Oxford University Press's Blog, page 994
December 21, 2012
Who’s Who dinner party quiz
Who’s Who (and its sister publication, Who Was Who) has traditionally included entries for the cream of British society, and in this festive season, the Who’s Who team have come up with a theoretical dinner party where key people from all areas of life, alive and dead, could come together to solve the world’s problems.
Where else could you find a table where Roald Dahl, Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs, Clare Balding, Dame Judi Dench, Michael Palin, Caitlin Moran, and Richard Ayoade might rub shoulders, looked after with tender care by Rick Stein and renowned bon viveur Oliver Reed, and hosted at Blenheim Palace by the Duke of Marlborough?
In a classic game of six (or in this case seven) degrees of separation, can you spot the links between Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Dominic Mohan, Mary Berry, Leon McCawley, Ronald Searle, Christine Lagarde, Ivor Novello, right back round to Martin Luther King?
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Who’s Who is the essential directory of the noteworthy and influential in every area of public life, published worldwide, and written by the entrants themselves. Who’s Who 2013 includes autobiographical information on over 33,000 influential people from all walks of life. The 165th edition includes a foreword by Arianna Huffington on ways technology is rapidly transforming the media.
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Image credit: Christmas pudding photograph by esp_imaging via iStockphoto.
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Looking back on looking back: history’s people of 2012
2012 — What a year to be British!
A year of street parties and river processions for the Jubilee; of officially the best Olympics ever; of opening and closing ceremonies; of Britons winning every medal on offer; of the (admittedly, not British) Tour de France, of David Hockney’s Yorkshire; and of a new James Bond film. Even a first tennis Grand Slam since the days when shorts were trousers and players answered to ‘Bunny’. If asked for the people of 2012 you’d obviously opt for Wiggins, Boyle, Farah, Ennis, Craig, Murray and, of course, Her Majesty the Queen, complete with parachute.
At the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography we too have delighted in these achievements. But, as our remit demands, we’ve also spent this year looking further back at some of the historical Britons celebrated or commemorated during 2012. As the year comes to a close, here are a few highlights — a look back, if you will, on looking back.
It’s been a strong year for anniversaries. We began in February with what’s proved the biggest and longest-running of these celebrations: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens about whom so much has been said and done in 2012. Other bicentenaries are available, however. In addition to the mighty ‘Boz’, the Oxford DNB includes a further 242 men and women born in 1812. A few did gain some recognition, notably the poets Robert Browning (born 7 May 1812) and Edward Lear, whose birthday fell a week later, but neither could compete with the Our Mutual Friend.
Any smaller and you were submerged in a Dickensian backwash. Thus only a handful of parties for the great Gothic architect Augustus Pugin (1 March) or the Russian-born radical and Anglophile, Alexander Herzen (6 April [New Style]), and probably nothing at all for these two gems from the ODNB list. First, Samuel Isaac (1812-1886) who, despite having ‘no engineering experience’, accepted an invitation to undertake and underwrite the building of the Mersey Tunnel — what’s more successfully (it opened in February 1885). Then there’s Henry James Jones (1812-1891), Bristol baker and ‘the inventor of self-raising flour’ — surely a man deserving a little more recognition in the year of Boz. No Henry James Jones (or yeast) means no fluffy loaf, however Great your Expectations.
Popular anniversaries often highlight artistic or cultural, rather than science-related, episodes from our past. 2012 was a bit different in that it saw celebrations (in June) for the centenary of the mathematician, Alan Turing (1912-1954). Turing’s appeal is due in part to the near universal reach of his work — even if the details of The Turing Machine, and later developments in computer science, leave most of us baffled. There’s also his wartime association with Bletchley Park where he spearheaded the breaking of the German Enigma and Fish codes. But Turing also catches the imagination for his (then) unusual openness towards his sexuality, his arrest and controversial punishment for indecency, his curious death, and the ongoing campaign to have him granted a posthumous pardon.
Turing was rightly deserving of the anniversary events held in 2012, though — as the Oxford DNB again shows — he wasn’t alone among scientific centenarians. In fact, the dictionary offers a further 29 men and women born in 1912 and now remembered for their contributions to scientific and medical fields. They include some remarkable lives: among them the astronomer George Alcock (born 28 August) — who discovered five comets (a British record) and boasted a photographic memory of 30,000 stars — and cardiologist Bill Cleland (30 May), the pioneer of open heart surgery in Britain in the early 1950s. Centenary science (albeit of a much less robust kind) is also marked this month, indeed this week, with the 100th anniversary of the public unveiling of Piltdown Man. Discovered in Sussex, these bone fragments were dated by their finder, Charles Dawson, to 4 million BC and identified as the ‘missing link’ between apes and man. The announcement, made on 18 December 1912, caused a sensation. For four decades Piltdown Man — or Eoanthropus dawsoni, Dawson’s Dawn Man — enjoyed the status of Europe’s oldest known human. Then, in the 1950s, Piltdown was revealed for what he really was: parts of a relatively recent human skull mingled with bones from a small orangutan. In December, therefore, we remember a 100 year-old hoax.
2012 was also a year for looking back at some dramatic, indeed shocking, events. Charles Dickens was just three months old when, on 11 May 1812, the prime minister Spencer Perceval was shot and killed in the Commons lobby — the first and only British premier to suffer this fate. His assailant was John Bellingham, a bankrupt commercial agent who was arrested, tried, and hanged within the week.
