bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Road to Somewhere: Locating Knowledge in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
Authors: Allred Jeff
Published: November 2023

Preston Sturges’s film, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), begins with the title character, a successful but callow Hollywood director, yearning to leave the dream factory and discover the more authentic America that he hopes to find on the back roads between the coasts. He has amassed a small fortune making films such as Hey-Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Pants of 1939, frothy comedies that, according to his studio colleagues, have succeeded because they “don’t stink with [political] messages.” Politics, however, is precisely what Sullivan now wants to impart in an attempt to match his aesthetic to the social conditions of the Depression, to offer audiences “a commentary on modern conditions . . . stark realism . . . the problems that confront the average man.” This homily links Sullivan’s proposed film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? to the documentary mode in an attempt to convince his peers of its seriousness: “I want this picture to be a document.
Introduction
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

The argument. Every anthology makes an argument. Few anthologists, however, will come out and tell you what it is. Take, for instance, the anthologist’s selection of individual poems and poets. The argument, unstated, is, “This or that poet is worth including, is canonical,” and so forth. That this is indeed the stuff of argument becomes clear when the point-counterpoint reviews that inevitably follow the publication of noteworthy anthologies begin to appear.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Sonnet 129

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and, till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad. Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe, Before a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Lady Mary Wroth (1586–c. 1652)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Sonnet XIX from The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

COME, darkest night, becoming sorrow best; Light, leave thy light, fit for a lightsome soul; Darkness doth truly suit with me oppressed, Whom absence’ power doth from mirth control:

The very trees with hanging heads condole

Sweet summer’s parting, and of leaves distressed In dying colours make a griefful roll,

So much, alas, to sorrow are they pressed.

Thus of dead leaves her farewell carpet’s made:

Their fall, their branches, all their mournings prove, With leafless, naked bodies, whose hues vade

From hopeful green, to wither in their love: If trees and leaves for absence mourners be, No marvel that I grieve, who like want see.

Sonnet VI from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

My paine still smother’d in my grieved brest, Seekes for some ease, yet cannot passage finde, To be discharged of this unwelcome guest,

When most I strive, more fast his burthens binde. Like to a Ship on Goodwins cast by winde,

The more shee strive, more deepe in Sand is prest, Till she be lost: so am I in this kind

Sunck, and devour’d, and swallow’d by unrest.
Anonymous (published 1692)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Loving Mad Tom

I’ll bark against the Dog-star, And crow away the morning;

I’ll chase the moon Till it be noon,

And I’ll make her leave her horning.

But I will find Bonny Maud, Merry Mad Maud, And seek whate’er betides her;

Yet I will love Beneath or above

That dirty Earth that hides her.

I’ll crack the poles asunder, Strange things I will devise on.

I’ll beat my brain against Charles’s Wain, And I’ll grasp the round horizon.

But I will find Bonny Maud, Merry Mad Maud, And seek whate’er betides her;

Yet I will love Beneath or above

That dirty Earth that hides her.

I’ll search the caves of slumber, And please her in a night dream;

I’ll tumble her into Lawrence’s fen, And hang myself in a sunbeam;

But I will find Bonny Maud, Merry Mad Maud, And seek whate’er betides her;

Yet I will love Beneath or above

That dirty Earth that hides her.

I’ll sail upon a millstone,

And make the sea-gods wonder;
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples

The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon’s transparent might, The breath of the moist earth is light, Around its unexpanded buds;

Like many a voice of one delight

The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The city’s voice itself, is soft like Solitude’s.

I see the deep’s untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown: I sit upon the sands alone,—

The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion,

How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found,

And walked with inward glory crowned— Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure, Others I see whom these surround— Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;—

To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are;
John Clare (1793–1864)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

I Am

I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:— I am the self-consumer of my woes;—

They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes:— And yet I am, and live—like vapours tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,— Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;

Even the dearest, that I love the best

Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes, where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God;

And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept, Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie, The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Popular Songs: from American Mock-Bird (published 1801)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

The Mad Lover

What if I am mad? What if in pain I rave and rage and reel?

What if my tears, like scalding rain, Count every pang I feel.

Hadst thou fall’n victim to the art Of some false lovely she,

Heaven in her face, hell in her heart, Thou’d ave and rage like me.

I am Etna now, my bowels burn, Demons the lava blow;

And now I’m Caucasus and turn’d A chilling mass of snow.

Fool why dost laugh? where is the wit, With torture that makes free?

If hapless love thy brain had split, Thou’d freeze and burn like me.

On death’s dread verge, I seem to stand, Yet hold my hated life:

To strike me down, no pitying hand, No poison cord or knife.

