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Russia’s toughest prisons: what can the Pussy Riot band members expect?

By Judith Pallot

The onion dome of Russian Orthodox Church dominates the skyline of women’s correctional colony number 14 (IK14) in Part’sa. The Governor of the colony, showing Laura and I around, told us that five prisoners – all tuberculosis sufferers – who volunteered to help build the Church were miraculously cured of their disease.  It was a story we were to hear repeated several times on our research trip to women’s penal colonies in S-W Mordoviia.  How the community of believers in IK 14 will react to the arrival of members of the controversial rock-band ‘Pussy Riot’, recently convicted of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ is a matter of intense concern to their supporters.

Judith Pallot with co-author Laura Piacentini, various correctional officers, and research collaborators outside the entrance to IK14. The Governor of the colony (Kulyagin) is in the centre of the photo.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the band members recently convicted, arrived in IK14 last week.  The colony is one of seventeen located along a now defunct single-track railway line  extending 60 miles north of the Pot’ma station on the mainline connecting Moscow and Siberia in the S-W corner of the Mordoviyan republic.  Prisoners have been brought here from the early 1930s, initially to work timber stands to produce wood for the construction of the Moscow metro.  Part’sa, the settlement that hosts IK 14, is in the heart of the penal zone; it is a strange place – everyone here is connected in some way with the prison service.

IK14 is more accessible now than it was in the past when permits were needed to enter the penal zone. However, for anyone wanting to visit one of the 14-15,000 men and women incarcerated here the cost in time and money can be prohibitive.  Small wonder that the statistics for visitation are so poor; 60-70% per cent of prisoners receive no visit during the course of a year, with the record is worse for women than for men.

Tolokonnikova will be among the more fortunate as she has a good support group around her.  However, she will only be entitled to ten visits per year; including four ‘residential’ three-day long visits.  The Russian prison service can boast that it is ahead of much of the rest of Europe in the provision of ‘residential’ visits, but it should be noted that the need for these has arisen due to prisoners being sent to such remote regions.

Prison residential visiting suits are rather like student accommodation blocks in the West.  They consist of a number of rooms off a corridor each with two/three beds, a kitchen for communal use and, sometimes, a common room with TV.  In the Mordoviyan colonies they have vases of plastic flowers and landscape pictures on the walls to ‘make it seem like home’.  But there are no outside windows, and both prisoners and their visitors remain inside for the 72 hours of the visit.

Visitors to the correctional colonies have to bring provisions sufficient to last three days. It is not uncommon to see a line of women laden with bags waiting to have their contents checked before entering the colony. Russian prisons allow a surprising range of products and goods into the colony compared with their American counterparts.  Further to this, whilst in the visiting dormitory prisoners can dispense with their uniform and headscarf, are exempt from parade ground head counts, and given dispensation from work in the colony’s ‘production zone’.

An issue for Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is whether her daughter Gera will be brought to visit her.  Not many children visit their mothers in prison – the journeys are often too long and, many believe that it is wrong to bring children into such a ‘dark place’.  Colonies organise Family Open Daysdesigned for children, but those who come are often told that the prison is a hospital, ‘secret factory’, or indeed, a convent.

A prison Church in L'govo colony Riazan.

Half of Mordoviia’s correctional colonies have a church like the one in IK14, and the Mordoviian penal authority is the first to have placed priests on its pay roll.  In 2001 the former Head of the Prison Service declared that the priest had become more important than correction officers in re-socialising prisoners. It would smack too much of conspiracy theory to suggest that the strong presence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Mordoviia’s colonies influenced the decision to send Tolokonnikova to IK 14 in Part’sa.   But, given the nature of the Pussy Rioter’s last encounter with the Russian Orthodox Church, we might be forgiven for wondering whether it is more than a coincidence.

Judith Pallot is Professor of the Human Geography of Russia at the University of Oxford, and Official Student of Christ Church. Judith Pallot is co-author (with Laura Piacentini) of Gender, Geography, and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia (OUP, 2012).

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 Image credits: Courtesy of Judith Pallot. Do not reproduce without permission.

How to avoid programming

By Robert St. Amant

What does a computer scientist do? You might expect that we spend a lot of our time programming, and this sometimes happens, for some of us. When I spend a few weeks or even months building a software system, the effort can be enormously fun and satisfying. But most of the time, what I actually do is a bit different. Here’s an example from my past work, related to the idea of computational thinking.

Imagine you have a new robot in your home. You haven’t yet figured out all of its capabilities, so you mainly use it for sentry duty; it rolls from room to room while you’re not at home, turning lights and appliances on and off, perhaps checking for fires or burglaries.

Your robot is a simple reflex agent, in the jargon of artificial intelligence. It acts on reflexes, or rules: “If you sense such-and-such in the environment, then take such-and-such an action.” Your robot has a variety of sensors for identifying furniture and doorways and such, and you can write rules for it to follow: “When you sense a doorway with an end table to the right, then go through the doorway.” You can also place small signs in a room for the robot: “If you sense a sign with a red octagon next to a doorway, don’t go through that doorway.”

Here’s the question we became interested in: Given a specific behavior that you’d like the robot to carry out, and given the choice between making changes to either the robot’s program (writing new rules) or the environment (putting up new signs), what do you do?

We often choose between general versions of these two strategies (or apply both) in our everyday lives. For example, if my two-year-old niece is visiting, I can tell her not to play with various fragile knick knacks, but because “programming” a two-year-old isn’t very effective, I can also make some changes to the environment as a form of childproofing. I do the same to myself; I can “program” myself to remember to take a gift for a colleague to work in the morning, or instead I can place the package in front of the door so that I won’t leave without either picking it up or stepping over it. Cognitive scientists have studied such strategies under the umbrella of embodied and situated cognition, but less is known about how they might apply to interactive computer systems.