On 18 May 1912, exactly 100 years after Bellingham’s execution, 30,000 people gathered in Colne, Lancashire, for the funeral of a local man, Wallace Hartley, a former ship’s musician. So many gathered because that ship was the RMS Titanic, captained by Edward Smith who with Hartley, and more than 1500 others, lost their lives on 15 April 1912. The Titanic disaster — undoubtedly the anniversary event of the year — came within weeks of an equally celebrated episode in popular histories of Britishness. On 19 March 1912 Captain Robert Scott and his two surviving companions pitched their tent for the final time. It was three months since their ‘defeat’ at the South Pole, and three days since their fellow explorer Captain Oates had walked to his death. The men got no further, with Scott the last to die on about 29 March. Looking back from 2012 the tragedies of ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ and the Titanic come in quick succession, a severe blow to Edwardian self-confidence seemingly delivered in the spring of 1912. A centenary ago the chronology was, of course, a little different: not until November 1912 did a search team confirm the deaths of Scott and his party, and it took a further three months for news of this disaster to reach London.
In the coming decades, delays of this kind would become a thing of the past. And last month the BBC marked the 90th anniversary of the reason why: the institution’s first radio broadcast, an event that would soon bring new sounds, voices, opinions, and information into millions of homes. At the helm on 14 November 1922 was the imperious John Reith, manager of what was then the British Broadcasting Company. At the microphone, Arthur Burrows, who announced the results of the general election: Mr Bonar Law 332, David Lloyd George 127.
If you missed Dickens, Turing, Perceval, and Piltdown Man, and would like to get involved there is still time. Between now and the year end why not hold a do-it-yourself celebration for the author of Self-Help, Samuel Smiles (born 23 December 1812)? Or throw a ‘happening’ for the centenary of Birmingham surrealist, Conroy Maddox (27 December)? In a striking coming together of dates, 12 December is also the 150th anniversary of J. Bruce Ismay’s birth. The owner of the White Star shipping line, Ismay is now remembered for his controversial escape from his greatest ship — the RMS Titanic.
And the future? A quick search of the Oxford DNB reveals many reasons to celebrate and commemorate in 2013. Take, for instance, the quatercentenary of library founder Thomas Bodley; the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice; the 150th anniversary of the London Underground; 100 years of British film censorship; 50 years since Kim Philby’s flight to Russia; Britain’s 40 years in the European Union; or 20 years since the death of Audrey Hepburn. And that’s just January.
Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,000 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 165 life stories now available (including the lives of Alan Turing, Piltdown Man, Wallace Hartley, and Captain Scott). You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.
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Jack Kerouac: On and Off the Road
By David Sterritt
Jack Kerouac, the novelist and poet who gave the Beat Generation its name, died 43 years ago on 21 October 1969 at the age of 47. This Friday, the long-delayed movie version of Kerouac’s autobiographical novel about crisscrossing the United States with his hipster friend Neal Cassady in the 1940s, On the Road releases. When the novel was published in 1957, six years after he finished writing it, Kerouac dreamed up his own screen adaptation, hoping to play himself (called Sal Paradise in the novel) opposite Marlon Brando as Dean Moriarty, the Cassady character. He wrote to Brando but Brando didn’t write back, so the dream production remained a dream. Now that it’s reaching the screen with Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund as Sal and Dean, we can only guess what Kerouac would have made of it.
On the Road remains Kerouac’s most widely acclaimed novel, partly for its literary merits — boundless energy, quicksilver prose, an almost mystical view of the American landscape — and partly because of the legendary way he created it, typing it on a 120-foot scroll so he wouldn’t have to interrupt the flow of words by changing paper. Kerouac wrote many other works, including several novels, a great deal of poetry, two books about Buddhism, a compendium of his nightly dreams, and a play that inspired the 1959 movie Pull My Daisy, a mostly playful glance at the mercurial Beat lifestyle. But his most prolific period was limited to the 1950s, when he wrote nearly of his significant works.
Weighed down and ultimately defeated by alcoholism and depression, Kerouac produced little of note after 1960 except the novels Big Sur and Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46, published in 1962 and 1968 respectively. He felt badly misunderstood by the American public, and although he was right, he was also to blame. His footloose characters and propulsive writing style had convinced admirers and detractors alike that being Beat meant disdaining the ordinary social rules — which was true as far as it went, but far less important to Kerouac than the need to be both “beat” and “beatific,” meaning saintly in a literal sense. Appearing on William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative TV show a year before his death, Kerouac said he rejected the “mutiny” and “insurrection” that the Beats had come to connote; instead he favored “order, tenderness and piety.” By this time, however, the Beats had given way to the flower children as the American gadflies par excellence, and few were interested in the profoundly religious sensibility — oscillating between Catholicism and Buddhism but always deeply felt — of a once-blazing rebel now seen as a soggy old complainer.
Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in On the Road. Photo © Gregory Smith. Source: ontheroad-themovie.com
Although the original Beats were a loosely knit crew, its key members were unquestionably Kerouac, fiercely committed to the spontaneous writing he pioneered; Allen Ginsberg, a modernist poet inspired by everything from 19th-century verse to late-night radio patter; and William S. Burroughs, a storyteller with a schizoid style and a hearty appetite for sex, drugs, and metaphysics. Their rebellious values have stayed in the social imagination ever since their early days as friends and fellow travelers, influencing the cyberpunks of the 2000s no less than the hippies of the 60s and the punks of the 70s.
Two ideas united them: a shared rejection of consumerism and regimentation, and a collective desire to purge their lives of spiritually deadening dross. Their rallying cry was a call for remaking consciousness on a deeply inward-looking basis — revitalizing society by revolutionizing thought, rather than the other way around, through cultivation of “the unspeakable visions of the individual,” in Kerouac’s unforgettable phrase. They had different ways of accomplishing this. Kerouac became a self-described “great rememberer redeeming life from darkness” in the many novels he wrote; Ginsberg invented a new variety of incantatory, almost shamanistic verse; Burroughs cut, folded, and shuffled his pages to bypass his ego and extract fresh, outlandish truths. The ultimate goal for them and their followers is what Kerouac called “eyeball kicks,” the jolts of cosmic energy that divide everyday diversions from visionary art.
