bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“The Mind Is Buddha” Pojo Chinul’s Secrets on Cultivating the Mind
Authors: Park Jin Y
Published: November 2023

Pojo Chinul (1158–1210) is one of the most influential figures in Korean Zen Buddhism. Chinul’s Zen is characterized by huatou (or “a critical phrase”) meditation, a version of the encounter dialogue (Chin. gong’an; Kor. kongan; Jap. kō an) method. At the basis of Chinul’s huatou meditation, also known as Kanhua Zen, lies his philosophy of mind. By tracing Chinul’s account of mind, one can gain an understanding of the evolution of his thought, which can be broadly divided into three stages.
Asa ga’s Bodhisattvabhūmi The Morality Chapter
Authors: Sparham Gareth
Published: November 2023

The morality chapter (śīla-patala) of the Bodhisattvabhūmi (The bodhisattva stages) is the locus classicus for an explanation of bodhisattva morality and vows. Asan.ga (fourth century C.E.), who is credited with founding the Cittamātra, or Mind Only school, is regarded as the probable author of the Bodhisattvabhūmi. Here, he discusses morality under nine headings, of which two—“What Morality Is” and “Morality in Its Entirety”—are the most important.
Woodwind Commonalities
Authors: Ely Mark C , Van Deuren Amy E
Published: November 2023

Acoustical Basics: Common acoustical and physical tonal characteristics of woodwind instruments. The acoustical qualities of woodwind instruments are largely determined by the design of the instrument and the manner in which tone is produced. Although the design characteristics of woodwind instruments vary greatly in some respects, they also share several fundamental design characteristics. All woodwind instruments are designed with (1) a way to set the air column in vibration; (2) an instrument tube for the vibrating air column; and the use of only the First and second partials (or First and third partials on clarinet) of the harmonic series in the normal playing ranges. The way an instrument is designed contributes signiTcantly to the overall tonal and response characteristics of that instrument. These design variables include: (1) the manner in which the air column is set in vibration; (2) the types, weight, and thickness of materials used in instrument construction; (3) the shape or Sare of the instrument tubing; the inner dimensions along the tubing; (5) how the tubing is bent or looped; and (6) the Tnish (e.g., lacquer or silver plate). The acoustical and physical tonal characteristics of each woodwind instrument are located under Acoustical Properties in each instrument chapter. See also Harmonics, Action: In general, the way keys and key mechanisms work on a particular instrument. The term “action” is used when referring to the way an instrument feels when it is played and/or the ease with which players can reach and operate the keys. Action is oRen described in terms of being smooth or rough, even or uneven, and heavy or light. Typically, the action on smaller woodwind instruments (flute, oboe, and clarinet) is light in comparison with the action on larger woodwind instruments (saxophone and bassoon) because their key mechanisms are smaller and lighter, and because the distance between the keys and the tone holes is much shorter. Smaller woodwind instruments are not prone to having a heavy action; however, any instrument that has not been properly adjusted, cleaned, and oiled can feel sluggish and uneven.
A Delightful Life and Place
Authors: Bliss Michael
Published: November 2023

Oxford, England. Saturday, May 27, 1905. The pace of transatlantic travel depends on the weather, and because it has been good the OslerIs have landed a day early. They telegraph ahead and come on by train and then carriage. Later in the afternoon Dr Osler, Mrs Osler, Revere, and a secretary-governess arrive at 7 Norham Gardens, a big brick pile of a house on a pleasant street in a newer part of town. They are renting it from Mrs Max Muller, widow of the Sanskrit specialist famous for having brought Teutonic philological scholarship to England and for apparently discovering the common origins of all mythologies.

The rental includes the servants. A butler named William meets the American party at the door. The maids stand ready in the hall. The bedrooms have been made up, and the cook has made a delicious meal. A happy beginning.
“He’s Had Enough”
Authors: Munson Ronald
Published: November 2023

I had never seen such a horrible wound.

The right half of Walter Post’s face was missing. His cheek was cut away, and his upper and lower jaw had been removed at the midline. Stainless-steel wire bound the remnants of his jaws together. His tongue was a raw stub of cesh protruding from a dark clot that seemed to fill what was left of his mouth.

I stood at the foot of the bed in the cramped surgical intensive care room with Walt’s wife Martha and his ENT surgeon, Dr. Roy Stone. Michael, the SICU night nurse, a thin blonde man in his thirties, used metal tongs to pull out the pads of blood-soaked gauze packed into Walt’s wound. With the gauze gone, the bone of the coor of his skull was visible as an irregular white patch in a field of red. Blood was seeping from the edges of multiple surgical wounds.

Martha gripped the metal frame at the end of the narrow bed, then turned her face toward the blank yellow wall. Her plump jaw was clenched, and her skin was the pale gray-white color of ashes, yet she didn’t cry. Then, with what seemed to require an effort of will, she looked back at Walt.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea
Authors: Munson Ronald
Published: November 2023

Meg Anderson didn’t look like someone with a fatal disease.

