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Is cosmetic plastic surgery on the increase?

By Henk Giele

In its article ‘UK plastic surgery statistics 2012: brows up, breasts down’, The Guardian reported that 39,000 women underwent cosmetic plastic surgery in 2012: nearly 10,000 breast augments, 4,000 reductions, 5,000 facelifts, 3,000 nose jobs and 3,000 tummy tucks.

Fat Transfer Facelift

Even men got in on the act with 4,102 men reported to have had cosmetic surgery. However, men had no recorded breast augmentations, but did have 107 tummy tucks, and 642 breast reductions. The report went on to say that this represented a 6% rise on the previous year and a similar rise was seen every year since 2009. At this rate we will run out of patients soon enough!

Gynecomastia with Liposuction

However, these facts have to be interpreted with care as Daily Mail reported there were 95,000 cosmetic or aesthetic plastic surgical procedures in the UK in 2011, half of them being non-invasive cosmetic treatments such as Botox, fillers, dental treatments and even hair treatments. The UK came 16th, with 3.5 people per 1,000 per year having a cosmetic procedure. Surprisingly, South Korea topped the rank with 13.5 people per thousand. It is important to keep in mind that these figures are based on self-reporting surveys rather than official statistics. Given that cosmetic plastic surgery operates on the fringes of normal medicine and surgery, is not funded by national health services or insurance companies, and can be performed by anybody not necessarily a skilled doctor, let alone a surgeon or a plastic surgeon at that, the figures are likely to be massively underestimated.

There is of course a benefit in the cosmetic surgical societies and their members in inflating the figures in order to normalize the concept of cosmetic surgery in the belief that if it becomes normal that will reduce the threshold of acceptance of potential patients and thus increase the numbers further.

So does this mean that cosmetic plastic surgery is on the increase?

One would expect that cosmetic plastic surgery, which adds value to the body, would be an indulgence funded by disposable income and thus, in times of austerity and belt-tightening, the rates of such surgery would decrease.

However, if the above-mentioned reports are to be believed, cosmetic plastic surgery rates are dramatically increasing. Perhaps, the weight loss and skin excess are now associated with the belt-tightening and driving business? Or are they driven by views such as those attributed to Professor Ruth Holliday from Leeds University saying that ‘getting a boob job is a way of getting status for people who don’t have any status selling coffee to the public’.

Forgive me, but the last time I looked having bigger breasts did not make you a better professional. Such comments and media reports on how common cosmetic surgery has become normalize the surgery and increase the readiness for patients to talk about it, thus creating a virtuous feedback circle. Except that the virtuous part of it is highly debatable.

Undoubtedly, every year new procedures are developing and gaining popularity. Most recently labiaplasty has been the talk of the town, and the number of people talking about it and doing it has increased considerably. On the down side, personal communication with cosmetic plastic surgeons suggests that cosmetic procedures are on the decrease, at least in their practices. But perhaps the patients are avoiding private practitioners and seeking the chains or groups that offer standardized services such as no fee consultations and standard pricing. Such groups do seem to be much more prevalent in the UK than in the god-fatherland of plastic surgery the United States where individual surgeon practices with their individual reputations are the norm.

Increasing or decreasing? It is impossible to know, but my guess is that the acceptance of cosmetic plastic surgery is getting more and more widespread as is the scope of the procedures available and the scope of potential problems correctible. Gone are the days when clinics had to have separate doors and waiting rooms so that patients could hide. Now it is almost as if patients wish to flaunt it, especially the breast enlargements. Celebrities no longer lie about it; they tweet, blog or vlog every gritty detail. There are even TV series about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of the surgery, driven by voyeurism and public interest. There is no doubt that cosmetic plastic surgery, and the patients they treat are becoming increasingly popular. And every time someone else writes about their experience, it becomes more and more normal.

Henk Giele is a Consultant Plastic and Reconstructive surgeon at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. He is also a consultant in hand surgery, and cosmetic surgery. Originally from Australia, he took a post at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford in 1997. Henk came to the UK having had posts in various regions of Australia and also France. He is a member of many medical associations, including the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons, and is widely published in books and journals. Along with Oliver Cassell, he is the author of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

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Image credits: Amir Karam Fat Transfer Facelift, by BestInPlastics, and Gynecomastia with Liposuction by David Andrew Copeland, via Wikimedia Commons.

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De-extinction: could technology save nature?