I set up an experiment with the help of David Christian, a graduate student working with me. Participants were given the task of directing a simulated robot through a small maze to reach a goal. At each intersection of the maze was a symbol: a square, a circle, a diamond, or a triangle. The robot was pre-programmed with a behavior for each symbol: turn left, turn right, or go straight. Here’s the tricky part. The robot’s program had a bug — the robot couldn’t reach the goal following its current program. To fix the problem, the participant could either change a rule or change a symbol at an intersection, making as many changes as needed (watching the robot run through the maze after each change) for the goal to be reached.

The robot is represented by an arrow, the goal by a yellow square

Our main question was this: Do participants have a natural preference between programmatic control of the robot versus modification of its environment? Each maze was set up so that a single change to either the robot’s program or its environment would produce the correct behavior. The two problem-solving strategies aren’t quite the same, though. Changing the robot’s program produces a “global” change in its behavior; if we were to change the green square symbol in the robot’s program to “Go straight,” that would apply in every intersection showing a green square. (If it’s not possible to go straight, the robot simply stops.) Changing the environment, on the other hand, is a “local” change; the difference is in the robot’s behavior at just one specific intersection.

About a third of the time participants chose only programming changes for a given maze, and about a third of the time they chose only environmental changes. In the cases where participants chose a mixture of programming and environmental changes, we saw an interesting pattern. They tended to choose one or more programming changes first, and then a series of environmental changes until the problem was solved. In 78% of the mixed cases, the first change was to the program, and in 89% of the mixed cases, the last change was to the environment. About half of our participants were computer programmers, but we saw no difference between programmers and non-programmers in our main performance measures.

The patterns in the mixed strategies are reminiscent of how we solve problems in the real world. For example, in government we have broad rules established at the federal level, with specialized problems handled at the local level. Business people sometimes talk about setting the ground rules for their cooperation and then dealing with specific situations as they arise. It turns out that this same pattern seemed to hold, at least some of the time, in the way people chose to solve problems in our robot control experiment. We make initial, global decisions that move us quickly through a problem, and then we make small, local changes until we hit upon a solution. We see this same approach in many areas of computing, from computer architecture to software engineering to artificial intelligence.

Let’s come back to computational thinking. Jan Cuny, Larry Snyder, and Jeannette Wing describe computational thinking as “the thought processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form that can be effectively carried out by an information-processing agent.” My own interest is in the commonality between strategies for computational thinking and strategies we apply for solving problems in our everyday lives. There are usually differences, but sometimes we can find basic similarities. Then we can say, “The way you go about solving this familiar problem is one version of a general strategy in computational thinking. Here’s how it works…”

Robert St. Amant is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, and the author of Computing for Ordinary Mortals, from Oxford University Press. You can follow him on Twitter at @RobStAmant and read his Huffington Post column or his previous OUPblog posts.

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Image credit: Maze image courtesy of Robert St. Amant. Used with permission.

How to survive election season, oral history style

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

Every presidential election, similar concerns arise: Don’t the campaign ads seem especially vicious? Has the media coverage always been this crazed? Will we ever actually get to vote? While I know many who become more motivated the more absurd the election season becomes, I tend to become disenchanted with the whole process, wondering how my one small vote could compete against the Koch Brothers or Morgan Freeman.

Believe it or not, to keep the thoughts of voter purges and new ID laws from sending me into a blind panic, I’ve taken to trolling through online archives dealing with civil rights and past elections. Yes, this historian-in-training finds a disturbingly academic comfort in undertakings like the University of Southern Mississippi’s Civil Rights Documentation Project and the American Folklife Center’s Civil Rights History Project. I have spent an absurd amount of time listening to interviews from the Southern Oral History Program’s Long Civil Rights Era Initiative. I like to think my mother and my 10th grade social studies teacher would be extremely proud.

A group of African-American children gather around a sign and booth to register voters. Early 1960s. Image courtesy of Kheel Center, Cornell University.

I’ve also found refuge in more contemporary interviews and analyses, such as the Miller Center’s take on the October 3rd presidential debate. The Miller Center actually boasts a lovely and comprehensive presidential oral history program that not only documents the lives of past presidents, but also covers special topics like the life of Senator Edward Kennedy and White House speechwriters. The two other projects I’ve stumbled upon are Louis B. Nunn Center for Oral History’s project on how religion impacted the 1960 presidential election in Kentucky, and the “Slaying the Dragon of Debt” by the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library at the University of California–Berkeley, which examines fiscal policy and national debt since the 1970s.

Between the panicky pronouncements from Walker, Texas Ranger and threats of rioting on Twitter, it’s hard not to get caught up in the maelstrom of the campaign season. However, history — and oral history in particular — helps it keep it all in perspective of the larger struggle towards whatever ideal USA one holds dear (mine features chocolate and a public option). While I would not dissuade anyone from worrying over the outcome of November 6th, it’s good to remember that we’ve been on this roller coaster before, succeeded and failed by a variety of metrics. And we’ll do it again.

See you at the polls.

Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the new editorial/ media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities. Before coming to Madison, Caitlin worked for the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview and like them on Facebook to preview the latest from the Review, learn about other oral history projects, connect with oral history centers across the world, and discover topics that you may have thought were even remotely connected to the study of oral history. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts on the OUPblog for addendum to past articles, interviews with scholars in oral history and related fields, and fieldnotes on conferences, workshops, etc.

