Oxford University Press's Blog, page 1016
October 8, 2012
Don’t you like the castle?
A remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats — this is the setting for Kafka’s story about a man seeking both acceptance in the village and access to the castle. In The Castle, Kafka explores the relationship between the individual and authority, as the protagonist K. asks why the villagers so readily submit to an authority which may exist only in their collective imagination. In the following excerpt from the new Oxford World’s Classics edition, K. first encounters the castle and the strange power it holds over the village.
Now he could see the castle above, distinctly outlined in the clear air, and standing out even more distinctly because of the thin covering of snow lying everywhere and changing the shape of everything. In fact, much less snow seemed to have fallen up on Castle Mount than here in the village, where K. found it as difficult to make his way along the road as it had been yesterday. Here the snow came up to the cottage windows and weighed down on the low rooftops, while on the mountain everything rose into the air, free and light, or at least that was how it looked from here.
Altogether the castle, as seen in the distance, lived up to K.’s expectations. It was neither an old knightly castle from the days of chivalry, nor a showy new structure, but an extensive complex of buildings, a few of them with two storeys, but many of them lower and crowded close together. If you hadn’t known it was a castle you might have taken it for a small town. K. saw only a single tower, and could not make out whether it was a dwelling or belonged to a church. Flocks of crows were circling around it.
His eyes fixed on the castle, K. went on, paying no attention to anything else. But as he came closer he thought the castle disappointing; after all, it was only a poor kind of collection of cottages assembled into a little town, and distinguished only by the fact that, while it might all be built of stone, the paint had flaked off long ago, and the stone itself seemed to be crumbling away. K. thought fleetingly of his own home town, which was hardly inferior to this castle. If he had come here only to see the place, he would have made a long journey for nothing much, and he would have done better to revisit the old home that he hadn’t seen for so long. In his mind, he compared the church tower of his childhood home with the tower up above. The former, tapering into a spire and coming down to a broad, red-tiled roof, was certainly an earthly building — what else can we build? — but it had been erected for a higher purpose than these huddled, low-built houses and made a clearer statement than the dull, workaday world of this place did. The tower up here—the only visible one—now turned out to belong to a dwelling, perhaps the main part of the castle. It was a simple, round building, partly covered with ivy, and it had small windows, now shining in the sun — there was something crazed about the sight — and was built into the shape of a balcony at the top, with insecure, irregular battlements, crumbling as if drawn by an anxious or careless child as they stood out, zigzag fashion, against the blue sky. It was as if some melancholy inhabitant of the place, who should really have stayed locked up in the most remote room in the house, had broken through the roof and was standing erect to show himself to the world.
Once again K. stopped, as if standing still improved his powers of judgement. But his attention was distracted. Beyond the village church where he was now — in fact it was only a chapel, extend like a barn so that it could hold the whole congregation — lay the school. It was a long, low building, curiously combining the character of something temporary and something very old, and it stood in a fenced garden that was now covered with snow. The children were just coming out, with their teacher. They crowded around him, all eyes fixed on him, and they were talking away the whole time, do fast that K. couldn’t make out what they were saying. The teacher, a small, narrow-shouldered young man who held himself very upright, but without appearing ridiculous, has already seen K. from a distance — after all, apart from his own little flock K. was the only living soul to be seen far and wide. K., as the stranger here, greeted him first, noticing that despite his small stature he was used to being in command. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. All at once the children fell silent, and the teacher probably appreciated this sudden silence in anticipation of his remarks. ‘Looking at the castle, are you?’ he asked, more gently than K. had expected, but in a tone suggesting that he didn’t like what K. was doing. ‘Yes,’ said K. ‘I’m a stranger here; I arrived in the village only yesterday evening.’ ‘Don’t you like the castle?’ the teacher was quick to ask. ‘What?’ K. asked in return, slightly surprised. He repeated the question in a milder tone. ‘Do I like the castle? What makes you think that I don’t?’ ‘Strangers never do,’ said the teacher. Here K. changed the subject, to avoid saying anything the teacher didn’t like, and asked, ‘I expect you know the count?’ ‘No,’ said the teacher, and he was about to turn away, but K. wasn’t giving up, and asked again: ‘What? You don’t know the count?’ ‘What makes you think I would?’ asked the teacher very quietly, and he added in a louder voice, speaking French: ‘Kindly recollect that we’re in the company of innocent children.’ This made K. think he might properly ask: ‘Could I visit you one day, sir? I shall be here for some time, and feel rather isolated; I don’t fit in with the local rustics here, and I don’t suppose I will fit in at the castle either.’ ‘There’s no distinction between the local people and the castle,’ said the teacher. ‘Maybe not,’ said K., ‘but that makes no difference to my situation. May I visit you sometime?’ ‘I lodge in Swan Alley, at the butcher’s house.’ This was more of a statement than an invitation, but all the same K. said: ‘Good, then I’ll come.’ The teacher nodded, and went on with the crowd of children, who all started shouting again. They soon disappeared along a street that ran steeply downhill.
