bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Reception Deception
Authors: Miller Toby
Published: November 2023

Eve Tushnet was editor-in-chief of The Yale Free Press in 1999. Reflecting on her leaving year’s reception of Gilda, Charles Vidor’s 1946 film noir, she wrote, “Gilda tries to get her dignity back through sex, Johnny through power—the same trophies many of us seek at Yale, the former on couches and the latter in classrooms.” Tushnet, who went on to be a conservative Catholic-conversa blogger, understood the importance of a materially situated uptake of texts. So should we. I take her illuminating remark on ruling-class methods and mores, titillation and training, as a touchstone to criticize what I am calling the “reception deception”—namely, dominant investigations of cultural effects. In its place I propose a hybrid of political economy and ethnography, borrowing, inter alia, from several essays in this volume.
The ABCs of Classic Hollywood
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as Classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli once gave away its secret: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.” How would we go about finding those things? What method would enable us to retrieve them, and by doing so, to understand better how Hollywood films got made? The ABCs of Classic Hollywood attempts to answer those questions by looking closely at four movies from the 1930-1945 period when the American Studio System reached the peak of its economic and cultural power: Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, and Meet Me in St. Louis. To avoid the predictable generalizations that have plagued film studies, Ray works with the movies’ details, treated as initially mysterious, but promising, clues: e.g., Grand Hotel’s coffin and room assignments; The Philadelphia Story’s diving board and license plate PA55; The Maltese Falcon’s clocks and missing bed; Meet Me in St. Louis’s violinist and ribboned cat. By producing at least 26 entries for each of these films (one for every letter of the alphabet), Ray demonstrates that a movie’s details contain the record of the work and ideas that produced them, the endless negotiation between commercial efficiency and seductive enchantment. In our unconscious memories, we recognize something in the movies, something tantalizing and just out of reach. This book unlocks those memories, making them conscious and explicit, so that they will help us understand the most powerful and important storytelling system ever designed.
Dachshund
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Grand Hotel’s choice of pet confirms how even peripheral objects contribute to a movie’s meaning. For Americans, the dachshund’s exaggeratedly silly appearance and lapdog size soften the Baron’s character, making even this jewel thief seem less threatening than threatened. To measure this effect, one has simply to imagine replacing the dachshund with another appropriately German breed—Doberman pinscher, rottweiler, German shepherd—whose more menacing aspects and connotations would convert the Baron from dandy to predator.
Errors
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Hollywood cinema’s continuity system developed as a means of managing the hundreds of choices involved in every stage of the filmmaking process. That system addressed itself primarily to two crucial sites: the contents of individual shots and the articulation between them. For individual shot decisions (known as mise-en-scène), mainstream commercial cinema settled on centering, using various devices to keep narratively important elements prominent in the frame. Typically, this process involves framing and character positioning: in Grand Hotel, for example, Garbo’s scenes keep her spatially centered, rarely allowing her to dissolve into the mise-en-scène’s background. Designed to overcome early movies’ illegibility, centering could also work more subtly, especially with sound: by merely speaking, for example, even a marginalized character would at least temporarily command the viewer’s attention.
I Want to Be Alone
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

This famous line, forever associated with Garbo, occurs for the first time in Grand Hotel, where its effect demonstrates star-acting’s dependence on the viewer’s extratextual knowledge. By 1932, Garbo’s aloofness—in part her natural disposition, but also a persona carefully nurtured by MGM—had become central to her performances. Merely by playing them, Garbo could now endow her characters with a world-weary remoteness requiring little narrative motivation. Garbo, in other words, like almost all great movie stars, had become a shorthand, an extraordinarily efficient way of rendering a person, a situation, an atmosphere.
Overhead Shots
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Grand Hotel opens with one of its most memorable images, an overhead shot of the hotel switchboard, the depersonalized operators (the film never shows their faces) busily routing incoming and outgoing calls. This overhead angle, unsponsored by any diegetic motivation (it issues from no character’s point of view), will recur intermittently throughout the movie. The shots of the circular staircase and lobby, the image of Garbo removing her ballet costume, the view of Kringelein’s drunken return to his room—taken together, these moments indicate Goulding’s taste for, and Thalberg’s tolerance of, design over plot.
Questions
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, I suggested that the surreal- ist game of “irrational enlargement” might offer a tool for thinking about classic Hollywood. The game asks questions of the sort expressly forbidden by New Criticism, whose paradigmatic example of an improper question was, “What did Hamlet study in Wittenberg before the play begins?”—i.e., a question unaddressed by the play. Hollywood films, however, never provide answers for all of the questions they imply.
Seduction
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In S/Z, Barthes demonstrated how an apparently innocent description of Sarrasine’s visits to La Zambinella’s performances might be replaced by a structurally identical erotic anecdote. “This operation,” Barthes suggested, “is based not on a lexicon of symbols but on systematic cohesion, a congruence of relationships” that appear in rereadings. Similarly, Grand Hotel’s dictation scene between Flaemmchen and Preysing provides an analogue of the sexual-act-interrupted- by-impotence.
War Souvenirs
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