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Curly-murly, flippy-floppy boom-booms

By Mark Peters

There are many words I love. Some of my favorites are abyss and buttmunch. I also love many categories of words, such as euphemisms and variations of the f-word. One of my favorite word types makes my heart go thump-thump and pit-a-pat: reduplicative words.

Reduplicative words are far more than a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, though they’re often a load of gaga. If you’ve ever said night night, made a wee-wee, listened to “Helter Skelter,” or supported Mr. T’s war on jibber-jabber, you know some reduplicative words, which repeat all or part of the root. This involves changing a vowel (clip-clop) or a consonant (hocus-pocus). There’s also contrastive reduplication (“I’m not an assassin assassin!”) and schm reduplication (“Dingleberry, schmingleberry!”).

The Oxford English Dictionary is chock full of reduplicative words, many of which were new to me. Here’s a dibble-dabble of reduplicative OED words. If these terms seem unworthy of attention, stop being a doodoo brain and repeat one of my favorite quotations as a mantra. As Isaac Goldberg put it in 1938: “In the dawn of language, the bow-wows and the pooh-poohs and even the ding-dongs must have served man well.”

boom-boom

While I’ve heard this term used in the childish and awesome expression make a boom-boom, I never heard of a British sense that serves as punctuation to a joke, especially a bad one. The OED says boom-boom was the catchphrase of a puppet fox named Basil Brush, who was popular in the 1960s. Here’s an example from Monty Python in 1972: “I’ve got a chauffeur and every time I go to the lavatory he drives me potty! Boom-boom!”

quavery-mavery

Since this means “In an uncertain or precarious condition.” I relate to it very much, though not as direly as in this 1809 use: “Your father… is standing, as a body may say, quavery-mavery between life and death.” According to my accountant, my financial status is quavery-mavery between freelance writer and freelance hobo.

flippy-floppy

This self-defining word is used in this 1922 example: “The breeze suddenly blew it to one side, and there on the sand, instead of her two little shoes, was a mermaid’s tail, with a flippy-floppy fin on the end!” I like that sentence, though it seems a little disrespectful to the mermaid community. I recommend this word be reserved for less majestic creatures such as politicians.

A lenten dream by J. Keppler. Puck. 12 March 1884. Library of Congress.

fluster-blusterer

Speaking of politics, this word for a blowhard (used since the late 1600s) applies best to those who bluster and bloviate on an Olympic level. A fluster-blusterer is likely to make a wringle-wrangle, which is a “Controversial argument; wordy disputation.” That one appears here in 1882: “The House was not sitting, and there was no wringle-wrangle of debates to furnish material for the columns.” There’s a lot of cross-pollination between reduplicative words and BS euphemisms. Reduplication is a natural way of describing arkymalarky.

fnarr fnarr

Here’s another Briticism I feel deeply ignorant for not knowing. Fnarr fnarr represents “lecherous or half-suppressed laughter” and seems like the sort of thing Benny Hill must have done repeatedly.  It dates from the 1980s and is dripping with sexual innuendo, as seen here in 1999: “From the dirty organ (fnarr!) opening (fnarr, fnarr), you just know it’s going to be a suggestive few minutes.” From there, it became an adjective as well, as seen in this wonderfully deadpan Scottish use from 2010: “If he cracks any more gags as fnarr-fnarr as the one about the policewoman taking down your particulars I wouldn’t be surprised to see her throw in her lot with the ladies.”

fingle-fangle

This is “A trifle; something whimsical or fantastic.” Citations from the 1600s mention “fingle-fangle fashion” and wrangling over “the slightest fingle fangle.” That’s in the same lexical ball park as niffy-naffy. which means “trifling, fussy, concerned with small or unimportant detail; foolish or indecisive.” Niffy-naffy types love their fingle-fangles.

twingle-twangle

This term has been used since the 1600s as “A representation of the continuous sounds of a harp or the like.” It popped up as recently as 1900: “When he had…finished cocking his viol and twingle-twangling it to his satisfaction.” To my ears, this word sounds a little less heavenly than the dulcet tones of a harp or any other non-ear-torturing instrument. Maybe whoever coined it lived with the Gilbert Gottfried of harp players.

mingle-mangleness

Under a lengthy entry for mingle-mangle (a type of hodgepodge or mishmash), I found this awesome variation, which was used here in 1827:  “I wish you could see what is done, which for oddity, mingle-mangleness, and out-of-the-wayness may vie with anything that has ever preceded it.”

The word of reduplicative words is nothing but mingle-mangleness and higgledy-piggledyology, which is not a word I made up. It’s the name of a chapter in theoretical physicist John D. Barrow’s book Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits. This word gives me hope that one day reduplicative words will be respected, perhaps even by their harshest critics: that one day Mr. T and jibber-jabber will walk together hand in hand, as friends.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

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Who owns the Paracel, Spratley, & Senkaku Islands?

By Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

The idea that the twenty-first century will be marked by the ascendency of Asia, and more specifically the rise of China as a global superpower, has gained broad currency in academic discussions, policy decisions, and general public opinion around the world. After focusing on the Middle East for much of the last two decades, the United States has recently declared a pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, for example, while opinion surveys show majorities of Americans already believe China’s economy has overtaken that of the US (China is currently number two in absolute terms but ranks around 120th place on a per capita basis measured in purchasing power parity). The idea that some type of US-China rivalry will come to dominate the international agenda has assumed a certain air of inevitability for many. This provides an attractive storyline of an established power facing a rising upstart, yet the most serious challenges will likely come from Asian countries trying to reconcile the realities of increasing economic integration with long-standing nationalist antagonisms within the region.