Kafka‘s last novel, The Castle, breaks new ground in evoking a dense village community fraught with tensions, and recounting an often poignant, occasionally farcical love-affair. This new translation by prize-winning translator Anthea Bell follows the German text established by critical scholarship, and mentions manuscript variants in the notes. The detailed introduction by Ritchie Robertson, a leading Kafka scholar, explores the many meanings of this famously enigmatic novel, providing guidance without reducing the reader’s freedom to make sense of this fascinating novel. Read Ritchie Robertson’s blog post: “Innocence and Experience: Childhood in Kafka.”
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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October 5, 2012
The Beatles begin, Friday, 5 October 1962
The Beatles’ dream of releasing a record came to fruition fifty years ago today when Parlophone issued the band’s first disc, “Love Me Do.” That night, EMI played the song on its own London-produced weekly radio program Friday Spectacular, broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. In the Beatles’ Anthology, George Harrison recalled that, “First hearing ‘Love Me Do’ on the radio sent me shivery all over. It was the best buzz of all time.” But records only become hits through marketing, and manager Brian Epstein soon learnt that for significant promotion he could not rely on others. He would need to develop a different strategy.
October had begun optimistically for the Beatles. First, of the two recordings of the song they had made in September, George Martin had chosen to release the Ringo Starr version. He may have thought that doing so would build group confidence; but he also probably preferred Lennon’s harmonica solo on this performance to the Andy White take. He had originally wanted to release their version of Mitch Murray’s “How Do You Do It?”; but the songwriter had withheld his permission after hearing the performance, and learning that an unknown group from Liverpool had recorded it. Of their other songs, “Please Please Me” needed additional work before release and “P.S., I Love You” shared the name with another disk, leaving “Love Me Do” as the A side.
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Second, the Beatles were now playing better engagements and were earning significantly more money than they had before the day the conservatively dressed businessman first descended the steps of the Cavern Club. In December 1961, Brian Epstein had promised them a recording contract and he had delivered. With Parlophone about to release the Beatles’ first record, Epstein proffered a new contract in which the band agreed to pay NEMS Enterprises 25% of their gross income over the next five years. Although 25% of the gross posed a significant fee, the band understandably saw promise under Epstein’s management.
For Paul McCartney and John Lennon, the new contract also promised a 50% share of the publishing income from future songs. At this point, although they liked to brag about their catalogue, only a few of their compositions had shown any promise. Notably, Ardmore and Beechwood (their publisher) seems to have considered their potential as unproven at best and illustrated by the limited promotion the company gave “Love Me Do.” In the sixties, publishers had the responsibility of selling songs by plugging material to artist-and-repertoire managers like George Martin, by getting pictures and press releases into papers such as New Musical Express (NME), and by pushing their contacts in the media to gain exposure.
At Ardmore and Beechwood, Kim Bennett had the responsibility of marketing the song, but he may have found himself either too busy to give much attention to this first attempt by a bunch of northerners or he may have been under instructions to provide support to a different release. Publishers always had to prioritize the songs in their catalogue, devoting more attention to some recordings than to others. The general readership for publications like NME and Melody Maker represented the largest markets for discs, providing tour dates, personal interviews with recording stars, and even a gossip column on the back page. Placement in one of these publications meant added royalties from sales of sheet music and records.
Perhaps the earliest London ad for “Love Me Do” appears inside the front cover of the 27 September 1962 issue of Record Retailer and Music Industry News and is from the record corporation. “Out next week from EMI, the Greatest Recording Organization in the World, The Beatles, Love Me Do, Parlophone 45-R4949.” The promotion displays four Dezo Hoffmann headshots, one for each of the Beatles, including George Harrison (with a bruised eye from a fan’s sucker punch over the ouster of drummer Pete Best). Elsewhere in the same issue, on the “Plug Page” (23), EMI lists “Love Me Do” along with eight other recordings.
The following week on 4 October 1962 (at the point when Parlophone was about to release “Love Me Do”), Record Retailer included a brief review of “Love Me Do,” mentioning the band’s popularity in Liverpool and describing this recording as “the strongest outsider of the week” (6). “Outsiders” accurately describes the provincial beat group and their manager; phrased like Ladbroke’s odds on a dog race, the Beatles and Epstein appeared to be unlikely candidates to change the music world.
A press release from Tony Barrow commissioned by Brian Epstein in the same issue of Record Retailer, presciently titled “Introducing… the Beatles,” extols the Liverpool group, emphasizing their popularity in England’s northwest (“voted Top Group”). The blurb lauds the band’s ability to outdraw the Shadows (Britain’s top group at the time) in Liverpool and their stage experience with artists such as Bruce Channel, Joe Brown, and trad jazz devotees Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball. Although this piece would have helped to create interest among conservative shop owners, encouraging them to make wholesale purchases of the disc, British teens would have ignored it.