When “the chauffeur” interrupts the Baron instructing Adolphus on the rules of courtship, the camera focuses on the desk and its significant objects: a kaiser helmet (used by German troops in World War I), a model airplane, and a miniature artillery cannon. These souvenirs, along with the Baron’s wristwatch (which the war had popularized), are what Barthes called semes, “flickers of meaning” that “appear to float freely, to form a galaxy of trifling data.” As S/Z demonstrated, they work collectively to create a character, whose proper name will act “as a magnet field for the semes” traversing it. Casablanca’s introduction of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) offers another ideal example. While temporarily withholding Rick’s face, the shot defines him through objects whose meaning repeated use has made clear: The champagne glass and cigarette suggest both sophistication and jadedness, the solo chess game (an intellectual’s solitaire) cleverness and a solitude simultaneously proud and melancholy.
Yellow Room
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Grand Hotel often mentions what Flaemmchen calls “the funny yellow room where they dance.” There, strange events take place: the drinking of absinthe and Louisiana Flips, an affirmation of love’s existence, dance lessons, attempts at murder, solicitation of a prostitute (even this partial summary will suggest the movie’s proximity to the world of directors like Pabst). The Yellow Room’s name also invokes an issue central to film history. In one of his most famous essays, André Bazin argued that the critics who regretted the coming of sound had failed to understand “the myth of total cinema,” whose ideal had always been an asymptotic advance toward reality’s perfect reproduction. If the movies’ ontology involved, as Bazin thought, “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image,” then the advent of technological developments like sound and color warranted celebration. Hollywood, however, conflated “realism” with an “invisible style” that hid not only the process of filmmaking, but also the gap between the screen and the world. But the Yellow Room’s name confounds the goals of both realism and stylistic self-effacement: in a black-and-white movie, the room’s “yellowness” calls attention to the cinema’s technological immaturity, its inability to render completely its own chosen subjects. Given the name, a viewer cannot help inferring that an actual Yellow Room exists somewhere, and this is not it.
A in Katharine Hepburn (after Roland Barthes’s S/Z)
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Katharine Hepburn’s individuality appears not only in her screen persona, but also in the spelling of her name. The opening K defies countless Catherines, including several English and French queens and two Russian empresses. Nevertheless, the K better represents Hepburn’s characteristic angularity than would the curvy C. More interesting is the uncommon vowel choice for Katharine’s second syllable, where the usual e gets replaced by the eccentric a, inherited from her mother, a women’s rights and birth-control activist. Since this syllable is silent, its purpose remains symbolic and aesthetic, offering the suggestion of several connotations: androgyny, achievement, Academy Awards (12 nominations, 6 wins), A for the highest grade.
Hepburn
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

By now, the story is well known: reeling from being denounced as “box-office poison” by Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners of America, Hepburn retreated to her parents’ house in Connecticut, where, nearing 30, she feared her movie career was over. She continued to seek the part of Scarlett O’Hara, but would get nowhere on that front. Suddenly, play- wright Philip Barry, whose earlier Broadway hits (1923’s You and I and 1928’s Holiday) had only led to a string of failures, appeared with the rough idea for two different plays. The first, about a suicidal diplomat, Hepburn quickly rejected, but the second was a marital comedy whose heroine Barry had based both on his Philadelphia socialite friend Hope Montgomery Scott and on Hepburn herself. Hepburn retired with Barry to his Maine summer house, where they worked on the play together. As Sheridan Morley observes, “Few actresses in the entire world history of theater can ever have had such close attention from a playwright.” George Jean Nathan detailed Barry’s method: He spent two long months observing at close quarters, recording carefully every attractive gesture she made, every awkwardly graceful movement of her body, every odd little quirk of her head and every effective dart of her eye, then to incorporate them all into the play he was writing for her. A line was interpolated to allow her to swing her lithe figure across the stage; another was so contrived that a toss of her lovely brown hair would pictorially embellish it; still another was so framed that it would permit her, while seated, relevantly to cross her knees and display her pretty legs to the critical professors out front. If her voice was found unable to cope properly with a line, it was altered until she could handle it nicely.
Kittredge
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Brendan Gill once identified Philip Barry with a group of Irish- American writers, including Eugene O’Neill, John O’Hara, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, “drawn to the rich and well-born.” Each of the four had Ivy League connections: O’Neill and Fitzgerald attended Princeton, where O’Hara ended up living; Barry graduated from Yale, for which O’Hara had so longed that he kept scrapbooks detailing the exploits of his imaginary class. Barry even named Kittredge for a Harvard English professor, famous at the time.
Mac the Night watchman
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