The disputes over maritime borders in East and Southeast Asia have proven to be recurring flashpoints highlighting these entanglements. On their surface, the issue of rightful ownership of a series of tiny archipelagoes, outcroppings, and reefs, most of which are uninhabited, seems pointless and even a bit silly. Yet they have emerged as major sources of tension, resentment, and anger across the region. The Paracel Islands are one such source of dispute. The islands of this remote archipelago straddle the approximate halfway point between China and Vietnam in the South China Sea. Despite this, they have assumed an outsized role in international relations. Both China and Vietnam claim the Paracels as part of their sovereign territory, as does Taiwan, but China has exercised administrative control since expelling Vietnamese troops from the archipelago about thirty years ago.

The islands are themselves unremarkable and support no permanent inhabitants. Yet sovereign control over the Paracels would provide the basis for that country to establish a formal exclusive economic zone under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Extending out in a 200 mile circumference from each Paracels landmass, this maritime zone would encompass some productive fishing areas, but the real prize is the possibility of discovering undersea oil and gas deposits. Vietnam and China also view the Paracels as part of their broader territorial/maritime claims throughout the region, including the disputed Spratley Islands in the southern South China Sea. Like the Paracels, the Spratley archipelago consists of miniscule islands lacking native residents and is surrounded by productive fisheries. Unlike the Paracels, the Spratley area is already known to contain significant undersea fossil fuel deposits, although the amount is unknown. In addition to Vietnam, China, and Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei also claim all or portions of the Spratley area.

This helps explain the recent controversies of July 2012. After the Vietnamese government declared the Paracels and Spratleys within its maritime territory, China responded by raising the Parcels to the status of a prefecture with its own “capital,” which was basically China’s pre-existing military garrison. Predictably, this prompted a denunciation from Vietnam. The Philippines and the US also issued negative statements aimed at China. Neither have direct territorial or maritime claims in the Paracels, but both would undoubtedly like to check China’s ambitions in the region.

These gestures were symbolic, but the dispute over the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu) in the East China Sea has triggered more active confrontations. Like the Paracels, the Senkaku Islands are uninhabited and the surrounding seas may contain significant oil deposits, but the cast of characters is slightly different here, involving Japan and the US in addition to China and Taiwan. Japan administered the islands before World War II and resumed de facto control after the US ended its military occupation of Japan’s Ryukyu Islands in the 1970s. The situation lingered as a relatively minor irritant in Japanese-Chinese-Taiwanese relations, but the situation has threatened to boil over during 2012. Reacting to pressures from domestic nationalist groups, the Japanese government arranged to purchase several of the islands that had been privately owned by a Japanese family. This triggered a flurry of diplomatic activity including formal complaints, angry denunciations, and violent streets protests. There has also been a steady war of nerves at sea as Japanese coast guard vessels have struggled to repel flotillas of Taiwanese and Chinese fishing trawlers and small naval craft from entering the Senkaku waters. So far, the maritime clashes have been limited to exchanges with water cannons, but Japanese business interests in China have been subject to arson, vandalism, and calls for a nation-wide boycott. Given the intense economic linkages between China and Japan, any trade disruptions would have serious implications within Asia and the broader global economy.

Despite being diminutive in area, the Paracels, Senkakus, and Spratleys have become entangled with outsized nationalist sentiment. These disputes have the potential to derail Asia’s economic growth and that would likely far outweigh any gains resulting from maritime resource development. This basic contradiction, between the zero-sum approach to territory inherent in the established state system on one hand and the increasingly trans-national nature of economic development on the other hand, is illustrative of the contradictory nature of borders in the early twenty-first century. The prospects of resolving these disputes are slim to none in the short term. The most likely scenario is the maintenance of the status quo, reflecting the odd adage of possession being nine-tenths of the law, as well as the huge political and economic risks inherent in any effort to overturn the current state of affairs. Yet the forces of nationalism have repeatedly shown their ability to turn events in unexpected and uncontrollable ways.

Alexander C. Diener is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas. He is the author of One Homeland or Two?: Nationalization and Transnationalization of Mongolia’s Kazakhs, and co-author (with Joshua Hagen) of Borders: A Very Short Introduction.

Joshua Hagen is Professor of Geography at Marshall University. He is the co-editor of Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the National State (with Alexander C. Diener) and author of Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism: The Jewel of the German Past.

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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500th anniversary of the dedication of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling

By Anne Leader

Today marks the 500th anniversary of the dedication of Michelangelo’s magnificent Sistine Ceiling on the vigil of All Saints’ Day (otherwise known as Halloween) in 1512. The anniversary comes at a time of growing debate about whether the Vatican should impose limits on who can enter the chapel and how. While some argue that a visit to the chapel is now an “unimaginable disaster” and “more like a packed, sweaty, and very noisy railway station” than one of the grandest expressions of Christian theology and incomparable masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, Vatican officials, at least for now, promise to keep the chapel open to the tens of thousands of visitors who visit the site each day.

Despite the crowds, seeing the chapel in person is an experience not to be missed. With some perseverance and planning, visitors can tune out the din and take in the sublimely painted Judeo-Christian history from Creation through Second Coming on its ceiling and walls. The patient visitor will be rewarded with a seat on one of the benches that line the walls and dividing screen, known as the cancellata, in the front portion of the chapel. After sliding in to a recently vacated spot, the spectator can use binoculars or a small mirror held to the bridge of the nose to enhance viewing pleasure. As one’s eyes become accustomed to the dimly lit interior, the spectacularly clear colors — revealed after carefully executed cleaning in the latter part of the twentieth century — begin to glow from the vault and walls.