The magazine Disc (6 October) also carried a very brief review of “Love Me Do,” comparing the Beatles’ performance to the Everly Brothers and suggesting that the song could “grow on you.” The same issue carried a brief introduction to the band; but that would be the extent of the coverage they would receive. Indeed, on Friday 5 October 1962, one can imagine the Beatles buying issues of the New Musical Express (NME), The Record Mirror, and Melody Maker to see if the papers had any mention of their disc. However, when they opened the pages of NME, they would have seen promotions for two other Parlophone releases: the Fentones’ instrumental “The Breeze and I” and Nicky Hilton’s “Your Nose Is Going to Grow” (“This Week’s Top Single”). No mention of “Love Me Do” appears.
In the 11 October 1962 issue of Record Retailer, storeowners like Brian Epstein would have read in Robbie Lowman’s weekly “Alley-gations” column on Denmark Street (London’s equivalent of New York’s “Tin Pan Alley”) that the numerous fall releases had “pluggers” barraging his office. He notes that Kim Bennett in particular was pushing four titles at once, with “Sherry” by the Four Seasons getting the most push, followed by Hank Locklin’s “We’re Gonna Go Fishing.” “Love Me Do” competes for last place on Bennett’s agenda with Joe Meek’s production of “Sioux Serenade” by the Outlaws. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the same issue of Record Retailer (the most reliable of British charts), “Love Me Do” crept into “Britain’s Top 50” at number 49.
On 5 October 1962, the first James Bond film Dr. No premiered at the London Pavilion with a story about a Caribbean installation that threatened the United States. Coincidentally over the month of October, the Cuban missile crisis would grow to dominate the news, feeding the film’s success. Perhaps October’s spies and the threat of nuclear war, not to mention the British instrumental “Telstar” topping the charts, created an environment in which British teens began embracing that most essential of Beatles love songs, and “Love Me Do” slowly climbed the UK charts.
Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.
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Fighting Triple-Negative Breast Cancer
According to Breastcancer.org, about one in eight US women will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. It is a complicated disease that takes different forms — one of the most confounding being Triple-Negative Breast Cancer.
Patricia Prijatel, a nationally published magazine writer and an award-winning teacher, was diagnosed with Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) in 2006. The journalist did what any reporter would do when diagnosed; she started investigating the disease, how it occurs, how it’s treated, and how to keep it from recurring. She found a noticeable lack of resources on the TNBC, a disease that differs from hormone-positive breast cancer from the initial prognosis to the treatment options. Patricia is now in remission, but along the way she has poured her heart into creating Surviving Triple Negative Breast Cancer: Hope, Treatment, and Recovery.
We spoke with Patricia Prijatel for insight into her own experience with TNBC, health advice for those battling the disease, and the importance of maintaining hope throughout the fight.
On her diagnosis
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On the importance of hope
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On diet and exercise
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Patricia Prijatel is author of Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer, published by Oxford University Press. She is the E.T. Meredith Distinguished Professor Emerita of Journalism at Drake University. She is doing a webcast with the Triple Negative Breast Cancer Foundation on 16 October 2012. Read her previous blog post: “Just what is triple-negative breast cancer?”
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What is the position of HIV & AIDS in North Africa & the Middle East?
By Alan Whiteside
The biennial International AIDS Conference was held in Washington D.C. in July of 2012. This was the first time that the conference had been on US soil for 20 years. The International AIDS Society had previously decided that while legislation prevented HIV positive people from travelling to the States, the conference would not be held there. However, these laws were repealed by the Obama administration in 2010. The meeting was huge: 25000 people. Speaking at the conference, I identified three key issues: the location of the epidemic; the changing response; and availability of resources, including financial support.
The location of the epidemic
The highest HIV prevalence levels are in eastern and Southern Africa. For example, in South Africa an estimated 5.6 million people are infected, and in Swaziland 54% of women in the 35- 39 age cohort are living with HIV. In the rest of the world, and especially in Arabic speaking countries, the disease is primarily located in the ‘most at risk populations’ which includes groups such as drug users, men who have sex with men, and commercial sex workers.
Over recent years it has become abundantly clear that HIV is unlikely to spread in general populations. This creates particular challenges for the response in Arabic speaking countries (and in parts of Eastern Europe). All major Islamic sects prohibit homosexuality; it is a crime under Sharia law. Drug use is illegal and the penalties are usually draconian. Commercial sex is frowned upon – although Senegal’s pragmatic approach in the 1980s and 1990s contributed to stopping HIV spread there. Adultery (by definition, sex outside marriage) and premarital sex are forbidden and subject to punishment although we note it is almost always the women who are punished. This combination of circumstances makes responding to HIV difficult for UNAIDS, other international agencies, Ministries of Health, and NGOs. It is fortunate that the epidemics are small.
A changing response
In Washington this summer, it was apparent that response has been medicalised. Biomedical science ruled and there was little discussion of behaviour change. The mantra was: if everyone who is infected is put on treatment this will greatly reduce transmission sufficiently to halt the epidemic. While the science is clear — there is a 96% reduction in HIV acquisition from people on treatment to their partners — the black box is getting enough people on the drugs to alter the course of the epidemic. When the target population is marginalized or engaged in illegal activities this becomes even more problematic.