She was tall and slender, with an athletic, almost boyish build. Her hazel eyes were luminous, and her hair had the golden-dark color of wild honey. It was so short that feathery tufts stuck up along the whorl at the crown of her head, but the result was charming. She was like a beautiful actress pretending to be seriously ill for the sake of the story. Only Meg wasn’t pretending, and no one knew how her story would end.

The year was 1995, and Meg was thirty-five years old. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer a few months earlier, and her hair was so short because it was still growing back after chemotherapy. Only 1 in 2,300 women her age develops breast cancer, so she was statistically unlucky.

Nor did her bad luck end there. When Meg was diagnosed, her doctors discovered that her cancer had already progressed to a late stage. Cancerous cells had migrated to her lungs, and she was judged to have the most advanced state of breast cancer: stage IV. Women with stage IV cancer usually have been treated and become cancer free, then their disease returns months or years later. Thus, Meg started off where most women diagnosed with breast cancer fear they might end up.
Conquest
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

The great Easton conference opened on October 8, 1758, with more than 500 representatives from thirteen Indian nations, including each of the Six Nations, in attendance. George Croghan represented Sir William Johnson, and Conrad Weiser and Henry Montour were the principal interpreters for Pennsylvania. Teedyuscung was there with his Wyoming Delawares, supported by Israel Pemberton Jr. and other members of the Friendly Association. More significantly, the western Delawares were represented by Pisquetomen and an Indian named Thomas Hickman, who had joined the return party from Kushkushkee after the negotiations there.
Under the Tyrant’s Foot
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

“To govern is absolutely repugnant to the avowed principles of Quakers,” wrote the author of a minor pamphlet in 1764. “To be govern’d is absolutely repugnant to the avowed principles of Pr[esbyteria]ns.” What hope was left, then, for Pennsylvania? Supporters of the Paxton Boys blamed the Conestoga massacres on the Quaker party’s inability or unwillingness to provide adequate defense, an elementary obligation of any government. Critics of the Paxton Boys, by contrast, saw the massacres and the march on Philadelphia as proof of proprietary incompetence and Presbyterian fanaticism. For Benjamin Franklin and his allies the solution was to place Pennsylvania under direct royal government. The stage was set for a political showdown.1
The Velvet Glove
Authors: Thompson Gordon
Published: November 2023

Our experiences as listeners shape our expectations of the “authentic” such that the aural environment of a recording constitutes a constructed acoustic space. Producers sculpt this reality. At the height of the beat boom, two broad types of record producers ruled Britannia’s wave of recordings. On the one hand, salaried corporate producers labored for Decca, EMI, and Pye. On the other, independent producers licensed recordings to the corporations. The term “producer” was also relatively new in late 1950s London, such that journalist Tony Brown (1958: 3) described them as the “men who manipulate the vocal puppets on the record scene.” Moreover, he asserted, “their influence cannot be doubted. The Artists and Repertoire Manager is the most consulted—and the most insulted—man in pop music.” Through much of the era, the first wave of professionals tended to use “artists and repertoire manager” to describe what they did, with “producer” coming to predominate by the late sixties. Independents tended to call themselves producers, as distinct from the corporate “managers” who preceded them. Here, we will use “producers” broadly to describe the role in the sixties and “artists and repertoire managers” when referencing their historical origins.
The Write Stuff
Authors: Thompson Gordon
Published: November 2023

The songwriters who gravitated to London’s Denmark Street in the sixties differed from the previous generation in that many primarily intended their songs for recording rather than for the theater. Indeed, one of the remarkable changes to take place in this era—the demise of sheet music as an important measure of a song’s popularity—represented only a symptom of deeper differences. In the early 1950s, the New Musical Express routinely printed a ranking of sheet music sales, but by the mid-sixties, the weekly paper had dropped this measure of success. As the decade lurched forward, the paper’s list of the top-selling singles grew longer and eventually a ranking of long-playing records (LPs) joined it.
Please Please Me
Authors: Thompson Gordon
Published: November 2023

On 11 September 1962, when Andy White set up his drum kit in EMI’s studio two, he had heard of the band he was about to assist, knew of their popularity in Liverpool, and had an inkling that the session might be interesting, if routine. His real musical loves lay in jazz and in the traditional rhythms of Scottish pipe bands, but he had also developed an instinctual feel for pop music, which made him a natural for this session.
Mary Barber (1685–1755)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

On seeing an Officer’s Widow distracted, who had been driven to Despair by a long and fruitless Solicitation for the Arrears of her Pension

O wretch! Hath madness cured thy dire despair? Yes—All thy sorrows now are light as air:

No more you mourn your once loved husband’s fate, Who bravely perished for a thankless state.

For rolling years thy piety prevailed;

At length, quite sunk—thy hope, thy patience failed. Distracted now you tread on life’s last stage,

Nor feel the weight of poverty and age:

How blest in this, compared with those whose lot Dooms them to miseries, by you forgot!

