Oxford University Press's Blog, page 1006
November 10, 2012
Kelly Gang folklore clanks ever onwards
Bushranger Ned Kelly belongs to Australia, doesn’t he? You might think so, but Australians are surprised to find that there is interest in Ned Kelly far beyond our shores. There are quite a few UK titles from the past, and Australian volumes about him turn up on US book sites all the time.
Sidney Nolan’s popular caricatures of Ned have reinforced the heroic legend. Just last weekend the Canberra Times repeated the silliness that the Gang’s actions were political rather than criminal. The gang were part of an organised crime network stealing farm animals, including draught horses, from their neighbours.
Although born just outside Melbourne, the Irish saw and still see Ned as a revolutionary Irish spirit. I disagree. The gang shot five police (six if the police trooper from Queensland, one of the so-called blacktrackers wounded at Glenrowan, is included).
Melbourne artist David Milne’s Nolanesque portrait of Ned Kelly. Used with permission.
The US, Britain, and Australia had outlaws. The Kelly Gang stuck out in 1880 because of their use of medieval-style armour. This was weird stuff. They had tested the armour at ten metres with a Martini-Henry rifle, the most powerful police weapon of the day. Four desperate young men clad in armour battling society is a powerful image that has lingered in the national imagination.Hardly a week goes by without another Kelly Gang story. Australian debate always boils down to heroes or villains. The last time the police case was detailed in a book was in 1968, fifty years ago. So today’s ‘facts’ tend to be from the vast pro-Kelly Gang folklore.
For me, writing about the gang was like treading on eggshells and broken glass. My book has hundreds of citations to archival documents. But that won’t guarantee immunity from criticism. Luckily for me, the pro-Kelly folk on internet forums nowadays are feuding among themselves.
My demographic ranges from people who know little, to experts in micro-details. One example is Bill Denheld who spent nine years identifying exactly where the Stringybark Creek murders of three police took place. Australia has a knack for losing its prime heritage sites. I devoted a chapter of Eureka: from the official records to discussing the lost location of the 1854 Eureka Stockade.
Best-selling author Ian Jones is the Kelly Gang’s staunchest champion. But I question his 2005 attack on Alex Castle’s posthumously published Ned Kelly’s Last Days as ‘poisonous’ and inaccurate. Jones’s reliance on 1960s interviews with descendants of people whose parents may have known the Kelly Gang is odd. This has skewed his portrayal of gang members. In his books they seem to be personable young men dogged by ill fortune.
The Ned Kelly I found in the official records and newspapers was forever waving a gun in people’s faces and threatening to ‘blow their brains out’.
I found several unpublished documents about the Kelly Gang. These included a plea from Constable Alex Fitzpatrick for a new police pullover. His had a bullet hole in the sleeve and other damage, and was being kept as evidence. Fitzpatrick’s claim that Ned Kelly shot at him three times at the Kelly home in 1878 has been hotly debated. Kelly said he was not there. The document seems to settle the matter. In a strange unpublished note from his prison cell, Ned requested the chief of police to return a saddle.
There are missing records too. The Kelly Gang sent between fifty and sixty letters as part of their hate campaign against police. There were drawings of coffins, the gang shooting at police, and a piece of funeral crepe. The letters were full of blood-curdling threats which would shock most Australians if revealed today. But they have strayed. So many pivotal archival documents are missing that I say in the book ‘there is a possibility that the records have been systematically plundered’ and, if so, ‘the nation itself has been robbed’.
Ned’s .32 pocket Colt revolver was stolen from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry during the US Bicentennial in 1976. It had been lent by the State Library of Victoria. I believe there was something radically wrong with this revolver, and that it caused the superficial wounds suffered by Constables Fitzpatrick and Thomas Lonigan in 1878.
Ned’s execution took place 132 years ago at 10:00 a.m. on 11 November 1880. After the post-mortem a death mask was made. He was buried next morning in a rough wooden box. The executed prisoners were dug up in 1929 for transfer to grounds at Pentridge prison. Last year, DNA analysis proved the bones to be his. But his skull is still missing…
Ian MacFarlane is a former journalist, court reporter, archivist and historian. He is the author of The Kelly Gang Unmasked from Oxford University Press Australia and New Zealand. With eminent historian Michael Cannon, he co-edited the Historical Records of Victoria series, a primary source in eight volumes documenting pioneer European settlement in Victoria, Australia. With Lt-Col Neil Smith in 2005, he wrote Victoria and Australia’s First War that dealt with the colony’s naval contribution to New Zealand’s First Taranaki War in 1860-1. MacFarlane was recently interviewed in Melton Weekly and the book was recently reviewed by The Police Association Victoria.
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Image: Melbourne artist David Milne’s Nolanesque portrait of Ned Kelly. Used with permission of Ian MacFarlane. Do not reproduce without permission.
