Oxford University Press's Blog, page 955

Singing in a choir is like knitting and bingo

By Barbara Stuart

Joining a choir is all the rage and some say that choir memberships are getting younger. It’s like knitting and bingo — it’s cool to sing in a choir. Not in the choirs around here, not yet!

Every English choral society has its stalwarts; ladies (sadly mostly ladies — there are never enough men) who run the committee, enjoy a frisson with the young(ish) conductor, share lifts, and find friendship. Some have very fine voices indeed. Some find it harder nowadays to control their vibrato. All give a lot and get a lot back.

Twice or three times a year, regular as clockwork, the choir employs local musicians to form their orchestra. The singers have rehearsed the notes accompanied by their faithful pianist for months. Then, at around 7:20 on the Wednesday before the concert, the final rehearsal, an assorted bunch of local instrumentalists pitch up and, for the first time, the choir becomes part of the work performed as the composer intended. The impact of those opening few bars makes all the hurried dinners, the trips out in the wind and wet, the missed glasses of wine worthwhile.

Photo courtesy of Woodstock Music Society

I’m a clarinettist and I’ve been doing these gigs for years. The orchestra is picked from a small pool of local players — an even smaller pool of wind players. We turn up to the same faces sitting in the same places time after time. We only ever meet up in school halls and churches, but there’s a warmth and comfortable understanding grown out of a common purpose. It’s like slipping on a comfortable pair of slippers; everyone knows the etiquette, what’s expected of them, how it goes. We know that there’s only one toilet and that it’s a better bet to slip out to the pub next door to avoid the queue. We know to wear two t-shirts, a jumper, and a fleece under our coats because St Andrew’s in February is the coldest church in Oxfordshire. We know that we’ll get a welcome cup of tea at half-time and if there’ll be biscuits. And we know to set out from home ridiculously early on concert night so we’re sure to be in our places at least 15 minutes before the downbeat. No point giving our colleagues extra worry lines or risking the conductor’s angry stare.

After a few years of turning up on time and playing respectably you’re part of the gang and the ladies sitting in the front row of the choir just behind you know your name and include you in their chat. The back row of the winds has a special function — sopranos unknowingly rest their vocal scores on your heads as their arms sink with the weight of a chunky Mozart Requiem. Those sitting immediately behind have a good enough sight-line to be able to follow the clarinet and bassoon parts note by note and they will whisper encouragement and maybe the occasional compliment after a successfully-negotiated solo.

Why do we do it? It’s not for the money. There are longeurs a-plenty (so you don’t forget to take your phone and the latest Private Eye to rehearsals), but when a performance goes better than you ever thought it could, and it often does, being a small part of something so big and beautiful is a high which isn’t often to be had. I hope the ladies in the front row feel the same.

Barbara Stuart is Marketing Manager for printed music at OUP and a busy amateur clarinettist.

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Sudden cardiac death: what about the rest of the family?

By Mattis Ranthe

Most people regard cardiovascular disease as results of poor lifestyle, and the majority of patients are thought of as older persons. However, over recent decades an increasing pool of genetic findings has implicated that some cardiovascular diseases have a genetic component. The most common, coronary artery diseases, and some less common cardiac conditions, including disturbances in heart rhythm and diseases of the cardiac muscle itself (cardiomyopathies) have a lot of genetic traits associated with them. These genetic cardiac diseases often tend to present at young age and some can lead to early and often sudden death; a worst case scenario is when they present with sudden cardiac death as a first sign. Sudden cardiac death is internationally defined as sudden, unexpected death due to natural unknown or cardiac causes, with an acute change in cardiovascular status within one hour of death or, in unwitnessed cases, in a person last seen functioning normally within 24 hours of being found dead. In young people it is most often caused by undiagnosed heart problems that may be hereditary, indicating that there may be genetic mutations causing the condition. Such an unexpected sudden cardiac death is a dreadful and devastating event, leaving families torn. A question to the family physician is often, “What about the rest of family?”

One cardiovascular condition which can lead to sudden cardiac death is the long QT syndrome, the first genes associated with this syndrome was discovered in the mid 1990s. Several other inherited cardiac conditions can lead to sudden death and in a landmark article in the Lancet in 2003, Elijah Behr and colleagues presented results that indicated a burden of cardiovascular disease in families of victims of sudden unexplained death. In 2013, both cardiologists and pathologists have increasingly focused on the problem, which has led to the discovery of a vast number of genes associated with cardiovascular disease. Today, several US and European cardiac centres have set up units especially focusing on inherited cardiovascular disease. These units focus on early prevention and treatment of the conditions in question to prevent sudden cardiac deaths. But these noble initiatives have, until recently, been based primarily on studies in selected groups of patients, and population bases studies have lacked.

We recently published a significant contribution to this question of risk in those left behind.  In nationwide Danish health registers we examined more than 3,000 first- and second-degree relatives of victims of sudden cardiac death. We followed them from 2000 to 2011 and overall we identified 292 cases of cardiovascular disease. The expected number based on rates in the background population was 219, and so we saw a relatively modest relative risk increase of 33%. The study was made possible by combining a previous study were researchers identified 470 victims of sudden cardiac death, aged between 1-35, in Denmark between 2000 and 2006. We identified relatives of these 470 victims and this gave us the first nationwide cohort of relatives of victims of sudden cardiac death ever described in the literature.