By Gregory E. Kaebnick

This past November, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature declared the western black rhinoceros of Africa, last seen in 2006, officially extinct. It also concluded that most other rhino species are in danger, even “teetering.” Yet at the same time, over the past year, some scientists and others have been declaring that the woolly rhino — last seen, oh, 10,000 years or so ago — could soon not be extinct. Along with a small but growing host of recently expired species, it might undergo “de-extinction”: we could sequence and then synthesize its genome, and then use the genome to synthesize the animals themselves. The work requires a combination of genetic and reproductive technologies. One route would be to extract DNA from a reasonably well-preserved specimen of the ancient animal (several have been found in Siberian ice and one in a Polish tar pit), reconstruct the overall genome, insert the genome into an enucleated egg taken from a living rhino species, stimulate the egg so that it becomes an embryo, and bring the embryo to term in a living rhino. Some first forays have already been taken at the early steps in this process.

Black Rhinoceros. US Fish and Wildlife Service. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Is this good news for a conservationist? Seen one way, de-extinction is an answer to extinction — not the only, and surely not the best, but an interesting and exciting fallback option. Seen another way, it is a distraction from the core issues threatening species, which mostly have to do with over-hunting and habitat destruction. Seen yet another way, both de-extinction and human-caused extinction are part of the same phenomenon – of the wave of human activity that is remaking the world in almost every conceivable way. Given the growing human influence on the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans, nature has arguably now ended, as the science journalist Bill McKibben has memorably put it. And given the science that makes de-extinction possible — notably, synthetic biology and assisted reproductive technologies — nature may be fading not only from the environment at large but also from particular organisms. At least, that is how many interpret the development of genetically modified organisms, which many regard as unnatural.

Yet defending nature is difficult, and not only because it seems to be giving way on so many fronts, but because the very idea of nature has been under assault. One criticism is that we are often wrong about it. Environmental phenomena thought to be entirely natural are in fact artificial to at least some degree. The Great Plains of North America, for example, were actively maintained as plains through regular burning carried out by the people who lived there. A second criticism is that, according to some thinkers, the idea of nature is just incoherent. The belief that nature must be protected from human activity suggests (hold these critics) that nature is a pristine, pure realm from which humans are excluded — that human activity is somehow unnatural. That seems bizarre. Yet if humans are part of nature, then what is unnatural, exactly, about the human activity that supposedly threatens nature, and why try to protect nature as something apart from humans?

This is the foundational challenge posed by de-extinction. It plays into criticism of the very idea of nature. To preserve nature has mostly meant to restrain or limit human interference with it. But with de-extinction, preservation is interference with nature. Indeed, de-extinction can look like an attempted coup, in which technology overtakes nature and preservation as usually understood is eliminated. Preserve creation? We can recreate it. As synthetic biologist George Church captured it in the title of a 2012 book, we can achieve “regenesis.”

I suspect that for many critics of de-extinction, the possibility that these technologies effect a shift in thinking about how to balance human activity in the world with conservation of the world is what initially gives them pause, and perhaps remains an underlying misgiving even though the explicit objections to de-extinction are framed in terms of its possible consequences. De-extinction threatens preservationism at the level of its premises, not just its practices. It might redirect our attention from nature as a thing to be preserved to nature as a realm for unrestricted human activity.

If this is right, then the decision about whether to bring back the wooly rhinoceros depends partly on questions such as, What does “nature” mean? What should the human relationship to nature be? How should those views affect public policy? The criticisms of the idea of nature have established that “nature” cannot refer to a pure and pristine realm that is entirely distinct from anything human. Yet to think of nature as something worth preserving in and of itself, apart from its benefits to humans, is to think of it as at least partially distinct from human activity. The preservationist’s question about de-extinction is whether an ingenious technological intervention into nature can also advance the preservationist goal of leaving nature alone.

Gregory E. Kaebnick is the editor of the Hastings Center Report, a scholar at The Hastings Center, and author of Humans in Nature: The World As We Find It and the World As We Create It.

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Sinitic script and the American experience

By Margaret Hillenbrand

In recent years, American studies have taken a decisively transnational turn. The origins of this shift lie in a distaste for the notion of “American exceptionalism,” in a revolt against the disjuncture between cherished ideas of the United States as the special homeland of all the democratic virtues, and the persistent realities of discrimination over race, gender, faith, and sexuality. Born out of a desire to salvage American studies from this sort of suspect nationalism, the transnational turn now takes bold and varied form. It has angled American studies outwards, towards the globe, and towards approaches that recognise the countless land and sea crossings, in all four directions of the compass, that created the United States in the first place. A telling example of this new orientation can be found in literary studies, which increasingly acknowledge that American literature is not just multi-ethnic — that much has long been indisputable — but multi-lingual, too.

A multi-lingual American literature brings, however, provocations of its own. After all, American literature written in Hindi, Polish, or Chinese can find readers far offshore, in communities for whom the United States is sometimes only ever a textual experience. Take, for example, the very substantial body of literature written by the generations of young men and women who travelled from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong throughout the twentieth century to study at American universities, a good many of whom never returned home. These are texts written in America, about America, because of America. Yet many take Chinese as their medium of expression, and they have always been consumed in Chinese-speaking spaces: in the natal country, in Chinatowns across the United States and beyond — in any place, in fact, where the Sinitic script is understood.