Now, wild as winds, you from your offspring fly, Or fright them from you with distracted eye; Rove through the streets; or sing, devoid of care, With tattered garments and dishevelled hair;

By hooting boys to higher frenzy fired,

At length you sink, by cruel treatment tired, Sink into sleep, an emblem of the dead,

A stone thy pillow, the cold earth thy bed.

O tell it not; let none the story hear,

Lest Britain’s martial sons should learn to fear: And when they next the hostile wall attack, Feel the heart fail, the lifted arm grow slack;

And pausing cry—’Though death we scorn to dread, Our orphan offspring, must they pine for bread?

See their loved mothers into prisons thrown, And, unrelieved, in iron bondage groan?’

Britain, for this impending ruin dread;

Their woes call loud for vengeance on thy head: Nor wonder, if disasters wait your fleets;

Nor wonder at complainings in your streets. Be timely wise; arrest th’ uplifted hand,

Ere pestilence or famine sweep the land.
Matthew Green (1696–1737)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

from “The Spleen. An Epistle to Mr. C J

First know, my friend, I do not mean To write a treatise on the Spleen;

Nor to prescribe when nerves convulse; Nor mend th’alarum watch, you pulse. If I am right, your question lay,

What course I take to drive away

The day-mare Spleen, by whose false pleas Men prove mere suicides in ease;

And how I do myself demean In stormy world to live serene.

When by its magick lantern Spleen

With frightful figures spreads life’s scene, And threat’ning prospects urg’d my fears, A stranger to the luck of heirs;

Reason, some quiet to restore,

Shew’d part was substance, shadow more; With Spleen’s dead weight tho’ heavy grown, In life’s rough tide I sunk not down,

But swam, till Fortune threw a rope, Buoyant on bladders fill’d with hope.

I always choose the plainest food To mend viscidity of blood.

Hail! water-gruel, healing power, Of easy access to the poor;

Thy help love’s confessors implore, And doctors secretly adore;

To thee I fly, by thee dilute—

Thro’ veins my blood doth quicker shoot, And by swift current throws off clean Prolifick particles of Spleen.
Anonymous (published 1751)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Strip Me Naked, or Royal Gin for Ever. A Picture

I must, I will have gin!–that skillet take, Pawn it.—No more I’ll roast, or boil or bake. This juice immortal will each want supply; Starve on, ye brats! So I but bung my eye.

Starve? No! This gin ev’n mother’s milk excels, Paints the pale cheeks, and hunger’s darts repels. The skillet’s pawned already? Take this cap; Round my bare head I’ll yon brown paper wrap. Ha! Half my petticoat was torn away

By dogs (I fancy) as I maudlin lay.

How the wind whistles through each broken pane! Through the wide-yawning roof how pours the rain! My bedstead’s cracked; the table goes hip-hop.— But see! The gin! Come, come, thou cordial drop!

Thou sovereign balsam to my longing heart! Thou husband, children, all! We must not part!

Drinks Delicious! O! Down the red lane it goes; Now I’m a queen, and trample on my woes.

Inspired by gin, I’m ready for the road;

Could shoot my man, or fire the King’s abode.

Ha! My brain’s cracked.—The room turns round and round; Down drop the platters, pans: I’m on the ground.

My tattered gown slips from me.—What care I? I was born naked, and I’ll naked die.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

The Suicide’s Argument

Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no No question was asked me—it could not be so! If the life was the question, a thing sent to try And to live on be YES; what can NO be? to die.

Nature’s Answer:

Is’t returned, as ‘twas sent? Is’t no worse for the wear? Think first, what you ARE! Call to mind what you WERE! I gave you innocence, I gave you hope,

Gave health, and genius, and an ample scope, Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair?

Make out the invent’ry; inspect, compare! Then die—if die you dare!

The Pains of Sleep

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, It hath not been my use to pray

With moving lips or bended knees; But silently, by slow degrees,

My spirit I to Love compose,

In humble trust mine eye-lids close, With reverential resignation,

No wish conceived, no thought exprest, Only a sense of supplication;
A. Mary F. Robinson (1857–1944)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Neurasthenia

I watch the happier people of the house

Come in and out, and talk, and go their ways; I sit and gaze at them; I cannot rouse

My heavy mind to share their busy days.

I watch them glide, like skaters on a stream, Across the brilliant surface of the world.

But I am underneath: they do not dream

How deep below the eddying flood is whirl’d.

They cannot come to me, nor I to them;

But, if a mightier arm could reach and save, Should I forget the tide I had to stem?

Should I, like these, ignore the abysmal wave?

Yes! in the radiant air how could I know How black it is, how fast it is, below?
Edward Thomas (1878–1917) Melancholy
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Melancholy

The rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly. On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy Wrought magic, so that if I feared the solitude

Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude, Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice. What I desired I knew not, but whate’er my choice Vain it must be, I knew. Yet naught did my despair

But sweeten the strange sweetness, while through the wild air All day long I heard a distant cuckoo calling

And, soft as dulcimers, sounds of near water falling, And, softer, and remote as if in history,

Rumours of what had touched my friends, my foes, or me.