An increase in risk of 33% may sound alarming, but as a comparison, cigarette smoking doubles your risk of clotted coronaries, that is 100%, or a 2-fold relative increase in risk. But due to the size of our cohort we were able to examine subgroups in a greater level of detail, and extreme difference in risk revealed itself. If “bad genes” lead to a disease, one should expect that a closer kinship with  someone potentially having a genetic disease, should lead to higher risks, and in fact we found that first-degree relatives had an increase in risk of up to 20-fold. What was even more alarming was that the risk was very much dependent on age, such that in relatives of victims of sudden cardiac death aged 60 year or more there were no increase in risk, whereas in the  youngest persons under 35 years the risk was increased 6-fold or more. We witnessed a three-fold increased risk of any cardiovascular disease (CVD), a six-fold increased risk of ischaemic heart disease (reduced blood supply to the heart), and a more than 10-fold increased risk of cardiomyopathies (damaged or weakened heart muscle) and ventricular arrhythmias (potentially fatal disturbances in the rhythm of the heartbeat).

From this we can see that sudden cardiac death, or the underlying heart problems, has a large hereditary component. Relatives, particularly young, first-degree relatives, are at much greater risk of developing heart conditions compared with the general population. Family members of young sudden cardiac death victims should be offered comprehensive and systematic screening, with the focus on the youngest and nearest relatives.

Most of the cardiovascular diseases leading to sudden cardiac death are treatable, if diagnosed in time. Our findings reinforce the concept of screening as a rational ‘tool’ to identify such cardiovascular diseases in family members at risk, and thereby possibly prevent future sudden cardiac deaths.

Mattis Flyvholm Ranthe is a medical doctor from Copenhagen, Denmark. He graduated from medical school in 2006 and has a clinical experience from both general practice and clinical cardiology, but has since 2010 undertaken various studies within cardiovascular epidemiology at Department of Epidemiology Research at Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen. Mattis is handing in his Ph.d. thesis on familial aspects of cardiovascular disease and early cardiovascular death later in 2013, and expects to resume a clinical career along with continued research in cardiovascular epidemiology. The study was presented by Mattis at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2012 in Münich, where he won the Young Investigator Award in population sciences. His paper, ‘Risk of cardiovascular disease in family members of young sudden cardiac death victims’ was published in the European Heart Journal.

The European Heart Journal is an international, English language, peer-reviewed journal dealing with Cardiovascular Medicine. It is an official Journal of the European Society of Cardiology and is published weekly. The journal aims to publish the highest quality material, both clinical and scientific, on all aspects of Cardiovascular Medicine. It includes articles related to research findings, technical evaluations, and reviews. In addition it provides a forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of Cardiovascular Medicine, including education issues.

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Image credit: The anatomy of the heart. By Tvanbr (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Does the lily grow in the valet? Is good ballet bally good?

By Anatoly Liberman

This post is an answer to a letter I received from our correspondent Jonathan Davis. Not too long ago, I mentioned the differences in the pronunciation of niche: in the speech of most Americans it rhymes with pitch, but the rhyme niche/leash can also be heard, and it seems to be prevalent in Britain. Mr. Davis is an Englishman living in Texas and, not unexpectedly, favors the vowel of ee and sh in niche, while those around him prefer short i and ch. This difference made him raise the general question about the norm governing such words. He cited valet and ballet as examples. My inconclusive answer follows.

The fear of sounding snobbish is familiar to many people who use the French pronunciation of niche, valet, and their likes. As a radio host I am regularly asked whether forte “a strong point” should have one syllable or two. Some listeners castigate those who do not know the “correct” pronunciation; others are confused and unhappy. In my capacity as a public figure I am supposed to increase the amount of happiness in the world, but all I can say is that the “norm” does not exist in this area. Sounding more educated than one’s neighbors is awkward because neighbors never forgive those who (they think) put on airs. On the other hand, sounding under-educated to gratify the “lowbrows” is also a torture. You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Dictionaries sit on the fence (assuming that dictionaries can sit): they register the existing variants and, by ordering them, indicate which are more common.

In the process of assimilating French words English has always been torn between two tendencies: it either retained their foreign shape or Anglicized them. Equally important has been the tyranny of writing: spelling pronunciation tips the scale more than once. Not only borrowed words succumb to spelling. Consider the sad fate of often and forehead. Nowadays, everybody I hear says often (of-ten) and fore-head. Yet both are Germanic words. Forehead used to rhyme with horrid—except in “vulgar speech,” as old sources inform us; now the “vulgar” have won (as always: that is why language changes). Often is puzzling. Listen, glisten, whistle, and thistle stayed with mute (silent) t. So why often? Hypercorrection, the fear of the timid and the insecure to appear illiterate? It should be added that American English arose as a colonial language and is therefore in some respects more conservative than the language left behind in the metropolis. In the former colonies we regularly find variants that were current in Shakespeare’s days but are no longer admitted into the British Standard (dialects, to be sure, go their own way). This also holds for grammar and usage.

Lily of the Valet?

With regard to French, American English may be advanced or ultraconservative. Herb has initial h only if it is the shorter form of Herbert. Herb “plant” is erb, while heir, honest, and hour are pronounced alike all over the English speaking world. As always, the norm is capricious and partly unpredictable. Delight, fruit, and habit, were borrowed when final t was still sounded in Old French. Naturally, the consonant stayed in English even after the lending language dropped it. Later borrowings also followed the French norm, but now they retained t only in spelling.  However, English never came to terms with valet and ballet, which were taken over in the eighteenth century. Stress fluctuates in them. In ballet, no one pronounces final t; yet in the United States classical bally will probably inspire a mocking smile: the second syllable seems to be always lay, whether stressed or not. With valet the situation is somewhat different. As Mr. Davis notes, in professional language, one can occasionally hear t. Not only among professional employers, it can be added. In the relatively recent past, valet rhyming with shall it was apparently the norm. Kenyon and Knott, the authors of an American pronouncing dictionary published in the nineteen-forties called the t-less valet pseudo-French. Three hundred years ago, French valet de chambre was sometimes spelled valley-de-sham.