The new movie version of On the Road was written by Jose Rivera and directed by the respected Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, who deserves an Oscar for just getting the picture finished. A number of writers, including major ones like Russell Banks and Michael Herr, have tried and failed to complete satisfactory screenplays during the 33 years that producer Francis Ford Coppola has owned the adaptation rights. Rivera’s effort finally captured the tone that Coppola was looking for, and Salles allowed the actors to improvise at times, which is very much in the Beat spirit. Reviews were mixed when the picture premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival last spring, but its American distributors, IFC Films and Sundance Selects, have expressed their optimism by scheduling its theatrical debut for December 21st, a popular timeslot for films with award possibilities. Kerouac loved movies, and one hopes he would have smiled on this big-screen reincarnation of his profoundly personal tale.
David Sterritt is a film professor at Columbia University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and professor emeritus at Long Island University. A noted critic, author, and scholar, he is chair of the National Society of Film Critics and chief book critic of Film Quarterly, and was for many years the film critic for The Christian Science Monitor. His books include The Beats: A Very Short Introduction, Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the ’50s, and Film and Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility, and he serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Beat Studies. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Journal of American History, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Beliefnet, Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. Sterritt has appeared as a guest on CBS Morning News, Nightline, Charlie Rose, CNN Live Today, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The O’Reilly Factor, among many other television and radio shows.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!
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Image credit: Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in On the Road. Photo © Gregory Smith. Source: ontheroad-themovie.com. Used for the purposes of illustration.
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December 20, 2012
Christmas beers
For those of us who celebrate Christmas, this time of year is resplendent with sights, songs, and smells that bring the holiday instantly to mind. Most of us who grew up with a real Christmas tree in the house are instantly transported by the smell of a freshly cut fir tree. For others, it’s the smell of pies baking. For the ancients, it was frankincense and myrrh. For me… it’s latex paint. Wait, I can explain! As many families do, we always had a lot of people over to the house around Christmastime, and many of them were folks who might only visit once a year. So the holidays were a natural time to spruce the house up, including whatever interior painting needed doing that year. So my olfactory memory of Christmas blends pine needles, interior latex eggshell paint, pies baking, and the unique smell of brand new plastic toys and electronics. At one time, though, especially in Europe, one of the classic smells of the Yuletide was Christmas ale.
Brewers have always made special beers for religious holidays, and over the last few hundred years Christmas ales have been popular during the holiday season. Though Christmas ale is basically a catch-all descriptive phrase, these beers tend to have several things in common. Almost all of them are dark, or at least go for a rich amber color suggesting heartiness. They also tend to be stronger than average, ranging from 5.5% at the low end to more than 14% for age-worthy after-dinner beers. Belgium, England, Scandinavia, and the United States are all major producers of these beers, though in this country we tend to use more inclusive names such as holiday ale. At one time, especially in England, Christmas ales were often spiced and sometimes mulled. Wines, ales, and ciders were often served this way around the holidays and were referred to collectively as wassail, a drink often consumed while caroling. Today, many American craft breweries produce spiced ales at the holidays, harking back to the old tradition.
As you go shopping for your Christmas table, remember that beer can work wonders with a wide array of holiday foods. Belgian saison, Belgian witbier (white beer), and Bavarian weissbier (also known as hefeweizen, the fruity German wheat beer style) are light and spritzy, making them great earlier in the day, especially with brunch. As you move into dinner, French farmhouse ales, called bières de garde, have nice caramel and earthy anise-like flavors, making them particularly good with turkey and ham. Belgian Christmas ales, almost universally dark, strong and plummy, are great with lamb, duck, and goose.
Traditional Mexican cuisine reaches some its greatest heights at Christmas, when people make the complex and time-consuming dark mole sauces, many of them based on nuts, chilies, and chocolate. Served with chicken, duck or the traditional turkey, these can be wonderful with rich, dark porter beers; there the roast character of the beer will pick up perfectly on the chocolate in the sauce. Also from Mexico, one of my favorite Christmas dishes is chile en nogada, a poblano pepper stuffed with spiced minced pork and fruit, covered in a walnut-based frosting, and studded with pomegranate seeds. It’s as beautiful to look at as it is delicious to eat, and it’s great with those massive West Coast “double IPAs”. The big hop flavors really pick up on the flavor of the poblano pepper, while the bitterness provides the cutting power for this super-rich dish.
After dinner it’s time for big chocolaty imperial stouts and fruity, warming barley wines. While they aren’t sweet, both of these have enough residual sugar to work with desserts, and they’re often a far better match than dessert wines. Barley wines, which are well-aged beers usually over 9% ABV, bring concentrated malt and dark fruit flavors that are great with cheeses, especially the British Christmas classic, Stilton. Many years ago, shortly after Christmas, I visited with a friend in the English countryside. “Mummy always gets a Stilton at Christmas” he intoned, and the Stilton — at least a foot across — was wheeled out on its own purpose-built cart. It looked like it could feed a family of five for the entire winter, and I’ve little doubt that it actually did. Some British barley wine was a magnificent accompaniment. Imperial stouts are at least as good with Stilton, and even better with desserts, especially ice cream, chocolate cakes, tarts, and all sorts of cookies.
Finally, Christmas is a great time to go out and put together a little after-dinner beer tasting. Many of the world’s greatest beers cost scarcely more than a fancy cup of coffee. If you’re having people over or going to visit friends and family, why not gather up ten beers you’ve been curious to taste? There will be plenty of people to taste them with you, and hopefully plenty of time for tasting. After all, Christmas isn’t just for the kids, and although you might not be unwrapping a bright yellow Tonka truck on Christmas morning, adulthood does have its privileges. For the designated drivers (our heroes!), make some ludicrously sinful spiced hot chocolate; my personal favorite is from Jacques Torres. Here’s wishing everyone a happy, healthy, wonderful Christmas — and don’t forget to touch up the paint.