Strike to my heart, ah, treacherous friend!

That will not set me free:

Didst thou thus linger near thy end, Thou’d long to die like me.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

To fight aloud, is very brave— But gallanter, I know

Who charge within the bosom The Cavalry of Woe—

Who win, and nations do not see— Who fall—and none observe— Whose dying eyes, no Country Regards with patriot love—

We trust, in plumed procession For such, the Angels go—

Rank after Rank, with even feet— And Uniforms of Snow.

The first Day’s Night had come— And grateful that a thing

So terrible—had been endured— I told my Soul to sing—

She said her Strings were snapt— Her Bow—to Atoms blown—

And so to mend her—gave me work Until another Morn—
Henry Kendall (1839–1882)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Outre Mer

I see, as one in dreaming,

A broad, bright, quiet sea; Beyond it lies a haven—

The only home for me.

Some men grow strong with trouble, But all my strength is past,

And tired and full of sorrow I long to sleep at last.

By force of chance and changes Man’s life is hard at best;

And, seeing rest is voiceless, The dearest thing is rest.

Beyond the sea—behold it, The home I wish to seek,

The refuge of the weary, The solace of the weak!

Sweet angel fingers beckon, Sweet angel voices ask

My soul to cross the waters; And yet I dread the task.

God help the man whose trials Are tares that he must reap;

He cannot face the future— His only hope is sleep.

Across the main a vision

Of sunset coasts, and skies, And widths of waters gleaming,

Enchant my human eyes.

I, who have sinned and suffered,

Have sought—with tears have sought—
Robert Bridges (1844–1930)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Melancholia

The sickness of desire, that in dark days Looks on the imagination of despair, Forgetteth man, and stinteth God his praise; Nor but in sleep findeth a cure for care.

Incertainty that once gave scope to dream Of laughing enterprise and glory untold, Is now a blackness that no stars redeem, A wall of terror in a night of cold.

Fool! thou that hast impossibly desired And now impatiently despairest, see

How nought is changed: Joy’s wisdom is attired Splendid for others’ eyes if not for thee:

Not love or beauty or youth from earth is fled: If they delite thee not, ‘tis thou art dead.
Richard David Comstock (published 1930)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Always Like This

I want to get well, but I can’t, it seems,

And I’m still disturbed in my restless dreams, And I just can’t catch the sunlight’s beams.

Will it always be like this?

There’s something bothers me all night. It hectors, taunts till the morning’s light, And the mirror shows me a sorry sight.

Will I always look like this?

I try to do just as the doctors say And do it all in the proper way,

But still I drag on thru’ listless days. Will all days be like this?

But one thing sure, there’s room for a grave On the old home ranch where the free

winds rave,

And its one long rest, with sorrow saved, Then it will not be like this.

I’m sick of the hustling to and fro,

And I want to go where there is no woe, But I don’t dare tell the doctor so,

That things are so amiss,

For he’d give me a funny look,

And write me up in a black-bound book Where the suicidal notes are took,

I’d be much worse off than this.
Stanley Kunitz(1905–2006)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father for killing himself,

especially at such an awkward time and in a public park,

that spring

when I was waiting to be born.

She locked his name in her deepest cabinet

and would not let him out,

though I could hear him thumping. When I came down from the attic with the pastel portrait in my hand of a long-lipped stranger

with a brave moustache and deep brown level eyes, she ripped it into shreds without a single word

and slapped me hard. In my sixty-fourth year I can feel my cheek still burning.
Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

from “The Studies of Narcissus”

The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal,

Marked by the monuments which no one

Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces, Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled. The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins

Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.

I waited like obsession in solitude:

The sun’s white terror tore and roared at me, The moonlight, almond white, at night, Whether awake or sleeping, arrested me And sang, softly, haunted, unlike the sun

But as the sun. Withheld from me or took away Despair or peace, making me once more

With thought of what had never been before—

—The others were the despots of despair—

The river’s freshness sailed from unknown sources—

. . . They snickered giggled, laughed aloud at last, They mocked and marvelled at the statue which was A caricature, as strained and stiff, and yet

A statue of self-love!—since self-love was

To them, truly my true love, how, then, was I a stillness of nervousness

So nervous a caricature: did they suppose Self-love was unrequited, or betrayed?
Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Neurotics

No one gives you a thought, as day by day You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.

None think how stalemate in you grinds away, Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high To bite on earth. The mind, it’s said, is free:

But not your minds, They, rusted stiff, admit Only what will accuse or horrify,

Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces Sink further from the light. No one pretends To want to help you now. For interest passes Always towards the young and more insistent,

And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends Your long defence against the non-existent.
Thomas P. Beresford (1946– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Edith in Ann Arbor

“Where will it end?” she asked me one time, years ago, Before it ended there and began somewhere else.