Jonathan Swift knew the pronunciation of verdict as verdi and vardi. We dutifully mimic the French in dealing with éclat, croquet, crochet, chalet, and bouquet (in all its senses), except that, since a word of Modern English cannot end in a short vowel unless it is schwa (as in sofa) or i (as in icky), the final vowel becomes long (éclat rhymes with spa) or turns into a diphthong (chalet rhymes with lay). Trait has fared even worse. It stuck to its heritage in England (that is, it has become a homophone of tray) but not in America, where it is indistinguishable from the root of the noun traitor. Extra care is needed in dealing with buffet: being buffeted is not the same as enjoying buffet dinner, regardless of the length of the food line. I remember reading about the rich and generous Mr. Buffet and wondering how to pronounce his family name.

French has lost not only final t but also s. Fracas and tapis (as in the phrase on the tapis) are words with a checkered history. Robert Burns rhymed fracas with Bacchus, and for a long time both British and American dictionaries registered final s in the word. It seems that Americans now know only the spelling pronunciation (with -s), while British English does without s. On the tapis occurs rarely, but most people probably understand it. American lexicographers, including Webster (the first edition of his dictionary appeared in 1828), and the authors of pronouncing dictionaries used to recommend tapis rhyming with lapis; at present this does not seem to be the case. One never hears the phrase, so it is hard to judge.

Niche is spelled with ch. At one time, the group (digraph) ch designated in French the same affricate it does in Modern English. When chamber, chance, charge, charity, chief, to cite a few, were borrowed from Old French, ch sounded similarly in them. When French ch yielded to sh (compare chief and its doublet chef), the pronunciation, but not the spelling, of borrowings began to reflect the change as evidenced by chagrin, champagne, charlatan, chemise, moustache, and so forth. If a word of Modern English is spelled with tch, it follows that the preceding vowel has always been short (catch, itch, wretch), while ch indicates length (each, reach, coach). Touch also had a long vowel (that is why we spell it with ou), but which, much, and such are real exceptions. According to this rule, the vowel in the etymon of niche was long. Consequently, nitch is a spelling pronunciation. May those say nitch who feel like it! May every speaker go his or her own way (it is their language they mold or trample underfoot): our withers are unwrung. German also appropriated this word, but Nische has a short vowel after the French consonant.

The valet or the varlet?

The French for the lowest playing court card (“jack” or “knave”) is valet. The character on this card usually bears demeaning names ranging between “servant” and “rogue.” Since valet is a cognate, almost a doublet, of varlet, who would be surprised that the knave of hearts stole some tarts? Let us hope that the dealings of this lady killer with tarts did not go much further.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credits: (1) Convallaria majalis, Rusaceae, Lily of the Valley, inflorescence; Karlsruhe, Germany. Photo by H. Zell, Creative Commons License, via Wikimedia Commons. (2) The knave of hearts, he stole those tarts. From R. Caldecott’s picture book (no.1) . NYPL Digital Gallery.

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Border Control in America before Ellis Island

By Hidetaka Hirota

On the seventeenth of April 1907, 11,747 immigrants arrived in the Ellis Island landing station in New York, marking a record high in terms of the number of people processed on a single day at the station, where 17 million newcomers landed between 1892 and 1954. This arrival was part of a broader landmark immigration wave. In 1907, the United States received 1,285,349 immigrants, and this annual entry remained largest in the nation’s history until 1990.

For the majority of immigrants, Ellis Island was a gateway to a new American life. The station also represented a bitter reality that the door to America was firmly closed to many. By 1907, the federal government had developed a series of laws to regulate the quality of newcomers who would join American society. Immigrants of undesirable character such as prostitutes, criminals, paupers, persons “likely to become a public charge,” people with physical and mental defects, and people with contagious diseases were not permitted to land. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and subsequent legislation, had also suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers. As the nation’s major point of entry, Ellis Island played a central role in the implementation of federal immigration law. Upon the arrival of immigrants, federal inspectors interrogated them, examined their medical conditions, and ordered the return of those deemed excludable to their countries of origin. Those who seemed to require additional inspection were detained.

While Ellis Island is now widely recognized as a historical icon of the American immigration experience, some important questions remain to be addressed. Where did federal immigration regulation law come from? How was immigration to the United States regulated prior to Ellis Island? What was the relationship between earlier practices of immigration control and federal regulatory policy that developed from the late nineteenth century onward?

Some of the roots of federal immigration control can be traced back to passenger laws in Atlantic seaboard states. Since the 18th century, coastal states adopted policies for preventing the landing of destitute Europeans. Upon the arrival of a steamship, state or local officials examined the condition of passengers, and sent back to the other side of the Atlantic those who were likely to become public charges in America unless the shipmaster provided a certain amount of bond money for their landing.

PERSPECTIVE VIEW (NORTHWEST) OF MAIN GATE – Castle Clinton, Battery Park, New York. Historic American Buildings Survey Collection. Library of Congress.

Among coastal states, New York and Massachusetts pursued this kind of exclusion policy successfully. In 1855, New York established an immigration depot at Castle Garden, an old fort in lower Manhattan. At this state-level predecessor for Ellis Island, the New York Commissioners of Emigration inspected arriving passengers. If paupers or criminals were found, the officials wrote, “they are detained” and “measures may be taken to cause their return to the port of embarkation.” In addition to admission regulation, Massachusetts developed policies for deporting foreign paupers already in the state in response to the influx of the famine-stricken Irish in the mid-19th century.

State-level immigration control was developed into national policy in the early 1880s. When the US Supreme Court struck down state passenger law in 1876 for infringing upon Congress’s authority over foreign commerce, immigration officials in New York and Massachusetts organized an interstate campaign to establish national immigration legislation. The result of the campaign was the Immigration Act of 1882. Enacted three months after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the act was modeled on preexisting immigration policies in New York and Massachusetts and prohibited the landing of criminals, paupers, and lunatics with a deportation provision for criminals. This act, together with the Chinese Exclusion Act, laid the foundations of federal immigration control.