At times, the consumption of these writings has been close to avid. China in the 1990s was just such a moment. As society gradually recovered from the closed-off, culturally uniform, even xenophobic years of the Maoist era, almost anyone with aspirations began to cherish dreams of going abroad. But opportunity only knocked for the privileged few. For those at home, meanwhile, literary tales of diaspora offered a cultural means through which readers could step out curiously and vicariously to the globe. What is the real America? What is it like to migrate there as a person of Chinese descent, often living through the unexpected traumas of racism, poverty, and a hard-luck life? Non-Anglophone stories of America – whether in Chinese, Hindi, or Polish – respond intently to these kinds of questions. In so doing, they offer their audiences a short cut to the New World, a sheltered passage of the imagination opened up by the mother tongue and along which they are shepherded by their compatriots overseas. It is precisely their polyglot character, in other words, which allows them to carve open cross-oceanic conduits and thus speed the global circulation of “America”.

Chinese-language writings about the United States accelerate this process in particularly flamboyant ways. Many of these tales of student life overseas trade in triumph and disaster, American dream and American nightmare, as their protagonists veer wildly from rags to riches and back again. In this sense, such stories offer both reassurance and a certain Schadenfreude, showing readers that the gilded élite do not always have things their own way, and, better still, that things back home might not be so bad after all. That said, readers are not dupes. They know all too well from media panic-mongering about the “brain drain” that overseas students often end up voting with their feet and staying in America. And this realization that the nation’s brightest and best are never really coming home is a discomfiting one, not least because it gives those left behind a sudden sour sense of their own parochialism. Chinese-language stories, with their potent aura of America, offer by this token a means of becoming transnational in the mind: they are a beckoning, slightly penitent hand towards the world.

It is worth giving this question of diasporic guilt some thought when considering why it is that authors choose to write in the language of “here” or “there”. To write in English as an American immigrant is often seen as a mark of arrival, both into US identity and into a potentially wider readership. Cleaving to the ancestral language, by contrast, can seem nostalgic, plaintive, even ethnocentric. Certainly, some have favoured the language of “there” in order to write more candidly about the adoptive nation than might be prudent in English — not to mention the richer poetic flair permitted by the script of home. Ultimately, though, there may also be something emotionally tactical about the decision to write about the American odyssey in the mother tongue for people back home. Chinese students abroad are, and always have been, a blessed and special cohort, granted the opportunity to study in the United States on the understanding that the knowledge toiled for overseas will be husbanded for the greater good at home. So to stay in America is to renege on the deal, and that lack of fealty comes at a cost. In this sense, performing loyalty to origins — for people at home, in the language of home — becomes a way for immigrants on the cusp to assuage guilt, to tell themselves and their compatriots that home is still home, even when that is quite transparently no longer the case. Writing home, in other words, takes the sting out of saying goodbye. And as they travel, these letters of penance become deterritorialized documents of American literature, too, which carry ideas about the United States to new and distant audiences, and thereby bring them closer.

Margaret Hillenbrand is University Lecturer in Modern Chinese and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of “Letters of Penance: Writing America in Chinese and the Location of Chinese American Literature” (available to read for free for a limited time) in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

MELUS, a prestigious and rigorous journal in the field of multi-ethnic literature of the United States, has been a vital resource for scholarship and teaching for more than thirty-five years. Published quarterly, MELUS illuminates the national, international, and transnational contexts of US ethnic literature. The journal is sponsored by the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

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Image credit: Asian beautiful female student writing on notebook in living room. © enat via iStockphoto.

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Seeing the ball: The view from Seattle to the Super Bowl

By Viki McCabe, PhD

How did the Seattle Seahawks, “the best collection of leftovers this side of the day after Thanksgiving” according to sports writer John Boyle and the “guys who have kind of been thrown aside by other teams, guys with chips on the shoulders” pointed out fondly by former Seahawk wide receiver Brandon Stokely punch the ticket to the 2014 Super Bowl?

One reason is the Seahawk’s ebullient, 62-year-old-going-on-32 coach Pete Carroll’s mandate to his players to “follow the ball” — a strategy that focuses everyone’s eyes on what is actually happening on the ground regardless of whatever pre-planned play may have been called. This strategy is not about the ball, it is about seeing the ball. The result is the Seahawks often see what other teams miss. Unbeknownst to those of us who are obsessed with our big brains, our senses, dominated by our eyes, provide our only direct contact with the world outside our own heads. Despite the misconceived yet widespread belief that those systems are subjective and thus unreliable, they actually evolved to provide our sole source of accurate information about what goes on around us. Everything else is hearsay.