The availability of resources
Funding was and will remain a hot topic. Between 2008 and 2011 resources for HIV and AIDS plateaued. In Washington we learnt global spending in 2011 was US$16.8 billion, an 11% increase over 2010. International spending has flat lined. The main source of additional funding is domestic: national governments responding to needs in their countries. However there is a large funding gap especially in the poorer African countries. UNAIDS estimates in 2015 the requirement for a comprehensive response will be $24 billion of which, on current projections, only $17 billion will be available. At the meeting Bernhard Schwartlander of UNAIDS noted: “The lives of more than 80% of the people, who receive AIDS treatment in Africa, depend every morning on whether or not a donor writes another check.”
The central theme of the conference was moving to ‘an AIDS free generation’. This means everyone who needs it is on treatment (thus people living with AIDS but not dying from the disease) and there are zero new infections. Small epidemics and reasonable wealth means most Arabic speaking countries have the capacity to put people on treatment. However as Mead Over of the Centre for Global Development has consistently pointed out there has to be an AIDS transition where the number of new infections falls below the number of AIDS deaths. Until this happens the number of people living with HIV and AIDS will increase. Globally we are not at this tipping point yet. The key challenge for Arabic speaking countries is to care for infected people; ensure the right sorts of prevention, targeted at the right people are put in place; and perhaps to understand their role in the global community, in some case this may be in providing development assistance.
Alan Whiteside is Director and Professor of Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) which he established in 1998, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. He has been researching HIV/AIDS since 1987. He is the author of HIV/AIDS: A Very Short Introduction.
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.
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Image credit: Globe with World AIDS Day red ribbon. Illustration by JuSun, iStockphoto.
October 4, 2012
The OED needs you! Announcing the new OED Appeals
Today the Oxford English Dictionary announces the launch of OED Appeals, a dedicated community space on the OED website where OED editors solicit help in unearthing new information about the history and usage of English. The website will enable the public to post evidence in direct response to editors, fostering a collective effort to record the English language and find the true roots of our vocabulary.
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When researching and revising entries, OED editors use our famous citation files, gathered over more than a century, as well as electronic databases and corpora. Nonetheless, we sometimes find ourselves stumped when tracking down the very early uses of a word. Sometimes the trail runs cold earlier than we expect; in other cases, the ultimate origin of a word is shrouded in mystery. OED Appeals continues our long tradition of asking the English-speaking public for help in recording the origins of our vast, ever-changing lexicon. After all, when it comes to the words we read, write, speak, and hear each day, every one of us is an expert.
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The OED has been a collaboration between lexicographers and the public since its earliest days, from the appeal issued by the Philological Society in 1859, to the television programme “Balderdash & Piffle,” broadcast in 2005 and 2007. OED Appeals continues this tradition by using the reach of the web and social media to connect lexicographers with those who may hold hidden clues to word history without even realizing it.
The first example of baked Alaska might be hiding in a forgotten cookbook on your bookshelf; your high school year book might hold the first evidence of the phrase in your dreams. Our goal is to leave no stone unturned in our search for the earliest evidence of each word included in the dictionary. Can you help us?
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Each week, as OED editors go about their daily work of revising and researching entries, they will be posting new appeals for evidence on specific words. You can keep abreast of the latest requests by visiting the Appeals home page, or following @OEDonline on Twitter.
Here are some of the words we are researching right now:
Disco (earlier than September 1964)
Bellini (earlier than 1965)
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FAQ (earlier than 1989)
Cootie (earlier than 1967)
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Can you help us find documentation of these words’ earliest history? Happy hunting!
This post originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world. As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from those of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find these in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to films scripts and cookery books. The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Today, the dictionary is in the process of its first major revision. Updates revise and extend the OED at regular intervals, each time subtly adjusting our image of the English language.
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50 years of James Bond in music
Few characters in the history of cinema, if any, are more iconic than Ian Fleming’s debonair super-spy, James Bond; few, too, can boast of any comparison to the equally iconic music which accompanies the intrepid agent 007’s exploits. Since the series’ beginning, the Bond films have been marked by exceptional music, including contributions from Paul McCartney, Shirley Bassey, Louis Armstrong and Madonna, and, of course, John Barry’s instantly recognizable recording of Monty Norman‘s “James Bond Theme.” (Adele will sing the theme for the 23rd film, Skyfall, which releases in the United Kingdom on 26 October and in the United States on 6 November.)
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Bond film, Dr. No, we’ve put together a playlist of every theme from the series’ run (with the exception of Gladys Knight’s “Licence To Kill,” which can’t be found on Spotify but which you can listen to here). Also included are a few different takes on the themes from notables like Count Basie and Moby. Listening through, you get the sense that while the styles have changed with the fashions of the day, the sense of adventure, danger, and perfect sang-froid which epitomizes 007 has stayed very much the same.
Jon Burlingame is the author of the upcoming book, The Music of James Bond, slated for release this fall to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the billion-dollar movie franchise and the release of Skyfall. One of the nation’s leading writers on the subject of music for film and television, he writes regularly for Daily Variety and teaches film-music history at the University of Southern California. His other work has included three previous books on film and TV music; articles for other publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Premiere and Emmy magazines; and producing radio specials for Los Angeles classical station KUSC. Read his previous blog post: “James Bond at the London 2012 Opening Ceremony.”