“Mac the nightwatchman is a prince among men,” Tracy declares, and Dexter offers even higher praise: “You could marry Mac the night watchman, and I’d cheer for you.” Despite his minuscule role, undeveloped character, and single brief appearance, Mac seems The Philadelphia Story’s most respected character. And yet, neither Philip Barry nor George Cukor appears especially interested in this walk-on part, played with a slight Scottish accent by the uncredited David Clyde. Why, then, does the movie repeatedly refer to him? Mac is an alibi, providing assurance that character, not wealth, determines a person’s quality. Although Tracy has contemplated marrying George, though she has entertained having an affair with Mike, she ultimately marries Dexter, thereby defying Ellie Andrews of It Happened One Night and, indeed, the whole screwball comedy genre. Tracy’s decision represents the genre’s retreat from socioeconomic to marital conflicts. Instead of bridging social classes, the union of Tracy and Dexter un- ashamedly reunites old money with old money. Mac, however, offers the continuing promise of a classless, utopian American society, and thus, he enables The Philadelphia Story to avoid the scandal of snobbery. Only Mac’s “princeliness,” the means of displacement from class to character, permits George to be “beneath” Tracy.
Red
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Although Katharine Hepburn’s father called her “Redtop,” she has been alternately described as having “red,” “coppery-reddish,” “reddish-brown,” or “auburn” hair. Pinpointing the exact shade proves difficult. Hepburn didn’t make a color film until 1951’s The African Queen, when she had reached her mid-40s, and her hair had begun to turn gray. Even the promotional posters for Holiday (1938), another Barry-Cukor-Grant-Hepburn production, offer contradictory images of a coppery-reddish and an auburn-haired Hepburn, dueling representations repeated by The Philadelphia Story’s ads.
Spy
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Sidney Kidd’s Dime and Spy magazines, with their celebrity photo spreads and “horrible, snide, corkscrew English” (“No hunter of buckshot in the rear is Cagey Crafty Connor”), are obvious parodies of Henry Luce’s Time and Life, whose syntax would again be imitated by Citizen Kane’s newsreel. Dime goes unmentioned by the movie, but Spy (read: Life) initiates the plot, prompting a gathering of characters and romantic confusion worthy of Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, made only a few months earlier. Nevertheless, Spy caused Philip Barry trouble. On the one hand, Kidd’s blackmail provides the motivation for introducing Mike and Liz into the Lord household while, at least in the film version, also enabling Dexter’s return. But, on the other, integrating that story into the narrative of the Tracy-Dexter reunion was a problem. “As he started the second act,” Barbara Leaming reports, “Barry lost track of the original story about a reporter.” The movie version of The Philadelphia Story betrays Barry’s struggle.
Two Years Later
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

This title card, appearing after the prologue’s Tracy-Dexter fight, represents the movie’s only obvious concession to the demands of temporal discontinuity. Like almost all classic Hollywood films, The Philadelphia Story relies on radical abridgement made legible: its events, if played out in real time, would require far more than the movie’s 112 minutes. Here is the basic structure: women”) prevents that need, and its solution, from seeming purely mechanical (the weakness of the “well-made play”). At the same moment, the narrative’s speed (things are coming to a head) averts any objections to the regressive image of “a woman’s place.” Thus, the typewriter represents The Philadelphia Story’s economy: by acting in cahoots, the movie’s narrative and ideologi- cal tactics render each other invisible.
UnansweredTelephone
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

To suggest narrative’s interference with what he most valued about the cinema, its capacity for producing photogénie, Jean Epstein complained, “The telephone rings. All is lost.” The Philadelphia Story offers one solution to that problem: don’t answer it. Tracy ignores the ringing in her bedroom. In doing so, however, she triggers the plot’s denouement, thereby confirming that Hollywood cinema can almost never escape a telephone’s importuning. George will arrive to track Tracy down, and the resulting confrontations will lead her back to Dexter.
X
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