In fact, our sensory systems cleverly bypass our brain’s lengthy, often inapplicable, conscious contemplations and instead, they provide the information that expedites our immediate flight from danger – be it runaway cars or imminent sacks. Today, by relying on their eyes to update the playbook in their minds, Carroll’s players can track the pattern of the play as it occurs on the field before they are consciously aware of doing so. The focus-on-seeing mandate primes the Seahawks understanding of the situation at hand — where everyone and everything is and the obstacles and openings in front of their noses. It buys time and fosters their uncanny knack of getting the ball where they want it before their opponents actually know what’s happening.

A second, less obvious reason for the Seahawk’s perceptual acumen is Carroll’s celebratory attitude and actions toward his band of rejects. He hugs them and loves them. And as he put it “we celebrate them being themselves, we cheerlead them into being themselves.” Carroll’s continual upbeat and supportive strategies promote the kind of confidence that helps his players trust their own judgment and see things for themselves which leads to their being at the right place at the right time. The result: they are typically on hand to back up cornerback Richard Sherman’s tipping and quarterback Russell Wilson’s flipping and the rest is history.

Russell Wilson listens as Pete Carroll gives instructions near the end of the game. Courtesy of Seattle Seahawks Organization.

During the play-off game with the 49ers, for example, 5-foot-10-inch quarterback Russell Wilson was looking for a crossing pattern to pass through. At the same time 6-foot-4-inch, 305-pound defense tackle Fred Evans and 6-foot-3-inch, 244-pound linebacker Aaron Henderson were closing in on him. Wilson saw an opening between the two that no one else saw. He flipped the ball to running back Marshawn Lynch leading Fox sports commentator Joe Buck to assert “I don’t know how you stop Russell Wilson. I’m serious, he is just all ball, all the time… he gets it, buys time in the pocket, nothing there and he just flips it.”

Seeing to the heart of the situation also put linebacker Malcolm Smith where he normally wouldn’t have been with thirty seconds left in the game and the 49ers on their own 15 yard line. Because Smith followed the ball, he was on the spot to play off Richard Sherman’s high-jump, left-handed tip and intercept 49er quarter back Colin Kaepernick’s 15 yard fade pass leaving linebacker Michael Crabtree empty handed in the end zone. With twenty-two seconds left, Smith’s knee hit the turf. Game over. Seattle Seahawks 23 – San Francisco 49ers 17.

NFL analyst and Hall of Famer Michael Irvin claims the Seahawks’ story “is bigger than football. It’s an American story. When you take all that everybody else has discarded… and you pull the best out of each one and make it the best group,” you free players from preconceptions and playbooks to become the best they can be. But what Irvin doesn’t say is that those players also see the most that they can see.

Viki McCabe, PhD, is the author of Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes and visiting scholar at the Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.

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Wrecked on a desert island

February 1st is Robinson Crusoe Day, marking the anniversary of the rescue of Alexander Selkirk – the inspiration for Defoe’s character – in 1709. Selkirk was a Scottish sailor who in September 1704 was left on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez after a quarrel with his ship’s captain. Daniel Defoe’s novel was published in April 1719. Below is an excerpt from the third chapter, ‘Wrecked on a Desert Island’.

When I waked it was broad day, the weather clear, and the storm abated, so that the sea did not rage and swell as before. But that which surprised me most was, that the ship was lifted off in the night from the sand where she lay by the swelling of the tide, and was driven up almost as far as the rock which I at first mentioned, where I had been so bruised by the wave dashing me against it. This being within about a mile from the shore where I was, and the ship seeming to stand upright still, I wished myself on board, that at least I might save some necessary things for my use.

When I came down from my apartment in the tree, I looked about me again, and the first thing I found was the boat, which lay, as the wind and the sea had tossed her up, upon the land, about two miles on my right hand. I walked as far as I could upon the shore to have got to her; but found a neck or inlet of water between me and the boat which was about half a mile broad; so I came back for the present, being more intent upon getting at the ship, where I hoped to find something for my present subsistence.