November 9, 2012
Friday procrastination: Hurricane Sandy edition
As many of you may have noticed, it’s been a little chaotic in the New York office of Oxford University Press these past two weeks. The MTA and NJTransit have the Flickr streams to prove a photo of a boat on railway tracks is worth a thousand “Service has been suspended until further notice” messages.
Resources if you’d like to help out: Sandy Hates Books, American Red Cross, Brooklyn Recovery Fund, Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, Salvation Army, United Way Sandy Recovery Fund, Amazon’s Sandy registry. GalleyCat, Shelf Awareness, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal have been providing daily updates of people in need and how to help, so check them out too.
A lot of that.
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Aren't I glad I learned the word ingle-nook in October?
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Tuxedo demostrates how to cope without heat
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Short stories are excellent for brief distractions before running in place for warmth
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OUP USA Publisher Niko Pfund talks about two books that he acquired and edited at NYU Press on the AAUP blog for their Books That Matter series. It’s a nice reminder for those of us who work in academic publishing why we do what we do.
The New York Times examines the hashtag, one of my favorite aspects of the Internet. #jk #lol #omgseriously
The article that was emailed to everyone in the office because of the following quote: “Any Oxford book of this-or-that is worth getting, though I don’t care much about exploration.”
LJ’s Infodocket has more on MOOCs.
Columbia University Press put together this helpful Storify on the 2012 Charleston Conference.
BBC photos of the Guatemala earthquake (via @OxfordEdGeog).
William Todd Schultz warns against diagnoses in psychobiography.
I’m considering having dead presidents represent me. Or at least get me coffee.
There’s a Life in Publishing tumblr. I will not admit that it is all true.
And finally, only one person noticed my one-week-without-power-induced grammatical error and she works on our dictionaries.
#bbpBox_265344024053956608 a { text-decoration:none; color:#717DBD; }#bbpBox_265344024053956608 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }Guess who's dictionary is included in @November 5, 2012 1:45 am via HootSuite Reply Retweet Favorite Oxford Academic
Leave a comment correcting me and get your virtual #oxfordpoints.
Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.
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How to play Six Degrees of Oxford Index on Twitter
Can you connect two seemingly different ideas? Now’s your chance! In a new addition to our regular Friday Twitter games, we’re introducing Six Degrees of Oxford Index or #6degreesOI.
We’ll pose a challenge — such as Pompeii to propaganda – with the #6degreesOI hashtag. Discover the five steps to move from one Oxford Index Overview Page (Pompeii) to the other (propaganda) using the “Related Overviews” on the right hand side. The first person to tweet the correct steps with the #6degreesOI hashtag wins.
“@OUPAcademic Pompeii – Apollo – Zeus – Jupiter – triumph – propaganda #6degreesOI”
A free discovery service, the Oxford Index lets you search across Oxford’s digital academic content with a single click, and find related content every step of the way. Overview pages provide a quick, at-a-glance view of a single topic with smart, integrated linking to additional resources. Since Oxford Index allows you to explore related content, you can end up going from point A to point Z without even realizing it. Hence, the idea for our game.
Here’s a sample game to give you an idea of how it works.
Sample game of Six Degrees of Oxford Index on Twitter.
Sample game of Six Degrees of Oxford Index on Twitter.
View the story “From Pompeii to propaganda #6degreesOI” on Storify
The Oxford Index is a free search and discovery tool from Oxford University Press. Oxford Index Beta launched a year ago in November 2011 and you can now search over 2.5 million items of content and 15 online products. The Index is designed to help you begin your research journey by providing a single, convenient search portal for trusted scholarship from Oxford and our partners, and then point you to the most relevant related materials – from journal articles to scholarly monographs. One search brings together top quality content and unlocks connections in a way not previously possible. The Oxford Index contains a cross-searchable set of nearly one million “index cards,” each representing a single article, chapter, journal, or book. Index pages display key information (including abstracts and keywords) about an item, helping you to judge the relevance of that content to your research.
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How is beer made?
Ever wonder what ingredients are needed to make beer? How do they interact? What exactly does fermentation entail? Garrett Oliver, editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, takes us inside the Brooklyn Brewery to show us where beer comes from and how fermentation works. He is brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and the foremost authority on beer in the United States.
Where Beer Comes From
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How Fermentation Works
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Garrett Oliver, editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, is the Brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and author of The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food. He has won many awards for his beers, is a frequent judge for international beer competitions, and has made numerous radio and television appearances as a spokesperson for craft brewing.
The Oxford Companion to Beer is the first major reference work to investigate the history and vast scope of beer, featuring more than 1,100 A-Z entries written by 166 of the world’s most prominent beer experts. It is first place winner of the 2012 Gourmand Award for Best in the World in the Beer category, winner of the 2011 André Simon Book Award in the Drinks Category, and shortlisted in Food and Travel for Book of the Year in the Drinks Category. View previous Oxford Companion to Beer blog posts and videos.