Indecency was an abstraction to be borne, Not fought with. She was older, more adept At life than I, and watching her was watching

Changelessness in the lunar face through dark and light. Until one night the swinging corpse of a child in a closet Woke me and the floating corpse of the same still child Woke me again, killing the last indecency.

She bore it to an end. I fought it to a draw.

An ending and an endlessness was all we saw.
Yusef Komunyakaa (1947– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Losses

After Nam he lost himself, not trusting his hands with loved ones.

His girlfriend left,

& now he scouts the edge of town, always with one ear

cocked & ready to retreat, to blend with hills, poised

like a slipknot

becoming a noose.

Unlike punji stakes,

his traps only snag the heart.

Sometimes he turns in a circle until a few faces from Dak To

track him down.

A dress or scarf in the distance can nail him to a dogwood.

Down below, to his left,

from where the smog rises,

a small voice reaches his ear somehow. No, never mind—

he’s halfway back, closer to a ravine, going deeper into saw vines,

in behind White Cove,

following his mind like a dark lover, away from car horns & backfire where only days are stolen.
Mark Jarman (1952– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Questions for Ecclesiastes

What if on a foggy night in a beachtown, a night when the Pacific leans close like the face of a wet cliff, a preacher were called to the house of a suicide, a house of strangers, where a child had discharged a rifle through the roof of her mouth and the top of her skull?

What if he went to the house where the parents, stunned into plaster statues, sat behind their coffee table, and what if he assured them that the sun would rise and go down, the wind blow south, then turn north, whirling constantly, rivers—even the concrete flume of the great Los Angeles—run into the sea, and four-

teen year old girls would manage to spirit themselves out of life, nothing was new under the sun?

What if he said the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing? Would he want to view the bedroom vandalized by self-murder or hear the

quiet before the tremendous shout of the gun or the people inside the shout, shouting or screaming, crying and pounding to get into the room, kicking through the hollow-core door and making a new sound and becoming a new silence—the silence he entered with his comfort?

What if as comfort he said to the survivors I praise the dead which are dead already more than the living, and better is he than both dead and living who is not yet alive? What if he folded his hands together and ate his own flesh in prayer? For he did pray with them. He asked them, the mother and father, if
David Baker (1954– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Hyper

Then a stillness descended the blue hills.

I say stillness. They were three deer, then four.

They crept down the old bean field, these four deer, for fifteen minutes—more—as we watched them

in the field, in the soughing snow. That’s how slowly they moved in stillness, slender deer. The fourth limped behind the other three, we could see, even in the darkness, as it

dragged its right hindquarter where it was hit or shot. Katie sat back on her heels.

The dog held in his prints, or Kate held him, hardly breathing at first. Then we relaxed.

Blue night descended our neighbor’s blown hills. And the calm that comes with seeing something beautiful but far from perfect descended— absolute attention, a fixity.

I say absolute. It was stillness.

In the books we gathered, the first theory holds that the condition’s emergence is most common at age eight, if less in girls than boys, or more vividly seen in boys whose fidgets, whose deficit attentions, like little psycho-economic realms,

are prone to twitches-turned-to-virulence, anxieties palpable in vocalized explosions—though now we know in girls it’s only on the surface less severe,
Humane Housing for Hogs
Authors: Beauchamp Tom L , Orlans F Barbara , Dresser Rebecca , Morton David B , Gluck John P
Published: November 2023

Bacon, pork chops, ham, sausage, hot dogs, bratwurst, tenderloin, ribs, pork roast, pulled-pork sandwiches, and pepperoni pizza: the variety of products that can be made from pig meat runs the gamut. From a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin to the most exquisite pork belly on the menu at the world’s finest restaurants, products made from pigs are everywhere. Pigs are the largest single source of meat for human beings, accounting for almost 40% of meat consumption worldwide by weight.1 Each year in the United States, over 100 million pigs are slaughtered, for total cash receipts in excess of $10 billion. Most consumers of pig meat have no contact with the animals they eat and little if any knowledge of the conditions under which the animals are raised and slaughtered. The Humane Farming Association (HFA), a nonprofit group interested in animal welfare, has found that the conditions under which pigs are farmed are generally not of high quality. The HFA has obtained video footage of pigs being boiled alive, beaten, and killed without being stunned or otherwise rendered insensitive to pain. One farm the HFA investigated is HKY, a large hog farm located in Wausa, Nebraska. The HFA found that HKY is a representative example of improper care and harms caused by factory farms.
Head Injury Experiments on Primates at the University of Pennsylvania
Authors: Beauchamp Tom L , Orlans F Barbara , Dresser Rebecca , Morton David B , Gluck John P
Published: November 2023