Garrett Oliver, editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, is the Brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and author of The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food. He has won many awards for his beers, is a frequent judge for international beer competitions, and has made numerous radio and television appearances as a spokesperson for craft brewing.
The Oxford Companion to Beer is the first major reference work to investigate the history and vast scope of beer, featuring more than 1,100 A-Z entries written by 166 of the world’s most prominent beer experts. It is first place winner of the 2012 Gourmand Award for Best in the World in the Beer category, winner of the 2011 André Simon Book Award in the Drinks Category, and shortlisted in Food and Travel for Book of the Year in the Drinks Category. View previous Oxford Companion to Beer blog posts and videos.
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Image credit: Pint of beer by the fireside. Photo by Marbury, iStockphoto.
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On the Second Amendment: should we fear government or ourselves?
The tragic shootings in Newtown, CT, have plunged the nation into the foundational debate of American politics.
Over at Fox News, the focus as been on mourning and the tragedy of what happened. As far as the search for solutions go, the focus has been on how to cope, what to say to children, and what to do about better mental health screening. It is consistent with the conservative view that when bad things happen, they happen because of errant individuals, not flawed societies. The focus on mourning indicates the view that when bad things happen, they are the inevitable costs of liberty.
At MSNBC, the focus has been on tragedy as a wake up call, not a thing in itself to simply mourn; on finding legislative and governmental solutions — gun control. This is consistent with the liberal view that when bad things happen, they happen because of flawed societies, not just the result of errant individuals or evil as an abstract entity.
The question of which side is right is an imponderable. Conservatives believe that in the end, our vigilance against tyrannical government is our first civic duty. This was the logic behind the Second Amendment. It comes from a long line of Radical Whig thinking that the Anti-Federalists inherited. That is why Second Amendment purists can reasonably argue that that citizens should continue to have access to (even) semi-automatic guns. They will say that the Second Amendment is not just for hunting; it is for liberty against national armies. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that a government duly constituted by the people need not fear government; and it is citizen-on-citizen violence that we ought to try to prevent. This line of thinking began with Hobbes, who had theorized that we lay down our arms against each other, so that one amongst us alone wields the sword. Later, we called this sovereign the state. The Federalists leaned in this tradition.
Should we fear government more or fellow citizens who have access to guns? Should government or citizens enjoy the presumption of virtue? Who knows. There is no answer on earth that would permanently satisfy both political sides in America, because conservatives believe that most citizens, most of the time, are virtuous, and there is no need to take a legislative sledgehammer to restrict the liberty of a few errant individuals at the expense of everybody else. Liberals, conversely, believe that government and regulatory activity are virtuous and necessary most of the time, and there is little practical cost to most citizens to restrict a liberty (to bear arms) that is rarely, if ever, invoked. Put another way: conservatives focus on the vertical dimension of tyranny; liberals fear most the horizontal effects of mutual self-destruction.
What is a president to do? It depends on which side of the debate he stands. Barack Obama believes that the danger we pose to ourselves exceeds the danger of tyrannical government (for which a right to bear arms was originally codified). The winds of public opinion may be swaying in his direction, and Obama appeared to be ready to mould it when he asked: “Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage?”
Here is one neo-Federalist argument that Obama can use, should he take on modern Anti-Federalists. If the Constitution truly were of the people, then it is self-contradictory to speak of vigilance against it. In other words, the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It was written in an era of monarchy, as a bulwark against Kings. To those who claim to be constitutional conservatives, Obama may reasonably ask: either the federal government is not sanctioned by We the People, and therefore we must forever be jealous of it; or, the federal government represents the People and we need not treat it as a distant potentate and overstate our fear of it.
If this is to be the age of renewed faith in government, as it appears to be Obama’s mission, then the President will be more likely to convince Americans to lay down our arms; he will persuade us that our vigilance against government by the people is counter-prouctive and anachronistic. But, to move “forward,” he must first convince the NRA and its ideological compatriots that we can trust our government. Only the greatest of American presidents have succeeded in this most herculean of tasks, for our attachment to the spirit of ’76 cannot be understated.
Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.
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The Grimms and ‘Tales for Children and the Household’
By Joyce Crick
This year, Thursday December 20th is the 200th anniversary of the publication of their Tales for Children and the Household, currently being celebrated world-wide. Just in time for Christmas.
But even after 200 years, English-speaking countries still seem to know little more about the brothers and their stories than as a brand name for films from Disney or Terry Gilliam. How many could we name off the cuff? A dozen? Twenty?
It isn’t as if they really went away. In its two centuries of existence, their collection of stories has been selected, reprinted, translated (into 160 languages!), bowdlerized, modernized, deconstructed, illustrated, adapted for film and theatre, rewritten and remade again and again, from the brothers’ seemingly artless transcripts of stories told them by family friends or the tailor’s widow who came selling her garden produce, all the way to Shrek.
For one thing, the collection is more various and far bigger than the core of ‘magic’ stories we label Grimms’ Fairy Tales, following the style set by their earliest translators (it started at eighty-six in the two volumes of 1812 and 1815, but grew to two hundred and ten by the seventh edition of 1857!) The presence of fables, tall tales, moralities, earthy — but not too earthy — comic anecdotes, and many literary borrowings changes the constellation we are familiar with. But it explains the brothers’ own title better.
