Oxford University Press's Blog, page 754

Monastic silence and a visual dialogue

As part of the Oral History Association conference, we asked Abbie Reese to write about her film-in-progress, which evolved in parallel to her book, Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns. This summer, Abbie was awarded a grant by Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library to conduct follow-up interviews with a half dozen women she began interviewing more than five years ago — women contemplating religious life. Abbie is preparing for post-production of a collaborative film made with and focused on a young woman in the process of becoming a cloistered contemplative nun.

Recently, a journalist asked me how I convinced the Poor Clare Colettine nuns, back in 2005, to let me write a book about their lives, and how I convinced them to help me in that endeavor. I explained that was not my approach. I asked the Mother Abbess if I could undertake a long-term project about their lives; I said that although I did not know the outcome, I would keep the community apprised.

At that time, I wanted to understand: What compels a young woman to make this radical departure to a cloistered monastery? I believed that there was value in the stories, perspectives, and memories of women who remove themselves from the world to pray for humanity — to become mothers of souls and saints on earth.

About the same time that I began to engage with the Poor Clare Colettine nuns in oral history interviews, I began interviewing young women around the States in the process of “discernment.” Each was contemplating if she had been called to a religious vocation.

I arranged to meet “Heather” in 2005. We met at her dorm at Elmhurst College in the suburbs of Chicago, and then we met up again a few hours later at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford where she would stay overnight for the first time. (She stayed in an area outside the enclosure and visited with the Mother Abbess and the Novice Mistress, separated by the metal grille.)

Heather and I met over the years; I interviewed her as she maintained hope that she would join a cloistered order. Her parents required her to finish college first, and then she dealt with school debt as she struggled to find a job.

In 2011, I met Heather and her family at the monastery when she was delivered there. I continued to conduct oral history interviews and I was allowed to enter the enclosure to record video footage. At that time, I was enrolled in an MFA in visual arts program at the University of Chicago. I had sensed even before she joined the Poor Clares that Heather was hesitant in our interviews. I wasn’t sure the reason: her uncertainty, not knowing if she truly has been called to cloistered contemplative life; the familial opposition that led her to talk less about the prospect of a religious vocation; or the possibility that she was not as articulate verbally as she is sophisticated visually. (She was a painter and studied graphic design.) From her blogs, I read her open tone.

Two nuns work in the wood shop of the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Ill. The Poor Clare Colettine nuns make vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. Courtesy of Abbie Reese.

An expatriate, Heather has made the exodus from mainstream society. A year after entering the monastery, Heather became “Sister Amata” in the Clothing Ceremony. (She chose both aliases to reflect and preserve the Poor Clare value of anonymity.) As she slowly integrates, Sister Amata is governed by a schedule that determines when she prays, sleeps, eats, and works, while she learns the expectations and the culture. Sister Amata continues the six-year formation process as she transitions into a new social role and new identity as a member of a community following an 800-year-old rule.

The enclosure is an intermediary space. The Poor Clare Colettine nuns intercede between humanity and an unseen realm; they believe their prayers and penances can change the course of history. Like the Poor Clares, Sister Amata inhabits a threshold — a space between worlds.

A contemporary practice that depends upon social contracts and long-term relationships is a complicated endeavor; representing others and representing otherness are problematic territories, following an imperialistic tradition of exploiting native resources. As in Bronislaw Malinowski’s model, boundaries between insider and outsider collapse, and the notion of “the outsider” slips. This hybrid of genres has probably sustained my focus and dedication because I find it challenging and nuanced.

To enact co-authorship and shared authority, to remove myself as the mediator holding the camera and the microphone, I obtained permission to lend Sister Amata a video camera. In essence, I chose Sister Amata as the cinematographer. I asked her to use the camera as if it were eyes encountering her world. I made three requests: document the daily rhythms of prayer, meals, and manual labor within the monastery’s rich material culture; record impressionistic moving images that place primacy on the visual over the discursive; and turn the camera upon herself to make video diaries of her impressions and motivations and experiences as she assimilates into the community.

Even though I was not physically present, my relationship with Sister Amata is embedded in the visual dialogue that transpired; the history of our engagement since 2005 fed the new film endeavor. Sister Amata’s video diaries are raw, sincere, and vulnerable. The nature of this as an exchange is evident when she addresses me directly.

The nuns gave me all of their documentation and I agreed to give them copies of it, as well. I met with Sister Amata and her novice mistress, “Sister Nicolette,” to download the digital files, to look at footage and to discuss it with them. I made additional requests.

Because of other nuns’ interest in contributing documentation, I lent a second camera. (The older nun constructed enactments of monastic life, instructing fellow nuns what to do, when.) I also recorded video footage inside the enclosure and my interviews with the nuns.

I am now working on post-production of a feature-length film that will be released theatrically. This project in-progress embeds the negotiations of a para-ethnographic, collaborative documentary:

How do we pursue our inquiry when our subjects are themselves engaged in intellectual labors that resemble approximately or are entirely indistinguishable from our own methodological practices?

Para-ethnography answers this question by proposing an analytical relationship in which we and our subjects — keenly reflexive subjects — can experiment collaboratively with the conventions of ethnographic enquiry. This methodological stance demands that we treat our subjects as epistemic partners who are not merely informing our research but who participate in shaping its theoretical agendas and its methodological exigencies. (Holmes, Douglas R. and George E. Marcus. “Para-Ethnography.” Ed. Lisa M. Given. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2008. Page 595.)

Film-making addresses some of the questions and interests that drive my practice. In giving Sister Amata and the other nuns the video cameras, they selected and composed what was recorded, essentially the same dynamic in my other interactions with them. Enunciating our “visual dialogue,” video cameras are seen crossing the threshold into the “Jesus cage,” passing between slats in the metal grille separating the monastery from our world. Through this exchange, the viewer will be granted Sister Amata’s vantage point — her painterly eye and the risks she has taken.

Once, a documentary film professor at the University of Chicago described her own work with a tribe in Alaska; she said that just as she chose to work with the tribe, they chose her. This professor said the same was true of my work — just as I chose to work with the nuns, they chose me. The title, Chosen, also reflects the nuns’ belief that God has chosen them for this ancient rule and demanding life.