Dedicated on the Feast of the Assumption in 1483 by Pope Sixtus IV, for whom the chapel is named, the Sistine was built to serve as the palace chapel for the popes and continues to be the place where the College of Cardinals meets to select a new pope. The original decoration, painted in fresco by a group of artists from Tuscany led by Pietro Perugino, focuses on the twin biographies of Moses and Jesus. It follows the Roman precedent of pairing Old and New Testament stories on opposite walls of church interiors like the basilicas of Old St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, and Santa Maria Maggiore. In the Sistine, Moses and Jesus complement each other as teachers, lawgivers, and priests, with Moses representing the Era of the Law and Jesus, the Era of Grace. Standing portraits of the first twenty-eight popes appear in fictive niches above the biblical narrative to suggest a continuum of leadership from Moses to Jesus to Peter and his papal successors. (The first four portraits, along with the first two narratives and original altarpiece, were later destroyed when Michelangelo prepared the altar wall to create his Last Judgment.) Inscriptions over each narrative underscore this clear message of papal authority and primacy.

In the early sixteenth century, settling foundations caused cracks to appear in the chapel vault, which had been simply painted with a blue, starry sky in the original project. Uninterested in mere repairs, Pope Julius II, nephew to Sixtus, commissioned Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling. Drawings show that the design evolved from a relatively simple presentation of enthroned apostles to the complex series of narratives and ancestral portraits that now fill the entire vault and the lunettes over the windows and papal portraits. Though completed twenty-nine years after the chapel’s original dedication, Michelangelo’s ceiling provides a suitable introduction to the scenes below, tracing Judeo-Christian history from the Separation of Light and Dark through the Creation and Fall of Man, Flood, and Drunkenness of Noah.

This Halloween is also the anniversary of the dedication by Pope Paul III in 1541 of Michelangelo’s magnificent Last Judgment, which the artist completed at the age of sixty-six. The Last Judgment complements the original wall decoration commissioned by Sixtus and completes the narrative begun on Michelangelo’s ceiling, dedicated twenty-nine years earlier. The subject of the Last Judgment itself also offered the opportunity to manifest specific messages of papal power and primacy, as the imagery reminds all viewers that entry to heaven is regulated through St. Peter and his church.

From the vault to the walls below, the entirety of Christian past and future are displayed and contained within the pope’s chapel. Humanity’s Original Sin, shown at the center of the ceiling in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, leads to all that unfolds on the walls below. The pope and his court, when gathered together in the chapel, sit literally and symbolically at the center of this action. During Mass, the pope would kneel on the large porphyry disk set in the floor at the entrance of the chapel, able to see all of Christian history unfolding on the ceiling and walls above him with Michelangelo’s glorious vision of the Second Coming on the altar wall opposite where he knelt. For visitors, it is a view worth taking before leaving the chapel.

Anne Leader received her Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance Art from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and teaches at the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her research and publications explore a range of topics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art, architecture, urbanism, and religious tradition, including Michelangelo’s final project for the Sistine chapel. Her first book, The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery, has just been published by the Indiana University Press.

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Requiem Mass settings

By Lucy Allen

The clocks have gone back, the days are colder, the evenings are darker, and poppies are starting to appear on everyone’s lapels. As November approaches our thoughts turn to Armistice Day (11th November) and to commemorating the fallen. Orders for the music of Requiem settings keeps the OUP Hire Library busy at this time of year, but with so many different Requiem versions, how does one select which to perform? We asked OUP staff and their families for their favourite; read on to find out which they chose.

Britten

First performed in 1962, Britten’s War Requiem is a deeply moving and often haunting mix of the standard Latin Requiem words, set mostly for full orchestra, soprano soloist, and chorus, with some passages sung by a distant boys’ choir, and settings of WWI poems by Wilfred Owen, delivered by baritone and tenor soloists accompanied by a separate chamber orchestra. The War Requiem was dedicated to four of Britten’s friends who died in the war and the whole work deals with conflict and resolution, with some striking recurring musical motifs guaranteed to affect any listener. Hailed in the 1960s as a contemporary masterpiece, Britten’s War Requiem continues to have great impact today.  It’s not an easy work to listen to and it’s not meant to be: Britten famously wrote to his sister after the premiere, saying, ‘I hope it’ll make people think a bit’, and that is exactly what it does, during and long after any performance. I’ve been to several performances of the War Requiem, most featuring the inimitable Ian Bostridge as soloist, and also taken part in one (with the women of the cathedral choir I sang in as a student pretending to be a choir of boys!), and its powerful effect on me has never diminished.

Anna Williams

Thought by many to be the pinnacle of his output, Britten’s War Requiem is a profoundly moving, grandiose work commissioned in 1958 to mark the consecration of the new cathedral at Coventry (the original building having being badly bombed during the Second World War). As an avid reader of Wilfred Owen’s evocative war poetry since the days of English Literature classes at school, I am always captivated by the incorporation of the nine poignant Owen poems within the framework of the familiar Requiem text. I was fortunate enough to be in the orchestra for a performance of this work at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in my final year at university, and this memorable experience has made this work my favourite Requiem setting.

Laura Jones

My vote must go to Britten’s War Requiem, his grandest and, I would say, greatest work. It has a formidable and dazzling structure, interspersing the Latin text of the Requiem Mass with the English of Wilfred Owen’s intensely moving First World War poems. Much of it is very beautiful and there are many shattering and heart-stopping moments. I have never listened to it without feeling overwhelmed (in the best possible way) by its power.