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Geography, chronology, and Israel’s survival
Modern science has spawned revolutionary breakthroughs in the essential meanings of space and time. Still, such major breakthroughs in human consciousness remain distant from the often overlapping worlds of diplomacy and international relations. This disregarded distance is dangerous, and, potentially, catastrophic. In the Middle East, especially, there is ample room for needed reconciliations between science and diplomacy. Much of the relentless struggle between Israel and its neighbors is about space. Largely overlooked, however, is that this conflict is also about time. For one reason or another, scholars and policy-makers have typically ignored the palpable impact, both real and potential, of chronology.
Here, time could be power. For example, the intangible idea of felt time, or time-as-lived, which contrasts with humanity’s uniformly accepted idea of clock time, has its intellectual origins in ancient Israel. Already rejecting measurable chronologies as nothing more than a sterile linear progression, the early Hebrews approached time with remarkably advanced intellectual sophistication, with the notion of time as a qualitative experience. For them, time was understood as subjective, inseparable from any personally-infused content.
The Jewish prophetic vision was one of a community existing under a transcendent God and in time. Oddly, the significance of space — today, of course, we must speak politically and strategically, of land — stemmed exclusively from something markedly theoretical and impractical. The nexus of sacred events that had allegedly taken place within ancient Israel’s divinely-delineated boundaries had little or nothing to do with protecting the Jewish Commonwealth.
Western wall in Jerusalem. Photo by Wayne McLean. Creative Commons License.
For present-day Israel, the space-time relationship has two core dimensions, both of which now need to be better understood, in Jerusalem, and also in Washington. First, further territorial surrenders by Israel would reduce the amount of time Israel has left to resist catastrophic war, terrorism, and conceivably genocide. Second, any such surrenders, especially when considered together or synergistically, could provide added time for Israel’s existential enemies to await an optimal, or ideally perfect, attack opportunity.
For Israel, the strategic importance of time can be expressed not only by its nuanced relationship to space, but also by its undimmed role as a storehouse of Jewish memory. Perhaps, by conscientiously recalling the immobilizing vulnerabilities of Jewish life in the world, Israel’s leaders could better prepare to step back from what must appear alarmingly as a very bad dream. To be useful, this eye-opening nightmare would need to recall a perilous sequence of national compromises and forfeitures. “Yesterday,” warned Samuel Beckett in his legendary analysis of Proust, “is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably a part of us, heavy and dangerous.” At times, the poet may offer better ideas than the military strategist.
Iris palaestina. Photo by MathKnight and Zachi Evenor. 2010. Creative Commons License.
Israel must immediately care to understand the very different ways in which particular countries and terror groups might themselves choose to live within time. If, for example, certain terrorist groups were now willing to accept an identifiably short time horizon in their search for a cataclysmic end to Israel, the Israeli military response to anticipated enemy aggressions would have to be correspondingly swift. More concretely, any such perceived willingness would plausibly heighten Israel’s incentive to undertake certain defensive first-strikes, or preemptions. In the language of international law, these strikes, if permissible, could express ‘anticipatory self-defense.’ This represents a binding part of customary jurisprudence that has its origins in an 1837 case, known formally as The Caroline .If, however, it would seem that this apocalyptic time horizon were authentically “long,” Israel’s policy response could be substantially less urgent. On behalf of its indispensable security, Israel could then choose to rely more upon the relatively passive and problematic strategic dynamics of deterrence and defense.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, a suicide bomber is afraid of death, so afraid that he is enthusiastically willing to “kill” himself (or herself) as a means of overcoming individual mortality. With this tactic, whether in Gaza, or Sinai, or Lebanon, certain terrorists will judge themselves able to reorient chronology from an intolerable and inevitable personal extinction, to a glorious and divinely-promised life everlasting.
This chronologic conceptualization has notably serious implications for foreign policy and peace. Accordingly, Israel could benefit from “decoding” a growing and pertinent mindset, one that would somehow identify “suicide” with eternal life. The suicide bomber sees himself or herself as a religious sacrificer. Israel must learn how to change a widespread enemy understanding that closely links heroic “martyrdom” to a conquest of time.
Moreover, Israel must reluctantly acknowledge that there can even be “suicide states.” Today, the most obvious candidate for any such a fearful designation would be Iran, especially because this nuclearizing country is expressly committed to an apocalyptic narrative of Shiite Islam. A suicide-state could be perfectly rational, so long as its considered expressions of mass-murder and absorbed retaliation were both presumed to be gainful.