A little after noon I found the sea very calm, and the tide ebbed so far out that I could come within a quarter of a mile of the ship. And here I found a fresh renewing of my grief; for I saw evidently that if we had kept on board we had been all safe—that is to say, we had all got safe on shore, and I had not been so miserable as to be left entirety destitute of all comfort and company as I now was. This forced tears to my eyes again; but as there was little relief in that, I resolved, if possible, to get to the ship; so I pulled off my clothes—for the weather was hot to extremity—and took the water.  But when I came to the ship my difficulty was still greater to know how to get on board; for, as she lay aground, and high out of the water, there was nothing within my reach to lay hold of. I swam round her twice, and the second time I spied a small piece of rope, which I wondered I did not see at first, hung down by the fore-chains so low, as that with great difficulty I got hold of it, and by the help of that rope I got up into the forecastle of the ship. Here I found that the ship was bulged, and had a great deal of water in her hold, but that she lay so on the side of a bank of hard sand, or, rather earth, that her stern lay lifted up upon the bank, and her head low, almost to the water. By this means all her quarter was free, and all that was in that part was dry; for you may be sure my first work was to search, and to see what was spoiled and what was free. And, first, I found that all the ship’s provisions were dry and untouched by the water, and being very well disposed to eat, I went to the bread room and filled my pockets with biscuit, and ate it as I went about other things, for I had no time to lose.  I also found some rum in the great cabin, of which I took a large dram, and which I had, indeed, need enough of to spirit me for what was before me. Now I wanted nothing but a boat to furnish myself with many things which I foresaw would be very necessary to me.

It was in vain to sit still and wish for what was not to be had; and this extremity roused my application. We had several spare yards, and two or three large spars of wood, and a spare topmast or two in the ship; I resolved to fall to work with these, and I flung as many of them overboard as I could manage for their weight, tying every one with a rope, that they might not drive away. When this was done I went down the ship’s side, and pulling them to me, I tied four of them together at both ends as well as I could, in the form of a raft, and laying two or three short pieces of plank upon them crossways, I found I could walk upon it very well, but that it was not able to bear any great weight, the pieces being too light. So I went to work, and with a carpenter’s saw I cut a spare topmast into three lengths, and added them to my raft, with a great deal of labour and pains. But the hope of furnishing myself with necessaries encouraged me to go beyond what I should have been able to have done upon another occasion.

Daniel Defoe’s enthralling story-telling and imaginatively detailed descriptions have ensured that Robinson Crusoe remains one of the most famous stories in English literature. On one level a simple adventure story, the novel also raises profound questions about moral and spiritual values, society, and man’s abiding acquisitiveness.

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. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credit: Robinson Crusoe, first edition, 1719 [public domain]. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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Happy Birthday, Carol Channing!

In recognition of the inimitable Carol Channing’s 93rd birthday, we have excerpted a portion of her interview from Eddie Shapiro’s forthcoming book of interviews with the leading ladies of Broadway, Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater. This portion of the interview begins with a discussion of production tension between prolific Broadway producer David Merrick and other members of the production of the Detroit run of Hello, Dolly! in 1963, which opened there to mediocre reviews. (The show went on to open on Broadway in 1964 to rave reviews, ultimately winning 10 Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Actress in a Musical for Channing.)

Eddie Shapiro: In his book, Jerry Herman said that both Gower Champion and David Merrick were monsters to him during the out-of-town run of Hello, Dolly! in Detroit. Even though you didn’t personally have a bad experience with any of them, did that affect the environment for you?

Carol Channing: I was focused on the character of Dolly. I had to find her. I was totally focused and consumed with that. Anyway there was nothing wrong because Mr. Merrick said, “You listen to her and do exactly what she wants.”

So you weren’t aware of tension?

Carol Channing: I didn’t think of the environment. I was focused on Dolly. My job is to change character with every show. You’d never recognize Lorelei Lee next to Dolly. It’s not the same person. It’s just the opposite. Dolly was running everybody’s life. Well, so was Lorelei but she didn’t let anyone know. But the thing is . . . you hire a great actor like Jimmy Stewart to just be Jimmy Stewart. And they are fabulous. People like Gary Cooper. They are whoever they are playing. That’s who they are. My job is like a revue artist. You jump from character to character and you don’t recognize me from one character to another. That’s my talent. But it’s different from being John Wayne. Except I just heard him sing on The Dean Martin Show and he was marvelous! Almost as good as Dean! He was a great singer! Isn’t that something? But he never used it because they liked him the way that it was. Dumb businessmen.

I wonder if John Wayne chose not to sing because he had chosen this tough guy image for himself and that’s what he was selling throughout his career. That’s what he knew was marketable.

Carol Channing: No. We don’t think “what’s marketable and what’s not.” No. Never. No actor does. That’s phony. You’ve got to get this character that you are playing now, across to somebody who will understand what you are trying to do. And believe me that I am Dolly, that I am Lorelei. The most wonderful character was Ruth Sherwood in Wonderful Town. While you are doing that character there isn’t any other character. That’s all you were born with.

You’ve seen other people play Dolly, after you…

Carol Channing: I saw Pearl Bailey and I thought she was wonderful as Pearl Bailey. And why not? Why shouldn’t Dolly be Pearl Bailey. You know who did a good job in the movie? Shirley Booth [The Matchmaker]! She was soft and sweet and entirely different. A whole other Dolly. She was just heaven. But look, I have no perspective on myself. So if I sound phony . . . I can’t see myself doing it. I only see Dolly. I just have my eyes on Dolly and Thornton Wilder.