Featured image: Poor Clare Colettine nuns return to the monastery after a funeral service on the premises, in 2010, for a cloistered nun who served in WWII. Courtesy of Abbie Reese.

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The Oxford DNB at 10: what we know now

Autumn 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In a series of blog posts, academics, researchers, and editors look at aspects of the ODNB’s online evolution in the decade since 2004. Here the ODNB’s publication editor, Philip Carter, considers how an ever-evolving Dictionary is being transformed by new opportunities in digital research.

When it was first published in September 2004, the Oxford DNB brought together the work of more than 10,000 humanities scholars charting the lives of nearly 55,000 historical individuals. Collectively it captured a generation’s understanding and perception of the British past and Britons’ reach worldwide. But if the Dictionary was a record of scholarship within a particular timeframe, it was also seen from the outset as a work in progress. This is most evident in the decision to include in the ODNB every person who had appeared in the original, Victorian DNB. Doing so defined the 2004 Dictionary (to quote the entry on Colin Matthew, its founding editor) as ‘a collective account of the attitudes of two centuries: the nineteenth as well as the twentieth, the one developing organically from the other.’

In the decade since 2004 this notion of the ODNB as an organic ‘work in progress’ has gone a step further. This is seen, in part, in the continued extension of biographical coverage, both of the ‘recently deceased’ and of newly documented lives from earlier periods—as discussed in other articles in this 10th anniversary series. But in addition to new content there’s also been the evolution—in the form of corrections, revisions, amplifications, and re-appraisals—of a sizeable share of the ODNB’s 55,000 existing biographies, as new scholarship comes to light.

The need to ‘keep-up’ with fresh research is not new. In 1908 the Victorian DNB was reprinted in an edition that collated the marginalia and correspondence born of several decades of reading. Thereafter, no further reprints were undertaken and later findings remained on file: information relating to the birthplace of the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry, for example—submitted by postcard in 1918—could not be address until the 2004 edition of the Dictionary. Such things are today unimaginable. Over the past ten years, and alongside the programme of new biographies, existing ODNB entries have been regularly updated online—with proposed amendments reviewed by the Dictionary’s academic editors in consultation with authors and reviewers. It’s worth remembering that today’s expectation of regular online updating is one that’s emerged in the lifetime of the published ODNB. Just 10 years ago, many saw online reference as a means of delivery not a new entity in its own right. The expectation that scholarly online reference could and should keep in step with new research and publications (and could be done while maintaining academic standards) is one pioneered, in part, by works like the ODNB.

One consequence is that Dictionary editors now focus on conservation (just as museum or gallery curators care for items in their collection) as well as on commissioning. In doing so we draw heavily on an ever-growing range of digitized records that have become available in the lifetime of the published Dictionary. This has been a truly remarkable development in humanities research in the past 5 to 10 years. For British history we’ve seen the digitization of (to name a few): the census returns for England and Wales (to 1911); indexes of civil registration in England and Wales (births, marriages, and deaths from 1838); Scottish parish registers from about 1500; early modern wills and probates; and 300 years’ worth of national and provincial newspapers. And this just scratches the surface.

Portrait of Lady Meux by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, 1881. Frick Collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2004 there were many people in the ODNB for whom the biographical trail ran cold. Access to paper records alone once meant that certain individuals simply disappeared from the historical record. Of course, some lives remain puzzles. But with these newly digitized sources we’re now able to address many of the previously unknown and untraceable episodes that were scattered across the 2004 edition. A decade on we’ve added details of nearly 3000 previously unknown births, marriages, and deaths for ODNB subjects. Access to newly digitized sources also prompts more wide-ranging revisions. Take, for example, the traveller Eliza Fay (1755/6-1816), known for her Original Letters from India, whose Dictionary entry has recently doubled in length owing to new genealogical research that minutely plots a troubled personal life that led Fay to travel to India and the business ventures she maintained there.

The case of Eliza Fay reminds us that this boom in digitized resources is particularly valuable for better understanding the lives of nineteenth and twentieth-century women. As a result of multiple marriages and/or multiple name changes many such biographies are prone to obscurity. There are also many occasions when women gave false information about their age, often for professional reasons. With digital resources, and a little detective work, it’s now possible to recover these stories. One example is Valerie, Lady Meux (1852-1910), who married into one of Britain’s wealthiest brewing families. To her contemporaries, and to generations of researchers, Lady Meux appeared the epitome of high society. But recent research uncovers a very different story: that of Susie Langton, the daughter of a Devon baker who—via multiple changes of birthdate and name—worked her way into the London elite. To Susie Langton (or Lady Meux), the discovery of her true past may not have been welcome, but for modern historians it becomes a key part of her story, and a fascinating case study of late-Victorian social mobility.

A good deal of this detective work is being done from the ODNB office. But much more comes in from thousands of researchers worldwide who are also making use of digitized resources. It’s our good fortune that the ODNB online is growing up with the Who Do You Think You Are? generation—a band of genealogists from whom we’ve benefited greatly thanks to their willingness to share new information. Such discoveries obviously enhance our understanding of the ODNB’s 60,000 main subjects, but they’re similarly adding much to the Dictionary’s 300,000 ‘other’ people: the parents, children, spouses, in-laws, patrons, teachers, business partners, and lovers who also populate these biographies. Looking ahead to our second decade, we anticipate that more will be made of these hundreds of thousands of ‘extras’ in creating a richer picture of the British past—as the ODNB continues to document and add to what we know.

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Blue LED lighting and the Nobel Prize for Physics

When I wrote Materials: A Very Short Introduction (published later this month) I made a list of all the Nobel Prizes that had been awarded for work on materials. There are lots. The first was the 1905 Chemistry prize to Alfred von Baeyer for dyestuffs (think indigo and denim). Now we can add another, as the 2014 Physics prize has been awarded to the three Japanese scientists who discovered how to make blue light-emitting diodes. Blue LEDs are important because they make possible white LEDs. This is the big winner. White LED lighting is sweeping the world, and that’s something whose value we can all easily understand. (Well done to the Nobel Foundation, by the way: this year the Physics and Medicine prizes are both about things we can all get the hang of.)