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die

And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into this solitude.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying to-night or lying still awake

Solitary, listening to the rain,
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Sorrow

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain Beats upon my heart.

People twist and scream in pain,— Dawn will find them still again; This has neither wax nor wane,

Neither stop nor start.

People dress and go to town; I sit in my chair.

All my thoughts are slow and brown: Standing up or sitting down

Little matters, or what gown Or what shoes I wear.

“I know a hundred ways to die”

I know a hundred ways to die. I’ve often thought I’d try one: Lie down beneath a motor truck

Some day when standing by one.

Or throw myself from off a bridge— Except such things must be

So hard upon the scavengers And men that clean the sea.
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Resume

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.
Robert Edward Duncan (1919–1988)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Songs of An Other

If there were another . . .

if there were an other person I am he would be heavy as the shadow

in a dying tree. The light thickens into water welling up to liven

whose eyes? who hides his mother behind him mirrord in his

bride’s gaze when the flame

darkens the music as he plays?

for I am here the Master of a Sonata meant for the early evening

when in late Spring

the day begins to linger on

and we do not listen to the news

but let the wars and crises go revering strife in a sound of our own, a momentary leading of a tone

toward a conflicting possibility and then fury so slowd down it lapses

into the sweetening melancholy of

a minor key, hovering toward refrain it yet refrains from, I come into the being of this other me,
Jane Kenyon (1947–1995)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Having it Out with Melancholy

FROM THE NURSERY When I was born, you waited

behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing

the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on

everything under the sun and moon made me sad—even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God: “We’re here simply to wait for death;

the pleasures of earth are overrated.”

I only appeared to belong to my mother,

to live among blocks and cotton undershirts with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes

and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. I was already yours—the anti-urge,

the mutilator of souls.

BOTTLES

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. The coated ones smell sweet or have no smell; the powdery ones smell like the chemistry lab at school

that made me hold my breath.
(John G. H. Oakes, editor) (published 1991)
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Nicol

By My Own Hand

I watched these cold stiff fingers reach in searching the sacred edge the sharp undoing

and I didn’t struggle against them

as a long thin line appeared

above the throbbing and the sweet red wine spilled over

and mixed itself together with the bitter

of salty tears

and once again I lay in this frothy soup never knowing what’s to come of it because I was unable to bear the best of it.
Jeff Holt (1971– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S
Published: November 2023

Imbalance

Echoing threats drown out the quiet roar Of lattes, strangers laughing easily.

My thoughts are flopping fishes, cold, not sure That water will return. I barely see

Past trembling fingers I still recognize

By bitten nails, that scab. Wait. Did I speak? My limbs are clown balloons. I need to rise, Smile as I leave. Today I will not break.

I will not brake once I am out that door;

I’ll race across charred ruins, fly through Hell— Slow down. I am a paying customer

At Border’s; so what if I’m not feeling well? Strangers can’t hear the threats, that doctor said.

I rise, cling to his words, stalk through these dead.

The Patient

The doctors know I dream when I’m awake. I’ve smoked until my fingertips are brown. Watching the door, I sit alone and shake.

My sister and her kids, Kelly and Jake,

Played games with me when I’d sink this far down Until they knew I dream when I’m awake.
The Death of a Vagrant Bird
Authors: Beauchamp Tom L , Orlans F Barbara , Dresser Rebecca , Morton David B , Gluck John P
Published: November 2023

On a hot August day in 1991, several amateur bird watchers were encamped in southern New Mexico at a place called Rattlesnake Springs, just inside Carlsbad Caverns National Park. This small oasis, located in the midst of the parched Chihuahuan desert, attracts a large number of bird species and had become a popular observational area. For some time the attention of many members of a bird-watching group had been drawn to the sight and song of a lone, small olive and yellow bird about six inches long that seemed oddly out of place. Descriptions and taped recordings of its song strongly suggested that the bird was a Yellow-green Vireo. As far as anyone knew, the established range of this species was from Central America to Mexico. In an arresting use of language, individual birds sighted out of their established geographical context are referred to as “vagrants.” One common use of the noun “vagrant” is meant to designate someone who travels “idly with no means of support, such as a drunkard,”1 but the usage here is a direct derivation from the Latin root vagari, meaning “to wander.” Many circumstances lead vagrant birds to be out of place, and they are associated with different degrees of scientific importance. For example, the bird may have overshot its migration target, been blown off course by a chance encounter with a storm, hitched an unintended ride on a boat or plane, or be in an active search for a new habitat.
Should Frog Dissection Continue?
Authors: Beauchamp Tom L , Orlans F Barbara , Dresser Rebecca , Morton David B , Gluck John P
Published: November 2023