While X could represent the cinema’s rapid vulgarization (The Philadelphia Story’s Tracy Lord became pornography’s “Tracy Lords”), here are other possibilities. The Roman numeral for 10, X indicates the number of primary characters in The Philadelphia Story: Seth Lord Margaret Lord Tracy Lord Dinah Lord Uncle Willie C. K. Dexter Haven George Kittredge Mike Connor Liz Imbrie Sidney Kidd 152 The ABCs of Classic Hollywood Furthermore, as the 24th letter of the alphabet, it equals the number of hours before the wedding, during which time, a series of reversals (X-like crossings) will occur. X stands for the kiss Tracy shares with Mike, while also indicating the erasure of financé Kittredge. The algebraic X, the unknown quantity (whom will Tracy marry?), finds its own solution: X marks the spot, as Tracy reunites with eX- husband Dexter, the only character bearing an X in his name.
Bogart
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The favorable early line on John Huston derived almost entirely from two sources: James Agee’s 1950 Life essay, “Undirectable Director,” and Lillian Ross’s New Yorker articles on the making of The Red Badge of Courage, published as Picture in 1952. Both pieces were essentially puffs, with Agee’s so gushing that it would quickly win its author the chance to collaborate with Huston on The African Queen: Most of the really good popular art produced anywhere comes from Hollywood, and much of it bears Huston’s name. To put it conservatively [?!], there is nobody under fifty at work in movies, here or abroad, who can excel Huston in talent, inventiveness, intransigence, achievement or promise.
Clocks
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

To what extent can a movie withhold information without confusing its viewers? Although Glenn Todd has demonstrated that the events in Hammett’s novel take place over five days (6–10 December 1928), Huston’s film confines the same action to four, with the conclusion in Spade’s office occurring at dawn on the fourth day. Since the movie must compress almost 72 hours of story time into 100 minutes, it relies on continual ellipses, whose exact durations often remain uncertain. The movie’s temporal demarcations become increasingly ghostly, the result of a calculated untethering of events from normal routine: Spade eats no meals, his newspapers have no dates, and the camera keeps his wall calendar just out of legible range.
Passports
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Discovered by Spade, Joel Cairo’s three passports—Greek, French, and British—suggest the character’s connections to nineteenth-century fiction, when the burgeoning European metropolises of London and Paris had begun to render every identity suspect (see Balzac and Dickens). Cairo, of course, is a crook, and his proliferating passports merely fill in that portrait. Determining his origins, imagine the hermetically sealed space of The Maltese Falcon as one large theatrical set, the Swing Your Lady poster seems like a door in the stage’s rear wall, suddenly flung open to reveal the actual world. The very lack of attention accorded the poster achieves another effect. As Barthes points out, when real historical characters (or objects) get introduced into a fiction obliquely, in passing, “their modesty, like a lock between two levels of water, equalizes novel and history.” After The Maltese Falcon’s success, Warners would exploit such “locks,” casting Bogart in a series of World War II adventures (Across the Pacific, Casablanca, Action in the North Atlantic, Sahara, Passage to Marseilles, To Have and Have Not), the first of which, 1942’s Across the Pacific, concerns the Panama Canal.
Spade’s Bed
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In the movies, subtle, unexplained alterations in established decors suggest that reality itself is being rearranged every time the camera turns away. Hitchcock’s North by Northwest shows how this unsettling effect can be deliberately produced: returning with the police to the house where he has been held down and plied with alcohol, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) finds that bourbon stains have mysteriously vanished from a sofa, and a liquor cabinet has become a bookcase. In The Maltese Falcon, such changes are smaller, probably uncalculated, but insidiously disturbing.
Zero
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

At The Maltese Falcon’s center, recurring nothingness: a worthless forgery, an inconclusive plot, a barren band of rogues, a murderer who calls herself “LeBlanc,” but whose “real” name begins with the fatal zero: O’Shaughnessy. Early in his career, Samuel Dashiell Hammett had written under the name “Peter Collinson,” a pseud- onym derived from “Peter Collins,” slang for a nobody. Later in life, he went by “Dash Hammett” (–Hammett?), a nickname suggesting an emptiness incapable of replacement by any letter. What is an “empty” event, one without referent, existing solely for the purposes of being recorded? We call such an event “a movie.
Nature, Mission, And Structure Of The Church
Authors: Dulles Avery Cardinal
Published: November 2023

There exists a general impression that Vatican II accomplished a major revolution in ecclesiology. John O’Malley credits it for achieving a reform by transformation or revolution rather than by adjustment or development; Gregory Baum holds that its documents reflect a ‘‘Blondelian shift’’ from extrinsicism toward experience and immanence. Richard P. McBrien speaks of ‘‘Copernican’’ and ‘‘Einsteinian’’ revolutions that overcame the unhealthy ecclesiocentrism of the past. George Lindbeck finds in the council documents a mixture of classical and progressive elements but holds that the old is to be understood in terms of the new rather than vice versa.
The Challenges Of Reform And Renewal Within Catholic Tradition
Authors: Lamb Matthew L
Published: November 2023