Red and green LEDs have been around for a long time, but making a blue one was a nightmare, or at least a very long journey. It was the sustained target of industrial and academic research for more than twenty years. (Baeyer’s indigo by the way was a similar case. In the late nineteenth century, making an industrial indigo dye was everyone’s top priority, but the synthesis proved elusive.) What Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura did was to work with a new semiconductor material, gallium nitride GaN, and find ways to build it into a tiny club sandwich. Layered heterostructures like this are at the heart of many semiconductor devices — there was a Nobel Prize for them in 2000. So it is not so much the concept of the blue LED that the new Nobel Prize recognizes as inventing methods to make efficient, reliable devices from GaN materials. In this Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura succeeded where many others had failed.

The commercial blue LED is formed by two crystalline layers of GaN between which is sandwiched a layer of GaN mixed with closely related semiconductor indium nitride InN. The InGaN layer is only a few atoms thick: in the business it is called a quantum well. Finding how to grow these exquisitely precise layers (generally depositing atoms from a vapor on a smooth sapphire surface) took many years.

The quantum well is where the action occurs. When a current flows through the device, negative electrons and positive holes are briefly trapped in the quantum well. When they combine, there is a little pop of energy, which appears as a photon of blue light. The efficiency of the device depends on getting as many of the electron-hole pairs as possible to produce photons, and to prevent the electrical energy from leaking off into other processes and ending up as heat. The blue LED achieves conversion efficiencies of more than 50%, an extraordinary improvement on traditional lighting technology.

An LED Solar Lamp, Rizal Park, Philippines “Solar Lamp Luneta” by SeamanWell. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

How does this help us to get white light? Well, one route is to combine the light from blue, red, and green LEDs, and with a nod to Isaac Newton the result is white light. But most commercial white LEDs don’t work that way. They contain only a blue LED, and are constructed so that the blue light shines through a thin coating of a material called a phosphor. The phosphor (commonly a yttrium garnet doped with cerium) converts some of the blue light to longer wavelength yellow light. The combination of yellow and blue light appears white.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to how amazing little devices such as these are made. And how they are packaged, and sold for next to nothing as components for everyday consumer products. Low cost and availability are important. It is easy to see that making a white-light LED which can produce say 200 lumens of light for every watt of electrical energy it uses is a big step in reducing energy consumption in lighting homes, offices, industries, in street lighting, in vehicles, and so on. They replace the old incandescent lamp which produced perhaps 15 lumens per watt. Since 20% of our electricity is used for lighting, a practical white LED lamp is transformative.

But the white LED has another benefit, in bringing useful light to communities all over the world that do not have a public electricity supply. One day, I took to pieces a little solar lamp, which sells for a few dollars. I wanted to see exactly what was in it, and in particular how many chemical elements I could find. When I totted them up I had found more than twenty, about a quarter of all the elements in the Periodic Table. This little lamp has a small solar panel, a lithium battery and at its heart a white LED. It brings white light to people who previously had only dangerous kerosene lamps, or perhaps nothing at all. And it provides a solar-powered charger for a phone too. Four of the more exotic elements in this lamp are in the LED light, indium and gallium in the LED heterostructure, and yttrium and cerium in the phosphor. Is this solar lamp really the simple product that it seems? Or is it, like thousands of other everyday articles, a miracle of material ingenuity?

Featured image: Blue light emitting diodes over a proto-board by Gussisaurio. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 2

Continued from “Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 1″…

Dangerous derivations and chance coincidences

A correspondent cited a few tentative etymologies of English words.

Sail : in Mennonite Low German sähl means “harness.”
Bride : Dutch brudespaar allegedly means “broody pair.” Doesn’t bride mean “broody hen”?
Cow : the German word kauen means “to chew.” Couldn’t that be the origin of the word cow?

I am sorry to disappoint our correspondent, but such haphazard comparisons should be abandoned. To discover the origin of old words, one has to compare their most ancient attested forms. For example, kauen always had a diphthong, while cow has its late diphthong from a long monophthong that once sounded like Modern Engl. oo (compare German Kuh). And so it goes. On the more intuitive level, one should realize that, if a word has baffled professional scholars for centuries, the most tempting solutions have probably been offered and rejected. By the way, the Dutch compound for “bride and bridegroom” is bruidspaar, not brudespaar; the word has nothing to do with brooding.

Another correspondent wrote that the Russian word for “kiss” also means “to aim.” Whoever suggested this connection seems to have confused the Russian words tsel “whole” (discussed in the post on kissing) and tsel’ “aim.” The sign l’ stands for palatalized (or “soft”) l; where the transliteration has an apostrophe Russian has a special letter (the so-called miagkii znak). Tsel is an old word, while tsel’ is a borrowing of German Ziel “aim” (more precisely, Middle High German), via Polish.

Still another correspondent wonders whether the noun chapbook and the verb tucker (out) “to tire, to weary” can be of Hindi origin. I think chapbook has such a transparent English derivation that it does not merit further discussion. Tucker is probably a frequentative of tuck, like very many verbs of this structure. There is no denying the fact that our correspondent cited Hindi words that have both the form and the meaning closely corresponding to chapbook and tucker. But, as I have written many times while answering similar questions, the fact of borrowing can be ascertained only if we succeed in showing how a foreign word reached English (compare the history of thug, which is indeed from Hindi, or other examples cited in the great book Hobson-Jobson). Was tucker used mainly by Hindi speakers? Do we have any proof that this verb spread from their community? Only a detailed investigation along such lines can sound convincing. Otherwise, we will stay with kauen ~ cow and their likes.

Wise restraint. An old colleague of mine wrote in connection with my post on roil.

“Honoré de Balzac published in 1842 a novel called La Rabouilleuse. The title name is explained as being a word local to the Berry region of France where a young girl is employed to stir up the mud in a stream, thus clouding the water and permitting a fisherman to more readily catch crayfish (crawfish?). One can easily see the way the word is formed: the verb bouillir “boil” plus a reduplicating prefix ra- and a feminine agent suffix. Now the verb rabouillir or some variant of it might fit in with roil both with some phonemes and the meaning.”