Clear and reliable national data on the number of frogs killed for dissection in middle schools and high schools are lacking, but some data do exist. There are roughly 30 million students in grades 7−12 in the United States. About 80% of teachers who responded in a 2004 survey reported that they use dissection to teach biology. There is therefore no doubt that over a million frogs are killed each year for this purpose.
Becoming Faulkner
Authors: Weinstein Philip
Published: November 2023

William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. In this imaginative biography, Philip M. Weinstein-a leading authority on Faulkner-targets this disjunction as one among a number of paradoxes that defined Faulkner's experience of the world. Weinstein conjures the forces at play as Faulkner came of age--a racially divided country, a separatist family legacy, a susceptibility to mythology and to alcohol--and considers the ways these factors informed his often turbulent circumstances. He suggests that Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history become fully understandable only when traced out into his writing, which took the charged material of personal frustrations and translated it into a singular language that captured human consciousness as never before. Juxtaposing Faulkner's personal story with the remarkable representation of Southern life in his novels, Weinstein has produced a sharp, fresh biography. Featuring 20 black-and-white images, Becoming Faulkner testifies to the singular psychology of a man whose world unfolded somewhere between art and life.
Bad Girls Go Everywhere
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer
Published: November 2023

Born in Arkansas to a family of modest means, Helen Gurley Brown worked at countless secretarial jobs and was an advertising executive before writing the 1962 international bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, marrying the love of her life, becoming the diva of the New York magazine world, and editing Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years. In her farewell column in 1997, Brown offered her Cosmo readers three pieces of advice: every woman has something that makes her unique and gifted; men are not the enemy; and sex is among the best things in life. With these brief directives Brown summarized the philosophy that made her such an important and contested figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Imagine the life of a single woman in 1962. Women were encouraged to attend college primarily to obtain an Mrs. degree, newspaper ads listed jobs by sex, women could only obtain credit through their husbands, and unmarried women became suspect by the time they reached their mid-twenties. Along came a firebrand named Helen Gurley Brown, who had remained single into her late thirties and who had the audacity to encourage her unmarried sisters not to grab a husband, or to hide their single status, but to live, instead, in what she called "superlative style." Her 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl, became an overnight and international sensation for its frank look at single women's work lives, financial lives, and, of course, sex lives. To conservatives, Brown's books and magazine released the single woman from all social and sexual constraints, making her a threat to the institution of marriage. To many in the women's liberation movement, Brown's views enhanced men's rather than women's lives by turning women into sexually available playmates rather than making them powerful in their own right. For her legion of fans, however, Helen Gurley Brown represented another path, one that let women pursue heterosexual relationships yet remain independent, work at being beautiful yet call themselves feminists. Jennifer Scanlon's book is the first biography of Helen Gurley Brown, an icon of contemporary women's history and popular culture. Brown's irreverent and daring life and work challenge the stereotype of second-wave feminists as frumpy and humorless, while foreshadowing the sex-positive, lipstick-wearing--Cosmo-reading--third wave. Because Brown both bought into and utterly transformed advertising and consumer culture, this book will interest not only a female trade audience, but scholars in women's studies, American studies, popular culture studies, sociology, and history.
Growing Up Gurley, And a Girl
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer
Published: November 2023

Before it became famous as the birthplace of Helen Gurley Brown, Green Forest, Arkansas, a tiny town in the Ozarks, was known principally for two things: its individualistic traditions and its bawdy folklore. It seems a fitting place, then, for Helen Marie Gurley to have entered the world on February 18, 1922. Years later, as a young adult struggling to survive financially on a secretary’s salary and then, even later, as a successful writer and editor enjoying financial security, Brown largely denied any connection to the place of her birth. Green Forest lacked the cachet claimed by many of her equally successful contemporaries who hailed from cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. And her own Horatio Alger–like approach to success left little room or incentive for her to delve too deeply into the significance of her life as an Arkansan.

Nevertheless, reflective or not, in her appreciation for individual accomplishment and in her celebration of sexuality, Helen Gurley carried forward some of the traditions she hardly realized she had inherited. In her conscious mind she remained haunted by certain aspects of her young life.
Good Girls Go To Heaven—Bad Girls Go Everywhere: Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer
Published: November 2023

In the aftermath of the 1962 publication of Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown’s fans sent her so much mail that the post office in Pacific Palisades, California, informed Brown that they would no longer deliver it to her home. If she wanted her mail, she would have to pick it up. Helen’s fan mail followed her on her move to New York City in 1963 and continued to arrive even into 1964. “It seemed to me that Helen was developing a constituency, if not a cult,” David remembered with appropriate awe years later, adding, “The women who read her stuff felt they knew her personally.” For her part, Helen, too, felt a personal connection with each correspondent and pounded out individual responses on her trusty Royal 440 typewriter. Although she had taken on the newspaper column hoping to reach her audience collectively rather than individually, she still received a great deal of mail—and felt a need to respond to it. Eventually, though, even the intrepid Helen Gurley Brown became exhausted by the volume of the mail and the effort required to reply in anything other than routine fashion.
Aging, Resisting, Redefining
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer
Published: November 2023