Publicity photo of Carol Channing and David Burns in Hello, Dolly!

You have to have known the response to your performance.

Carol Channing: Oh yes. It’s quite a feeling. At the end of the “Dolly” number, it used to hit me right where I carried my son. It would go right to my waist, to my tummy. It knocked me over backwards the first time. I had to get used to standing there and standing straight.

Jerry Herman said that the night Dolly opened on Broadway, he knew that his life had changed forever. Did you have that same sense?

Carol Channing: No. There are critics who can look straight at you and say, “That’s not what I think Dolly should have been.” So you always have that to face. Betty White tells me she was there opening night and she knew she was witnessing history. We didn’t know. I was focused on Dolly’s salvation.

Somewhere during the run, though, you must have realized that this wasn’t your average show.

Carol Channing: Yes, we knew that we were a hit.

In more than thirty years of playing Dolly around the world, how did the experience of playing her change for you?

Carol Channing: What do you mean?

Over the years, was it different?

Carol Channing: It could have been but I don’t—Oh, I would check with critics. Christiansen was with the Chicago Tribune, I would check with Elliot Norton in Boston. These are the great critics. And critics can be great. Claudia Cassidy was the meanest, rottenest critic in the whole United States and she said, “In Wonderful Town, Rosalind Russell played the leading character for intelligence, Carol Channing played her for genius.” My God! She came to New York to see Dolly before she died [in 1996]. But before she died I called her and thanked her for raising the level of the theater across the United States. I said, “Miss Cassidy, I want you to know that I keep touring.” If you are fortunate enough to have a show run, to have it be enough of a hit, the whole world hears about it. You can tour with it. That’s the privilege that you get and it’s a privilege to work in the theater but you’ve got to recreate the Mona Lisa every night.

Eddie Shapiro is a freelance writer and theater journalist whose work has appeared in Out Magazine, Instinct, and Backstage West. His books include Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater and Queens in the Kingdom: The Ultimate Gay and Lesbian Guide to the Disney Theme Parks.

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Image credit: Publicity photo of Carol Channing and David Burns in Broadway play, Hello Dolly, 1964. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Oral History Review’s Short Form Initiative

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

On behalf of the Oral History Review editorial staff, I am excited to publicly announce the journal’s latest project: the short form initiative. What is this? (I imagine everyone wondering aloud with feigned nonchalance.) Well, while the typical OHR article tends to fall between 8,000 to 12,000 words, we are now actively seeking substantially shorter submissions — approximately 3,000-4,000 words in length. The editorial staff will review pieces with the journal’s usual mission statement in mind, but also welcomes submissions that experiment with form and/or boast a multimedia dimension.





Just like long-form pieces, the short-form article may address any aspect of oral history: theory, practice, methodology, pedagogy, uses/applications of oral history, editing and writing oral history. However, the short form initiative will allow us to more actively circulate ideas among the field. Most obviously, the lower-word count will allow us to publish more articles per issue. More excitingly, with the short-form we can create a space for “works-in-progress.” According to editor-in-chief Kathy Nasstrom, “A short-form piece [will be] where authors can feel the freedom to do a preliminary development of an idea and present work that is suggestive, not quite yet definitive.” By publishing such work, she hopes the OHR will encourage greater scholarly exchange. “Authors always get feedback before publication through the peer review process, but many more people can participate in responding to, and hopefully shaping, an author’s ideas when work-in-progress is published.”

To get a sense of how the short form initiative may shape future issues of Oral History Review, you may want to revisit the special issue on Oral History in the Digital Age. This issue, guest edited by the Louie B. Nunn Center’s Doug Boyd, featured a number of case studies and other articles that deviated from the standard long-form to better represent the field’s ongoing engagement with new recording and archiving technologies. Nasstrom considers the OHDA issue “a very good indicator of the reasons to move the journal in the short-form direction.” If this all sounds exciting to you — and we hope it does — you can look forward to the publication of OHR Volume 41, issue 2 this coming fall, which will feature a special “short-form initiative” section. I personally can’t wait to see what new theories and arguments our scholars have to share.

Finally, I imagine the Oral History Review is not the first journal to open its inbox to shorter submissions. So, if there are any editors or scholars out there who have experimented with this form, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below. Tips for our editorial staff are especially welcomed!

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

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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Image credit: dictaphone isolated on white background, selective focus on nearest part. © Kuzma via iStockphoto.