The introduction of the federal Immigration Act of 1882 didn’t signify the end of states’ involvement in immigration control. Since the federal government had neither the administrative capacity nor the experience in passenger regulation to enforce the law, the 1882 act left the implementation of its provisions, such as inspecting passengers’ conditions and excluding undesirable foreigners, to state officials. Thus, federal immigration control started as a state-federal joint endeavor.

State officials’ participation in federal policy continued even after 1891, when the nationalization of immigration regulation was technically completed. In March 1891, Congress passed a new immigration act that replaced state enforcers with federal employees. The passage of the act was followed by the construction of the federally operated Ellis Island landing station. Yet again, without trained staff of its own, the federal government ended up hiring state workers at Castle Garden for the administration of Ellis Island. Similarly, in Massachusetts, state officials were employed as US officers to implement the 1891 act.

U.S. inspectors examining eyes of immigrants, Ellis Island, New York Harbor. Miscellaneous Items in High Demand. Library of Congress.

State officials’ enduring involvement not only helped consolidate federal control in its formative period but also shaped the way federal law was implemented. One of the characteristics of federal control that developed in the following decades was immigration officers’ virtually unqualified power over exclusion and deportation decisions. The vague construction of the “likely to become a public charge” clause allowed officials to apply exclusion to a wide range of people. Deportations could be processed based on unlawful arrest and informal evidence. In short, federal immigration control was loose at best and to a great extent subject to the discretion of immigration officials.

Precedents for this aspect of federal control are found in the practices of state officials prior to 1882. The New York Commissioners of Emigration, for example, routinely detained and returned destitute immigrants at their discretion without giving ship masters the option to provide bonds. In antebellum Massachusetts, Irish paupers were deported often illegally without required court warrants by state officials who were desperate to remove “an ignorant and vicious Irish Catholic population” or “leeches upon our tax payers.” These state-level approaches to undesirable foreigners were integrated into national policy through the 1882 act’s state-federal joint administration and state officials’ continuous presence after the passage of the 1891 act.

It is beyond dispute that racism against Asians and Mexicans immensely influenced the development of modern American immigration policy. Yet American immigration restriction also stemmed from earlier practices and mindsets against destitute Europeans established in northeastern seaboard states long before Ellis Island. Border control, then, is a tradition deeply rooted in the American immigration experience.

Hidetaka Hirota is Postdoctoral Fellow of History at Boston College. He is the author of “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy” in the Journal of American History (March 2013), which won the 2012 Organization of American Historians Louis Pelzer Memorial Award.

The Journal of American History is the leading scholarly publication and the journal of record in the field of American history. Published quarterly in March, June, September, and December, the Journal continues its nine-decade-long career presenting original articles on American history. Each volume of the Journal features a variety of pieces that deal with every aspect of American history, including state-of-the-field essays, broadly inclusive book reviews, and reviews of films, museum exhibitions, and Web sites.

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Sympathy in modernist literature

By Kirsty Martin

In Virginia Woolf’s 1931 modernist novel The Waves her character Neville, looking around in a chapel service at school, is suddenly transfixed by his friend Percival:

But look – he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.

Neville is captivated, and overwhelmed, by Percival’s gesture here. Capturing this moment, Woolf’s language becomes gesturative too – it points the reader to Percival and suggests an undefinable quality to his movement through the vague, charged use of ‘such’: “such gestures”. This heightened awareness of gesture, and of bodily movement and posture, pervades Woolf’s novel, and pervades modernist literature.

Descriptions like Woolf’s account of Percival’s gesture raise questions about the nature of love itself, and about how we might understand each other. Neville’s response to Percival taps into questions about how we might feel for gesture, and indeed about what it might mean to respond in this way to gesture: how far might, or should, mere gesture be a basis for love?

Such concerns about gesture, and movement, have become increasingly important today in thinking about how we might understand each other. There has been a growing amount of neuroscientific research into how the brain responds to bodily movement. In particular, the discovery of mirror neurons – neurons which respond to the gestures and movements of others as if the watching subject were performing the same movements – seem to suggest that gesture might be one of the things that bind us together, that the details of movement and posture might form connections between people at a basic bodily level.

This idea – that love and sympathetic understanding might be forged by bodily gesture – might seem a troubling way of thinking about human connection. The word ‘gesture’, after all, carries hints of theatricality and posturing: ‘sympathetic gestures’ might not be the same thing as sympathy itself. Neville’s response to Percival, too, might sound like hyperbolic infatuation. Yet as he reports being ‘hopelessly’ in love the moment does also suggest inevitability, that this response to gesture might be an inextricable part of what it is to feel and be alive.

At stake here are complex questions about what it is that we respond to in people, and about what might be an adequate basis for love. Thinking about gesture, one must consider whether understanding others need always involve an attempt to understand other minds, or whether there’s a way of responding to another’s individuality that might just consist of attentiveness to the details of the ways their body moves.

Woolf’s work taps into all of these concerns, and in doing so it’s characteristic of its time. Early twentieth-century literature is full of moments where characters pay careful attention to gestures, postures, movement.  Modernist literature is full of scenes like that with Neville and Percival, where gesture can prompt wonder and desire – in D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow Tom Brangwen is shown falling in love with his future wife Lydia because of the manner of her movement: “it was her curious, absorbed, flitting motion [...] that first attracted him”. There’s a subtlety to this moment in The Rainbow – there’s sexual attraction here but also a quality of thoughtfulness as Brangwen considers the nature of Lydia’s movement, considers how much might be conveyed by gesture. At other moments modernist literature demonstrates anxiety over gesture, a sense of the difficulty of decoding it – as in The Good Soldier where Ford Madox Ford’s narrator wonders in retrospect about the over-the-shoulder glance directed at him by his wife Florence, or when Conrad’s Marlow contemplates Lord Jim’s flourishing farewells.