The author of the letter did not suggest any solution, and I think he was right to do so. The coincidence looks like being due to chance.

Old Friends

Every now and then I run into publications that would have come in most useful in my earlier posts and comments. But it is never too late to pick up even the oldest chestnuts. For instance, I have challenged the supporters of they ~ them in sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait to give examples that are really old. Almost nothing has turned up. But here are two more phenomena that have aroused some interest among our readers.

Split infinitive. It would seem that passionate, as opposed to rational, splitting set in several decades ago, and the construction I called to be or to not be conquered the ugly day. Roswitha Fischer’s article on the split infinitive appeared in 2007; however, I read it only this summer. Among many other examples, she quoted Wycliffe: “It is good for to not ete fleisch and for to not drynke wyn” (ca. 1382). I do not follow Wycliffe’s recommendation but in defense of his grammar should say that with for to he had nowhere else to put the negation. I am sure everybody will remember: “Simple Simon went a-fishing, / For to catch a whale.” Nowadays, for to, an analog of German um zu, is dead, except in some dialects.

One… his. We have been taught to say one…one’s. But people keep correlating one with his (now probably their; see above). In The Nation for 1921 I found a letter to the editor from Steven T. Byington (Ballard Vale, Massachusetts) with the funny title Four Centuries of Onehese. The writer quoted five sentences with one—his. I’ll reproduce only the relevant part of them:

“…one was surer in keeping his tunge, than in muche speking” (excellent advice going back to 1477)
“…the higher one doth mount, the less doth euery thing appeare which is below him” (1607)
“If one proposes any other end unto himself” (1650)
“…one’s sure to break his neck” (1650), “One should do what his own nature prescribes” (1886)

Among other things, the letter discusses the utterance: “One oughtn’t never take nothing that ain’t theirn.” I suspect that in the great books on English grammar by Jespersen, Poutsma, and Curme many more examples of the one… his type will be found. A certain Markman, a friend of James Steerforth’s, “always spoke of himself indefinitely as a ‘man’, and seldom or never in the first person singular” (David Copperfield, Chapter 24 “My First Dissipation”). This way of speaking may help those who have trouble with one.

Check your slang

Also in The Nation, this time for 1922, I found a more than enthusiastic review by Clement Wood of Carl Sandburg’s fourth book of poetry Slabs of the Sunburnt West. In the opening paragraph, Wood expressed his delight about Sandburg’s use of slang. I ran the list by my undergraduate students. Here it is: humdinger, flooey, *phizzogs, fixers, frame-up, *four-flushers, rakeoff, getaway, junk, *fliv, fake, come clean, gabby mouth, *hoosegow, *teameo, *work plug, lovey, slew him in, bull, jazz, scab, booze, stiffs, hanky-pank, hokum, bum, and buddy.

The words that no one recognized are given above with an asterisk. I knew more. However, some of them I knew by chance. For instance, long ago, a bookstore near our main campus closed its doors. It began to sell its stock at a small discount, but every two days the prices went down. The only books that no one wanted to take even when they were free were those by American poets. I grabbed the entire batch and read everything. In this rather dubious treasure trove, I discovered Sandburg, read his poem called Phizzogs, and looked up the word. It has never occurred in my reading since that day. In my work, I have dealt with synonyms for “prison,” so that hoosegow was quite familiar to me. I also knew fliv, but the word is forgotten. This is what I expected, for once I tried the same experiment with jitney and drew blank, while people of my age recognized it immediately. If I had run into a poker player, such a person would have had no trouble identifying four-flushers. Fixers, bull, work plug, slew him in, and stiffs look transparent, but without the context it is impossible to decide their exact meaning. We of course guessed that hanky-pank is a back formation on hanky-panky.

My students say that, when they watch movies of the fifties, they do not understand the slang used there, while their parents are in the dark when it comes to the slang of their children. On the other hand, the words given in bold in my list are today so familiar that no one would have referred to them as particularly striking. One should take into consideration that, to know one’s language, one has to read the literature written in it. It is curious to follow the modern annotations of Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. Both Dickens and Thackeray used slang quite generously, and the commentators assume that no one understands it today. Perhaps they are right.

I still have some questions unanswered and will take care of them at the end of October.

Image credits: (1) Photograph of Carl Sandburg, 1947. Library of Congress. (2) Sandburg book cover via Booklikes.

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Classical mythology comes to Hollywood

This summer saw the release of Hercules (Radical Studios, dir. Brett Ratner). Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took his place in the long line of strongmen to portray Greece’s most enduring icon. It was a lot of fun, and you should go see it. But, as one might expect from a Hollywood piece, the film takes a revisionist approach to the world of Greek myth, especially to its titular hero. A man of enormous sexual appetite, sacker of cities, and murderer of his own family, Hercules is glossed over here as a seeker of justice, characterized by his humanity and humility. And it is once again Hercules, not Heracles: the Romanized version loses the irony of the Greek, “Glory of Hera.”

This is neither the Hercules of ancient myth, nor is it the Hercules of Steve Moore’s graphic novel, Hercules: The Thracian Wars (Radical Comics, 2008), on which the film is loosely based. It is perhaps not surprising then that Moore fought to have his name removed from the project, at least according to long-time friend Alan Moore. Steve Moore died earlier this year and buried deep in the closing credits of the film is a dedication in his memory.

When he wrote his comic, Moore strove to fit his story into the world of Greek myth in a “realistic” way. Though the story (and that of its sequel, The Knives of Kush) is original, the characters and setting are consistent with the pseudo-historic Bronze Age of Greek legend. The film jettisons much of this careful integration for little narrative gain. I am never opposed to revisions to the myth (myth, after all, can be defined by its malleability), but why, for instance, set the opening of the film in Macedonia in 358 BCE instead of 1200? It adds nothing to the story, but confuses anyone with even a passing knowledge of Greek history — our heroes should be rubbing elbows with Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father. The answer to this question, I suspect, is a sort of Wikipedial historicity: Hercules and his companions are hired by a fictional King Cotys, a name chosen by Moore as suitably Thracian — and there was a historical Cotys in 358.