Jerusalem’s immediate policy response must be to somehow convince prospective suicide bombers, both individuals and entire states, that any intended “sacrifice” of Jews or of the Jewish State will never elevate them above the fixedly mortal limits of time. For this to work, however, would-be enemy sacrificers will first need to be convinced that: (1) they are not now living in profane time; and (2) that every sacrificial killing of “infidels” is an actual and consequential profanation of their one true faith.
This sort of persuasion will not be easy. It may even require the cooperation of certain leading Islamic clerics. For his part, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will need to acknowledge enemy perceptions of space and time as utterly meaningful core visions, adversarial ideas that are preeminently religious and cultural in nature. Only then, when Israel finally understands that enemy notions of space and time are not genuinely political or jurisprudential, could Israel find itself on the correct path to Middle East peace.
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is author of many books and articles dealing with war, terrorism, and international law. He was Chair of Project Daniel, which presented its then-confidential report on Israel’s Strategic Future to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on 16 January 2003. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, Professor Beres lectures and publishes widely on issues of Israeli security, strategy, and deterrence. He is a regular contributor to OUPblog.
If you are interested in this subject, you may be interested in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, edited by Craig Callender. As the study of time has flourished in the physical and human sciences, the philosophy of time has come into its own as a lively and diverse area of academic research. Philosophers investigate not just the metaphysics of time, and our experience and representation of time, but the role of time in ethics and action, and philosophical issues in the sciences of time, especially with regard to quantum mechanics and relativity theory. This Handbook presents twenty-three specially written essays by leading figures in their fields. It is the first comprehensive collaborative study of the philosophy of time.
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Is Renaissance art ‘history’?
By Geraldine Johnson
When the latest news in the art world is all about record-breaking prices for contemporary works and the celebrity buzz of London’s Frieze Art Fair, thinking about Renaissance art might seem, well, a little old-fashioned, if not downright eccentric. But if the two experiences I had recently are anything to go by, maybe we need to think again.
The first of these occurred during an art history class I was teaching to a group of newly-arrived master’s students fizzing with intellectual energy and excitement. The topic was how the concept of ‘the artist’ had changed in European culture from ancient times to the present day, with an intriguing sideways glance at the situation in pre-Modern China. By the end of the usual give-and-take of a graduate seminar, it had become clear to all of us that there were actually a surprising number of similarities between that first great celebrity artist, the ‘divine’ Michelangelo, and much more recent art world superstars.
As we know all too well from countless biographies, exhibitions, films, and television specials, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rebel-artists seemed to gain critical acclaim in the long run (indeed, often only after they had died) by very overtly rejecting all trappings of worldly success. Think of Gauguin giving up a career as a big-city stockbroker to live in faraway Tahiti or van Gogh being unable to sell almost any paintings during his own lifetime. In contrast, Michelangelo, Dürer, Titian, Bernini, Rubens, and many other Renaissance and Baroque artists were absolutely desperate to become rich, famous, and if at all possible ennobled, and were clearly thrilled at the prospect of hanging out with popes and princes. This, in many ways, seems much closer to the red-carpet appearances, VIP-fraternizing, and multi-millionaire tastes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Grayson Perry than to those old garret-loving, poverty-stricken members of the Modernist avant-garde. The lifestyle choices and self-conscious PR strategies of contemporary celebrity artists may thus have more in common with Michelangelo than with Manet or Matisse than one might at first think.
Another recent event that convinced me that Renaissance art is far from ‘history’ was the phone conversation I had immediately after my class had finished. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal had called to ask me to provide some background information for an article she was writing on changing reactions to nude men versus nude women in art. The catalyst was the opening of a new exhibition in Vienna’s Leopold Museum entitled Nackte Männer or Nude Men, which rather predictably was generating a great deal of controversy even before the first ticket had been sold.
Once again, contemporary art practices could only be fully understood by looking back in time. Initially, one had to turn to the art academies of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that privileged usin
g the nude male model in art education and thus, by definition, made it nearly impossible for respectable young women to be trained in anything other than painting demure still lives and fully-clothed portraits. But ultimately, to find the sources for the almost endless academic studies of nude men—not to mention the four-meter-high photographic installation known as Mr Big currently lounging in front of the Leopold Museum—one had to go back to the future once again in the form of Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, who saw the male rather than the female body as the ideal human form and who themselves looked even further back to the Classical bodies of ancient Roman and Greek sculpure.
Today in Vienna, large red stickers have been hastily pasted onto the exposed genitals of the three naked male athletes whose photograph by French artists Pierre & Gilles is being used on the Nackte Männer’s exhibition posters plastered throughout the city, much to the distress of the more delicate members of the Austrian public. Back in Michelangelo’s day, it was painted loincloths that were retroactively added to cover the bare buttocks (and worse) of the saints and sinners depicted in his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, with the censorship carried out, in this case, at the behest of incensed clerics convinced that the pope’s chapel was being turned into a brothel. So, what goes around, really does come around, if you know your Renaissance art. And, funnily enough, there are even some ‘old masters’ on display at a spin-off of this year’s Frieze Art Fair.