When Helen Gurley Brown first stepped into the editor’s office at Cosmopolitan in 1965, she was forty-three years old. It was not unusual to encounter an editor a generation older than a magazine’s audience, particularly when the target audience was that coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four age group. Experience and business acumen often compensated for the difference, and in Brown’s case the degree of identification she accomplished with her particular audience more or less buried criticisms of her age—at least for a time. Inevitably, though, the topic of her age and the growing disparity between her age and that of her readers would become more and more of a story in itself. And through the years, as Helen Gurley Brown encountered her own aging process and that of family and friends, she attempted to resist and redefine what it meant to grow older. Not surprisingly, given her Cosmo Girl predilections and her dedication to individual achievement, Brown would claim repeatedly and in terms courageous, saucy, and at times outlandish, that all women, even old ones, can have it all.
Introduction: Sterling A. Brown’s Odyssey into the Heart of Blackness
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Tracy Steven C
Published: November 2023

There are fewer than 120 poems in just over 230 pages of poems in Sterling Brown’s Collected Poems, little more than one-third the number in Robert Frost’s 500 page collected poems, and far fewer than Carl Sandburg’s nearly 800-page poetic output of more than 800 poems. The sixteen volumes of Langston Hughes’s Collected Works dwarfs the amount of Brown’s work (he also wrote essays, short stories, and scholarly works), as do the collected works of Brown followers like Amiri Baraka and Michael Harper. Perhaps that explains some of the difficulty Brown has had taking his rightful place in the American canon. In a culture that lionizes the Great American Novel, not the Great American Haiku, more sprawling evidence of an author’s literary work is frequently nec- essary for the arbiters of literary value. This holds true even for the author of that perennial candidate for the Great American Novel, Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison’s failure to finish a second novel has proven troubling among canon- formers in some quarters. Size matters.
Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk-Poet
Authors: Locke Alain LeRoy
Published: November 2023

Many critics, writing in praise of Sterling Brown’s first volume of verse, have seen fit to hail him as a significant new Negro poet. The discriminating few go further; they hail a new era in Negro poetry, for such is the deeper significance of this volume (Southern Road, Sterling A. Brown, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1932). Gauging the main objective of Negro poetry as the poetic portrayal of Negro folk-life true in both letter and spirit to the idiom of the folk’s own way of feeling and thinking, we may say that here for the first time is that much-desired and long-awaited acme attained or brought within actual reach.
Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-Modern Moment
Authors: Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

When Robert Penn Warren wrote his highly ironic line “Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical” (321), he compressed into five deceptively economic feet nearly a half-millennium of white hegemonic philosophy, both its rhetorical strategies and underlying presuppositions. Buzzard, “the carrier of the ostracizing power of white discourse, the trope which declares the otherness of the black” (Nielsen 117), does not simply assert black inferiority but reconstructs and reaffirms the mutually exclusive mythic realms “white” and “black” must inhabit in order to sustain five hundred years of radical inequity. As ametaphysical, “the black” (or, better yet, blackness) must exist beyond the aesthetic, beyond the redemptive possibilities central to the humanistic tradition of arts and letters. As “fictive signifier of the nonwhite” (Nielsen 10), blackness serves as a repository of reifying antitheses: anti-intellectual, illiterate, subhuman, and ahistorical. All in all, Warren constructs a blackness thoroughly banished to the margins of the human community, a blackness of radical absence proclaiming the final and ultimate abstraction of damning eternal sameness. Indeed Warren (and by extension what I will call hegemonic or conventional modernism) achieves much of his coherence through the assertion of objectified blackness, through a tropic vocabulary of necessarily reductive poses impervious to change over time (see Nielsen, North).
An Integer Is a Whole Number
Authors: Harper Michael S
Published: November 2023

When Daisy died in June 1979 I was at Yaddo, the artists’ retreat, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. I was called to the phone by Eloise Spicer and returned to the dinner table without comment; the poet June Jordan approached and said: “Across your face is the sign of death. Who died?” I left that evening for Washington, D.C. Sterling, of course, was inconsolable. I was already working on his Collected Poems, which I’d selected for the National Poetry Series, and we were beyond deadline. The book was to be a surprise to “Rose Anne” (Daisy) after Sterling’s 78th birthday celebration, planned to be at the Museum of African Art in the District. I thought we would have all summer to work on this book— all Sterling’s poetry collected in one volume. Now I would have to read his “Thoughts on Death” at Daisy’s funeral.
“Let Me Be with Ole Jazzbo”: An Interview with Sterling A. Brown
Authors: Rowell Charles H
Published: November 2023

charles h. rowell: In an essay on the blues, you say that Irving Berlin’s “Schoolhouse Blues” and Jerome Kern’s “Left All Alone Blues” are not the form or feeling of true blues as sung by the people. sterling a. brown: That is true. That is true. I think they’re not blues at all. It’s just that they used “blues” in their titles because it was popular to do so. A Tin Pan Alley title. It entered the language of popular music, but they are not blues. They are not blues feeling. Actually they are the opposite of blues. Berlin’s “Schoolhouse Blues”: when you think of schools for Negroes in the South (and you’re thinking of this as a writer), you can see that Berlin was just a Tin Pan Alley writer. Critics talk about him as a poet of ragtime, but “Alexander’s Rag- time Band” became a popular number at the conclusion of the ragtime period.
“Fear Did Not Catch His Tongue and Throttle His Breath”: A Discography of Recordings by and Related to Sterling A. Brown
Authors: Tracy Steven C
Published: November 2023

