simplistic and brutal. When Lily, the elegant racetrack swindler of The Grifters (1990), summons a physician to treat her sick son, she advises him, “My son is going to be all right. If not, I’ll have you killed.” We may smile, but we may also envy, if only a little, the unadorned directness of Lily’s approach.
Medicines from Nature
Authors: Newman David J , Kilama John , Bernstein, Aaron , Chivian Eric
Published: November 2023

While biodiversity makes possible the ecosystem services that keep us and all over living things on this planet alive, it also provides us with medicines that relieve our physical suffering and treat, and in some cases even cure, our diseases. Even with the advent of modern combinatorial chemistry, which can churn out thousands of synthetic chemicals in the hope that one or a few may have biological activity, pharmaceuticals derived from Nature remain a mainstay of medical practice today, as they have for millennia.
Religion, Healing, and the Body
Authors: Crawford Suzanne J
Published: November 2023

At the center of my scholarship are questions about embodiment: how bodies in movement, in society, in symbol, and in expression, create and are created by religious experience. At the heart of religiosity is a move toward wellness—physical, spiritual, intellectual, social, ecological. Spiritual lives are dominated, overwhelmed at times, by a need for healing. Through enacting ritual, religious practitioners and adherents re-create the world, re-create the self, re-create the body. I would argue that, at the heart of every religious tradition, are practices of healing. Healing and medical traditions within every culture are intensely concentrated arenas in which foundational notions of the sacred and the ultimate (whether explicit or implicit) come into play within lived daily life.
Shanti: Peace for the Mind, Body, and Soul
Authors: Narayanan Vasudha
Published: November 2023

To study health and healing in the Hindu traditions is to learn about the larger concepts of well-being and happiness in human life. “Well-being” (su asti or svasti, from which the word svastika is derived) is dependent on a harmonious relationship with the earth, the planets, and the stars; appropriate balances between the various elements within the body, family, and society; and a good relationship with the natural world, ancestors, and deities. Imbalances and disharmony are, alas, a part of life—one’s astrological chart may be flawed, one catches viruses, one’s children may not do what one desires. All of these cause a lack of well being—particularly the virus—and the many Hindu traditions have thousands of ways to remedy the situations.
The Anthropology of Experience: The Way to Teach Religion and Healing
Authors: Turner Edith
Published: November 2023

It was clear to William James in 1901 that religious experience was a major force among humankind. But in the century that followed, the discipline of religious studies seemed limited to textual investigation, philosophy, and theology, and little notice was given to religious experience. With a few exceptions this is still the case, and, even with attempts to explain religion psychologically, religious studies seem at a dead end, afraid to say anything about experience.
World Religions and Healing
Authors: Barnes Linda L
Published: November 2023

What follows is the syllabus for a thematic—or comparative—lecture course, “World Religions and Healing,” which I first taught in 1997 at Harvard University. Since then, I have revised it and offered it through the Religion Department at Boston University, where I serve on the faculty of the School of Medicine. I suggest that composing this kind of course challenges one to think through how, on the one hand, to say enough about the changing constellation of practices associated with a given tradition that students can begin to grasp that tradition’s complexity and internal pluralism. On the other hand, one faces the related challenge of illustrating the dynamics of cross-fertilization and ensuing hybridity (see the discussion in the introduction).
Losing the News
Authors: Jones Alex S
Published: November 2023

What is wrong with the news? To answer this dismaying question, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones explores how the epochal changes sweeping the media have eroded the core news that has been the essential food supply of our democracy. At a time of dazzling technological innovation, Jones says that what stands to be lost is the fact-based reporting that serves as a watchdog over government, holds the powerful accountable, and gives citizens what they need. In a tumultuous new media era, with cutthroat competition and panic over profits, the commitment of the traditional news media to serious news is fading. Should we lose a critical mass of this news, our democracy will weaken—and possibly even begin to fail. The breathtaking possibilities that the web offers are undeniable, but at what cost? The shattering of the old economic model is taking a toll on journalistic values and standards. Journalistic objectivity and ethics are under assault, as is the bastion of the First Amendment. Pundits and talk show hosts have persuaded Americans that the crisis in news is bias and partisanship. Not so, says Jones. The real crisis is the erosion of the iron core of “accountability” news, a loss that hurts Republicans and Democrats alike. Losing the News is a vivid depiction of the dangers facing fact-based, reported news, but it is also a call to arms. Despite the current crisis, there are many hopeful signs, and Jones closes by looking over the horizon and exploring ways the iron core can be preserved.
Saving the News
Authors: Jones Alex S
Published: November 2023

The town of Idaho Falls is tucked into the southeast corner of Idaho, an area known for its striking natural beauty, Republican politics, and powerful ties to the Mormon Church, which dominates the region even more than it does Salt Lake City, about 200 miles to the south. The local paper, the Post Register, has been owned for four generations by the Brady family, a clan of Irish Catholic Democrats who have thrived despite being routinely bashed by locals who consider them liberal papists.