Geraldine A. Johnson is a University Lecturer in History of Art and Associate Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford University, as well as a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. She is the author of Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction, co-editor of Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and editor of Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension. She is currently completing a book on art and the senses in Renaissance Italy.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!
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Image Credits: Ilse Haider, Mr Big [Courtesy of Galerie Steinek, Wien]; Michelangelo, Detail of the Creation of Adam, 1508-12. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City [public domain via Wikimedia Commons]; Michelangelo, Detail of the Last Judgment 1534-41. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City [public domain via Wikimedia Commons]
November 8, 2012
Denzel Washington’s Flight from authority
Over the course of the last thirty years, Denzel Washington has played a notable variety of roles: leading man and aging man; hero and villain; emblem of his race and Everyman. Yet to a truly striking degree the various roles he’s chosen — and here it’s worth noting that as one of the most blue-chip actors in Hollywood, he’s long enjoyed considerable power in this regard — revolve around two key relationships: mentor and protégé. Early in his career (Carbon Copy, Glory) he was a literal or figurative son; in more recent roles (John Q, The Great Debaters) he’s been the literal or figurative father. In Malcolm X, he managed to play both, the disciple of a religious movement as well as a role model for others. This is no coincidence. For decades, Washington has been a spokesman for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Since the turn of the century, Washington has expanded his cinematic vision of mentoring in new racial and gender directions. In Man on Fire, he was a surrogate father for the white child played by Dakota Fanning; in Unstoppable he was the steady hand in a crisis with Chris Pine.
All of which makes Washington’s latest star turn, as an airline pilot in the newly released Flight, so surprising. He plays William “Whip” Whitaker, whose daring maneuver navigating a malfunctioning plane allows most of its passengers to survive the ordeal. Such impressive competence is not unusual for a Washington character. Nor is the fact that he’s a flawed man — in this case, an alcoholic and drug addict who made that landing in a state of plural intoxication. Washington has played troubled and ethically-challenged people before (notably as a corrupt cop in Training Day, for which he won an Oscar, in part no doubt by playing against type) and American Gangster. What’s different here is the degree to which we see the limits of power for a Washington character on his own terms. It’s not simply that he can’t save all the passengers — a fact that puts his career in jeopardy when evidence of his altered state surfaces. Even more significantly, his character tries, and fails, to mentor multiple people.
The first example that we see comes early in the movie with his younger white co-pilot (Brian Geraghty), who is earnest and anxious about the storm into which the two men are flying — and anxious about his boss as well. Whitaker shows real leadership in a moment of crisis, but cannot ultimately prevent disaster from befalling his lieutenant, who later interprets the situation very differently than Whitaker does. While recovering from his injuries at an Atlanta hospital, Whitaker also befriends an attractive young drug addict (Kelly Reilly) and later rescues her from an abusive landlord at the very moment she’s to become homeless. Whitaker gives her a floor, literal and figurative, which we she can rebuild her life. But his own addictions make it impossible for him to play a constructive role beyond that, which he clearly wants to do.
Washington’s character fails a much more fundamental test not as a figurative father but as a literal one for his own son (Justin Martin). Actually, the father’s main role is to prompt the son to stick up for his mother (Garcelle Beauvais). Father and son will ultimately experience a rapprochement, but it’s not quite the family reunion Hollywood convention typically dictates.
Not that Flight is an especially unconventional movie. Director Robert Zemeckis is a technically accomplished filmmaker with evident skills in telling this story. You know pretty much right away that Whip Whitaker is headed for a reckoning, and you know pretty much right away that it’s going to be one that happens on his time and on his terms, in good Alcoholics Anonymous fashion. Whip Whitaker is a rugged, if shambling, individualist. This is hardly shocking in the broader context of film history, but Denzel Washington rarely is. Moreover, Washington is not content to leave it at that this time around. His larger point in taking this role appears to be that personal accountability is insufficient — a necessary precondition for an authentic life, but not adequate on its own terms. In Flight, it seems, sooner or later you must go home again, notwithstanding any necessary detours. This involves accepting limits — among them the limits of leadership.
Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. He is the author of the forthcoming Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (December 2012), The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, and other books. Cullen is also a book review editor at the History News Network.
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Sinfonia Antartica: ‘Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free’
One hundred years ago this month the bodies of Captain Scott and his companions were discovered, eight months after they had perished from starvation, frostbite, and exposure on their return journey from the South Pole. Ostensibly a scientific and research expedition, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party had raced against Roald Amundsen to be first at the South Pole, and lost.