All of the commercially released recordings in this discography stem from sessions recorded by Moe Asch and Folkways Records in the 1940s, and from a ceremony honoring Brown at the Ira Aldridge Theater at Howard University in 1963. These have been reissued on a variety of sources, but are all collected together on The Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Other recordings not commercially released that feature Brown’s voice, as well as commercially released recordings by others of Brown’s poetry and Michael Harper’s recording of his poem “Br’er Sterling and the Rocker,” should be of interest to Brown scholars and students. Though performers do not seem to have taken to recording Brown’s poems the way they did to the works of Langston Hughes, this situation may well be remedied as Brown’s fame grows. His poems certainly lend themselves to performance.
Entertaining Guests at the Indian Agency
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

Arriving with the Taliaferros aboard the Warrior was the Reverend Thomas Williamson, an ordained Presbyterian missionary who had contacted Taliaferro months before, offering his services to teach the Indians. He arrived in advance of his family to check the location. Taliaferro decided that a minister in residence at Lac qui Parle would be a reliable source of information in monitoring the conflict between the two Indian nations. To pursue this course of missionary “diplomacy,” the agent needed the cooperation of the trader Joseph Renville, who maintained a large household at Lac qui Parle.
Wintering Over at St. Peter’s Agency
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

By mid-November, ice blocked the river, making it completely impassable by boat. The community was sealed in, bound together, encircled by ice for better or worse for the next six months. Although the coming of winter in Minnesota is marked by the first snow, it is the first snow that actually stays on the ground that really counts. The snowfall on the day that the Mackinac boat left melted in a few days time. By mid-November, however, another six inches of snow had been laid down. The dull brown prairie grass was now covered with a thick, bright white blanket. The world was reborn as fresh and new. Within two weeks though, the temperature fell to 10 below zero, too cold to snow. The soft-fallen snow became crusty as sugar that remains too long in the bowl. The ice on the rivers was solid, eight or nine inches deep.
Marriage: Together Alone
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

That left harriet. Though she was surely occupied with the guests during the treaty making, she didn’t leave with either the master or the mistress. At some point in these last busy weeks, Harriet was married by her master to Etheldred, the slave of Dr. Emerson, in the same manner that he performed other weddings at the agency. (It was said that several marriages were performed that summer in anticipation of legitimating the children who would be eligible to take shares under the treaty.)In Taliaferro’s autobiography, Harriet’s master mentioned their wedding last of several he conducted. Taliaferro indicated that he performed the ceremony himself and that he gave her to Etheldred, the slave, in marriage.
The House of Chouteau
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

The rural farm and the company of her stepmother would not long hold the interest of the young doctor’s wife, particularly after she had spent two years in the social isolation of a remote army post. Mistress Irene must have turned her attention to the dazzling St. Louis social life. In the same way that her brother had introduced his sisters into society, the Sanford name now opened doors, and Mistress Irene could take advantage of this connection during her sojourn without her husband. (Indeed, her husband would later use these social connections to try to keep his job.) Brother John was extremely prominent in the city, and Irene was now respectably married. Among women of her class, visiting, gossiping, and entertaining were the order of the day. Among those she would visit were her brother’s in-laws, the Chouteaus, who knew her before her marriage.
Dred with the Army of Observation and Harriet with the Children in St. Louis
Authors: Velde Lea Vander
Published: November 2023

The steamboat trip to Louisiana took a week. Along the lower Mississippi, Dred could see slaves at work in the sugar and cotton fields. It took little imagination to understand the hard lives they lived. He had once lived that life, as a young man, working an Alabama cotton plantation for the Blow family before he was brought to St. Louis.
Picking and Switching
Authors: Nathan Amy
Published: November 2023

Choose an instrument you’ll enjoy or you’ll never be motivated to practice,” says Ethan, one of the more than 150 older teen musicians who share their experiences in this book. Finding just the right instrument took a bit of searching—and switching—for many of the teens, and for some of our pro advisors as well. Sound snagged many. They heard someone play the instrument and fell in love with the tone. Ethan picked saxophone in fourth grade because, as he recalls, “I heard a tenor saxophone player at the high school who was very good and I knew right away that’s what I wanted to play.” Like Ethan, many heard a live performance at school, at a concert hall, or at home listening to a friend or relative play. A TV performance hooked Sary, who chose violin after seeing Itzhak Perlman fiddling away on Sesame Street. Emily fell for the mellow tone of the French horn when her school’s music teacher demonstrated instruments in class. The horn’s tone fascinated Adam, too, who notes, “The very first sound I made on this wonderful curly thing sounded like an elephant. I figured any instrument that could do that couldn’t be bad.”
The Time Squeeze
Authors: Nathan Amy
Published: November 2023