James Fitzgerald

Chilcott

I edited the vocal score of Chilcott’s Requiem, which is always a privilege as it means you get to see/hear the work before most other people and discuss the music with the composer. The premiere in the Sheldonian was wonderful, as the piece was performed by the Oxford Bach Choir, for whom it was written, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Having only ever heard the work in my head, I found that first moment of the performance really special. I remember hearing the first beat of the timpani and feeling almost like I wanted to hold my breath – the atmosphere Chilcott creates in that moment is so tangible. The energetic 7/8 ‘Sanctus’ is another particular highlight for me, as it feels like a real chance for the choir to let rip! There’s also a beautiful soprano solo in the ‘Pie Jesu’ and a really heartfelt setting of ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of my hearts’. I also recently attended a performance in Wells Cathedral, which had a very different flavour. It was performed with the small ensemble accompaniment rather than orchestra, and the boys’ voices gave a quite different feel to the piece. Their sound was amazing, and it felt as if they each had a strong connection to the music – perhaps because they’d recently recorded it for the Chilcott Hyperion disc.

Robyn Elton

Duruflé

First composed in 1947 and later revised in 1961, Duruflé’s Requiem is based around Gregorian and chants is one of the calmest and most reflective settings. The ‘Kyrie’ is a real plea for mercy whilst the meditative ‘Lux Aeterna’ is quite sublime. Nonetheless, Duruflé does not shy from drama, and the baritone solo of the ‘Libera Me’ followed by the chanting of ‘dies irae’ is terrifying and a morbid reminder of our own mortality.

Lucy Allen

Fauré

Whilst not being classically (or musically) educated, I grew up listening to my mother’s selection of (mainly orchestral) music; I don’t recall Fauré’s Requiem being amongst her records, yet somehow, a memory of this setting seeped into my consciousness as a thing of rare beauty. On acquiring a CD recording in the late 1980s of the classic recording by King’s College Choir, the lovely ‘Pie Jesu’ (sung on that recording by our very own, and at that time very young, Bob Chilcott) has since become one of my favourite pieces of music. Its sublime understatement proved the perfect accompaniment to the Committal at a recent family funeral with its calm, yet melancholy, reassurance.

Jerry Butson

Mozart

My favourite is the Mozart Requiem because it runs through every emotion and it is quite simply beautiful. Plus, I still remember the first time I sang it (6th Form College Christmas concert 1999) and I was totally blown away. I also played the first violin part a couple of years later at university.

Miriam Higgins

Mozart definitely. It scares me. The ‘Lacrimosa’ sounds as close to the dying process as I can imagine: you sing it and you feel — from the breaths, the broken words, the rise and fall of the music, the forward motion and then dropping off — that you are in the midst of the slow ebbing away of life (which as we know was where the composer was himself). You also sense the defeated sadness of it, which I guess is something people can feel at the point of death: the regrets and exhaustion from a life that perhaps could have been better lived. And then the ‘Dies Irae’ — this is just terrifying! — and I’m pretty sure that’s what I might feel myself when I go over. Mozart is always sublime, but in his Requiem I’ve always felt an expression of raw, unrefined emotion that I just don’t find in his other works. As if death pulled him away from the style, and he was left wide open.

Suzanne Ryan

Michael Finnissy’s completion of Mozart’s Requiem

This new completion of Mozart’s Requiem was written in 2011, and performed for the first time in November of the same year. I was lucky enough to be at the first performance. Michael Finnissy took Mozart’s unfinished manuscript and completed it in a truly creative way – he tried to imagine what might have influenced Mozart if he had been writing in the present day and composed the missing sections accordingly. Finnissy’s version of the Requiem ends with a solo bass voice fading away to nothing, which is incredibly moving and evocative. The performance I attended, on a cold winter night in a beautiful church, is one of the most memorable concerts I have been to.

Anwen Greenaway

Verdi

The opening of the ‘Dies Irae’ from Verdi’s Requiem never fails to send a thrill right through my body: it’s so darkly powerful that whether listening to it or performing I can’t help feeling completely overwhelmed and yet strangely elated. After all this drama, I always look forward to floating away on the sinuous bassoon solo that repeats throughout the ‘Quid sum miser’.

Emma Shires

Lucy Allen is the Print and Web Marketing Assistant in Sheet Music at Oxford University Press.

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Evidence-based policies

By Jeremie Hardie

Everybody likes evidence-based policy – who could favour a policy that is not confronted with the facts? – but after twenty or more years trying to make it work, we have ended up with some quite strange results, at least in the US and the UK. For instance, with many social policy interventions, you have to show that your proposal is supported by a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT). That sounds fine, if a bit tough. It at least means that policy is not, as Mrs. Thatcher’s Home Secretary Kenneth Baker once complained, determined by what she heard from her hairdresser yesterday – unless the hairdresser had an RCT to hand. And it is what drugs have to pass if they are to be approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

However, it also means that policies which have been designed by professionals, exhaustively tested by experience in the field, and accepted by them and their clients as doing good, can be terminated because subsequent evaluation by an RCT shows no effect. Now, that may just be having to face the facts. Just as Mrs. Thatcher’s hairdresser may have to accept that rigorous testing shows her policy proposal to be wrong, so in the more respectable circumstances of a parenting programme in Wales – where most recently this problem has arisen – it may be that the professionals have come to accept as the conventional wisdom that their programme works, even though it does not.

Self deception and conservatism and vested interests do certainly exist. But maybe something else is going on. Some of the problems may be technical. There are difficulties if an RCT is designed not to test one outcome (such as ‘this drug reduces heart disease’), but several; so the parenting  programme mentioned above helps with parent self confidence and child anxiety and truancy and…. If you ask people to take part in an RCT, you are saying that they have an even chance of being in the control group, and therefore not getting the help. If you, the parent, are worried about the family and can get help otherwise – from a GP or from friends – might you not then seek that help directly, rather than risk being part of the control group in the test? So, there is recruitment bias; your test population will tend to exclude those who have the more acute problem and those who might be most motivated to take part in the programme.