The introduction closed with the question of whether Vatican II would go down in history as a genuinely reforming council or fail at this task. Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized that the council will contribute to a genuine renewal of the Church and the world only when its teachings are understood and appropriated within the two millennial tradition of the Catholic faith. He spelled out the nature of a Catholic hermeneutics of reform within tradition by distinguishing between inevitable discontinuities of historical situations that are met by a profound continuity of the principles informing the truth of Catholic teaching down the ages. As he remarked in the address quoted at the beginning of this book, ‘‘It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists.’’ This is very different from the hermeneutics of discontinuity, which distorts the event of the council by privileging only what is new in its texts, as if the textual references to the continuity of deeper theological principles in past teachings are no more than compromises aimed at getting votes for the new.
Sphere of Application
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Article 1 sets out the general scope of the Convention. The Convention governs international contracts for the sale of goods. The Convention only applies to the sale of “goods.”Since a sale is between sellers and buyers, the Convention does not govern the rights of third parties. These rights will be governed by other law. Other related issues to the transaction would also be governed by the applicable domestic law. Moreover, issues outside the actual contract between the parties
Chapter I-General Provisions
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Article 25 defines the concept of a fundamental breach, which is a specific type of breach that may be committed by either the buyer or the seller. A fundamental breach is a breach of contract that is of such a degree to cause objectively the other party’s loss of the main benefit of the contract. The loss must have been foreseeable or should have been foreseeable by the breaching party. Article 25 does not distinguish among the various types of breach such as nondelivery, nonpayment, impossibility, or delay. The general effect of a fundamental breach is that if one party to the contract commits a fundamental breach, the other party may “avoid” the contract and be released from any further contractual obligations instead of continuing performance and seeking damages alone. The question of whether any particular breach constitutes a fundamental breach is fact specific and will depend on the effect the breach has on the nonbreaching party.
Obligations of the Seller
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Article 30 is the first in a series of articles that set out the seller’s obligations.628 The simple rule that Article 30 puts forth is that “[t]he seller must deliver the goods, hand over any documents relating to them and transfer the property in the goods, as required by the contract and this Convention.” This article must be read in conjunction with the other articles that give more specific guidance for the seller’s obligations. Therefore, the seller’s obligation to deliver is also governed by Articles 31 (seller’s delivery obligation), 32 (delivery in case of a carrier), and 33 (date of delivery); the seller’s obligations regarding documents is also governed by Article 34 (documents). Moreover, although Article 30 requires the seller to transfer the property rights in the goods, what constitutes a transfer of the property is outside the scope629 of the Convention and must be determined by other law.
Chapter IV-Passing of Risk
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Because international sales are fraught with risk, the casualty will almost always be covered by insurance. Even so, the parties may differ on the issue of who should salvage the goods, press claims against the insurer, and supplement any deficiency in coverage. Risk of loss is governed by Chapter IV (Articles 66–70) of the Convention. Under Article 66, once the risk passes, the buyer must pay for the goods. Article 67 addresses risk of loss in shipment and transhipment contracts.1039 Article 68 is a special provision to deal with goods sold in transit. Article 69 governs contracts where a bailee holds the goods, the seller transports the goods, the buyer is to come for the goods, and all destination contracts. Article 70 specifies the effects of breach on risk of loss.1040
III. Setoff
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Setoff When two parties owe each other an obligation, this rule allows mutual deduction of the respective obligations, and the obligations are discharged up to the amount of the lesser obligation. This avoids the need for each party to perform its obligation separately. The effect of the set off is to discharge the obligations. If the obligations are not equal, the effect of the set-off is to discharge the obligations to the amount of the lesser obligation. To have the right of set-off, the Principles require that each party owes the other party an obligation. The condition that the obligations must be mutual can give rise to a problem if one of the parties assigns its obligation to a third party. The non-assigning party can nevertheless set off its obligation if the right of set-off existed prior to the assigning party notifying the obligor.
IV. Limitation Periods
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

The CISG does not contain a limitations period. However, UNCITRAL has promulgated a companion convention: the Convention on the Limitation Period in the International Sale of Goods. This convention was adopted by a diplomatic conference on June 12, 1974. It establishes uniform rules governing the period of time within which legal proceedings arising from an international sales contract must be commenced. The Convention was amended by a Protocol adopted in 1980 by the diplomatic conference that adopted the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods in order to harmonize the two Conventions. Both the original Convention and the Convention as amended by the Protocol entered into force on August 1, 1988. This convention has not been nearly as successful as the CISG, and only 27 countries have ratified the original Convention and 19 the amended version.
Introduction and Backdrop
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

Albert Einstein once remarked that “the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Indeed, we appear to live in a cosmos that can be described or approximated by compact mathematical expressions and physical laws.
1700–1800
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

Where should we look to discover the principles that underpin reality? In Einstein’s view, while facts reside in the world, principles reside in the mind.… Einstein insisted that great theories are those that explain the most facts from the least number of principles.… The simpler the theory, the less it will look anything like the world we see. The ultimate view of science, he believed, is to find one all-encompassing, self-evident principle … from which the whole of reality can be deduced.
Final Comments on the Beauty of Mathematics in Science
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