Rapid social change is often stimulated by commanding events. The case presented below, involving baboons, marks a critical turning point in the history of twentieth-century animal experimentation. The stakeholders include a respected scientist, an Ivy League university, the federal government, and the newly formed (at the time) activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). PETA’s actions, as it turned out, triggered major changes in public attitudes toward animal welfare issues and regulation by public policy and law.
What Does the Public Have a Right to Know?
Authors: Beauchamp Tom L , Orlans F Barbara , Dresser Rebecca , Morton David B , Gluck John P
Published: November 2023

The Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), a nonprofit organization in the state of Washington, and the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle have generated controversy over several issues regarding the organization’s access to information about the university’s procedures and positions. Major questions are: Does an activist animal welfare organization have a legal or moral right to information about newly proposed or renewed animal experiments conducted at the university? Should such organizations be present at oversight committee meetings where animal experiments are either approved or disapproved? PAWS presents itself as representative of a segment of the community that is concerned about the welfare and protection of laboratory animals. It maintains that it should have a voice in what is done to animals at the university. The university is partially funded by revenues from state taxes and therefore is publicly accountable. But the university does not agree that PAWS has anything to do with questions of accountability. University officials view PAWS as an antivivisection group prone to distort information about animal experiments. John A. Coulter, executive director of health sciences administration for the university, says that the university is not opposed to divulging information, but it is opposed to giving certain types of information to PAWS and to having PAWS participate in university affairs. PAWS might raise public opposition to already approved animal experiments, which might result in unwanted confrontation and even stoppage of animal experiments and embarrassment to the university.
Can There Be Cruelty-Free Cosmetic Testing?
Authors: Beauchamp Tom L , Orlans F Barbara , Dresser Rebecca , Morton David B , Gluck John P
Published: November 2023

In the early 1970s, as part of a study into nonsurgical treatments of squint, Alan Scott, a clinical researcher, discovered that a bacterial toxin could be used to treat abnormal muscle spasms (dystonias).Such dystonias are responsible for a range of conditions other than squints, including facial spasms such as an involuntary and uncontrollable closure of the eyelid (blepharospasm). The toxin works by relaxing muscles through a local action on the nerves supplying the affected muscles. In 1987 Jean Carruthers, an ophthalmologist visiting Scott, noticed that the treatment of blepharospasm coincidentally resulted in the disappearance of the frown lines above the nose. She told her husband, a dermatologist, about this observation, and he remarked that he had been using the toxin for some time for cosmetic purposes, including the removal of these skin creases. They published a key paper in 1992, and the toxin—marketed under a variety of names such as Botox, Myobloc, and Dysport—has since found a variety of cosmetic and other uses (for 50 or so conditions, a number sure to increase), including replacing antiperspirants. The FDA approved Botox for medical uses in 1989 and for cosmetic uses in 2002. But there is a problem. The toxin has to be purified from a culture (of Clostridium botulinum), and each batch varies in strength. In order to determine the “potency” of each batch, every new batch has to be tested in mice using a lethality test from which some of the mice will die a painful death due to the paralysis of the breathing muscles, akin to asphyxiation.
Dark Twins
Authors: Weinstein Philip
Published: November 2023

He had apparently been drinking fairly heavily, and the outrageous words tumbled out: “If I have to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I’ll choose Mississippi. [I]f it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes” (LG 261). So spoke Faulkner in a New York interview with Russell Howe. It was early 1956; civil rights turmoil was approaching a boiling point. A young black woman named Autherine Lucy had been accepted into the University of Alabama. Southerners were already rioting at the prospect, but a federal court ordered the university to admit her nevertheless. Faulkner desperately wanted Lucy and the integrationists who stood behind her to back off. He was certain she would not enter the university alive. Word of his desire to speak got out, and the Reporter magazine set up an interview. Howe might been amazed to hear America’s foremost novelist—however intoxicated—speak as he did. When the interview appeared in print (in the London Sunday Times as well), Faulkner was horrified by his own words. He had seen no prior draft. He immediately wrote a letter to the Reporter explaining that the statements attributed to him were ones “which no sober man would make, nor any sane man believe” (ESPL 621). Off-balance in that charged interview moment, he felt betrayed by the mirror image of his own quoted voice. A month later, he would claim that Howe’s interview was “more a misconstruction than a misquotation” (F 618). Even though accurately reported (as Howe strenuously insisted), the views expressed in that interview were not his. Faulkner’s words, but not his thoughts. Not really Faulkner. Something more than incoherence is at work here.
In Search Of Sanctuary
Authors: Weinstein Philip
Published: November 2023