In 1947, Ealing Studios produced an ambitious and dramatic feature film of the story of Scott’s polar trek, which starred John Mills as Captain Scott. Scott of the Antarctic played up the tragedy’s heroic aspects, projecting an ethos of gloriousness in defeat and redemption through failure. Producer Michael Balcon commissioned Ralph Vaughan Williams to compose incidental music for the film. Vaughan Williams, an inveterate cinema-goer, was already composer of music for several significant British feature films produced as propaganda during the Second World War, such as 49th Parallel (1941), Coastal Command (1942), The People’s Land, and Flemish Farm (both 1943).
Vaughan Williams composed substantially more material for Scott than was eventually used (music for twenty-eight sequences in all). He had conceived much of the music before he even saw the screenplay, or rushes of the film. When he knew that he was to be the composer he read around the subject as widely as he could, and already had firmly in mind the materials that he would use. The manuscript, now in the British Library, shows the evocative titles for the various scenes: “Heroism,” “Ice floes,” “Penguins,” “Pony march and blizzard,” “Amundsen’s flag at the Pole,” “Death of Oates,” “Only 11 miles.” The subject matter chimed with themes which ran through Vaughan Williams’s whole life’s work, particularly his notion of a man within a pilgrim’s progress, a life-long spiritual quest for redemption and glory through trial and adversity.
Vaughan Williams once said to Alan Frank (his editor at OUP) that “almost always when I write film music I have an ulterior idea of a concert version in my own mind,” because for composers “in the concert room we are pretty sure we shall not have half the music cut out and the rest inaudible.” Thus, in 1949 he began composing Sinfonia Antartica. In a note for the premiere of the work in 1953, Vaughan Williams said that it was “suggested by the film Scott of the Antarctic which was produced by Ealing Studios a few years ago.” Some of the themes, he said “are derived from my incidental music to that film.” Sinfonia Antartica was first performed by the Hallé Orchestra and Choir, under Sir John Barbirolli (at the time, there was much debate about the title’s correct Italian adjectival spelling!) and it is in this form that Vaughan Williams’s Scott music has become best known to the concert-goer.
The five movement form given by Vaughan Williams to his symphony imposes a musical architecture on material which originated in the sectional narrative and mood painting inherent in film music. The symphony is not a patchwork sewn together from the film score, but a re-ordering and in many cases re-composition of the original material. The composer’s philosophical and objective intent is underlined by his inclusion of poetic superscriptions to each of the movements (printed in the score, but not recited in performance). A quotation from Scott’s journals (“I do not regret this journey… We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.”) replaced a quote from Ecclesiasticus (“Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name liveth for ever more”) for the final movement at the time of publication.
The result is a gigantic (forty minute) reflection on man’s isolation and ultimate vulnerability within the extreme untamed wilderness.
Simon Wright is Head of Rights & Contracts for Sheet Music at Oxford University Press. Our new edition of Sinfonia Antartica is now available, published during the centenary year of Scott’s expedition. New orchestral and vocal materials are available on hire. The score has been checked and edited by David Matthews, and there is an introductory essay on the original expedition and its interpretation in the film by Max Jones, author of The Last Great Quest and editor of Scott’s Journals: Scott’s Last Expedition.
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Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the USA by Peters Edition.
In praise of the podcast
PB. The initials are not exactly as familiar as, say, BBC or NPR, but we’re not operating in a massively different environment. PB: Philosophy Bites.
Time was when to broadcast on the radio (or the ‘wireless’) you’d have to seek a license for permission to use a teeny weeny portion of the radio frequency spectrum. Broadcasting was time-consuming, bureaucratic, and above all expensive. It required staff and costly equipment and it was possible only with the support of highly-trained studio technicians and engineers.
No longer. The Philosophy Bites podcasts are recorded on a five-inch tape recorder in various offices (usually in Oxford or London) and edited on a laptop in a small (and unkempt) bedroom in North West London. Since it was launched five years ago, it’s had 15 million downloads. It is heard all over the world – in San Francisco, Tokyo, London and Sao Paolo – and its followers include professors, journalists, farmers and at least one American soldier stationed in Afghanistan (thanks for your email, Sir).
My background is in broadcasting, though I have an academic post. PB co-founder, Nigel Warburton, is a bona fide academic and makes successful forays into the media. We’re both passionate about philosophy, and Philosophy Bites tries to combine our skills and interests. But we’re essentially dependent on the knowledge and eloquence of our interviewees: we’ve conducted 200 interviews now – and by far the most rewarding aspect of our PB experience has been the free education we’ve received from some of the most significant philosophers in the English-speaking world.
And we have some advantages over traditional media. We can focus on our niche, the stuff we know about; we can post interviews when we like, and our interviews can be as long as we like – and as long as they deserve to be. There’s no red tape, and we’re not saddled with the broadcasters’ procrustean burden of cutting programmes to finish exactly on the pips at the top of the hour.