A cover of Dell’s comic adaptation of the Hercules myth. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Thracian Wars is set well after Hercules has completed his twelve labors: in the loose chronology of Greek myth, we are somewhere between the Calydonian Boar Hunt and the battle of the Seven Against Thebes. Hercules arrives in Thrace as a mercenary, along with his companions Iolaus, Tydeus, Autolycus, Amphiarus, Atalanta, Meleager, and Meneus, the only character made up by Moore. (The Hollywood film production jettisons those characters who might have LGBT overtones: Meneus is Hercules’s male lover, and Meleager is constantly frustrated by and therefore exposes Atalanta’s lesbianism.) Though no story of Greek myth involves all these characters, they all belong to roughly the same generation — the generation before the Trojan War. These characters could have interacted in untold stories.

But they don’t interact well. As Moore notes in the afterword to the trade paperback, “Hercules was a murderer, a rapist, a womanizer, subject to catastrophic rages and plainly bisexual…I wouldn’t have wanted to spend much time in his company.” The rest of the band is not much better. Where the film presents a band of brothers, faithful to each other to the death, in the comic these characters loathe each other and are clearly bound not by love of each other but the need to earn a living. They are mercenaries, with little interest in the morality of their actions.

Legendary Greece, then, is without a moral center. Violence and bloodshed are never far away. Sexual activity is fueled only by deceit or lust. The Greek characters speak of their Thracian surroundings as barbaric, but we are never shown any better. The art of the comic articulates this grim reality. Eyes are frequently lost in shadow, for instance, dehumanizing the characters further. Throughout, artist Admira Wijaya deploys a somber color palette of greys, browns, and muted reds to convey a bleak world.

This, then, is the great disconnect of Greek myth with the modern world. In our times, our heroes of popular culture must be morally pure; only black and white values can be understood. So-called “anti-heroes” are occasionally tolerated in marginal media, but even here their transgressions are typically mitigated somehow (think of the recent television series Dexter, in which the serial killer is validated by his targeting of other serial killers — the real bad guys). The heroes of Greek legend — the word “hero” itself only denoted those who performed memorable or noteworthy deeds, without a moral element — often existed solely because they were transgressors. Tantalus, Oedipus, Orestes: their stories are of broken taboos, stories of cannibalism, incest, kin-slaying. Later authors may have complicated their stories, but violation is at the core of their being.

Sure, the common people of ancient Greece benefited from Hercules’s actions as a slayer of monsters, but none of his actions were motivated by altruism. Rather, it was shame at best that moved him: in most tellings, his famous twelve labors were penance for the death of his family at his own hands. Many of his other deeds were motivated by hunger, lust, or just boredom. In the film, Johnson’s Hercules finds a sort of absolution for his past crimes. In the comic, redemption is not an objective; in fact, Hercules doesn’t even seem to recognize the concept.

Hercules is a figure of strength and power, a conqueror of the unknown, a slayer of dragons (and giant boars and lions). The Hercules of Hollywood shows us strength. The Hercules of myth — and of Moore’s comic — shows us the consequences of that strength when it’s not carefully contained. There is a primal energy there, a reflection of that part of our souls that is fascinated with, even desires, transgression. As healthy, moral humans, most of us conquer that fascination. But myth is our reminder that it always, always bears watching. Hollywood isn’t going to help you do that.

Featured image: An engraving from The Labours of Hercules by Hans Sebald Beham, c. 1545. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Falling out of love and down the housing ladder?

Since World War II, homeownership has developed into the major tenure in almost all European countries. This democratization of homeownership has turned owned homes from luxury items available to a lucky few into inherent and attainable life goals for many. In the general perception, owning is often associated with better homes with larger gardens, in better neighbourhoods with better schools. To rent, in contrast, is considered pouring money down the drain. Therefore, especially as people marry and children are planned, homeownership becomes the preferred choice of tenure. This choice has been strongly subsidized by governments and has become the norm in countries such as Australia, Britain, Belgium, and the United States. Once people have better jobs or more children, they move to ever bigger and better homes. This has been described as people moving up the housing ladder.

However, the underlying idea of a stable, married family – which has been the standard convention for most of the twentieth century – is outdated. Many (though declining numbers of) marriages end in separation today. Besides the emotional turmoil that the marital separation causes, this event has profound effects on the chances to remain in homeownership for both ex-partners. Generally, at least one, if not both partners, will leave the previously shared dwelling. As separation often involves a loss of financial resources, people may have a hard time re-entering homeownership. After falling out of love and separating, a fall down the housing ladder may follow, as we show in a study recently published in European Sociological Review.

Figure 1: Average ownership rate before and after separation in Britain. Source: Lersch/Vidal 2014

How drastic this fall will be depends very much on the housing market environment (see Figures 1 and 2). In the past in Britain, easy access to housing finance and high supply facilitated (re-)entry into homeownership for ex-partners even under house price inflation in the 1990s and early 2000s. In tight housing markets ex-partners will face more difficulties, and once access to mortgages becomes restricted, as happened in Britain after the recent crash in the housing market, problems may arise. So in the past British ex-partners could return to homeownership at some point in their lives because access to mortgages was easy – and they needed to return because alternatives in the private and social rental sector were and are unattractive. This may no longer work in future. Ex-partners may increasingly face similar problems that new market entrants currently encounter, for which the term generation rent has already been coined.

To better understand what may happen to British ex-partners, we can consider the example of Germany. The German housing market is in many ways different from the British, not the least because private rental accommodation is an attractive alternative to homeownership. Access to mortgages is also more restricted than in Britain, even after the recent tightening of regulations in Britain. High down payments are the rule in Germany. In this market environment, homeownership is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many, while a considerable share of people will never enter homeownership. After separation, very few Germans will be able to return to homeownership (see Figure 2). Ex-partners will be less likely to be in homeownership through their lives post-separation. This scenario may foreshadow the British situation in the near future.