Besides involving itself in the intricacies of interpreting gesture, modernist literature is also marked simply by its intense awareness of how we do respond to gesture, by its recognition of how life might be punctuated by these sudden moments of intense attention. An interest in gesture is frequently bound up with an interest in epiphanic moments of wonderment. One might think, for instance, of the intense focus on arms in T.S. Eliot’s poetry: “But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!” (Prufrock), or the sudden sense of being undone in The Waste Land: “Your arms full, and your hair wet”.

Modernist literature is alive to gesture, and alive to our capacities to responding to gesture. And it’s the intensity with which early twentieth-century texts focuses on how we respond to gestures that is perhaps particular to modernism. There are of course many moments in literature of other periods which focus on the particularities of understanding the body – consider Milan Kundera’s sense of the “charm of a gesture” in Immortality or the pathos of Rosamond’s tightly folded hands in Middlemarch. Yet modernist writers were especially attuned to thinking about both about sensuousness and about abstraction, about the odd, tangential ways in which we might respond to things. Modernist writing like Woolf’s provides a way of thinking about ongoing debate over how we relate to each other, and it also simply draws attention to the particularities of human connection, addressing the reader: “But look”, and recognising how one might feel for such gestures.

Kirsty Martin is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter. Her book, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, was published by OUP in March 2013.

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Image Credits:

1. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Two Girls in Black [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

2. Leonardo da Vinci’s Study of Arms and Hands [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Portraying Dusty Springfield on stage and in film

By Annie Randall

As I celebrate the late Dusty Springfield’s 74th birthday on the 16th of April, I am struck by the number of singers who choose to perform as Dusty—complete with wigs, costumes, and the trademark hand gestures—rather than singing Dusty’s hit songs as themselves. It’s no surprise that ambitious and confident singers want to sing Dusty’s hits; many of the songs, like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and “The Look of Love,” are not only beautifully crafted, they’re vocally challenging. Assuming that she can meet the steep vocal challenges, the singer is well rewarded for her efforts: these songs are proven crowd favorites, guaranteed to elicit passionate applause, if not standing ovations for those brave enough to try singing them. For these reasons, most serious female pop singers know, and even closely study, the Dusty canon of classic recordings from the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them take it a step farther and, in addition to interpreting the songs as Dusty would, they want to look and act like Dusty as well.

The most recent singer to take a crack at “doing Dusty” is Kirsten Holly Smith in her now-playing off-Broadway show, Forever Dusty. Smith is one in a long line of excellent singers (and some, not so great, let’s be frank) who have attempted to portray the now legendary life and sound of 1960s White Queen of Soul, Dusty Springfield. Others include Suzanne Fletcher, Tamsin Carroll, Sheena Crouch, Karen Noble, Wendy Stapleton, Emma Wilkinson, Katy Setterfield, and drag performers like Lori Le Verne and Jayne County.

Dusty Springfield in het Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. 8 March 1968. Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief. Creative Commons License.

Each of these performers is to be admired not only for trying to scale the Mount Everest of female pop singing, but for subjecting themselves to the often withering critique of Dusty fans who insist that no one ever has, or ever will sound like Dusty. As the singers soon learn, after the final chords have faded and audience endorphin levels have returned to normal, some serious grumbling begins: “Poor thing, her singing’s not half bad but she’s nothing like our Dusty.” Consult any website or blog devoted to Dusty fandom (my favorite site is Let’s Talk Dusty) and you will see such reactions, largely negative, in response to the latest attempt to portray Dusty Springfield’s sound, look, and presence onstage.

Fan critique has not only been reactive, but proactive, in response to rumored film portrayals that have not yet even taken place. Again, go to any of the Dusty fansites and you will find discussion threads—some dating back many years—concerning Variety’s latest article on a much hoped-for but also much dreaded film biography of Dusty Springfield. Fans, generally, want a biopic to be made but one that celebrates Dusty’s stardom and not one that dwells on her often unhappy personal life. They fear that a narrative fig leaf or two will soon be stripped away by Hollywood or London’s prurient gaze.

Indeed, as rumors continue to fly about a Dusty Springfield biopic à la the award winning Ray Charles film, Ray, Patsy Cline’s Sweet Dreams, or Kevin Spacey’s homage to Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea, the burning question is: Who should play Dusty? Given Dusty’s musical, theatrical, and personal complexities, perhaps the question should be Who can play Dusty?

Annie J. Randall is Associate Professor of Musicology at Bucknell University. She is the author of Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods. The coauthor of Puccini and ‘The Girl’: History and Reception of Girl of the Golden West and editor of Music, Power, and Politics, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Popular Music-US branch and Co-Editor of the Music/Culture Series of Wesleyan University Press.

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A National Poetry Month reading list from Oxford World’s Classics

In this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list, we decided to celebrate National Poetry Month by selecting some of our bilingual poetry editions. In each of the below books, the poems are laid out as parallel texts, with the original language on the left and the English translation on the right. This means that you can enjoy the works either in the original language, in translation, or even compare the two. Do you have another favourite non-English language poet? Let us know in the comments below.

Arthur Rimbaud – Collected Poems

Rimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content and its often liberated forms. He wrote all his poems between the ages of about 15 and 21, after which he turned his back on family, friends, and France to roam the world. In his final years he was a trader in the Horn of Africa. Out of the brief, colourful life and the poetry of sensory wildness has been created the myth of Rimbaud, an enduring icon of youth, rebellion, and freedom. But behind the myth lies a poetic adventure of high ambition and painful rigour, poignant yet heroic. Rimbaud is one of the greatest French poets of all times.