The laws in this book are monuments to the progress of humankind, just as the Apollo spacecrafts were a testament to our quest for the stars, and the discovery of extrasolar planets was a milestone in our endless hunt through the heavens. Although these laws may be with us for as long as humans exist, we will understand and view these laws differently with the passage of time and the increase in our knowledge. For example, the discussion of Fourier’s Law of Heat Conduction noted that Fourier wrote and developed his theory in terms of “caloric theory,” an incorrect notion that changes in temperature are due to the transfer of an invisible and weightless fluid called caloric. Nevertheless, Fourier’s Law is correct and in agreement with experiments, even if Fourier’s idea of the nature of heat was incorrect.
Siren Calls: Consumer Revolution and the Body Beautiful in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust
Authors: Edmunds Susan
Published: November 2023

As we turn from Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio to Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, the horizon shifts from socialist to consumer revolution: where Olsen planned, in the projected ending of her novel, to draw Mazie and Will Holbrook into a revolutionary struggle touched off by agricultural workers in California’s Imperial Valley, West concludes his 1939 novel with a Hollywood mob scene in which “whole families” (CW 411) of consumers, frustrated by the stars’ delayed arrival at a world premiere, turn their pent-up sexual and murderous energies on one another. Tod Hackett, the modernist painter who serves as the novel’s protagonist, meets in the body of this mob both a threat to his own existence and a confirmation of the apocalyptic vision contained in his uncompleted masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” From the start, Tod has been fascinated by the “old” and “middle-aged” (CW 411) consumers who have “come to California to die” (CW 420). He identifies them as “cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious” (CW 420), and includes them in his painting as “torch-bearers” (CW 347) marching “behind [the] banner” of “a super ‘Dr. Know-All Pierce-All’ “ “in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land” (CW 420).
The Arbitral Award
Authors: Madsen Finn
Published: November 2023

The section opens by establishing what is meant by an arbitral award.1 The definition has been made in order to render possible the enforcement—in accordance with the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards—of as many decisions as possible made by arbitral tribunals in Sweden. The Convention addresses only foreign arbitral awards and contains no detailed definition of the term.2 The preparatory works contain a warning that it is not certain that all decisions in accordance with the Act, which according to the Act’s terminology are designated as “arbitral awards,” are to be regarded as awards under the New York Convention.
“The True Palladium of Liberty”: Federalists, Jeffersonians, and the Second Amendment
Authors: Cornell Saul
Published: November 2023

The first systematic effort to explore the role of the Second Amendment in America’s new constitutional system was undertaken by the learned Virginian judge St. George Tucker. These observations were made in a series of lectures at the College of William and Mary, where Tucker held the prestigious chair in Law and Police. Tucker believed that The Federalist provided a superb analysis of the theoretical foundations of the Constitution, but he lamented that “Publius” had not treated the defects of the Constitution candidly, something that Tucker resolved to do in his lectures. The other impetus for organizing his thoughts about the Constitution in a systematic manner was the recent adoption of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Tucker believed it was vital to provide his students with a detailed guide to the new law of the land.
Implications of an Appellate Body for Investment Disputes from a Developing Country Point of View
Authors: Qureshi1 Asif H , Khan Shandana Gulzar
Published: November 2023

Most successful judicial systems are accompanied by an appellate process. However, the need for accommodating such a mechanism in disputes processed through arbitration systems has not necessarily been apparent. Thus hitherto, many of the U.S. free trade agreements which dealt with investment issues did not include appellate processes to follow the standard arbitral facility that is included in the agreements. In an international investment system wherein an external conflict resolution system is shopped into (for example, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)) as and when needed, the introduction of an appellate system in ICSID with potential “precedential” consequences for other bilateral investment systems poses interesting challenges—including a sub-set from a developing country perspective.
Lordly Encounters—and Others
Authors: Hawley John Stratton
Published: November 2023

It seemed that thickly knotted thunderclouds Were raining passels of arrows on the army, gorging the great stream of battle— Archer clouds of every hue with lightning daggers in their hands, And a roar of kettledrums, conches, and battledrums screaming elephants and horses. A dusty mist flew in all ten directions and a torrent of javelins and spears As Vasudev’s two sons showed themselves, hid themselves, brilliant moon and sun. Flotsam of elephants littered the shore of a river flowing deep with blood— Bows were its waves; chariot wheels, its whirlpools; its water creatures, the torsos of warriors; Banners and standards and ropes to hoist the flags lay broken like trees uprooted on the banks, But totally fearless in that river of conflict the hero of the Y ādavs played. Palaces were emptied as kings laid claim to the heavenly mansions that awaited them In the instant that Hari, treasury of mercy, removed the griefs of earth. Mathura’s citizens were seized with happiness to see the city’s siege undone, For the Lord of Sūr had vanquished Jarāsandh and come to his rightful home. Today, my friend, let your eyes fill with the splendor of Hari’s chariot. The thirst to behold it makes people perform sacrifices, practice yoga and penance, and take on pilgrim vows. See the fine paintings inlaid with wondrous jewels, the whisks and the banner fluttering in the wind And the white umbrella, which rises above it like the moon in the east on a full-moon night. The darkness of his body, his lovely golden clothes, the crown on his head, and the garland on his chest Seem lightning and thunderclouds, sun and stars all assembled at a single time.
The Poet’s Petition and Praise
Authors: Hawley John Stratton
Published: November 2023