Figure 2: Average ownership rate before and after separation in Germany. Source: Lersch/Vidal 2014

Being excluded from homeownership in the German context is not as consequential as it may turn out to be in Britain, however. First, more Germans will accept to rent after separation compared to the British, because attractive, and most of all, secure accommodation is available for – internationally seen – reasonable costs. Second, the German public pension system is relatively generous for those who continuously worked throughout their lives. To build up private wealth as a cushion for old age is not as necessary as in Britain. In Britain, where individuals are expected to privately invest in financial products and property to build an individual safety net – an idea called asset-based welfare – people that experience a separation may lose this safety net. This may result in stark disparities between the separated and those remaining married in old life.

Homeownership may offer many advantages for families. At the same time, homeownership is a long-term investment that does not necessarily fit well with the dynamics of modern partnership and family life. Everybody needs suitable and secure accommodation. Such diverse accommodation may sometimes be better provided in the private and social rental sector, which must not result in less security or quality compared to homeownership as can be seen in Germany. To make this work people need decent options to build up a safety net for rainy days outside of the housing market. However, people should also have reasonable tenure choice, which is not currently the case for many ex-partners in Germany.

Headline image credit: Keys. CC0 via Pixabay.

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The divine colour blue

In Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, all three figures have blue in their clothing: a bright azure blue which stands out from the predominant warm golden yellows.

Commentaries on the icon refer to this as the blue of the sky, representing divinity. Investigating the correlation of blue with divinity takes us down some surprising and intriguing avenues.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit discusses ‘the blue of distance’. As she explains, the sky is blue because light at the blue end of the spectrum is scattered by air molecules as it travels from the sun to us.

It is the ‘light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost’ which ‘gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue’. She continues:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

Blue, therefore, would seem to be a particularly apt colour with which to represent divinity.

The association of divinity with blue goes back much further than Rublev and fifteenth century Russia.

Over a thousand years earlier, the fourth century monk Evagrius of Pontus (an intellectual who fled Constantinople for the solitude of the desert after falling in love with a married woman) wrote of prayer: ‘Prayer is a state of the mind that arises under the influence of the unique light of the Holy Trinity’ (Reflections 27).

Rublev’s famous icon showing the three Angels being hosted by Abraham at Mamre. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

He specified the colour of that light:

When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace, then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire or the colour of heaven; this state scripture calls the place of God that was seen by the elders on Mount Sinai. (On Thoughts 39)

If someone should want to behold the state of his mind, let him deprive himself of all mental representations, and then he shall behold himself resembling sapphire or the colour of heaven. (Reflections 2)

The light of the Trinity, which suffuses the mind in the highest forms of prayer, is sapphire blue, the colour of heaven. Evagrius did not reach this conclusion as a result of abstract thought, but on the basis of a particular biblical verse: Exodus 24:10.

In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) with which he will have been familiar, it reads: ‘And they saw the place, there where the God of Israel stood, and that which was beneath his feet, like something made from sapphire brick and like the appearance of the firmament of heaven in purity.’

At this point in Exodus, the Ten Commandments have already been given, and Moses has been commanded to ascend Mount Sinai once more, along with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of the elders.

In the Hebrew Bible they see the God of Israel; but the Greek translation is more circumspect, and there they only see the place where the God of Israel stands. Either way, beneath the feet of God is a pavement of sapphire blue.

Lapis Lazuli Beads. Photo by cobalt123. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

This ‘sapphire’ (Greek sappheiros, Hebrew sappir) is not the transparent gemstone, but lapis lazuli, a stone prized for its intense deep blue. The word ‘Lazuli’, along with the adjective ‘azure’, derives from the Persian name for the stone. Rublev will have used lapis lazuli as the pigment for his blue.

The Hebrew version of Exodus 24:10 says that lapis lazuli is ‘like the very heavens for clearness’. The stone often includes minute golden pyrite crystals, which shimmer like stars in the night sky.

The Greek translation brings in the word ‘firmament’, which sends us back to Genesis 1:6, where God says, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters’. The firmament was imagined as a solid dome, separating the waters above (the heavens) from the waters below (the sea).

When the prophet Ezekiel has his terrifying vision of the heavenly chariot, he sees four angelic ‘living beings’ (with four faces, and four wings) carrying a crystalline firmament over their heads, upon which is a sapphire (i.e. lapis lazuli) throne.

On the throne is ‘the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord’ (Ezekiel 1:28). In other words, Ezekiel has a vision of God at three removes: a fiery being on a blue throne.

In the biblical descriptions of Genesis, Exodus and Ezekiel, physical and spiritual heavens are intertwined. The blue of the sky merges with the throne of God. Evagrius begins a process of interiorising these descriptions, just as Rebecca Solnit interiorises the physics of scattered blue light.

For Evagrius, Mount Sinai becomes a landmark in the geography of the soul. And the colour blue symbolises the internal state of the mind at prayer. An internal state no doubt Rublev aimed to foster with his use of divine azure blue.

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Preventing and surviving crises: the modern approach

Why do organisations that know a crisis can cause intense damage to reputation and value take so few steps to prevent crises from happening in the first place? This is one of the perplexing questions of contemporary management.

One important element in this riddle is that many organisations simply fail to appreciate the difference between tactical crisis response and strategic crisis management, and thus miss the critical prevention phase. Importantly this is not a just a matter of semantics and definitions. How an organisation approaches crisis management can represent a genuine threat to survival. The reality is crisis response and crisis management are not the same thing, and that distinction lies at the heart of the modern approach to crisis management.

The traditional response approach is simple and effective in a limited way. It prepares the organisation in the event a crisis occurs, and helps it respond as effectively as possible to minimise the damage. This has been called the Event Approach – treating a crisis as an event you prepare for and then respond to. By contrast the emerging, more strategic approach represents a crisis not so much as an event, but as a point along a process which begins long before the crisis, continues through preparedness and prevention, works through managing the event itself, and then addresses the many organisational risks which develop after the event. This so-called Process Approach is undoubtedly one of the most important recent evolutionary developments in crisis management, bringing an increased focus onto two previously underdeveloped areas.