In February 2005, the Post Register began publishing a six-part series of articles based on hitherto secret court documents revealing that local Boy Scout officials had ignored repeated warnings about an Idaho Falls scout leader who had eventually been convicted of pedophilia. The first story was an account of 14-year-old Adam Steed, who had been one of the scoutmaster’s numerous victims. It told how this boy and his family had demanded the scoutmaster be stopped, and instead of being praised had been shunned and disparaged.
Religious Dance: Harmony
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

It is possible for beauty and holiness to interpenetrate so that one must speak of a harmony. We shall find the most beautiful examples in music and painting, but they are not lacking in the other arts, even the dance.
The Theological Aesthetics of the Dance
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

The problem is now to find, using the dance as a point of departure, an entrance to the problem of the relationship between beauty and holiness. Up to now we have been groping about the edge. We must now cry to achieve greater clarity. We can succeed only to a certain degree with the dance. It is the oldest, and to a certain extent the most elementary religious art, but certainly not the most theological. In the case of each arc we shall discuss the relationship with God.
Influences: Harmony
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

We shall here illuminate two more single influences which clarify the contact between religion and dramatic art, The Broadening and Deepening of Life This is brought about through play and, through it, play occasionally becomes capable of giving expression to the holy. By being caught up in a dramatic movement, life is reduced to its simplest form, to its particular content, to its eternal nucleus. While in the context of magic this nucleus was visible to all, so that dramatic representation of life could be truly simple as soon as dramaturgy ceased to be primitive, it had to express the unity of life in terms of the multiplicity of accidents which a life of movement entails.
The Theological Aesthetics of the Word
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

Poet and Prophet In a small book which Albert Verwey dedicated to his friendship with Stefan George, there comes clearly to light the conflict which arises as soon as poetry tries to return to its source, the holy word. Verwey, who was more than just a rhetorician, opposed the prophetic tone, the almost hieratic mode of expression, which is found in George’s poetry after The Seventh Ring. George speaks of the transformation of the world, which he introduces with these words: “When he said that, he was all passion, his whole body was movement. What fascinated me in everything he said was the power of his faith. That the world would be transformed, of that he was sure.Yes, I said, but we must be only poets.
The Prohibition of Images and the Iconoclastic Controversy
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

The prohibition Of Images We have seen how the pictorial arts, outside their existential context, lose their distance from their subject and devote themselves more and more to representation of human feelings. For this reason, they maintain only an external connection with religion, Thus the mind which has become “modern” loses its ability to see anything in the pictorial arts other than the expression of the human. This brings about an important transfer: at first, the prohibition of images was explained by the danger of reproducing the holy, the divine, thus bringing it into an immediate, terrifying proximity; but now the prohibition is motivated by awe in the presence of the divine being, This awe is intended as a protection against humanizing the holy, thereby robbing it of its strength and impairing its immediate effective ness. Man muse not make any graven image, because the god confined in the image will harm him, says primitive man. He must make no likeness, because the god which he so represents is capable of nothing, says “modern” man. The prohibition of images underwent this transfer early in the history of Judaism and Islam. The prohibition in Exodus 20 is based in Deuteronomy on the intangibility of the form of God, who speaks but remains invisible (Deut. 4:15 ff.).
The Transitional Structure
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

Liturgical Music Becomes “Church Music” Beautiful sound reinforces the power of beautiful words. Singing is more effective than speaking. We saw this in our discussion of poetry (p. 129), and shall return to it. Our modem times have almost forgotten this fact, There are people who complain about the “unnaturalness” of opera, perhaps because the hero sings while he breathes his last, or, in naturalistic works, sings when he asks for a glass of beer. There are al o people and basically it is the same complaint-who complain about the “unnat uralness” of non-Calvinistic worship, in which the priest sings the Creed, the prayers, and the Gospel. This comes about because singing has be come a specialized field which has certain “anistic value,” but may not be brought into direct continuity with life. One does not sing at home when one wishes to have a cup of tea, or when one dies, marries, or otherwise does something that is “a part of life.”