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A short history of Polish Jewish tavernkeeping

By Glenn Dynner

It was Sunday, and from church after morning Mass,


They came to Yankel’s to drink and relax


In everyone’s cup grey vodka swished


‘Round with a bottle the barmaid rushed


Yankel, the tavernkeeper, stood in the midst


—Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz (1834), Book IV

Gentiles dancing and drinking in a Jewish tavern. Lithograph by Gustaw Pillati published by A. Chlebowski, “Swit,” and printed by B.Wierzbicki and Sons, Warsaw, n.d. (Moldovan Family Collection). Courtesy of the Moldovan family.

So much of East European Jewish history is viewed through the lens of antisemitism and violence. But there is a reason that the Jews of Eastern Europe (mainly in the vast Polish-Lithuanian areas annexed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the end of the 18th century) formed three-fourths of the world’s entire Jewish population. Jews inhabited crucial economic niches, especially the nobility-dominated liquor trade, as this image by the Polish artist Gustaw Pillati shows.

The Jewish-run tavern became the center of local Christians’ leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. Luckily for Jews, the nobles who owned the taverns believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably. However, reformers and government officials blamed Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, as the following image by Grabowski illustrates, and sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade.

W. Grabowski, After a Quart of Vodka (1883). Courtesy of Professor Hillel Levine.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Polish Jewish tavernkeeping was banned. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that Jewish tavernkeepers often evaded fees, bans, and expulsions by installing Christians as “fronts” for their taverns and carrying on business as usual, all with the knowledge and complicity of nobles and other local Christians. This vast underground Jewish liquor trade reflects an impressive level of local Jewish-Christian coexistence, despite occasional flare-ups of anti-Jewish violence.

Henryk Rodakowski, “Karczmarz Jasio,” z cyklu Album Pałahickie, 1867, akwarela na papierze, 32 x 23 cm. Muzeum Lubuskie w Gorzowie Wielkopolskim

Late nineteenth-century art, such as this painting by Rodakowski, confirms the survival of Jewish tavernkeeping throughout this long period of “Jewish prohibition.” Travelers across the formerly Polish lands were still met by an exotic Jewish proprietor when they stopped in a tavern to eat, drink, and rest for the night.

Glenn Dynner is Professor of Jewish Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. He has been a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and is currently the NEH Senior Scholar at the Center for Jewish History in New York. He is author of Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland.

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                Related StoriesA goddess’s long lifeHalf the cost of a book“Before he wrote it, he lived it”? 

A short history of Jewish Polish tavernkeeping

By Glenn Dynner

It was Sunday, and from church after morning Mass,


They came to Yankel’s to drink and relax


In everyone’s cup grey vodka swished


‘Round with a bottle the barmaid rushed


Yankel, the tavernkeeper, stood in the midst


—Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz (1834), Book IV

Gentiles dancing and drinking in a Jewish tavern. Lithograph by Gustaw Pillati published by A. Chlebowski, “Swit,” and printed by B.Wierzbicki and Sons, Warsaw, n.d. (Moldovan Family Collection). Courtesy of the Moldovan family.

So much of East European Jewish history is viewed towards the lens of antisemitism and violence. But there is a reason that the Jews of Eastern Europe (mainly in the vast Polish-Lithuanian areas annexed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the end of the 18th century) formed three-fourths of the world’s entire Jewish population. Jews inhabited crucial economic niches, especially the nobility-dominated liquor trade, as this image by the Polish artist Gustaw Pillati shows.

W. Grabowski, After a Quart of Vodka (1883). Courtesy of Professor Hillel Levine.

The Jewish-run tavern became the center of local Christians’ leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. Luckily for Jews, the nobles who owned the taverns believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably. However, reformers and government officials blamed Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, as the following image by Grabowski illustrates, and sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Polish Jewish tavernkeeping was banned. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that Jewish tavernkeepers often evaded fees, bans, and expulsions by installing Christians as “fronts” for their taverns and carrying on business as usual, all with the knowledge and complicity of nobles and other local Christians. This vast underground Jewish liquor trade reflects an impressive level of local Jewish-Christian coexistence, despite occasional flare-ups of anti-Jewish violence.

Henryk Rodakowski, “Karczmarz Jasio,” z cyklu Album Pałahickie, 1867, akwarela na papierze, 32 x 23 cm. Muzeum Lubuskie w Gorzowie Wielkopolskim

Late nineteenth-century art, such as this painting by Rodakowski, confirms the survival of Jewish tavernkeeping throughout this long period of “Jewish prohibition.” Travelers across the formerly Polish lands were still met by an exotic Jewish proprietor when they stopped in a tavern to eat, drink, and rest for the night.

Glenn Dynner is Professor of Jewish Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. He has been a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and is currently the NEH Senior Scholar at the Center for Jewish History in New York. He is author of Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland.

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                Related StoriesA goddess’s long lifeHalf the cost of a book“Before he wrote it, he lived it”? 