Another quite different worry is this. We want professionals to think seriously about what will work for their clients, and use their professional judgement and experience to do so. That is a key part of wanting to decentralise decisions, and get away from decisions made by ticking the boxes in a centrally mandated code of best practice. In the Welsh case, what nearly happened  was that a programme which everybody involved approved of, including the professionals and the parents, might have been struck down by the application of a centralized rule – follow the RCT. If that were to happen a lot, then we have to say goodbye to decentralisation and the exercise of local expertise. That will be a good thing if indeed we can prove that again and again the locals are wrong. But can that be right?

Jeremy Hardie is now a Research Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics. He was Chairman of the WHSmith Group from 1992 to 1999. He is co-author (with Nancy Cartwright) of Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better (OUP, 2012).

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Image credit: Controlled test tubes. Photo by Armin Kübelbeck via Wikimedia Commons.

Monthly etymology gleanings for October, part 1

By Anatoly Liberman

I have received many questions and comments and will respond to them pell-mell.

Any more ~ anymore in positive statements. A correspondent from Pennsylvania wondered why those around him use anymore as meaning “these days, nowadays” (for example, Anymore, I just see people wearing skinny jeans with flip flops) and whether this usage owes anything to Pennsylvania Dutch. I am almost sure it does not.

First, let me remind those who are puzzled by the vagaries of their dialects that there is a wonderful reference work titled Dictionary of American Regional English (its acronym is DARE), a veritable treasure house of local words and collocations. Any more is of course there, with references to the literature on this phrase. The earliest citation in American printed sources goes back to 1859, but antedating is always possible. The map printed in the entry shows that anymore “now, nowadays” occurs far beyond Pennsylvania. However, DARE offers no suggestions on the etymology of the phrase, and I will risk offering one for what it is worth. DARE’s British counterpart, the great English Dialect Dictionary, published a hundred and ten years ago, cites any more from the north of Ireland, though its only sense is “in the future.” I could not remember anything like this adverb in German, Dutch, or Scandinavian. The closest counterpart is German nunmehr “now” and “from now on,” but it consists of nun “now” (not “any”) and mehr “more.”

So I will venture the suggestion (despite some discrepancy between the senses) that anymore was brought to America by Irish speakers. When people say: “I won’t do it anymore” and “I don’t wear flip flops anymore,” anymore can acquire in their mind the meaning “in the future” and “now,” divorced from and independent of the negation. Questions (“Will you wear baggy jeans anymore?”) do not need a negation, so that it is even easier to endow anymore with the meaning recorded in dialects.

Four-letter “Anglo-Saxon” words. Question: “Do you know when and in what circumstances we began referring to profanities as ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ regardless of their actual etymologies?” I couldn’t find the date or the originator of this usage, but the rationale behind it is clear. While reading old articles on etymology, one constantly runs into mentions of male and female genitals, because the sexual metaphor in the development of meaning is ubiquitous. Scholars, regardless of the language in which they wrote their works in the past, avoided even such words as penis and referred to the offensive organ as membrum virile, to give the most typical example. Latin was supposed to throw a pall of decency over the otherwise unpronounceable words and suppress prurient thoughts. Obviously, the desensitized membrum virile and the aggressive cock conjure up different images.

The usage was the same in German and English scholarship, but in English an additional factor has to be taken into account. Words of Romance (Latin and French) and Greek descent sound somewhat removed from the objects they designate and create an illusion of detachment: compare shit and excrements or to shit and defecate, let alone fuck and copulate (have intercourse) and prick and phallus. Two dozen or so of our most offensive words are indeed of Germanic, even if not exactly of Anglo-Saxon, origin. (For instance, I am certain that fuck is a late borrowing from Low German.) Thus profanities, from the inoffensive piss to the grossest among those mentioned above and quite a few more, are indeed “Anglo-Saxon” (relatively speaking), and since they are native, they are usually short and indeed contain only four letters. But I don’t know who introduced the usage referred to in the letter, when it happened, and how the “term” spread.

Flirt. Our correspondent quotes Dryden: “While the spread fan o’ershadows your closing eyes; / then give one flirt, and all the vision flies.” He suggested two interpretations of flirt, and I believe that the second one is correct. Before flirt began to refer to coquetry, it meant a sudden jerk, fillip, and so forth. Flirt in Dryden’s line seems to have exactly this sense.

Glitch, the word and a German family name, its origin. It is most often said that glitch is of German or Yiddish origin. As usual in such cases, an important thing is not only to find a plausible look-alike in a foreign language but also to trace the ways of a supposed foreignism’s penetration into English. Since the probable etymon means “slide, slip,” it need not be dismissed out of hand. But glitch is a recent word of American heritage (it was first recorded in the early sixties of the twentieth century), and we do not know why its originator needed a German or Yiddish source. Given the American scene, Yiddish is perhaps likelier than German, but an exact source has not been found. Dictionaries of German family names state that the name Glitsch goes back to some verb or noun denoting ‘sheen.’ However, the scope is large: from a splendid appearance (then we are dealing with what the Germans call Prunkname “snob name”) to a prominent bald spot (then it was a nickname).

My post on Walter Scott’s vocabulary and the words explained in the commentary was met with a small barrage of rather friendly fire. Two correspondents (one via email) assured me that people still read books. I have no doubt they do. That is why I noted that I was speaking about a mass phenomenon and disregarded exceptions. I constantly deal with students. Some are amazingly well-read, while others have read virtually (actually, essentially: choose your favorite buzzword) nothing. Peevish resentment against the use of less common English words in lectures is rife; look through students’ evaluations of their professors. (I do not mean myself, for in my undergraduate courses I stopped using “fancy” words like doctrinaire and perspicacious long ago.) A public speaker’s rich vocabulary smacks of elitism, a crime only a notch above rape.