For another, they are not strictly ‘fairy’ tales — at least, not in brother Wilhelm’s editions that followed the little book we are celebrating. There certainly were fairies at first, mainly Feen, having their origins in Perrault’s fées who did not dwell in the German countryside, but at the French court; but by the second edition of 1819 Wilhelm had banished them and any other words, like Prinzessin of such French pedigree. (He turned her into a ‘king’s daughter’.) He removed stories too: ‘Puss-in-Boots’, ‘Bluebeard’ from French sources, ‘The Hand with the Knife’ from Scottish. Why? They weren’t German enough. There is not a fairy left, not in the title and no longer in the stories themselves, though there is still enchantment of course, and plenty of wisewomen, godmothers, witches, and even a few warlocks. This points to another gap in our assumptions about the Grimms: their little book has an improbable but significant place in the much larger literary story of Romantic nationalism.
Jacob (foreground, right) and Wilhelm Grimm
They intended these tales, Jacob especially, to be part of a wider project of rescuing old cultural phenomena in danger of being lost to the modern world, and rediscovering a simple German folk tradition in face of both the sophisticated French cultural influence long prevailing at court, and of immediate invasion and occupation by Napoleon’s armies. Their search was also driven by an ideal of the creative powers of the folk to generate these tales spontaneously, anonymously; natural poesy is what Jacob called it, as opposed to art poetry. So they also gathered local legends and customs, folk sayings and songs, traditional law and lore, motivated by both the new German patriotism and this romantic view of the people, views they shared with two friends and fellow-harvesters, the poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, editors of the German folk-song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The brothers were making new myths as much as recording old ones.Their collection had a double purpose, ultimately contradictory. For it was also on the cusp between mere antiquarianism and the new sciences of anthropology and historical philology. This is where brother Jacob’s interests mainly lay. “To my mind the book was not written for children at all,” he wrote to Arnim. Wilhelm, though, became increasingly interested in the imaginative and educational possibilities of the collection as “a book for bringing up children.”
So even the handful of tales we do know, of lost children (more of them than just Hänsel and Gretel), strange transformations, talking animals, kings and princesses, tests and contests, rewards and fearsome punishments, journeys and homecomings, encounters in the threatening forest with wicked witches and helpful elves, were also at the beginning of a long afterlife not only in children’s imaginations but in scholarship as well. The collection turned out to hold far more possibilities than a simple publication of the tales the young men read in ancient tomes, or heard from their friends in the Hassenpflugs or the Wild girls next door or the tailor’s widow come selling her garden produce, or the curate in a neighbouring village, but rarely, it seems, direct from the mouth of the folk.
Jacob gradually left it to Wilhelm to edit the Tales to their seventh, final edition (1856-57), successively ‘enlarged and improved’ away from that first Christmas volume they had sent as a present to Arnim’s wife Bettina and their little son. Wilhelm’s ‘improvements’ between the edition we are celebrating and the last were considerable: he removed any sign of a foreign source; he added dialogue to plain narrative; combined tales; with artless art he cultivated the tales’ characteristic naive tone, turning — another contradiction — natural poesy into art poetry; his typical readership was the good bourgeois family, so he moralized, bowdlerized — though not nearly as much as his first English translators did. In other words, he made them Grimm.
So leave your laptop and join the celebrations: on December 20th choose an unfamiliar tale and read it aloud, preferably in the children’s corner of your endangered local children’s library — before the witches descend.
Joyce Crick taught German at University College London for many years. Since her retirement she has translated a variety of texts, including Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams for Oxford World’s Classics, which was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck prize in 2000, and Selected Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The tales gathered by the Grimm brothers are at once familiar, fantastic, homely, and frightening.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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Image credit: Doppelporträt der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1855. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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Foil thy Foes with Joy
Portrait of Benjamin Britten by Yousuf Karsh, via Wikimedia Commons.
One of Benjamin Britten’s strengths as a composer was writing music for children. Not just music for children to enjoy — many of his works, particularly his operas, are not really kid-friendly affairs — but for them to perform. I’m thinking particularly of choral music, where he excelled at writing songs that I found both beautiful and really fun to sing when I was very young.That’s not to say that these songs are easy, of course; much of Britten’s music was described by critics (often derogatorily) as “clever,” and can be highly challenging. But that’s one of the joys of singing it. His songs felt like puzzles we were given to solve, and I remember feeling pretty clever when we finally pieced them together.
I was about 10 years old when I first saw A Ceremony of Carols, Britten’s multi-movement Christmas work for treble chorus and harp. I left that performance awestruck, especially by the song “This Little Babe,” which has, off and on, been stuck in my head ever since. In the years after that concert my sister and I hoped emphatically that our church’s choir would sing that song in an Advent service one Sunday; they did, eventually, but not at the breakneck speed we were hoping for.
“This Little Babe” is a Britten puzzle-piece. It begins with all voices singing one line in unison, then, like several other movements in A Ceremony of Carols, uses a canon-like structure. (In a canon, one part of the choir begins a melody, another part joins in after them singing the same melody, and the overlapping of the two or more parts creates harmony. This concept is deftly explained here by a frustrated Stephen Colbert to the band Grizzly Bear.)
But “This Little Babe” isn’t quite a round or a canon. It’s not like “Row, row, row your boat” where each voice sings exactly the same melody as every other. Nor are the entrances of each part spaced out in a way that makes the resulting harmony similar in every measure. The second verse splits the choir into two parts, the third verse in three, and each entrance in the split follows so quickly after the last (only a beat apart) that there’s a ripple effect; it doesn’t sound like harmony so much as like echoes in a racquetball court.
Performing this effect is difficult, and demands focus from the singers. The parts all end simultaneously despite their starting at different moments, which means that the second and third lines are shortened (and, therefore, melodically different) versions of the first line. These slight differences and the speed of the song make it imperative that the chorus members know their parts cold. At a length of about a minute and twenty seconds, however, the song doesn’t demand that the kids learn very much material, just that they learn it well.