Federico Garcia Lorca – Selected Poems

Federico García Lorca is perhaps the most celebrated of all twentieth-century Spanish writers, known not only for his plays but also for several collections of poems published both in his short lifetime and after. Lorca’s poetry is steeped in the land, climate, and folklore of his native Andalusia, though he writes memorably of New York and Cuba too. Often in modernist idiom, and full of startling imagery, he evokes a world of intense feelings, silent suffering, and dangerous love.

Stéphane Mallarmé – Collected Poems and Other Verse

Stéphane Mallarmé was the most radically innovative of nineteenth-century poets. His writings, with their richly sensuous texture and air of slyly intangible mystery, perplexed or outraged many early readers; yet no writer has more profoundly influenced the course of modern poetry – in English as well as in French. In both form and content, his poems created new ways of conveying existential doubt, fragmentation, and discontinuity.

Rainer Maria Rilke – Selected Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, and one of the greatest twentieth-century lyric poets in German. From The Book of Hours in 1905 to the Sonnets of Orpheus written in 1922, his poetry explores themes of death, love, and loss. He strives constantly to interrogate the relationship between his art and the world around him, moving from the neo-romantic and the mystic towards the precise craft of expressing the everyday in poetry.

Paul Verlaine (far left) and Arthur Rimbaud (next to Verlaine) and others, in a portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Erotic Poems

Editorial censorship has long obscured the true form and content of the Elegies, which were inspired by Goethe’s sexual liberation in Italy and his love for the woman he took as his unofficial wife on his return to Germany. They are here presented as Goethe boldly conceived them together with the long-surpressed narrative poem known as The Diary. Superficially the story of a failed sexual adventure by a man of 60, at another level this is a profound study of the psychology of desire and the nature of fidelity, as well as being one of the most beautiful and good-humoured poems in the German language.

C. P. Cavafy – Collected Poems

‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’ 

E. M. Forster’s description of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) perfectly encapsulates the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language in his poems. Cavafy writes about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic, and cultural identities are blurred, and he was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused with his distinctive sense of irony. They have established him as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

Paul Verlaine – Selected Poems

Verlaine ranks alongside Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France whose work is associated with the early Symbolists, the Decadents, and the Parnassiens. Remarkable not only for his delicacy and exquisitely crafted verse, Verlaine is also the poet of strong emotions and appetites, with an unrivalled gift for the sheer music of poetry, and an inventive approach to its technique.

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 and Facebook.

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Image credit: By Henri Fantin-Latour [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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A vegetable wonder!

By Tatiana Holway

“GIGANTIC FLOWER–NEW DISCOVERY!” “A Vegetable Wonder!” “A Vegetable Prodigy!” “A plant of most extraordinary beauty, fragrant, and of dimensions previously unheard of in the whole vegetable kingdom!”

With headlines and taglines and raves such as these fanning out from Fleet Street in the autumn of 1837, it would be hard to overestimate the sensation surrounding the immense water lily found earlier that year in the remote South American colony of British Guiana and subsequently named Victoria regia in honor of the empire’s newly crowned queen. Within days of Victoria’s introduction to members of a small botanical society, particulars about the plant began appearing in leading learned publications. Within weeks, respectable periodicals were picking up the story and spreading the news. And within months, the press itself was marveling over the “great interest” that reports about the water lily were exciting–and then repeating those reports yet again so that “a plant of such magnificence may be generally known.” No doubt about it, Victoria regia was celebrity–but a singularly invisible one.

Growing profusely on wide open surfaces of inaccessible, alligator-infested swamps all over the vast, uncharted Amazon basin, the plant had been sighted by only a couple of European explorers before Robert Schomburgk stumbled upon it while attempting to map terra incognita for the Royal Geographic Society. Since his eye-witness account is the one that was recounted over and over, it’s worth reproducing again here:

It was on the 1st of January of this year [1837], while contending with the difficulties nature interposed in different forms to our progress up the river Berbice, that we arrived at a point where the river expanded and formed a currentless basin; some object on the southern extremity of this basin attracted my attention; it was impossible to form any idea of what it could be, and animating the crew to increase the rate of their paddling, we were shortly afterwards opposite the object which had raised my curiosity—a vegetable wonder! All calamities were forgotten: I felt as a botanist, and felt myself rewarded. A gigantic leaf, from five to six feet in diameter, salver-shaped, with a broad rim of light green above, and a vivid crimson below, resting upon the water: quite in character with the wonderful leaf was the luxuriant flower, consisting of many hundred petals, passing in alternate tints from pure white to rose and pink. The smooth water was covered with them; I rowed from one to another, and always observed something new to admire.

He also collected specimens (which disintegrated) and produced colored drawings (which didn’t) and these, along with this account and some additional botanical details, are what eventually arrived in London, where the buzz about the plant got going and the line between publicity and puffery blurred.

Take, for example, the size of the water lily: Schomburgk measured leaves as large as “six feet five inches in diameter” and flowers “fifteen inches across.” That’s big. But when subsequent versions stated that “its leaves measure above eighteen feet, and its flower nearly four feet in circumference,” the plant seemed even bigger. Amplified by epithets like “stunning,” “stupendous,” and “astounding,” ideas about the “vegetable wonder” could keep growing and growing, unchecked.

Schomburgk’s drawings didn’t much help put the scale of Victoria regia in perspective–at least not beyond the tiny, elite social and scientific circles where the original life-size drawings were initially displayed. Until the water lily was successfully cultivated in Britain, which didn’t occur for another dozen years, Schomburgk’s were the sole images on which all others were based-including the incredibly overblown rendering of Victoria regia that’s reproduced here. Published in early 1838, in the best-selling Penny Magazine, the picture looks like something straight out of the National Enquirer. But the fact that The Penny Magazine was issued by the earnestly educational Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge gives one pause. With articles on natural history, political economy, exemplary individuals, improvements in hygiene, and other such solid stuff, the illustrated weekly was intended to edify the working and lower-middle classes, not titillate or mislead them. And with Schomburgk’s account of the plant reprinted on the very same page as the picture, it doesn’t appear that the SDUK was attempting to sensationalize Victoria regia any more than it already was.