All this poses a threat to traditional media. If an increasing number of specialized podcasters cover their specialized topic as well or better than any general broadcaster can manage, audience figures for the powerful players will be slowly chipped away. They’ll probably have to focus on areas in which the minnows can’t compete — newsgathering, say, or live sporting events. But it’s good news for listeners — Philosophy Bites is part of a new landscape of content, provided by enthusiasts. CNN, BBC, NBC, ABC, and CBC will all survive, thankfully. But for the miniscule world of philosophy, another set of initials is on the scene: PB.
Here are a few of our most recent podcasts:
Liane Young on Mind and Morality
An important aspect of understanding morality is accurate description of what happens when people make moral judgments. Nigel Warburton talks to psychologist and philosopher Liane Young about her experiments designed to shed light on moral intentions.
[See post to listen to audio]
Gary L. Francione on Animal Abolitionism
How should we treat non-human animals? Is it enough not to cause them harm? In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Gary Francione argues that we need to go one step further than Jeremy Bentham did and abolish all use of animals. He calls his approach abolitionism.
[See post to listen to audio]
Richard Sorabji on Mahatma Gandhi as Philosopher
Richard Sorabji discusses Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence with Nigel Warburton for this the 200th episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.
[See post to listen to audio]
Or you can search the full back-catalogue, categorised by month and by topic.
David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.
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November 7, 2012
Monthly etymology gleanings for October, part 2
Fowl, fox, and pooch. My cautious reservations about a tie between the etymon of fowl and the verb fly were dismissed in one of the comments. Therefore, a few additional notes on that word may be in order. The origin of fowl is uncertain, that is, controversial, not quite unknown. In Friedrich Kluge’s lifetime ten editions of his German etymological dictionary came out. In the first three, he said that fowl and fly (he of course dealt with German Vogel and fliegen) had apparently been connected for good reason (nicht ohne Grund). In the next two editions, for good reason was replaced with perhaps (vielleicht). In the sixth edition (1899), we find more likely (wahrscheinlicher) instead of perhaps. By 1899 Kluge had read an important article, to which he referred, and felt convinced that fowl was related to some words outside Germanic (such words in Lithuanian and Sanskrit mean “bird’s down” and “bird”). No new revisions of this entry followed.
During the last years of his life Kluge was blind. He bequeathed his work to his amanuensis Alfred Götze, who became the editor of the next edition. Götze removed the Lithuanian example but left the rest of Kluge’s text intact, except that instead of more likely he wrote some people think (man denkt). In the excellent dictionary, known as Weigand-Hirt, the editor (Herman Hirt) featured the Sanskrit word and cited both hypotheses as equally probable. Walther Mitzka, the next editor of Kluge, advocated the fowl-fly connection. After his death the dictionary became Elmar Seebold’s responsibility. Seebold believes in the Indo-European provenance of fowl, and, as a result, the exiled bird from Lithuania has reemerged. But his predecessors thought that fowl had originally meant “feathered creature,” while Seebold derives the word from the root pu-, used for naming baby animals. His idea is also far from original; it first surfaced in 1913.
I have told this long story to make two things clear. First, anyone interested in etymology should remember that dictionaries, unless they unfold the entire panorama of conjectures and reasoning, reflect not the truth (which is often hidden) but their editors’ opinions, and opinions tend to change. Second, it is better not to insist on any of the existing etymologies of fowl, because the facts at our disposal can be interpreted in more ways than one. Skeat, in the first edition of his English etymological dictionary (1882), made the fatal mistake of saying that fuglaz, the reconstructed etymon of fowl, certainly arose by dissimilation for fluglaz (even the idea of dissimilation was called into question by those who accepted this etymology). When you study word origins, unless the question is trivial, never say certainly or undoubtedly! In Skeat’s last edition (1910), the verdict is short but not sweet: “Origin unknown.” Incidentally, the fuglas ~ fluglaz idea belongs to Eberhard G. Graff, whose dictionary of Old High German was appearing in installments between 1834 and 1846 (thus, decades before Kluge), and it found the support of such great scholars as Franz Bopp and Lorenz Diefenbach. And where is this idea now? Seebold does not even mention it!
There are other hypotheses on the origin of fowl, but we can do without them, because I have my own ax (or rather a small hatchet) to grind. If fowl goes back to an Indo-European root beginning with pu- (naturally, Germanic f corresponds to non-Germanic p), it may be akin to fox (Gothic fauho, pronounced foho): compare Sanskrit púcchas “tail, hind part” and Russian pukh “fuzz, down”). Fox would then emerge as an animal with a bushy tail, and fowl as a creature with a lot of down, fuzz, or fluff. As could be expected, other scholars suggested other connections: fox as an animal with a strong smell, and so forth. I am sure that, if foxes could understand comparative linguistics, they would have endorsed the proximity between their kind and fowl.