He was not unconscious the whole time. Specific details would flare into focus, then flee as swiftly as they had come. All he knew for sure was that he could not move, though he could not remember why. Where was he anyway? Sprawled out—half sitting, half lying—he pressed tentatively on his pounding head, trying to frame this moment of pure distress. An image arose in his mind: he was in New York, at his favorite hotel, the Algonquin. He had come here to complete the contracts with Random House for The Unvanquished: which meant that it was November 1937. He had come here to forget something as well—he suddenly knew what that was—but he had less luck there. Meta Carpenter was who he wanted to forget, who now appeared in his mind’s eye with aching clarity. He concentrated again, his screen of consciousness widened. Depressed—he had his reasons for it—he had been drinking steadily the night before. He had drifted from bar to bar, then seen no need to stop once he returned to his room. He vaguely remembered the sensation of booze sliding down his throat, the sought-after numbness it radiated. But how had that moment led to this one? Straining once more, he got hold of another image. The last thing he had done was to make his way into the bathroom and settle onto the toilet seat, bottle in hand. Time for one more swig before bed.
Review of the Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown
Authors: Gates Henry Louis
Published: November 2023

By 1932, when Sterling Brown published Southern Road, his first book of poems, the use of black vernacular structures in Afro-American poetry was controversial, indeed. Of all the arts, only through music had blacks invented and fully defined a tradition both widely regarded and acknowledged to be uniquely their own. Black folktales, while roundly popular, were commonly thought to be the amusing fantasies of a childlike people, whose saga and anecdotes about rabbits and bears held nothing deeper than the attention span of a child, à la Uncle Remus or even Green Pastures. And what was generally called “dialect,” the unique form of English that Afro-Americans spoke, was thought by whites to reinforce received assumptions about the Negro’s mental inferiority.
Two Lost Sonnets by Sterling A. Brown
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Ted Genoways
Published: November 2023

The emergence of Sterling A. Brown into poetic maturity resulted from a well- known dialectical engagement with the aesthetics of African American folk tradition. As Brown recounted so often, these experiential and imaginative encounters derived from a benevolent conspiracy between his theologian fa- ther, the Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown, and the eminent historian Carter G. Woodson to send the younger Brown South, to learn something about his people. Socially, this meant that at Virginia College and Seminary (1923–1926), before moving on to Lincoln University (1926–1928) and Fisk University (1928–1929), Sterling A. Brown began divesting himself of the confining black middle-class ethos of Washington, D.C., and of a New England–Ivy League sensibility instilled by formal education at Williams College (1918–1922) and Harvard University (1922–1923). Aesthetically, the move South meant an enthusiastic immersion into and embrace of the black South, especially its folk life, language, and lore—a relationship from which would come his best-known work. Lost, or at least understated, in this pursuit of a folk-based metaphysic is his point of departure.
Slim Greer, Sterling A. Brown, and the Art of Tall Tale
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar
Published: November 2023

A well-known story goes something like this: “One time a fellow was walking across the river road when he seen a hat laying in the road, so he gave it a kick and it was on a man’s head. He asked him if he needed help and he said, ‘I guess not; I’m on horseback.’ “While the story’s brevity and hyperbole deliberately understate the horseman’s predicament, they heighten his bravado, self- reliance, and courage to endure hardship. Such qualities place this improbable story at the heart of the tall tale tradition.
“A Brown Study”: Sterling Brown’s Legacy of Compassionate Connections
Authors: Callahan John F
Published: November 2023

Struggling to write about Sterling Brown, his poetry and criticism, at first I could utter only half-remembered, half-invented fragments from the many conversations we had during the fifteen years I knew him and was his friend. Hearing Sterling’s voice so tinged with sorrow songs and trainwhistle blues, I thought of William Butler Yeats, whom Sterling loved for his music and his discovery and twentieth-century redirection of Irish folklore, and whose shivering, sinewy voice Sterling had heard on a recording from the 1930s. Some lines came into my head, and like the folks who drop in unexpectedly in Sterling’s poems, they lingered on the front porch of my mind: I sought a theme and sought for it in vain. I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
A Symposium on the Life and Work of Sterling Brown: With Chet Lasell, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Paula Giddings, Sterling Stuckey, Wahneema Lubiano, and Cornel West
Authors: Smith Edited by David L
Published: November 2023