Instead, maybe it was a sense of wonder that the illustration was aiming to capture and to convey. Confronted with the Lilliputian explorers coming upon the water lily, ordinary Britons might begin to apprehend what only a few extraordinary travelers ever saw. Alexander von Humboldt was one of them, and the first to undertake a deliberately scientific expedition to equatorial South America. There, he said, “man and his productions disappear, so to speak, in the midst of a wild and outsize nature.” Charles Darwin was also overwhelmed. On first seeing the verdant riot of vegetation of Brazil, he wrote that “while viewing such scenes, one feels the impossibility that any description should come near the mark,–much less be overdrawn.” And when a plant-collector named Robert Spruce came across the “vegetable wonder” over a decade after Schomburgk’s encounter, he too was awed: “The aspect of the Victoria, in its native waters, is so new and extraordinary,” he said, “that I am at a loss to what to compare it.”

So perhaps the representation of Victoria regia in The Penny Magazine isn’t so overblown. Oversized, yes — at least as far as the plant is concerned. But overdone, no — not so far as the impression it made. Just imagine, then, the reaction when the water lily was finally successfully cultivated in Britain and the press started describing “the flowering for the first time in the old world, of one of those vegetable productions whose existence has so long been considered to have its basis only in the inflated fancies of moonstruck travelers.”

Tatiana Holway is an independent scholar and academic consultant with a doctorate in Victorian literature and society. She is the author of The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, The Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created and several studies of Dickens and popular culture. She also serves on the advisory board for the Nineteenth-Century Collections Online archive. Currently, she lives outside of Boston, where she pursues a passion for gardening.

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Image credit: The Penny Magazine, January 20, 1838. Public domain.

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Our Henry James

By John Carlos Rowe

As we anticipate the public release this year of Scot McGehee’s and David Siegel’s film, What Maisie Knew, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on 7 September 2012, I wonder once again what drives popular fascination with Henry James’s fiction in our postmodern condition? Of course, I love Henry James and have spent much of my scholarly career reading, teaching, and writing about his works, but I also understand that they are aesthetically and intellectually difficult, lack “action” if not plot, deal with the wealthy classes, and depend on subtle psychological ambiguities many readers miss completely. “What?! Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond had an adulterous affair in The Portrait of a Lady? Isabel Archer’s step-daughter, Pansy, is really Madame Merle’s daughter? When did that happen? I missed it!” Or better yet, “Prince Amerigo was in love with Charlotte Stant, his wife’s best friend, before Charlotte married Maggie’s father and became Amerigo’s mother-in-law? And now you’re telling me Amerigo couldn’t control himself and had an adulterous affair with Charlotte after he married Maggie?”

Portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent, 1913.

So it goes for the distracted reader of Henry James these days. Did your smartphone vibrate in your pocket? Your friend tweet you from Starbuck’s? Telemarketer catch you unawares with a new mortgage offer? You missed it, the whole shebang, the significant event that turns everything else around in Henry James. Bellegardes break off their daughter Claire’s engagement to the rich American, Christopher Newman, in The American ? Alert the media! Bellegardes are cold-blooded murderers! Cold shoulder in Mrs. Walker’s salon in Rome? Daisy Miller is dead! Wink, a nod, and a sleepover in Venice between Kate Croy and Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove ; their best friend, Milly Theale, is history! Bad lecture by Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians ? That Southern gentleman, Basil Ransom, arrives on his white horse to carry her away to southern hell.

Much as we dislike how scandal appears in Henry James, perhaps it is just such secrecy we also love. James anticipates our contemporary world in which celebrity depends not only on glossy appearances but vile depths, riddled with scandal. How happily distressed we are to learn that that fabulously rich, young, beautiful, generous Milly Theale is in fact being cheated on and by her two best friends. What schadenfreude we experience when the radical chic Princess Casamassima must bear responsibility for young, pathetic Hyacinth killing himself, rather than assassinating the Duke. As the one-percenters grow ever more distant from us in earning and political power, how satisfying it is to witness their destructive urges, whether it is Michael Jackson’s drug-riddled nights or Adam Verver’s cheating wife. Yes, James appeals to us the ways contemporary soaps and telenovelas draw us, not so differently from those romance writers of James’s own period, “the mad tribe of scribbling women” his mentor Hawthorne and James himself so envied.

At the same time, James lures us with big ideas, metaphysical thoughts in the heads of well-dressed men and women, who can recognize a vintage Lafite and have read Milton and Schopenhauer. James has “cultivation” far beyond what Donald Trump can imagine, Michael Jordan score, and it may well be this seventh sense of his characters for which we yearn nostalgically. Lord Mark can show Bronzino’s Lucrezia Panciatichi to the young Milly Theale in the gallery of his ancestral estate, and she can respond promptly and complexly: “She’s dead, dead, dead!” Bronzino’s Italian Renaissance mannerist style is indeed cold and angular, and the poor Lucrezia must have been trapped by her Catholic, aristocratic, patriarchal circumstances. Above all, Milly rejects Lord Mark’s subtle pass at her. All in four words. However terrible the scandals they must someday face, whatever the desperation James’s characters must endure, they are the original multi-taskers in the complex meanings that revolve in every sentence.