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Tutankhamun and the mummy’s curse
In the winter of 1922-23 archaeologist Howard Carter and his wealthy patron George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, sensationally opened the tomb of Tutankhamun. Six weeks later Herbert, the sponsor of the expedition, died in Egypt. The popular press went wild with rumours of a curse on those who disturbed the Pharaoh’s rest and for years followed every twist and turn of the fate of the men who had been involved in the historic discovery. Long dismissed by Egyptologists, the mummy’s curse remains a part of popular supernatural belief. We spoke with Roger Luckhurst, author of The Mummy’s Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy, to find out why the myth has captured imagination across the centuries, and how it has impacted on popular culture.
What does the extraordinary story of Tutankhamun tells us about the mummy’s curse?
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To what extent did the story of Tutankhamun become a media event?
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What does the curse of a Victorian gentleman have to do with Arthur Conan-Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles?
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Roger Luckhurst explains why he explored the mummy’s curse and why we are still so interested in the myths of Tutankhamun.
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Roger Luckhurst has written and broadcast widely on popular culture, specialising in science fiction and the Gothic. He is interested in the odd spaces between science and popular supernatural beliefs. He has previously written a history of how the notion of ‘telepathy’ emerged in the late Victorian period, and has published editions of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. He is also a regular radio reviewer of terrible science fiction films. He teaches horror and the occasional respectable novel by Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London. The Mummy’s Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy publishes in late 2012. Read his article on Downton Abbey and the Curse of King Tut.
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October 3, 2012
Memories of Eric Hobsbawm
I cannot claim to have known Eric Hobsbawm at all well, but my few encounters, over the years, as a student and after, made a vivid impression on me. They became linked to my more general sense of what historical inquiry and sensibility are supposed to be about. I was struck, of course, in meeting him (as much as in reading him), by the dizzying range of knowledge, the powers of synthesis and analysis, not to mention that facility with languages and ease with other cultures. Then there was his presence as participant and witness at some of the tumultuous historical events he described in his work. All this came to constitute for me, as a student, and since, the impossible Everest of the historian’s erudition and style.
I’d read most of his books before I set eyes upon him; I devoured his work in a hurry, part of my attempt to provide myself with a crash course in modern history, just before starting work at King’s College Cambridge on a Ph.D., supervised by Gareth Stedman Jones. Eric Hobsbawm was very present in his absence from the start of that process: like E.P. Thompson, who also figured in those years for me (as much through the anti-nuclear movement as the writings on history), Eric Hobsbawm was a friend of Gareth’s. King’s was not only the base of my then supervisor, but also Eric Hobsbawm’s own stamping ground, past and present. I occasionally glimpsed Hobsbawm at King’s; he would appear at certain grand college occasions, and quite often more directly he was the trigger for discussion (during and after my PhD) with Gareth.
My ‘crash course’ was all the more urgent as I came to King’s and the History Faculty in the early 1980s, without the usual perquisite of a first degree in the subject: I’d transferred from English, which was, in those days, in a state of civil war, at least in Cambridge. The Age of Revolution and of Capital, and later that decade, The Age of Empire became my bedtime reading, and Primitive Rebels, Captain Swing, Labouring Men and the rest, the stuff of my train commutes back and forth to London. The Invention of Tradition (1983), which he co-edited with Terence Ranger, was a landmark publication too and I think of it, along with Anderson’s Imagined Communities as something historians at large invariably take ‘as read’ in any discussion of nationalism.
In 1990, Hobsbawm came to talk at Queen Mary, University of London; I was by then in a teaching post there. Eric Hobsbawm was asked to kick off a lecture series, named after a former professor at QM, a certain Stanley Thomas Bindoff, well-known for his writings on the Tudors. This impressive series was dreamed up by the late Professor John Ramsden and was one of his many endeavours to raise the profile of the Mile End department. JR, who was a prolific historian of and indeed local councillor for the Conservative Party immediately zeroed in upon the name of Hobsbawm as the ideal person for him to secure for the first year. Google ‘Bindoff’ and ‘Hobsbawm’ and the title of the lecture come up at once: ‘Birth of a Holiday: The First of May’. This first glittering lecturer was to be followed by a rich variety of speakers in the years that followed; few of those asked from home and abroad refused the invitation, given whose footsteps they were following.
I recall Hobsbawm’s s skilfully crafted lecture on the international history of ‘May Day’ and also how quickly the resourceful Ramsden moved to ensure it was published in a Queen Mary pamphlet. I was fortunate, as the most recent junior appointment to the department to be invited along to the dinner, held in some Soho restaurant, straight after the lecture; I found myself wedged in a booth between the Conservative Party expert and the most celebrated Marxist historian of the age. Eric Hobsbawm was straightforward and brisk; and I found myself quizzed about Italian criminology, Victorian evolution, and French degeneration theory, the field of my own then research. At this Brasserie, whose name I’ve forgotten, Eric Hobsbawm could not resist a brief foray into French, as he spoke to the waitress; he sighed and recalled his own nostalgia for Paris, a city he said, looking meaningfully at his wife, Marlene, that they had both greatly enjoyed. It was my chance to hear something of his own vast storehouse of knowledge on nineteenth-century France and Italy; he talked of his own inquiries on the subject of Sicilian and Calabrian bandits, before turning to the question of the relationship of the Second International to Darwinism.