How many days have I lost ignoring Hari? My tongue has tasted the slandering of others— seeds sown to weigh down future lives. My wardrobe has been stocked with clean and lovely clothes; every part of my body massaged; Forehead mark in place, I was a leader among men, but I made myself a slave to the senses. Then it dawned on me. I shook with the fear of death. I even started whining to Brahma¯ and the gods. Poor wretched Sūr! Where does it all lead? To a belly full, and once it’s full, to sleep. Ma¯dhav, please, control that cow. Night and day she wanders over paths that are no paths, too elusive to be caught, And starved, so starved—why can nothing fill her? She’s stripped the Veda-tree of all its leaves. From the eighteen jars she’s drunk Pura¯n. a-water and still there’s no slaking her thirst. Place the six kinds of taste before her and she’ll sniff around for more, Eating what’s unhealthy, food she shouldn’t touch, things the tongue can scarcely describe. Oceans, mountains, forests, heaven and earth— she forages through them all. They’re not enough. So every day she tramples down the fields of fourteen worlds and even there she cannot be contained.
Rites of the Deity Tamdrin (Rta mgrin) in Contemporary Bön:Transforming Poison and Eliminating Noxious Spirits with Burning Stones
Authors: Jardins Marc Des
Published: November 2023

My first encounter with the Bönpo deity Tamdrin (Rta mgrin) occurred in April 2004. Upon my arrival at the Yeshé (Ye shes)Monastery in Nyagrong (Nyag rong, Xinlong xian) following two days of continuous travel from Chengdu, I suffered from exhaustion. The lama in whose quarters I was temporarily lodged became worried and decided that there were hindering spirits who were preventing me from functioning normally. Anyi Lama (A nyi bla ma), a senior monk, is one of the monastery’s ritual experts. He took it upon himself to conduct a ritual of exorcism for my well-being, as well as for some other monks who were also suffering from recurring illnesses. The third day after my arrival, all the preparations for the ritual, including the special torma cakes and other offerings for the altar, had been completed before 10:00 a.m. The lama then conducted the “General Ritual of Tamdrin” (Rta mgrin skor),and I was invited to join the other monks in his kitchen.
The Mind Against The World
Authors: Parker G F
Published: November 2023

When, in 1785, Mrs Thrale wrote up her anecdotes of Johnson, it was already clear to her that Johnson’s account of Shakespeare tensed itself against one possible way of reading the plays in favour of another. She spoke of Johnson’s. extreme distance from those notions which the world has agreed, I know not very well why, to call romantic. It is indeed observable in his preface to Shakespeare, that while other critics expatiate on the creative powers and vivid imagination of that matchless poet, Dr. Johnson commends him for giving so just a representation of human manners, ‘that from his scenes a hermit might estimate the value of society, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.’
Sex
Authors: Newlyn Lucy
Published: November 2023

When Godwm refers to ‘the extreme inequality of rank and power’ assumed by the Creator m Paradise Lost, his purpose is to explam the motivation which lies behind Satan’s rebellion. But he might Just as easily be pleading the cause of Eve. Grievances which Satan has against God—His establishmg of a fixed hierarchy m Heaven, His promotion of Christ—are similar in kind to Eve’s, for God repeats His practice of arbitrary sublection (on earth as it is in heaven), by constructing a human hierarchy, in which woman is placed below man. However, whereas Satan’s sense of resentment is made credibly sympathetic,, in terms of the republican values which Milton had earlier espoused, the issue of authorial sympathy in Eve’s case is more problematic.
Subjectivity
Authors: Newlyn Lucy
Published: November 2023

Two tradinons run alongside each other, in post-Miltomc writing: one laments the fallen state, nostalgically yearning to regain or rebuild paradise; the other offers consolation in the face of loss, and celebrates the human qualities that come through falling. For convenience, one might take as an example blank verse, which Edward Young called ’verse unfallen, uncurst’ Broadly speaking, the line of poems stretching from Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-30) through Cowper’s The Task (1785) and on into Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere (1800) exemplifies nostalgia, the wish to recreate Eden m the natural world, whilst The Prelude invests a greater hope in human potential: love and imagination, according to this second tradition, are not residues of the unfallen state, but tnumphant by-products of the Fall. It scarcely needs to be pointed out that these two traditions can coexist in a given writer.
Imagination
Authors: Newlyn Lucy
Published: November 2023