Chet lasell: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Chet Lasell, and I’m Director of Alumni Relations for Williams College. On behalf of the College, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to this symposium on the life and work of Sterling Brown. The connections between Williams and Dunbar High go back to the era of the 1920s, when there was an influx of Dunbar graduates, including Sterling Brown, to Williams. Thus began a close and fruitful relationship that continues today. We greatly appreciate the valuable assistance that Dunbar’s representatives have provided for this program today. This weekend’s events, which honor Sterling Brown and celebrate the visiting professorship established at Williams in his name, would not have been possible without the generosity and dedication of the members of our Williams black alumni network and several of our graduated classes. I also want to ac- knowledge the hard work and involvement of the members of our Washington Alumni Association and the twenty-one Williams alumni who are members of the highly effective Sterling Brown Events Committee. We sincerely appreciate all of your efforts.
Wife of a Celebrity
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

One summer day in 1857, as a freedwoman was ironing in her own front room on an alley in St. Louis, she saw a pair of white men approach. Her two daughters were busy assisting her, stoking the fire and moving the heavy irons from stove to ironing board so they would be hot enough to smooth the wrinkles from the freshly laundered clothes. At the back of the room, behind another ironing board, her elderly husband was asleep.
Winters Deep
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Six or seven people living in close proximity in the small agency house meant that, inevitably, each person learned to recognize the others’ movements by the distinctive way that a floorboard creaked, or by a sniffle or a cough. The sounds of the maidservants’ movements were muffled in their basement domain while the three upstairs dwellers’ movements—the master, the mistress, and her brother, H. N. Dillon—were amplified down into the kitchen from above. All of the house’s inhabitants were drawn into even closer proximity by their need to share the fires’ warmth.
Celestial Explorers
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Several of the summer’s steamboat tourists wished to remain at the agency. Since servants’ help was necessary to making the frontier livable, it was also the key to extending hospitality. “[A]s we are not prepared for much company, none remained but a distinguished French gentleman—who had letters to me from my friends in St. Louis,” the master wrote. The French gentleman, who was invited to stay, filled the place of houseguest after Mistress Taliaferro’s brother departed. Joseph Nicollet remained with the Taliaferros all winter. His was a friendship in which one was invited to visit and remains for the year. The master wrote: “So Monr. Nicollet has comfortable quarters in my family residence and the use of the Agency house to store and carry on his observation at his leisure.”
The Deteriorating Community
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

After the ice cleared sufficiently on the rivers, the first steamboat arrived. Agent Taliaferro arrived alone this time, bringing only his large black dog, Nero. He did not intend to winter over. This was to be his last summer at the St. Peter’s Agency, his final hurrah. He was there simply to see that the treaty was carried out and that justice was done to the Indians who had sold their land by treaty. Mrs. Taliaferro remained in Bedford, and without a lady in the household, there was no need for him to bring servants.
While the Doctor Was Away: St. Louis, 1840–1843
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

And so, harriet and her family returned to a slave state with the Emersons. No one needed to kidnap them or force them aboard the ship. All of the civilian housing in the immediate vicinity had been burned to the ground. There was nowhere else for them to go. The only settlements on the upper Mississippi were forts, like Fort Snelling, where Dred, at least, would have been regarded as the servant of another military officer. Chicago was little more than a settlement, and the other tiny river towns were hardly places for an African American family without money or farming experience. Reassigned to the Seminole War, Dr. Emerson traveled south along the river highway with the redeployment of almost the entire military contingent of the upper Mississippi Valley. He left the Scotts in St. Louis with his wife. By the end of June, he’d reached the fort at Tampa Bay. It is unlikely that either of the Scotts went to Florida during the three years the doctor served there. At first, Emerson listed Etheldred on his Florida pay slips, but he later named a different slave man. Dred’s name did not appear on the doctor’s pay slip again. Most likely, Emerson listed him in order to claim his allowance until he lined up another servant. After all, there were plenty of slaves available in Florida.
Missouri Changes Its Course
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

In march of 1852, a year after David Hall’s death, the Missouri Supreme Court decided the case and revoked the Scotts’ freedom, reversing its own precedent, which had endured almost half a century. The Scotts had believed themselves free for more than two years, relying on that longstanding precedent. Now the state high court changed the rules. It would no longer honor the Missouri Compromise in its courts, to recognize residence in free territory as grounds for freedom in Missouri.
Aftermath and Epilogue
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Like the comet that lit the skies of the Northern hemisphere that month, the decision riveted the nation’s attention. The Dred Scott case was the headline story in newspapers across the country, with reaction to it splitting the North and the South. But from the Scotts’ vantage point the St. Louis newspapers’ coverage of the story affected them most directly. The family’s newfound notoriety made them the subject of a public curiosity that they could have never imagined. A series of articles in the Missouri Republican asked the same perplexing question, “Who owned Dred Scott?” From Massachusetts, the extremely embarrassed Congressman Chaffee disclaimed having any knowledge of the matter. Even Dred wondered who his master was after the ruling. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated stated, “He is anxious to know who owns him, being ignorant whether he is the property of Mrs. Chaffee or Mr. Sanford.”
Introduction
Authors: Walton Charles
Published: November 2023