Now, one of our correspondents wonders whether pooch “dog” can be traced to the Sanskrit root mentioned above. I am afraid it cannot. The origin of most words designating “dog” is obscure (such are Engl. hound, Russian sobaka, and dog itself). Pooch is an early twentieth-century noun of seemingly American descent. Why should it have Sanskrit lineage? All the dictionaries I have consulted call pooch a word of unknown origin, while the Internet is full of dubious proposals. I also have a conjecture, admittedly, not a great one, but etymological beggars can’t be choosers.
It will be remembered that some scholars traced the Indo-European word for “baby animal” to the root pu-. Such roots tend to be recreated from one century to another. They have a vague sound symbolic value and are prone to self-generation. Pu- conjures up an image of something swelling or round. Although the idea underlying it may be vague, if we look at puppy, puppet, poppet “small person,” popsy-wopsy (a term of endearment for a girl), Winnie-the Pooh, and the beginning of such words as poodle, pudding, puddle, pug (originally another term of endearment, later “dwarf breed of a dog,” in addition to other senses), and many others, pooch will no longer appear isolated. I suggest that pooch is an emotional, expressive, slightly jocular word, part of the Pooh, pup-popsy-(poop)-pug group, that is, “doggie,” the more so as a pooch is usually a small dog.
Awning and aulnage; tarp. This was a most interesting comment, but it did not take me by surprise, because, after I read Skinner’s etymology of awning, I looked up a(u)ln- words in the OED and ran into aulnage and aulnager. Aulnage~ alnage referred to the measurement by the ell, and aulnager ~ alnager was a sworn officer appointed to examine and attest the measurement and quality of woolen goods. For a moment I also thought that Skinner had guessed the truth, but second thoughts prevailed. An etymologist’s first thoughts usually pertain to semantics, but then comes a phonetic hangover.
Aulning does not seem to have ever been spelled without an l. By contrast, awning never had an l in the middle. The group ln is rare in English. When it is simplified, it loses n. The examples are mill (from myln, from mylen) and kiln, pronounced, according to dictionaries, as kil by professionals dealing with such furnaces. Only in shaln’t and woln’t (shan’t and won’t) was l shed before n, but that happened in a combination of three consonants. It is anybody’s guess whether some speakers identified awning with aulnage. And I fully agree with our other correspondent who noted that, if tarpaulin had dropped out of the language and only its modern form tarp had stayed, no scholar would have been able to guess its origin. We often see such stubs and wonder what the trunk looked like.
Bald “hairless.” Bald eagle is not the only bird name with bald. German examples also exist, and English dialectal ball-faced “white-faced,” not “clean-shaven,” among others, reveals the older sense of the root.
Hoity-toity. Can it go back to French haut tout “all high”? To my mind, the chance is small for three reasons. The verb hoit “indulge in riotous and noisy mirth; move clumsily” looks like a better etymon for hoity (the adverb all-ahoit has also been attested). Higty-tighty, a variant of hoity-toity, may have been the original form of the word (if so, hoity-toity is a dialectal pronunciation of highty-tighty), though, to be sure, they may be independent variants. Finally, does the French locution haut tout “frolicsome behavior” exist?
More tidbits. Lie—lay—lain, lay—laid—laid, and lie—lied—lied. Since lay has ousted lie and we now lay down and have a rest, the process left some people profoundly confused. For the following piece I am again indebted to Walter Turner. (From the website of the Chicago Tribune): “I thought he was dead,” XX told the Dispatch. “When I dropped him into the water, he just lied there for a few seconds, but then he did a twist and shot off into the water.”
A well-known local variant but still amusing. “My mother taught me to dance with the one that brung you, and the voters brung me here,” said Rep. XX, R-Texas, one of the new freshmen who strongly opposed the Mexican aid. (Thus, sing—sang—sung and bring—brang—brung.)
Adverbialitis. XX and YY have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of possessing an extremely lethal poison for use as a weapon.” Even good dictionaries now give “causing great harm” as one of the senses of lethal, but lethal means or at least is supposed to mean “deadly, mortal,” and extremely lethal is a cousin of very unique, a great favorite with undergraduate students.
An exercise in rhetoric. “Why the political press raiseth up only to taketh down, and vice versa, is a matter of speculation.” The author of the newspaper article (a distinguished journalist and writer) decided to flaunt his knowledge of the Bible and, in so doing, produced a beautiful infinitive, to taketh. This is what I call screwing the pooch.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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Image credit: Sketch of rooster and fox by Oliver Wendell Holmes, ~1855-57. Source: Library of Congress.
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