Enlightenment and Romantic theories of imagination rely as heavily as do earlier formulations on the parallel between human and divine creativity. God is the great orginal, in Whose image man is made. Acts of imagination are repetitions, and therefore imitations, of His Creation. The hierarchical structure this implies can, however, be dissolved (at least m theory), since, by imitating God, man might hope to equal Him, go one better than Him, or merge into Him. Indeed, the potential for rivalry is built mto the act of imitation: to the imitator this offers the excitement of aspiration, but from a higher moral per-spective it looks like presumption. One might take as an analogy from Paradise Lost Satan’s estimate of his own powers, which appears compellingly imaginative from one po of view and impotently rebellious from the other.
Introduction: The Potatoes Speak for Themselves
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

On 28 January 1817, as the Prince Regent returned from opening Parliament, his carriage was surrounded by an angry mob. One of the carriage windows was broken, almost certainly by a stone, but there were rumours of a bullet. Thomas Wooler, editor of the extreme radical journal The Black Dwarfs sprang to the government’s aid. He conjectured a softer, more sinister missile and his ‘High Treason: Examination of the Treasonable Potatoes’ enthusiastically reported the full proceedings of the government’s attempt to prosecute the culprits.
Advertising, Politics, and Parody 1710–1780
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

Advertising occupied a significant place in popular print culture by the second decade of the eighteenth century. Its growth in the press had not been seriously hampered by the 1712 Stamp Act. By June of 1720 the investment frenzy which directly preceded the collapse of the South Sea Company had led to big increases in advertising, and the extravagantly competitive market inspired formal experimentation.
Eaton, Spence, and Modes of Radical Subversion in the Revolutionary Era
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

The propaganda generated by the Peterloo massacre and the Queen Caroline affair demonstrated that between 1819 and 1822 the radicals were able to produce anti-state publicity that in the variety of its forms, and in its sheer volume, was unprosecutable. The groundwork for this most visible demonstration of the freedom of the press had been laid in the years 1790-1815. It was not merely the product of experiments with political publication, but grew out of adaptations and refutations of the forms of loyalist publicity, and out of apolitical developments in the publishing industry.
The Political House that Jack Built’. Children’s Publishing and Political Satire
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

In December 181 g, when public outrage at the Peterloo Massacre was still strong, Hone published The Political House that Jack Built. The pamphlet, set in the form of an early nineteenth-century children’s nursery rhyme book, sold over 100,000 copies within the first few months of publication. It was the most notorious popular satiric reaction to the Peterloo massacre. The satire’s focal point was the massacre, yet it used this as a platform from which to treat more general problems relating to reform.
The Trials of Watt and Downie
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

Following the dispersal of the British Convention, the various branches of the Edinburgh Friends of the People had formed a Committee of Union to facilitate cooperation and to correspond with other radical societies. By March 1794 this committee, at the suggestion of Robert Watt, a wine-merchant, had delegated all its powers to a secret sub committee of seven, sometimes referred to as the Committee of Ways and Means, which met at the house of George Ross, formerly of the Edinburgh  Gazetteer. Watt became chairman of this subcommittee; its treasurer was David Downie, an elderly Catholic goldsmith and jeweller and formerly a delegate to the British Convention. Among the remaining members were three other former delegates, a weaver Arthur McEwan, a teacher William Bonthrone or Bonthorne, and a medical student Alexander Aitchison, who attended only the first meeting.
The Trial of Thomas Hardy
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

The trial of Thomas Hardy was the longest trial and most expensive trial for high treason that had ever been heard in Britain. The prosecution case was conducted by no less than eight barristers, led by the Attorney-General Sir John Scott and the Solicitor-General Sir John Mitford; the team also included Serjeant James Adai1 who would take over from the exhausted law officers at The lwall’s trial; Edward Law, who had distinguished himself at the trial of Thomas Walker by demanding a special verdict on the basis of perjured evidence; Edward Bearcroft, an old adversary of Erskine’s from the trial of William Shipley in 1783-4--the trial which had given a vital impetus to the successful attempt of Fox and Erskine in 1792 to reform the law on seditious libel; and william Garrow, one of the most aggressive cross-examiners of the age. For the defence, Erskine was seconded by Vicary Gibbs, who con ducted himself with a liberality and composure he abandoned later in his career, when as ‘Vinegar’ Gibbs and Attorney-General he attacked the freedom of the press as zealously as Erskine himself had defended it.
Paradise Lost
Authors: Nuttall A D
Published: November 2023

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing heavenly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed, In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of chaos: or if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou O Spirit, that dost prefer.