Britten began work on the carols in 1942, during a sea voyage to England. He had been living in America for three years as a conscientious objector to WWII, but returned that spring. He’d recently been commissioned to write a concerto for harp, and brought some harp manuals to study on his way home. The boat he was traveling on made a stop in Halifax before crossing the Atlantic, and while on shore there he bought the excellently titled book The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems.
Among this book’s contents are Robert Southwell’s “New Heaven, New War” (from which the stanzas that make up “This Little Babe” were taken) and four other 14th-16th century poems used in A Ceremony of Carols. Britten completed drafts of seven of the carols in the five weeks before he landed in England while working concurrently on another choral piece. He reported to a friend that this happened simply because “one had to alleviate the boredom!” (Trying to calculate how many Ceremonies of Carols I could have written while bored on long trips myself has yielded depressing results.)
The final aspect of what makes “This Little Babe” so thrilling to perform is the words. The first verse begins:
This little Babe, so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise, the gates of hell he will surprise.
If you’re the kind of kid (as I was) that preferred the Christmas carols she sang to be in a minor key, and to invoke some scary images (“We Three Kings,” “What Child is This,” or “Coventry Carol,” for example) then getting to sing the words “Satan” and “hell” in concert is something you might relish. And it’s not just that these ideas are involved — you also get to sing about their being vanquished by a tiny baby. Being a child and singing about another child who fights and wins against evil is a glorious sensation — especially when all voices come together in unison again to sing the final line: If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.
“In Freezing Winter Night,” a foil to “This Little Babe,” is slower, and quieter, but its text, also by Southwell, is thematically similar. It addresses the paradox of God existing as a human baby with all the attendant weaknesses, like vulnerability to cold, but in “In Freezing Winter Night” the baby is first described as pitiful, his shivering portrayed in the chilly harmonies in the choir and dissonant harp tremolos.
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It also utilizes a sort of canon, and in this one the top two voices do sing exactly the same line. But the harmonies shift underneath them, making the role of the D-sharp sung by the first voice-part different from the role of the D-sharp sung by the second voice part. This gives each line individual musical responsibility — a feeling that both are uniquely vital to the piece.
That is Britten’s gift to children’s choruses. He trusted them with exciting text and difficult music, and gave them the opportunity to make real art despite their age. Children can tell the difference. I’ve read that he originally intended this piece to be performed by a women’s choir, and I recently got to perform it with the women’s ensemble I’m in, but the best parts of that performance were the ones where I felt I was singing like a little kid, foiling my foes with joy.
Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, “Glissandos and Glissandon’ts,” “Wedding Music,” and “Clair de Supermoon,” or learn more about Benjamin Britten on Grove Music Online.
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No jingles: an alternative Christmas playlist
Christmas is, almost inescapably, a time of music. A lot of it is familiar and much-loved, but for those who might be looking for some more adventurous listening this year – beyond Slade, the Messiah, and Victorian carols – here are some pointers to alternative Christmas music from down the ages.
“The Sign of Judgment: the earth will be bathed in sweat”. This unlikely Christmas sentiment comes from the Song of the Sibyl, a 3rd-century Greek prophecy of the Apocalypse translated into Latin by St. Augustine and whose first lines he popularized as a form of Christmas greeting to non-Christians. The poem acquired a chant melody in 10th-century Catalonia, since when it has been a feature of the Christmas Eve liturgy in churches in Spain, Italy and Provence. This is the 10th-century Latin version, performed by Jordi Savall, the late Montserrat Figueras and La Capella Reial de Catalunya:
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The Song of the Sibyl could also be performed as liturgical drama, of the kind often found in the Middle Ages. The Officium pastorum of the 13th century is another example, and in its focus on the shepherds’ story one that begins to resemble our modern Nativity. This complete performance was given by Princeton University’s Guild for Early Music in 2011.
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A century or two later, the Christmas carol as we have come to know it began to emerge. Its origins lay in a mix of secular and sacred influences, including the French carole, an important social dance that required the dancers to accompany themselves with their own singing. By the 15th century, the carol as a form of song usually on the theme of Christmas had begun to establish itself, and there are many wonderful examples to discover; this setting of the Christmas lullaby Lullay, lullow from the Ritson Mansucript of c1460–75 – different from the more familiar “Coventry Carol” of the same name – retains something of those dancing origins.
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The Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise following the Anunciation (Luke 1: 46–55) is one of the very oldest songs associated with the Christmas story, and one of the most frequently set. Great Baroque Magnificats were composed by Claudio Monteverdi (his famous Vespers of 1610 conclude with two of them) and Bach, among others. But that by Heinrich Schütz combines the Venetian exuberance with the Lutheran poise of the other to exhilarating effect.
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Sidestepping the familiar Christmas favourites of the 18th and 19th centuries we encounter in the mid-20th century a major instrumental work, Olivier Messiaen’s La nativité du Seigneur (1935), a suite of nine scenes from the Christmas story, for organ. Messiaen, a devout Catholic, was possibly the 20th century’s greatest composer of religious music, as well as one of its finest organists. His musical language employed a variety of systematic procedures and a sometimes obscure symbolism, but there is no getting away from the extraordinary power and often tender characterisation of his music. (The capricious baby Jesus in the opening movement, La vierge et l’enfant, is a particular delight.) Both sides be heard in the virtuoso final movement, Dieu parmi nous, performed here by one of Messiaen’s leading interpreters, Dame Gillian Weir:
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Another leading composer of contemporary religious music has been Sir John Tavener. Unlike Messiaen, Tavener has drawn widely from a variety of faiths in the creation of his personal theology, in particular the Greek Orthodox Church, of which he was a member for many years. Works like Ikon of the Nativity (1991), which draw on Orthodox chants and liturgical practice, retain a strange and ancient mysticism beneath their apparently simple surfaces.