Years later I wrote to him, whilst researching the reception of Freudian theory in Britain, to ask about the Communist Party Historians Group and their relationship, or better lack of relationship, to psychoanalysis. He seemed intrigued and puzzled by the question, and as we spoke on the phone he said, what are you doing this week? ‘Come over for a drink and we’ll discuss it’. So I went to Nassington Road and spent a very interesting couple of hours in his ground floor sitting room, nursing a whisky, and hearing about the culture of the CP. He spoke of Freud as ‘in the air’ during the 30s – ‘we all knew of the “talking cure”, of course’, he mused; but he conveyed that it had left him cold: he acknowledged how far he had gone along with Soviet visions of psychology and the orthodoxy that Freudian thought and practice were ‘bourgeois’ concerns, of no direct consequence, at least in his work. In an essay that particularly intrigued me, concerned with Annales, he wrote of Freud as ‘a bad historian’ and thought psychoanalysis an unfortunate distraction for the student of the past. In those days perhaps, he mused, Pavlov had the better case. But he mentioned a cousin of his, of whom he sounded rather proud, who had indeed sought to bring Freud and Marx together. The conversation was inconclusive, and the question of why there had been no English version of ‘the Frankfurt School’ remained somewhat opaque at the end of our discussion. I took up the issue a few years later in a chapter of the Festschrift for Gareth Stedman Jones, edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, in which Hobsbawm’s work figures quite large, although I never found a way to make use of our personal conversation, and kicked myself afterwards for failing to take proper notes or bring a tape recorder.
Living not far from Hobsbawm, I sometimes ran into him in South End Green, and often enough at Birkbeck, where I moved some years ago. My address was a few doors up from the house of an old friend of his, Roderick Floud. I recall one of Hobsbawm’s memorable lectures, when he was already into his 90s, to a packed audience at Birkbeck; and of that capacity to ‘think aloud’, move across countries, continents, centuries, picking out examples with such facility, and few if any notes; it was pretty astonishing to hear him ‘live’, and he had the students spellbound.
My final chance meeting was at Hay this summer. I’d never been to this book festival before, but had been invited to speak about my work, and promptly ran into Eric and Marlene Hobsbawm having tea in the ‘Green Room’. He was of course the president of the Festival as he was of Birkbeck. I was struck by his frailty; he looked far more gaunt than in my previous encounter in London. Having figured out, with a couple of prompts, who I was, he was immediately interested in the subject that had brought me here and alert to the potential significance: what was the talk about? The book? What was the historical problem? What was I arguing? And this was quickly followed by some thoughts of own of the period in question. It was a fleeting exchange. I didn’t want to overstay, well imagining the irksomeness for the two of them of being buttonholed in this way.
Before I left, I reminded him of our conversation all those years ago about psychoanalysis and history, and asked again about that cousin whose identity I’d by then forgotten: he came up with the name at once: it was Reuben Osbert, who wrote under the name of Osborn, and produced a book for Gollancz in 1937, Freud and Marx, A Dialectical Study. He also reminded me of a detail, that John Strachey had written the introduction. A review of the book that appeared in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1940 might rather have confirmed Hobsbawm’s own doubts about the utility of Freudianism. The reviewer noted how the author tried to prove that Marxism and psychoanalysis are complementary, but concluded: ‘It is doubtful whether [Osborn’s] genuine sympathy with Freud adds much to his revolutionary efficiency.’ Hobsbawm was for me, in these chance meetings, and, of course, all the more in the vast wealth of his books and articles, the very epitome of ‘the historian’.
This article originally appeared on History Workshop Online.
Daniel Pick is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. An editor of History Workshop Journal, he is also a practicing psychoanalyst and a fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is the author of numerous works on European cultural history, including The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture and, most recently, Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi.
The Past and Present Society has put together a special virtual issue of Eric Hobsbawm’s collected Past and Present articles. The articles are free online. Eric Hobsbawm was a founding member of the journal.
Monthly etymology gleanings, part 2, September 2012
Last week’s “gleanings” were devoted to spelling and ended with the promise to address the other questions in the next installment. But, since the previous part inspired some comments, I will briefly return to Spelling Reform. One of the questions was: “Who needs the reform?” Everybody does.