I have also been asked why we did not find a more typical picture of a bartizan. Choosing illustrations is a trickier thing than people may realize. Some images are copyrighted, others do not have the resolution we need. Every now and then we are forced to give up our first choice. But I am glad that someone has commented on this matter; only Annie Morgan has once done so in the past.

Cussing and going bust. Mr. Cowan cited many additional examples of r lost in English words. All of them were known to me. Today I want to call our readers’ attention to a truly beautiful article by Ernest Weekley “Mrs. Gamp and the King’s English” (The Cornhill Magazine 125, 1922, 565-76). Weekley was an outstanding essayist, and it is a pity how few people remember his articles. I am aware of them only because my team of volunteers has looked through hundreds of popular journals published in the English speaking countries in search of works on word origins. Mrs. Gamp is a nurse in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, an unforgettable character. Her Cockney is delightful (both as regards the content and the form; it is even more entertaining than the Wellers’). She is a nurse, but she calls herself a nuss, and Weekley explained how common this type of pronunciation had once been among the cultured class. Let me repeat: the article is a true gem.

A FEW TIDBITS

Split!

(1) “To not be spoken about as a victim is a triumph in its own right, a breath of fresh air from the age-long discussion of the dangers of casual sex for females.” Oh, the raptures of casual sex! To not be victimized for the simple pleasures of the hook-up culture dominating our campuses! The joy of it.

(2) “Obama… this time pressed for an attack that allowed him to often dictate the terms of the debate….” This means “often allowed him to dictate…,” but to naturally speak is hard, especially when the current too often makes one swim with it.

Everybody is they. Right?

(1) “The student has been informed that they should not attend classes without being officially registered.” The administrators’ headaches are severe. I am happy when a registered student come (hear, hear!), but they tend to not come. 

(2) Men can also be pregnant; in our unisex world, you never know. From a journal published by Cambridge University: “…if someone calls because they think they’re pregnant — they start thinking about their options and in the end come away with some sense of a way forward.” That’s a proper attitude.

(3) (Submitted by Walter Turner.) From a “review” of a hotel in London: “The beds were comfortable, the rooms quite clean and the view from the window into the Duke of Bedford’s garden in the center of the block made one feel like they were staying in the country.” One are many. It all depends.

To be continued next Wednesday.

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: “Mrs. Gamp, on the Art of Nursing”, 4.4 x 5.8 inches, (Sarah Gamp and fellow-nurse Betsey Prig have a falling out), Illustration for Charles Dickens’s “Martin Chuzzlewit.” 1870s. Illustrator: Fred Barnard ((1846-1896). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Dances of Death

By Jessica Barbour

An eerie image emerged from Europe’s 14th-century bubonic plague epidemics into popular imagination: Death, in skeleton form, leading living souls in a processional dance to the grave. This idea, the danse macabre, was evoked by artists and writers across the continent, a cultural reaction to daily lives spent surrounded by death.

I was introduced to the genre in school when I first heard Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, a boisterous seven-minute work for orchestra written in the 1870s. Though the work’s origins are traceable to very specific medieval imagery, I didn’t know anything about them at the time. What I remember about my first encounter with the piece is the presence in the piece of Death, which I conflated musically with that of the Devil—something which obscured (in my mind, anyway) what the danse macabre was, and how it came to be.

The earliest known illustration of the danse macabre was a mural painted in the cloisters of the Cimitière des Innocents in Paris in the early 15th century. According to Grove Art Online,

the procession consisted of a series of couples, one living and one dead, arranged in an order of precedence beginning with pope and emperor and ending with a hermit and a baby. Underneath each dancer an eight-line octosyllabic stanza offered a moralistic commentary with a distinct social edge: death treats all estates equally.

Before the mural was destroyed in the 17th century, the book printer Guyot Marchant copied down the texts and published his Danse Macabre in 1485 with woodcut illustrations. The book’s illustrations were reprinted over and over, allowing the poems and imagery of the danse macabre to permeate European culture.

Centuries after Marchant’s book was published, works were still created on the subject, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem Der Todtentanz, Franz Liszt’s Totentanz for piano and orchestra, and, most famously, Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre.

Saint-Saëns originally wrote this piece as a song-setting of a poem of the same name by Henry Cazalis. The instrumental version, completed two years later, no longer included a voice singing the poem but followed the same story: Death suddenly appears after the clock strikes midnight, playing a violin — one that has been tuned in a specifically jarring way.

Violins are typically tuned in perfect fifths, their open strings playing the pitches G, D, A, and E. The score of Danse Macabre, however, requires the soloist playing the part of Death to tune the E string down to E-flat. The violinist enters playing the two highest strings together, and the resulting interval, a tritone, is so dissonant that its use was legendarily prohibited by Medieval music theorists, earning the nickname diabolus in musica (the devil in music).

Listening to Death’s entrance in Danse Macabre can be unsettling precisely because it is so close to sounding consonant and familiar. Playing open fifths together is how violinists tune before concerts, and the tritone is only a half-step away from that. It is as close as possible to being a perfect interval without being one, falling into the uncanny valley of musical sonorities (quite appropriately for accompaniment of the dancing dead), and is an inherently creepy harmony.

In honor of Saint-Saëns’ October birthday and, of course, Halloween, I invite you to play Danse Macabre and listen for Death (and the devil) in music.

Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, including “Wedding Music” and “Clair de Supermoon”.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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