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Is John Adams’s El Niño (1999–2000) the 21st century’s answer to the Messiah? Perhaps. In this “Nativity oratorio” the composer of the so-called “news operas” Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic turns his dramatic hand to the Christmas story, setting texts from the Bible and the Wakefield Mystery Plays (more medieval liturgical drama), as well as several South American poets. This extract comes from the final two sections of Part I, Se habla de Gabriel and The Christmas Star:
Click here to view the embedded video.
Finally, and to bring us right up to date, I’ve opted for Schnee (2008) by the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen. A secular choice, for certain, but if I had to choose a work that perfectly captures the frozen sunshine of a cold Christmas morning it would be this.
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Looking for an easy way to play these in one jingle-free session? Try this Spotify playlist:
Tim Rutherford-Johnson is co-editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Music Sixth Edition, with Michael Kennedy and Joyce Kennedy. He has worked for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (now Grove Music Online) since 1999 and until 2010 was the editor responsible for the dictionary’s coverage of 20th- and 21st century music. He has published and lectured on several contemporary composers, and regularly reviews new music for both print and online publications. Visit Tim’s blog here, or find him on Twitter @moderncomp.
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December 19, 2012
Limit the estate tax charitable deduction
By Edward Zelinsky
One widely-discussed possibility for reforming the federal income tax is limiting the deduction for charitable contributions. Whether or not Congress amends the Code to restrict the income tax deduction for charitable contributions, Congress should limit the charitable contribution deduction under the federal estate and gift taxes. Such a limit would balance the need for federal revenues with the desirability of encouraging charitable giving.
On December 11th, the advocacy group Responsible Wealth called for the federal government to tax estates over $4,000,000 at rates starting at 45%. Among those joining this call were heirs to old fortunes such as Abigail Disney and Richard Rockefeller and owners of new wealth such as Bill Gates, Sr. Most notably, Warren Buffett agreed (as he has in the past) with this recent plea for higher estate taxes.
I am a fan of my fellow Nebraskan and agree with him that the federal government should impose estate taxes, particularly on large fortunes. I also admire Mr. Buffett for the Giving Pledge which he has promoted with the younger Mr. Gates. Under that Pledge, wealthy individuals commit to giving at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.
There is, however, considerable tension between the Buffett commitment to federal estate taxation and the Buffett commitment to philanthropy. By virtue of the estate tax charitable deduction, when a wealthy decedent leaves part or all of his estate to charity, no estate tax is paid on these contributed amounts.
It is perfectly plausible to call for estate taxation only for those who don’t distribute their wealth to philanthropy. It is, however, hard to reconcile that position with Responsible Wealth’s advocacy of strong estate taxation. Mr. Gates, Sr., for example, declared that “it would be shameful to leave potential revenue on the table from those most able to pay.” However, that is precisely what happens when large estates go to charity, namely, estate tax revenue which would otherwise flow to the federal government is instead diverted to charity. Such charity may be worthwhile but it does nothing to reduce the federal deficit.
Similarly, Ms. Disney argued that “a weak estate tax” falls “on the backs of the middle class,” presumably because the federal government will respond to reduced estate tax revenues by deficit financing, by raising other taxes on the middle class or by reducing government spending. However, when an estate is distributed to charity free of estate taxation, the government confronts these same choices.
A compromise could preserve the incentive for charitable giving while also generating some estate tax revenues for the federal government: Limit the estate (and gift) tax charitable deduction.
Many, including President Obama, have suggested such limitations on the income tax charitable deduction. If, for example, an individual is in the 35% federal income tax bracket, the President has proposed that the donor receive a deduction as if he or she were in the 28% bracket. In a similar fashion, the estate tax charitable deduction could be curbed, thereby generating some additional revenues for the federal fisc while also keeping a tax-incentive for charitable giving.
Consider, for example, a billionaire who leaves his entire estate of $1,000,000,000 to charity. To simplify the math, let’s assume that this billionaire would pay estate tax at the 40% rate if he did not bequeath all his assets to philanthropy. Because this $1,000,000,000 bequest is fully deductible for federal estate tax purposes, no tax is paid in this example. If this billionaire had not made this charitable bequest but had instead left his money to his children, the federal government would have received estate tax revenues of $400,000,000.
Suppose now that Congress limits the federal estate tax deduction to 70% of the amount donated to charity. In this case, the billionaire would leave a taxable estate of $300,000,000. At a 40% rate, this would require a federal estate tax payment of $120,000,000.
To provide the cash to pay this tax, this billionaire would probably reduce his charitable bequest to retain cash to pay this estate tax. However, at the end of the day, charity would receive the bulk of this billionaire’s assets while the federal government would receive some estate tax.
A limit on the estate tax charitable deduction could be constructed to fall only on relatively larger estates. For example, the first $10 million of charitable bequests could be fully deductible for estate tax purposes and only the amount gifted over that threshold would be deductible in part.
Alternatively, the limit could be phased in as charitable contributions increase. For example, the first $10 million of charitable bequests could be fully deductible for estate tax purposes. Then the next $50 million of philanthropic gifts could be 90% deductible and any further gifts would be 70% deductible for federal estate tax purposes.
The details are less important than the basic policy: By limiting the estate tax charitable deduction, all large estates donated to philanthropy would pay some federal estate tax revenues at a reduced rate. This would balance the need for federal revenues with the encouragement of the kind of charitable bequests quite commendably encouraged by Mr. Buffett and the Giving Pledge.
Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears here.
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Image credit: Macro shot of the seal of the United States on the US one dollar bill. Photo by briancweed, iStockphoto.
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Semi-legal marijuana in Colorado and Washington: what comes next?
As officials in Washington State and Colorado try to decide how to implement the marijuana-legalization laws passed by their voters last month, officials in Washington, DC, are trying to figure out how to respond. Below, a quick guide to what’s at stake.
WHAT DO THE WASHINGTON AND COLORADO LAWS SAY?