At present, children spend hours learning “hieroglyphs” like chair, choir, character, ache, douche, weird, pierce, any and many versus Annie and manly, live (verb) versus live (adjective), and hundreds of others. Time is wasted on teaching and learning this nonsense, and every hour means money, labor, and mental strain. The result is embarrassing. All over the country, college students write Scandanavian, definately, occurance, and proffesor (in this respect they are touchingly consistent). Never mind midevil; this form may reflect their idea of the Middle Ages. Statements like I am a terrible speller, I have not taken geography in high school, and I am an early riser sound equally respectable. I met a law student who thought that indict rhymes with predict. Unless one knows a word from oral communication (and foreigners usually don’t), no English vocable should be pronounced without consulting transcription. But not only foreigners are at risk. That is why wizened old men begin to resemble their equally old but wise counterparts in the speech of native speakers, those frustrated citizens wandering like aliens in the jungle of their mother tongue.
All the arguments against the reform have been repeated and refuted millions of times. The main of them are two.
(1) Traditional spelling reflects the past of the English language and should be kept. Why should we speak Modern English but spell Middle English? At one time, the Norwegians were made to spell their words in Danish. Those who read old books may have seen editions of Ibsen translated from “Dano-Norwegian.” This is our case; we write Middle-Modern English, a frightening hybrid. Nor do the most ridiculously spelled words reflect their history. British colour reproduces the Old French form: the Latin word was color. Are we “translating” from Anglo-French?
(2) The other argument is that people have different accents, so that no spelling will satisfy all. This is true. For some people gh in night designates a real sound. But for the overwhelming majority of English speakers it does not, and here is perhaps one of the cases in which we should respect the rights of the majority. Anyway, cough and ghoul make no sense to anybody. Some excuse can perhaps be made only for Nottingham.
Should dictionaries be as permissive when it comes to spelling as they are when they describe pronunciation and usage? I don’t think so. Spelling has to be normalized, and sanctifying definately and Scandanavian as variants of definitely and Scandinavian would, to my mind, be a bad idea. However, the opponents of the reform may sleep in peace. It does not seem that anything will be done to reform English spelling in their lifetime unless spellers of the world unite and storm their departments and ministries of education. So far, it is all talk, just so much hot air.
I was aware of the reform of Dutch spelling because I constantly read older Dutch books, and when I quote them, I have to consult modern dictionaries to make sure that my spelling is not archaic. Not everybody is careful enough, and one constantly sees antiquated Dutch forms in British and American printed sources. I for one never know whether I should capitalize words like engels “English,” especially in titles. I meant Dutch when I referred to a reform carried out in several waves, but indeed, one should probably speak about a series of reforms. The literature on Spelling Reform, if one adds Russian, German, and French to English and Dutch, is huge.
Filipino versus Philippines. If I understand the situation correctly, the variant with F reflects Spanish usage, while Ph is an Anglicized variant. Phony. Like one of our correspondents, I suspect that the anecdote told by Stephen Goranson (a wedding arranged by telephone; see his comment) is a joke. That incident could hardly have given rise to the word phony.
Naïve and naiveté. Both words are French, and the only way to remember their spelling is to learn both as “hieroglyphs,” that is, individually. The same holds for their pronunciation. No rule will make the task easier.
Biscuit. The spelling of this word in Modern English goes back to one of its several variants in Old French (the same in Modern French). The older French forms were biscoit, biscuit, and biscot (compare Italian biscotto), from bis-coctus “twice cooked.” One of the earlier English forms was bisquite. Apparently, at that time the letter u was not mute.
Barse and bass. Mr. Cowan cited several other cases of r lost before s and in other positions. Those interested in comprehensive lists should consult standard historical grammars by Karl Luick and others. The closest one to bass is ass from arse, also a dialectal variant of the “main” word (only arse has unmistakable cognates). I am not sure why The Oxford American Dictionary calls arse the British spelling of ass. The words are not only spelled but also pronounced differently. However, gal for girl probably does not belong here. Girl and boy often function as expressive words, and their phonetic variants are not necessarily the products of regular phonetic changes. See especially Horn-Lehnert’s Laut und Leben.
Privacy and its kin. The norm is capricious. Privy has a short vowel in all varieties of English, which is “correct” (compare body, in which the heavy suffix -y prevented the vowel from lengthening). Privacy with the vowel of privy is also regular (short vowels prevail in trisyllabic words: compare holiday, as opposed to holy). Privacy with the vowel of private is, most likely, a phonetic pronunciation, but it could get long i from private and privation.
Math or Maths? Here again the norm is regional. In British English, the short form retains the plural of mathematics. In American English, the first syllable is all one needs (like trig for trigonometry). But I would like to quote the end of the question: “I now say mathematics, as I don’t want to sound like a yokel to one audience, or as an affected anglophile to another.” My heart goes out to the questioner. I feel the same when I have to use the word genealogy (and I often need it in my courses). Everybody says geneology (it rhymes with geology, biology, gynecology, etc.), but I cannot make myself join the majority. Nor can I pronounce it in public the way I would like to, with the vowel of allergy, for that will cause either surprise or ridicule. So it is now always genealogical information with me.
The interjection my lands, its origin. It is almost certain that my lands! is a euphemistic variant of my Lord. Any word beginning with an l prevents the Lord’s name being mentioned in vain. Likewise, any word beginning with a g substitutes for God (gosh, goodness, etc.).