By spring 1793, as France edged toward the Terror, even Tom Paine’s patience with free speech began wearing thin. In a letter to Georges Danton, deputy to the French National Convention and founding member of the Committee of Public Safety, Paine expressed his alarm about the relentless insults and slander plaguing revolutionary politics. A deputy himself, Paine urged Danton to take repressive measures. “Calumny,” this champion of civil liberties insisted, “is a species of treachery that ought to be punished as well as any other kind of treachery.”
Policing the Moral Limits Public Spirit, Surveillance, and the Remaking of Mœurs
Authors: Walton Charles
Published: November 2023

In the two and a half weeks between the time her father was fired and the time he was recalled and returned from Bâle, France, wrote Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, fell apart. The future Madame de Staël, in her letter to the Emperor of Sweden of August 1789, recounted, “My father [Jacques Necker, First Minister of Finances] returned on July 27 to find authorities destroyed or confused with new ones . . . an old nation fallen into a state of infancy rather than youth, a corrupt people clamoring for American institutions, insisting on freedom before establishing public spirit.”
The Bother of Balance
Authors: Katz Martin
Published: November 2023

I hated writing this chapter. Some thoughts about balance between partners must be included in a book such as this, but since the performer cannot be in two places at once, helpful guidance can at best take the form of unscientific suggestions and intuitive guesswork. This text has attempted so far to be analytical and objective with its advice, but counsel about good balance can defy that goal so easily.
Guidelines for Teaching Artistry
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

Pedagogy. It’s a terrible word, isn’t it? Sounds vaguely illegal, probably immoral. Etymologically, it comes from the name for the slave in ancient Rome who led the citizens’ children (only the males, of course) to and from school and kept an eye on their learning in general. I wasn’t thrilled to learn our beloved teaching practice derived from slavery, but I have come to think of our lineage as the nameless thousands who have served to lead people to and from learning encounters, and kept a general eye on their learning welfare. We must always remember that they, the learners, do the learning; we are the guides, and we watch over their learning health and progress.
What Does “Better” Look Like?
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

How did you learn to ride a bike? You may not recall your learning process, but here are a few things you probably didn’t do along the way. You didn’t get on, ride a few yards, get off, and then have an adult give you a long verbal analysis of how you had performed. You didn’t read an instruction booklet on bike riding. You didn’t even talk with your friends and figure it out in the tree house or your friend’s bedroom. You certainly didn’t do it at school to please the teacher.
Art for Art’s Sake or for the School’s Sake?
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

Music and art were not officially recognized as legitimate subjects of study in American public schools until about 1900. The decision to include the arts in the curriculum was supported by two main lines of reasoning. One might be called the inherent, or intrinsic, argument (art for art’s sake), and the other the instrumental argument (art for the sake of some other value, like workplace preparedness or improved test scores).
The Information Portal
Authors: Klingberg Torkel
Published: November 2023

Let us return to Linda. There she is, sitting at her desk in her open-plan office, surrounded by chatting colleagues and ringing phones. Her desk is littered with reports, articles, and brochures. On her computer screen is a Web page displaying an inventory of hard disks from which she has to select one for purchase. To the right are small animated advertisements for bargain trips to the West Indies. A little icon along the bottom edge of the screen reminds her that she has not yet emptied her inbox, and her cell phone announces with a happy pling that she has just received a text message. What choice should she make? Where should she even direct her gaze, and what elements of her visual field should she take in, process, understand, and think about? Where should she direct her attention? Attention is the portal through which the information flood reaches the brain. Directing your attention at something is analogous to selecting information, as you give priority to only a small part of all the information available.
The Everyday Exercising of Our Mental Muscles
Authors: Klingberg Torkel
Published: November 2023

When you wake up in the morning and start to plan your day with its meetings, lunch, travel, and chores, you are doing a mental jigsaw puzzle, the various pieces of which have to be kept in your working memory. You then use your working memory to keep a mental list of the items you need to pack and to remember each one as you look for it. A little while later, as you read the paper on the subway, you are using your working memory to retain information from the first word of each sentence to the last—a task that is particularly demanding on working memory if you have ended up beside a group of teenagers having an animated discussion about yesterday’s soccer game or last Saturday’s party. And so we go, using our working memory throughout the day. Should we not therefore be constantly exercising our working memory so that it progressively improves from one day to the next? The human brain is nature’s most complex organ.
Posture, Breathing, and Support
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