The first of these areas is crisis prevention. Conventional crisis preparedness is vital – including key activities such as crisis management manuals, team selection and training, pre-prepared contact lists and written materials, and a variety of simulations and training. However none of these activities helps reduce the likelihood of the crisis happening in the first place. They are like the insurance the homeowner takes out against fire and burglary. The insurance policy itself does nothing to reduce the chances of fire or burglary. It simply provides the homeowner with some financial protection, paid for in advance. But responsible homeowners do more than just take out insurance. They install smoke detectors, fire alarms, intruder alarms and CCTV, plus double locks on doors and windows. It is these steps which go beyond passive insurance (crisis preparedness) and add proactive steps to reduce the likelihood of disaster happening on the first place (crisis prevention). Obviously no astute homeowner would do one without the other.

In exactly the same way, the Process Approach to crisis management calls for organisations not just to put traditional crisis preparedness in place but also to implement a wide range of proven activities to prevent the likelihood of the event occurring. These might include environmental scanning, risk analysis, media monitoring, issue management, and preventive maintenance, as well as effective emergency response (because an emergency badly managed has the potential to become a crisis).

© GlobalStock via iStock.

None of these activities is fresh or original. What is new is explicitly positioning them within the context of crisis prevention as part of a continuum of organisational activities which constitute comprehensive crisis management. It helps explain the value of strategic crisis management as opposed to tactical crisis response.

The second underdeveloped area highlighted by the modern Process Approach is the need for a much more complete view of what happens after the crisis. The traditional Event Approach focuses primarily on getting back to “business as normal” as quickly as possible. This business continuity or operational recovery model typically has a strong emphasis on tactical matters such as restoring power, water and other utilities, as well as protection and restoration of data, communication, and other IT capacity.

Again, such activities are vital, but the Process Approach to crisis management emphasises that the crisis risk is not over when business resumes. This period is sometimes called the “crisis after the crisis” and can represent an even greater risk than the crisis itself, particularly the risk to reputation. These ongoing risks may take the form of official inquiries, coroner’s inquests, prosecution, costly litigation, adverse regulation, or shareholder backlash. When the crisis event itself is seemingly over it is very natural for executives to want to move on as quickly as possible. But the dangers in the post-crisis period are very real and have all too frequently led to the downfall of senior managers and even entire organisations.

There is, sadly, an extensive body of case studies and research which spells out the disastrous impact of a crisis on reputation, long-term share value, and the chances of corporate survival. While nothing can guarantee that a crisis won’t strike and potentially deliver these impacts, the Process Approach offers practical steps to reduce the chance of a crisis in the first place, to minimise damage should a crisis occur, and if a crisis does occur, to help the organisation survive.

Headline image credit: Highway at night. CC0 via Pixabay.

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“A Bright But Unsteady Light”

Edgar Allan Poe died 165 years ago today in the early morning of 7 October 1849. Only a few details of the illness that extinguished his “bright but unsteady light” are known because his physician, Dr. John Joseph Moran, used the illness to promote his own celebrity and in the process denied posterity an accurate clinical description. One of his later accounts, one summarized by Charles Scarlett, Jr. in the Maryland Historical Magazine (1978; 73: 360-75) came to my attention shortly after returning to Baltimore after 14 years at the Dallas VA Hospital in 1988. I was so taken by Moran’s fascinating and detailed description of Poe’s final days, I decided to use it as the subject of a clinical conference that has long been my favorite – the Clinical Pathologic Case Conference (CPC) Conference. This would prove to be the first of an ongoing series of historical CPCs devoted to the likes of Alexander, Columbus, Mozart and Lenin, stretching over two decades and spawning too-numerous-to-count articles in the international press, scores of manuscripts published in medical journals, and two books.

The clinicopathological conference is a standard medical conference designed to teach physicians and physicians-in-training basic medical concepts and clinical problem-solving techniques. It is a case-based exercise, in which the featured speaker and the audience struggle together to diagnose a particularly challenging illness of some patient using only the information included in a clinical summary prepared especially for the conference. That clinical summary, distributed well in advance of the conference, typically contains all of the medical information pertaining to the case in question, except for the definitive, diagnostic test result. That result, known only to the conference organizers, is revealed at the very end of the conference as a validation or repudiation of the presenter’s conclusions. To my knowledge, our “Poe Historical CPC” was the first to use an historical, rather than a current, patient as the subject of the conference.

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Descent into the Maelstrom” by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), published in 1919. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1995, during this first Historical CPC at the University of Maryland, Dr. R. Michael Benitez concluded that Poe died of rabies resulting from an unrecorded and most likely unrecognized animal exposure prior to his hospitalization in Baltimore. His diagnosis became a media sensation covered in venues as diverse as Science magazine and the answer to the final Jeopardy question of the TV show of the same name. Benitez based his diagnosis on evidence of autonomic instability (dilating and contracting pupils and an irregular pulse which alternated between rapid and slow), fluctuating delirium, and hydrophobia (suggested by Poe’s adamant refusal of alcohol and difficulty swallowing water) included in Moran’s later descriptions of the terminal illness.

Rabies, in fact, has much in common with Moran’s later description of Poe’s final illness. It is a viral encephalitis (i.e., an infection of the brain) marked by acute onset of confusion, hallucinations, combativeness, muscle spasms and seizures, all of which tend to wax and wane during the course of the illness. Autonomic instability marked by alternating tachycardia (racing pulse) and bradycardia (slow pulse), profuse sweating, lacrymation, and salivation are also characteristic. The infection is virtually always fatal, with a median survival time after the onset of symptoms of four days. Poe died four days after being admitted to the hospital.

Moran gave no such indication of autonomic instability or hydrophobia in the letter he wrote to Mrs. Clemm a month after her son-in-law’s death. Only decades later, most likely relying on memory alone, does he mention a “very low pulse” and that his famous patient’s “pulse which had been as low as fifty was rising rapidly, though still feeble and variable.”

Many diagnoses have since been offered to explain Poe’s death. The earliest and most persistent has been that of alcohol-induced delirium tremens. Moran’s later case summary, one almost certainly written to satisfy his public’s appetite for ever more moving and ironic details of his patient’s final hours, has generated several more. These include homicide, carbon monoxide poisoning, suicide, syphilis, and mercury intoxication, reflecting more an unwillingness on the part of the proposers to accept an ordinary disease as the cause of Poe’s death than any convincing clinical evidence of such disorders.