A goddess’s long life

By Amanda Podany

As an undergraduate, long before I chose to become an ancient historian, I took a course on ancient art history. I remember sitting in the darkened auditorium in the first weeks of the term, looking at images of prehistoric art and scribbling down notes as the professor paced the stage and pointed out features of each slide. Then came an image that took my breath away: a white marble face of a woman, almost life-size (though blown up to about six feet tall on the screen). Although her inlaid eyes and eyebrows were missing, her expression seemed so uncannily real in comparison with other sculptures we had seen. She looked slightly sad and thoughtful, the curves of her chin, cheeks, and lips perfectly rendered by an anonymous artist in the city of Uruk in southern Iraq, some 5,200 years ago. She was a survivor from a time right at the beginning of civilization, when writing was just beginning to emerge and before any kings ruled in Mesopotamia, or anywhere else for that matter.

We moderns are surrounded by facsimiles of people—photographs on our cell phones and laptops, billboards above the streets, posters on buses, mannequins in stores. We don’t think twice about them. But to an ancient Mesopotamian, a realistic image of a person or god was unusual and uncanny. The artist who made it was not employed to attempt to copy reality; he was tasked with creating a being that would wield the power of a person or god. Ancient statues of gods were often simply referred to as though they were the gods, incarnate and immortal.

Given the extraordinary workmanship of the woman’s head from Uruk and the fact that the white marble must have been imported, scholars have proposed that it was once part of a cult statue, perhaps of Inanna, the patron goddess of Uruk. Her body and robes would have been made of gold from Egypt (or of wood, plated with gold), and her eyes were perhaps inlaid with blue lapis lazuli that had been brought all the way from Afghanistan.

If this was indeed the cult statue of the goddess, the people of Uruk would have viewed her as alive, needing shelter, clothing, food, and adoration. In return they believed she watched over them, nurturing their crops and making their herds fertile. They swore oaths and drew up treaties in her presence, believing that she would punish anyone who lied under oath much more decisively than any human agency could.

When a city was conquered, the invaders sometimes captured the statue of the local god and took it away with them, holding it for ransom (but generally treating it well—they respected its power because, in their world, there was no such thing as a false god). This could have happened to the Uruk goddess at some point. But even if she avoided foreign capture she would still have traveled from time to time to visit other gods and goddesses in their cities. One highpoint of many religious festivals in Mesopotamia was the arrival of distant gods (in the forms of their statues) and their procession through the streets.

For centuries the same divine statues were worshiped and preserved, given new clothing from time to time, embellished with precious metals, and sought out for their wisdom and strength. But, in time, these Mesopotamian gods were superseded, to the point that, eventually, no one believed they brought fertility to the fields, and no one feared their wrath. Deities made of gold and silver, formerly exalted and protected from every danger, were melted down and recycled. Only fragments remained, like the marble head of the goddess from Uruk, and these were cast aside and forgotten. Eventually layers of debris entombed them in the ground, awaiting discovery by modern archaeologists.

A German archaeological team found the head about a century ago, when excavating at the site of Uruk, which was probably the world’s earliest real city. It was home to over 25,000 people at a time when the vast majority of the world’s peoples lived in villages or small roving bands. The goddess eventually found her way into the Baghdad Museum, which opened in 1923, inspiring visitors who saw her there and millions of others like me who never set foot in the museum, but who encountered her graceful face in a book or in an art history class. In my textbook, H. A. Groenewegen-Frankfort and Bernard Ashmole’s The Art of the Ancient World, the author noted of the sculpture that “the modeling has great nobility and the mouth is gentle.”

After eighty quiet years in a gallery, the goddess’s life took a turn for the worse in 2003. She was swept up in the frenzy of looting that accompanied the fall of Saddam Hussein, and she was hauled away from the museum, along with some 15,000 other precious and irreplaceable objects of the approximately 170,000 artifacts housed there. Most of the artifacts looted from the museum, many of them tiny exquisite cylinder seals, have never been found. But, incredibly, the goddess was tracked down and returned, undamaged.

The Baghdad Museum has been closed to the public ever since, but recently word has come that it is finally set to reopen to the public, perhaps as soon as February or March. The website of the museum shows bright modern galleries displaying many art works, objects of importance not only to the history of Iraq but to all of human history. The website also includes a statement that encourages us to hope that all the objects displayed have a long life ahead: “The Iraq National Museum is the only institution dedicated to protecting the comprehensive and collective archaeological heritage of Iraq from loss or destruction in order that it may be enjoyed and studied by the present and future generations of citizens and survive for additional thousands of years.” The goddess, one hopes, will still be staring pensively from her pedestal many generations from now.

Amanda H. Podany is Professor and Chair of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She is the author of The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction; the award-winning book Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, as well as a number of other books and articles on topics in ancient near eastern history.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to only Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credit: Uruk marble head. ca. 3000 BC. Anonymous. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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