Much of this information will seem obvious (and probably should seem obvious to anyone who has studied the oboe for some time)— “Oh, I knew that. “ But when oboe playing sounds bad or feels bad, the remedy is rarely found in the examination of detail or in the acquisition of tricks. Instead, some basic fundamental technique of playing either is defective or has been forgotten. There are no tricks. My teacher, John de Lancie, used to say, “You really don’t need to know very many things to play the oboe. “ (Left unsaid was just how long and difficult the road to this little bit of knowledge would be.) Improvement on the oboe depends on a thorough and constant effort to master the very basics of playing the instrument—the “simple “ things you were meant to learn from your first teacher in your first few lessons. Over time, oboe playing can become so automatic, so habitual, that a periodic selfexamination is worthwhile. Often you aren’t doing what you think you are. In a moment of frustration, after trying for weeks to improve the matter, I once asked a very tense and contorted student, “Doesn’t that feel awful? “ “No, “ came the reply. “It feels like playing the oboe. “ So do look at yourself and your students and make sure that what seems normal and familiar is also efficient. Efficiency and ease are the key words in this discussion. But they do not mean that oboe playing should be lazy. Playing the oboe can actually be quite strenuous, and oboe players should work hard, but every morsel of energy expended should be audible in the musical result.
Embouchure and Other Matters of Tone Production
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

Three factors regulate the quality (dynamic, tone color, etc.) and/or the pitch of the tone: air, reed placement, and embouchure formation. The basic ground rules are: the air should be energetic; as little of the reed as is practical should be placed in the mouth; and the embouchure tension should be minimal. After reading the preceding chapter to make sure that the air production is healthy, adjusting the rest of the toneproduction chain should be much more effective.
Professional Behavior and Deportment
Authors: Schuring Martin
Published: November 2023

Music is a difficult business. Many players compete for a small number of positions. Yet, this circumstance does not and should not deter legions of young people every year from applying to music schools for study. Each of these young people has a dream—usually to play in a professional symphony orchestra—that will probably not be realized. But it is not such an unlikely dream—it is not like dreaming of walking on the moon; it is like wanting to play major league baseball or to sing on Broadway. These are ambitious goals, but hundreds of people do sing on Broadway and hundreds do play in the major leagues. So the difference between the music profession and many other professions is that the music profession really only has room for good people. The student’s job is to become one of those good people.
Introduction
Authors: Shapiro Alan , Burian Peter
Published: November 2023

Tragedy, as everyone knows, tells “sad stories of the death of kings,” but 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 way that theme resonates with the deepest fears of our own age, this is one of the relatively few Greek tragedies that regularly finds its way to the stage. 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 women who survive the fall of Troy, and the degradation of the victors, shown by the Greeks’ reckless and ultimately self-destructive behavior. Trojan Women gains special relevance, of course, in times of war. Today, we seem to need this play more than ever.

Let us begin, however, by considering this extraordinary document of human suffering and resilience in the context of its own times. We know that Euripides competed at the City Dionysia of 415 with a trilogy of Trojan tragedies and won second prize—almost tantamount to losing, because only three playwrights competed in the tragic competition.
. . . And Occasional Visitors from Outer Space
Authors: Officer Charles , Page Jake
Published: November 2023

All it takes is a pair of binoculars to see that the Moon is a pretty inhospitable place, but a quick survey also suggests that it was even more inhospitable in the past. Its surface, and in particular its highlands, is pocked by craters great and small. There are craters within craters, bespeaking devastating events about which astronomers still argue. Clavius, for example, the largest crater visible to us, is 140 miles in diameter and is itself pocked by more than a half-dozen good-sized craters. Some of these craters were probably the result of major volcanic eruptions, but some are surely the result of a titanic battering by the debris that was zipping around in the Solar System when it was forming. Since there never was any water or any atmosphere to speak of on the Moon, probably not much plate tectonic movement, and little erosion, all of these giant pockmarks remain. It would seem unreasonable to imagine that the Earth—the larger of this two-planet system—was not subject to the same disturbances in its youth as the Moon. Of course, the Moon still is struck by debris, but far less so than formerly, now that the Sun’s gravity (among other physical forces) has swept up the neighborhood, so to speak, and imposed a more orderly pattern on this tiny region of the universe.