Lots of crucial details remain to be determined, but in outline:
In both states, adults may — according to state but not federal law — possess limited amounts of marijuana, effective immediately.
In both states, there are to be licensed (and taxed) growers and sellers, under rules to take effect later this year.
Sales to minors and possession by minors remain illegal.
Colorado, but not Washington, now allows anyone person over the age of 21 to grow up to six marijuana plants (no more than three of them in the flowering stage) in any “enclosed, locked space,” and to store the marijuana so produced at the growing location. That marijuana can be given away (up to an ounce at a time), but not sold.
HOW MUCH OF THIS CAN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PREVENT?
Paradoxically, the regulated activity permitted by these laws is easy to stop, but the unregulated activity is hard to stop.
Although everything allowed by the new state laws remains forbidden by federal law, if thousands of Coloradans start growing six pot plants each in their basements there wouldn’t be enough DEA agents to ferret them out. The same applies to possession for personal use.
On the other hand, the federal government has ample legal authority to shut down the proposed systems of state-licensed production and sale. Once someone formally applies to Colorado or Washington for permission to commit what remains a federal felony, a federal court can enjoin that person from doing any such thing, and such orders are easily enforced. So the federal government could make it impossible to act as a licensed grower or seller in either state.
Moreover, it could do so at any time. The lists of license-holders will always be available, and at any point they could be enjoined from continuing to act under those licenses. That creates a “wait-and-see” option unusual in law enforcement situations; in general, an illicit activity becomes harder to suppress the larger it is and the longer it has been established.
WHAT IMPACT WILL THE LAWS HAVE ON DRUG ABUSE?
It is possible that removing the state-level legal liability for possession and use of marijuana will increase demand, but there is little historical evidence from other jurisdictions that changing user penalties much affects consumption patterns.
There is no historical evidence concerning how legal production and sale might influence consumption, for the simple reason that no modern jurisdiction has ever allowed large-scale commercial production. But commercialization might matter more than mere legality of use. It could affect consumption by making drugs easier to get, by making them cheaper, by improving quality and reliability as perceived by consumers, and by changing attitudes: both consumer attitudes toward the drugs and the attitudes of others about those who use drugs. How great the impacts would be remains to be seen; it would depend in part on yet-to-be-determined details of the Colorado and Washington systems.
Washington’s legislation is designed to keep the price of legally-sold marijuana about the same as the current price of illegal marijuana. Colorado’s system might allow substantially lower prices. Falling prices would be expected to have a significant impact on consumption, especially among very heavy users and users with limited disposable income: the poor and the young.
WHAT EFFECT WILL THE LAWS HAVE ON DRUG TRAFFICKING?
If the laws affect Mexican drug trafficking organizations at all, the impact will be to deprive them of some, but not the bulk, of their revenues. Transnational drug trafficking organizations currently profiting from smuggling marijuana into the US or organizing its production here cannot gain from increased competition.
The open question is how much, if any, revenue they would lose from either falling prices or reduced market share. The oft-cited figure that the big Mexican drug trafficking groups derive 60% of their drug-export revenue from marijuana trafficking has been thoroughly debunked; the true figure is closer to 25%, and that doesn’t count their ill-gotten gains from domestic Mexican drug dealing or from extortion, kidnapping, and theft. So don’t expect Los Zetas to go out of business, whatever happens in Colorado.
Legal marijuana in Washington State is likely to be too expensive to compete on the national market. But prices in Colorado might be low enough to make legal cannabis from Colorado retailers competitive with illicit sellers of wholesale cannabis as a supply for marijuana dealers in other states. To take advantage of that opportunity, out-of-state dealers could organize groups of “smurfs” to buy one ounce each at multiple retail outlets; a provision of the Colorado law forbids the state from collecting the sort of information about buyers that might discourage smurfing. Marijuana prices might fall substantially nationwide, with harmful impacts on drug abuse but beneficial impacts on international trafficking. (The state government could even gain revenue if Colorado became a national source of marijuana.)
The other wild card in the deck is the Colorado “home-grow” provision. Marijuana producers in Colorado will be able to grow the plant without any risk of enforcement action by the state, and also without any registration requirement or taxation, as long as they grow no more than three flowering plants and three plants not yet in flower at any given location. By developing networks of grow locations each below the legal limit, entrepreneurs could create large-scale production operations with a significant cost advantage over states where growing must be concealed from state and local law enforcement agencies.
Only time will tell whether Colorado “home-grown” could compete with California and Canada in the national and international market for high-potency cannabis or with Mexico in the market for “commercial-grade” cannabis. But the risks imposed by local law enforcement, and the costs of concealment to avoid those risks, constitute such a large share of the costs of illegal marijuana growing that avoiding those costs would constitute a very great competitive advantage, and illicit enterprise has proven highly adaptable to changing conditions.
IS THERE A BASIS FOR A BARGAIN?
Maybe. Federal and state authorities share an interest in preventing the development of large interstate sales from Colorado and Washington, and the whole country might gain from learning about the experience of legalization in those two states: as long as the effects of those laws could be mostly contained within those states. The question is whether the federal government might be willing to let Colorado and Washington try allowing in-state sales while working hard to prevent exports, and whether those states, with federal help (and the threat of a federal crackdown on their licensed growers and sellers if Washington and Colorado product started to show up in New York and Texas), could succeed in doing so. If that happens, it would be vital to have mechanisms in place to learn as much as possible from the experiment.
Things will get even more complex if other states decide to join the party.
So buckle your seat belts; this could be a rather bumpy ride.
Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins, and Angela Hawken are the authors of Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know. Mark A.R. Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at UCLA, editor of The Journal of Drug Policy Analysis, and author of When Brute Force Fails and Against Excess. Jonathan P. Caulkins is Stever Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Angela Hawken is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.
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