Given numerous well-documented instances of Poe’s refractory alcohol abuse and its adverse effects on his physical and mental health prior to his departure from Richmond in late September of 1849, and the nature of the illness described by Moran in his letter of 15 November 1849 to Poe’s mother-in-law, one need look no further than delirium tremens as an explanation for his death. Whether his last bout with alcohol was the result of “cooping,” his own inability to control the craving that had for so many years driven him to drink, or a second (successful) attempt at suicide will never be known. However, if one ignores Moran’s later expanded description of Poe’s final illness, which deviates so spectacularly from his initial description in his letter to Maria Clemm a month after his patient’s death, neither rabies, homicide, mercury intoxication, nor, for that matter, any of the myriad other explanations proposed in the century and a half since Poe’s death, offers a better fit than delirium tremens.

Headline image credit: A photograph (taken by C.T. Tatman in 1904) of a daguerreotype (taken by Edwin H. Manchester in 1848) of Edgar Allan Poe. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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International Bar Association Annual Meeting 2014

In the Preface to their new book A Guide to The SIAC Arbitration Rules, authors Mark Mangan, Lucy Reed and John Choong observe that:

“the [Singapore International Arbitration] Centre is now well-established as a regional leader and the SIAC Rules are among the most popular globally…the authors are all leaders in Asia, including Lin Hoe, Nathaniel Khng, Zara Shafruddin, and Darius Chan in Singapore; Yong Wei Chan and Judy Fu in Hong Kong;…and Nicholas Lingard in Tokyo”

Their observation highlights the importance of Asia both as a centre for international arbitration, and generally for commerce and the practice of commercial law in the 21st century. This underlines the relevance of the 2014 annual meeting of the International Bar Association in Tokyo which, as Michael J Reynolds in his programme to the conference states:

“We will be celebrating the importance of lawyers in Asia and the role they are playing in building the relationships between Asia and the rest of the world. Tokyo will also be a delight to discover, from the finest foods to compelling history, and will provide a rich cultural experience for everyone.”

The first annual meeting held in Asia for seven years, IBA 2014 presents a unique opportunity for colleagues, practitioners and law specialists to meet each other and make personal contact, face to face, many for the first time. Below, we aim to provide some useful information for both new attendees and seasoned delegates to the IBA Annual Meeting.

Over 5,000 delegates from more than 100 jurisdictions over the globe will convene at the Tokyo International Forum from 19-24 October at the International Bar Association’s Annual Meeting. The conference will feature six days of over 180 working sessions and over 60 official IBA social functions. The programme naturally features a special focus on Asian legal practice, including sessions on corporate social responsibility in Asia, Corporate and M&A Law in Asia: inbound and outbound challenges and a Master class on using courtroom litigation to support arbitration in Asia

Tokyo is an excellent gateway to Asia. Often thought of as a city, Tokyo is officially governed as a “metropolitan prefecture”, which combines elements of both a city and a prefecture; a characteristic which is unique to Tokyo. Located in the Kantō region, and placed on the southeastern side of the main island Honshu Tokyo also includes the Izu and Ogasawara Islands. Ranked fourth among global cities by A.T. Kearney’s 2012 Global Cities Index, Tokyo is an attractive destination for this year’s Annual Meeting.

If you would like to know what’s available to fill your time outside your sessions, take a look at the following conference-related events:

Roppongi: Midtown & Mori Tower. Tokyo, Japan. photo by Lukas (LuxTonnerre). CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday 19 October: Opening ceremony. 6pm – 7.30pm, Welcome party 7.30pm-10.30pm, Auditorium, Tokyo International Forum


This year’s welcome party takes place in the iconic Glass Building which represents the very modern side of Japan and rated 3* by the Michelin Green Guide to Japan. The building reflects Japan’s mix of modern and traditional, offering delegates the opportunity to experience an energetic festival with traditional food, drink and entertainment.

Tuesday 21th October: 2pm-3pm, Meet Oxford author John Choong, author of A Guide to The SIAC Arbitration Rules


From 2pm – 3pm you can meet John Choong, at the Oxford University Press booths #16 and 17, who will be signing copies of his new title A Guide to The SIAC Arbitration Rules.





Wednesday 22 October Afternoon – IBA football match


The IBA ‘World Cup’ football match is a key part of the conference programme. 12 years after Japan co-hosted the 2002 World Cup, it now hosts the annual IBA match. Transport and other arrangements will be confirmed nearer the time and emailed to delegates who register an interest. All spectators are welcome.

Friday 24 October 7.30pm – 10.30pm, – Closing party, Happo-en


Happo-en is ‘garden of eight views’ and the closing party will be held in the grounds and buildings of this classic and beautiful Japanese garden. Constructed to be perfect from all angles, within this hidden gem of Tokyo you can wander at will and encounter some of the classical and historic art of Japan, including ancient Bonsai trees and stone lanterns together with live music and traditional performances.

Also, here are a few tips on what to expect when you get to Tokyo:

The weather in Tokyo in October will be mild. Expect temperatures to reach between 21-22 degrees Celsius, 69-71 degrees Fahrenheit.
There are eight restaurants at the Tokyo International Forum, including Takara which serves local and regional cuisine, including Sukiyaki (Japanese Beef Hot Pot) and Kaisendon (Sushi Rice Bowl), and Kurobuta-gekijo Hibiki, which specializes in local specialty foods of Kawagoe city, featuring dishes such as pork shabu-shabu and Yakiton (grilled pork skewers).
You can find details of the layout of the Tokyo International Forum online.

If you are lucky enough to be joining us in Tokyo, don’t forget to visit Oxford University Press at booth numbers 16 and 17 where you can browse our award-winning books, pick up a sample copy of one of our professional law journals, or get a free demonstration of one of our online services including Oxford Legal Research Library: International Commercial Arbitration and International Commercial Law.

To follow the latest updates about the IBA Conference as it happens, follow us @OUPCommLaw, @OUPIntLaw, and @blackstonescrim, and use the hashtag #IBA14. See you in Tokyo!

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