No time to practice—that’s the number one gripe mentioned by the 200 beginners (ages 10 to 14) who were surveyed about their musical headaches for this book. Finding time is a problem every musician has to deal with, including our troupe of pros and older teen advisors. Not all of them have always been eager to make time for yet another run-through. When trumpet wiz Wynton Marsalis was in elementary school, he definitely had not yet become a never-miss-a-day practicer. Flutist Paula Robison remembers in junior high that “there were times I didn’t want to practice. When you’re that age, there are so many other things you want to do.” Even so, she did squeeze in time every day for practice. Before long, young Mr. Marsalis did, too. Here are three ways our teen experts fit practice into a busy day: Many teens practice at the same time each day. It’s easier to remember a regular habit. “I tell myself I’ll practice clarinet at 7:00 P.M. no matter what. Then I stop everything else and do it,” says Stephanie. Meghan’s regular trumpet time is just after getting home from school. “Then I have the rest of the evening to do homework, relax, etc.,” she says. Maria Beatriz uses a right-after-school time so her piano won’t disturb her neighbors. “When I reach the time they don’t want me to practice anymore, I do homework,” she says. Daniel, however, must have more understanding neighbors. His trombone time? Very early in the morning, before school. Alyssa tackles music “at night after homework is done so I can concentrate on my violin.” Michelle notes, “Violin is so soothing after a stressful day.”
The Word is the Thing
Authors: Katz Martin
Published: November 2023

Apart from a handful of concert vocalises, any collaboration with a singer means dealing with language. In our pursuit of perfect ensemble and fusion with our partner, we cannot proceed very far down the road without words entering the picture. After all, it is the text that probably inspired the composer in the first place, and it is the text that serves as the conduit for the feelings to be expressed. Words are also a lot of fun, but that’s beside the point.
In Conclusion: A PepTalk
Authors: Katz Martin
Published: November 2023

It is almost a cliché that any text about collaborative piano will discuss the thanklessness, the inequality, and the lack of appreciation inherent in this choice of career. I cannot argue with all of that; those negatives do indeed exist to some degree, but I am also very mindful of how far we have traveled in this profession and how rewarding it can be.
Dustbowl Legacies Long-Term Change and Resilience in the Shortgrass Steppe
Authors: Sylvester Kenneth M , Gutmann Myron P
Published: November 2023

For centuries, European observers perceived the western High Plains as a desert. Few signs remained, on the surface, of the Pawnee villages that once grew maize and bean crops and built earthen homes in the bottomlands of the South Platte and Republican River basins. Decades-long drought during the 13th century had forced an eastward retreat of the first agricultural peoples on the High Plains. In the centuries that followed, humans were mainly visitors to a shortgrass steppe dominated by bison, drought, and fire. The landscape that emerged favored resilient shortgrass species, like buffalograss and blue grama, which thrived on natural disturbance. The longevity of these forces only began to unravel when Europeans introduced horses and firearms into plains ecology. The near demise of the bison in the 19th century, and the expansion of agriculture that followed, had dramatic consequences for the shortgrass, reducing its biomass and diversity. But unlike the tallgrass prairie, human intervention was limited by the interaction between the environment and the very institutions that promoted wholesale change farther east, thereby preserving sizeable grassland corridors in the process.
The Political Ecology of Southwest Michigan Agriculture, 1837–2000
Authors: Rudy Alan P , Harris Craig K , Thomas Brian J , Worosz Michelle R , Kaplan Siena S K , O’Donnell Evann C
Published: November 2023

Flying over southwestern Michigan, the Kellogg LTER site (Fig. 5.1), one looks down on what appears to be a glorious example of the agricultural landscape of classical American populism. The farm units are discernible by their woodlots, windbreaks, and rural roads, and are fairly small, or at least approximate what some have called a human scale. There is a mixture of pasturage, grain production, fruit trees, animal enterprises, and other forms of agriculture from tree farms to glass-house nurseries. Each farm seems to have a residential homestead and many have small gardens, red barns, and white or blue silos, interspersed with more recent structures for heavy machinery. In this populist image, the farms are prosperous, independent, and sustainable, and the farm families are harmonious and fulfilled.
Arts Integration: The Hot Zon
Authors: Booth Eric
Published: November 2023

The largest area of experimentation in arts education across the country today is “arts integration.” Schools and school districts, arts organizations and individual artists, enthusiastic teachers and model schools—by the thousands—are exploring the benefits of bringing more arts experiences into classrooms in direct relation to other curricula. On the surface, the idea is enormously appealing. Classroom learning can be revitalized with the excitement, fun, and fuller attention the arts often elicit.