Our teachers tell us that we keep reading Shakespeare because he is the master of the English language, penning more memorable lines than even the couplet-loving Alexander Pope. We think we should love Henry James for his prose style, but how many lines do we actually remember? “Then, there we are!” or “his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped” or “The house of fiction has not one window, but a million”?  No, it is not the lines by James we remember, not his notable style, early or middle or late; it is James’s cultivation, an aesthetic sensibility that no inherited title, no accumulated wealth, no diligent study can ever quite afford us. “We work in the dark, we give what we can, the rest is the madness of art.” Happy Birthday, Henry, you old survivor, my dear friend.

John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern California and the author or editor of eighteen books. He has published four books on Henry James: Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (1976); The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984); The Other Henry James (1998); and co-edited with Eric Haralson, A Historical Guide to Henry James (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is completing a new book on Henry James entitled “Our Henry James.”

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Henry Moseley and a tale of seven elements

By Eric Scerri

This year marks the 100th anniversary of a remarkable discovery by an equally remarkable scientist. He is Henry Moseley, whose working career lasted a mere four years before he was killed in World War I shortly before his 26th birthday. Born in 1887 in England, Moseley came from a distinguished scientific family. Both of his grandfathers — a mathematical physicist on his father’s side and an oceanographer on his mother’s side — and his father were fellows of the Royal Society. His own father, who died when Henry was just four years old, had also been a zoologist whose book had been praised by Charles Darwin.

Young Henry Moseley attended Eton College on a scholarship and began to show early academic promise. He then studied natural science at Trinity College, Oxford having again obtained a scholarship. He didn’t think much of his teachers at Oxford, whom he once described as being more interested in fox hunting than science. Moseley wasted no time in contacting Britain’s leading physicist, Ernest Rutherford, who was then at the University of Manchester. Rutherford obviously recognized a kindred spirit, accepting the young graduate even though he had only obtained a second-class degree in physics.

Henry Moseley. Photo from Eric Scerri’s collection used by permission from Emilio Segrè Collection.

After preliminary experiments involving radioactivity, which were proposed by Rutherford, Moseley began to develop an interest in X-rays, which had by then become a hot topic. After many years of debate as to their nature it was still unclear whether they consisted of waves or particles. Then in 1912, a breakthrough seemed to occur after von Laue in Germany suggested that X-rays might have very small wavelengths and might consequently be diffracted by objects as small as planes of atoms within crystals.  Even though this prediction was quickly confirmed others continue to wonder whether X-rays might still also have particulate properties.

At this point Moseley teamed up with Charles Darwin, the grandson of the Darwin, and produced a paper based on a detailed study of how X-rays behaved when reflected by metal targets. Soon Moseley, who had always had a keen interest in chemistry, began to examine how a sequence of elements following each other in the periodic table might behave when acting as targets for beams of X-rays. He began with experiments on a sequence of ten elements from calcium to zinc inclusive. He omitted scandium which falls immediately after calcium because he was not able to obtain a sample of it.

Nevertheless, the outcome was remarkably clear and simple. If the square roots of the frequencies of the diffracted X-rays were plotted against a series of whole numbers, a smooth graph was obtained. This meant that he had discovered a method for counting the elements and a means of finding which elements, if any, remained to be discovered. In 1914 he extended his study to encompass most of the known elements between aluminum and gold, and still the same simple relationship held out. In the remainder of his short life he immediately set about applying his method to many long-standing problems and some new ones.

First of all, the lightest elements in the periodic table had long been surrounded in mystery. The former use of atomic weights to order the elements suggested that one or perhaps two elements might be missing between hydrogen and helium, the two lightest known elements. Also, some authors had reported new spectral lines, which were attributed to possible missing elements called coronium and nebulium.

Secondly, there had been much confusion about known many rare-earth elements existed in the sixth row of the periodic table and whether some newly reported elements were genuine or not. Moseley personally examined samples of a supposed new element named celtium. By measuring the X-ray frequencies that this sample produced he confidently ruled against the existence of any new element.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he was able to resolve the long-standing controversy over the order in which the elements cobalt and nickel should be placed in the periodic table. The former approach of using increasing atomic weights to order the elements implied that nickel should come before cobalt. Moseley’s method showed otherwise because cobalt had the lower atomic number associated with its X-ray spectrum.

But alas all this brilliant work was cut short because World War I broke out and Moseley insisted on volunteering to fight in the trenches in spite of efforts to prevent him from doing so by Rutherford among others. He was killed on 10 August 1915 by a bullet to the head at the battle of Gallipoli in Turkey. It was left to others to apply his X-ray method further and it soon became clear that precisely seven elements remained to be discovered between the limits of the periodic table that stood between hydrogen and uranium.

Oddly enough, the fact that the search had been clearly narrowed down to just seven elements with known atomic numbers did not seem to diminish the level of controversy and argumentation over the next thirty or so years before they had all been correctly identified. The seven elements, all rather exotic, are protactinium (1917), hafnium (1923), rhenium (1925), technetium (1937), francium (1939), astatine (1940), and promethium (1945). Three of them, technetium, astatine, and promethium had to be artificially synthesized before their discovery could be confirmed. Almost all of these seven ‘discoveries’ were surrounded by controversy as well as acrimonious disputes of a personal and, in some cases, of a nationalistic nature. Above all the tale of these seven elements continues to affirm the essentially human and frail nature of scientific discovery.

Eric Scerri is a leading philosopher of science specializing in the history and philosophy of the periodic table. He is the author of A Tale of Seven Elements, The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction, and The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. He is also the founder and editor in chief of the international journal Foundations of Chemistry and has been a full-time lecturer at UCLA for the past twelve years where he regularly teaches classes of 350 chemistry students as well as classes in history and philosophy of science. He is also giving the Moseley Centennial Lecture at the American Physical Society April meeting on Monday, 15 April 2013, 10:45 AM–12:33 PM.

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