Semi-truck, why called this? I have always thought that the gigantic eighteen wheeler is called a semi-truck, because the tractor (prime mover) is a truck cut off at the rear, so that it looks like half of a truck. Perhaps our readers can offer a better explanation.
Used to. The phrase used to goes back to Middle English. At that time, use to also occurred in the present, but today we can no longer say: “I use to read poetry” (that is, we are advised not to do so). In pronunciation, use to was indistinguishable from used to. The phrase joined other modal verbs, so that used did not need auxiliaries in questions and negations: he used not to read poetry and used he to read poetry? With time (at least, in American English), the feeling prevailed that do, is, after all, necessary in such constructions, and people began to say he didn’t use to read poetry and did he use to read poetry? As noted, by contrast, I use to read poetry has not made its way into the Standard (only used is allowed). Used he to… and he used not to… strike most people as stiff. It is up to each of us to follow today’s (not at all recent!) trend or remain loyal to the old rule. Both variants are fraught with danger: some will be derided as “yokels” (hillbillies, hayseeds, country bumpkins…), others as snobs. He was in the habit of reading poetry will, most likely, satisfy everybody.
I will return to the fowl/fly question in my next “gleanings” on October 31. And for now enjoy a true image of a twice-cooked biscotto.
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: biscotti with candied orange and pine nuts arranged on a round chopping board. Photo by LuluDurand, iStockphoto.
The articulate assault
We’re at the Tacoma Theatre in Washington, DC, packed house, predominantly Black crowd. Chris Rock struts across the stage: “You know how I could tell he can’t be President? Whenever he on the news, White people always give him the same compliments, always the same compliments. ‘He speaks so well.’ … Like that’s a compliment… What the fuck did you expect him to sound like?!”
Rock was not talking about Barack Obama, but Colin Powell, and his routine was first performed in 1996. But the insidious racism that Rock identified when Powell’s name was being floated as a presidential candidate has persisted, indeed been amplified, by Obama’s presidency, and there are already hints that Romney supporters intend to exploit it again this campaign cycle, as one website describes Obama as “exceptionally intelligent, articulate.”
Why the obsession with Obama’s speech? There has been a particular bipartisan fascination with President Obama’s ability to string together sentences. The same sentiment that Rock joked about was expressed by even Joe Biden, who, in early 2007, as a Democratic presidential hopeful, described his future boss as the “first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” That same week former president George W. Bush told a reporter, “He’s an attractive guy. He’s articulate.” As Lynette Clemetson wrote at the time, “When whites use the word [articulate] in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. . . . [which] is inherently offensive because it suggests that the recipient of the ‘compliment’ is notably different from other black people.”
As the campaign heated up, it only got worse. In Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s account of the 2008 election, they reported that Senator Harry Reid thought that Americans might finally be ready to elect a Black president, commenting privately that this was especially true because Obama was, relative to such other Black candidates as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Reid later apologized for his comments, but not before he found an unusual ally in Rush Limbaugh who repeatedly played a snippet of an Obama speech on education and Title I. Limbaugh urged his audience to listen closely. Obama said: “As a condition of receiving access to Title I funds, we will ask all states to put in place a plan…” Limbaugh stops the tape and asks, “D-ahhhh… Did you catch that? No? You missed it… See, you’re listening to the substance here. You missed this.” After replaying it, Limbaugh said: “This is what Harry Reid was talking about. Obama can turn on that black dialect when he wants to and turn it off. The President of the United States just said here, ‘As a condition of receiving access to Title I funds we will aks [pause] all states.’ … Now, if I use the word aks for the rest of the day, am I gonna get beat up and creamed for making fun of this clean, crisp, calm, cool, new, articulate [pause] President? … I’ll aks my advisors.” [Note to Limbaugh: you could also ask Chaucer and other classic writers who used “axe,” the literary form of the day.]
When Black people are “complimented” for being “articulate,” it often comes along with other adjectives like “good,” “clean,” “bright,” “nice-looking,” “handsome,” “calm,” and “crisp.” This is precisely what makes the articulate compliment feel backhanded. It’s not merely the use of articulate that’s problematic, nor the expression of surprise or bewilderment that makes it suspect, it is also the fact that its adjectival neighbors describe qualities that help create talk about “exceptional Negroes.” These common linguistic patterns open articulate up to charges of racism, which folks may not even realize they’re perpetuating.
Rather than referring to successful African Americans as “intelligent” and “articulate”—like Chris Rock said, “What the fuck did you expect?” — a “post-racial” society would assume that its successful citizens possessed these qualities. And a “post-racist” society would learn to read this “exceptionalizing” talk as language patterns that reinforce racist stereotypes. Such commentary invariably demands that all “Other” Americans gain access to “the Promised Land” based on how “closely [our] speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to the dominant white culture,” as Barack Obama put it in The Audacity of Hope. We must continue to challenge ourselves to do better in forming a just, democratic society.
H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. Geneva Smitherman is University Distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Co-Founder of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Their book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through the lens of language.
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Image credit: President Barack Obama, right, announces that he will send U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, left, to Burma, during the ASEAN Summit in Bali, Indonesia, on November 18, 2011. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
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