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On 27 August 1955, the first edition of the Guinness Book of Records–now Guinness World Records, was published. Through listing world records of both human achievements and of the natural world, what started as a reference book became an international franchise, gaining popular interest around the globe. In celebration of this anniversary of weird and wonderful world records, we’ve selected a few favourites from talented individuals featured in our online products.
The Very Short Introductionsare indeed very short, so I had to cut a chapter out of my volume that would have discussed the aftermath or legacy of Romanticism today, two hundred years after Romanticism’s days of glory. In that chapter I would have pointed out the obvious fact that those who still love poetry look at the Romantic era as poetry’s high point in every European country. Think of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Leopardi, Lamartine, Hugo, and Nerval. Those who still love “classical” music fill the concert halls to listen to Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Wagner; and those who still love traditional painting flock to look at Constable, Turner, Friedrich, and Delacroix. These poets and artists are still “alive”: their works are central to the culture from which millions of people still draw nourishment. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I would feel if I knew I could never again listen to Beethoven or read a poem by Keats.
But more interesting, I think, is the afterlife of the Romantics in more popular culture. Take William Blake, for instance. Almost a century after he died, Charles Parry set Blake’s sixteen-line poem “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green” to a memorable hymn tune. It was first intended for a patriotic rally during World War I, but it was soon taken up by the women’s suffrage movement and the labour movement because of its moving evocation of a once and future Jerusalem in “England’s green and pleasant land.” It is now England’s second national anthem, and is sung in America too: a Connecticut friend of mine always sings “in New England’s green and pleasant land.” It also inspired the title and the music of the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. Emerson, Lake and Palmer have recorded an acid-rock version of the hymn in Brain Salad Surgery (1973) and Billy Bragg made a more restrained but eloquent one in 1990. In 1948 William Blake “appeared” to Allen Ginsberg in a hallucination, and thus takes much of the credit (or blame) for the Beat poet’s immense poetic works. I often see Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” as grafitti on walls or as slogans on bumper stickers. When I was an underpaid teaching assistant I joined a picket line carrying a sign I had made: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Even as a well-broken-in horse of instruction today I still see much truth in that proverb.
A major legacy of Romanticism is the environmental movement. John Muir (1838-1914), the great pioneer of the wilderness preservation movement, and founder of the Sierra Club, combined a Romantic sensibility with an outlook based on the Bible. He absorbed Burns from his native Scotland, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley from England, and Emerson and Thoreau from his adopted America. Thoreau himself, who was close to the Transcendentalist group, which grew in large part out of German and British Romanticism, was the first great nature writer in America; his Walden is still required reading not only in universities but among those who are devoted to conservation and sustainability. Wordsworth himself, of course, deserves some credit for his role in preserving the Lake District; he is sometimes called the grandfather of the National Trust of the UK
It is true that the environmental movement owes much to modern science, and most modern scientists no longer consider Romanticism a useful source of concepts. However it is also true that without something of the Romantic sensibility, especially the feeling of connectedness to nature or rootedness in the earth, it would not be much of a movement. “Organic” metaphors were common among the Romantics, notably the idea that nature is not a mechanism but a living organism and that in an open and imaginative state of mind we can, as Wordsworth put it, “see into the life of things,”. It seems to me that the holistic and ecological outlook owes much to this spirit. Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), famous for his best-selling Sand County Almanac with its “land ethic,” writes of the “biotic community” and the importance of “thinking like a mountain” to understand the complex interrelationships of humans and nature. And what could be more holistic than the “Gaia” theory of James Lovelock (born in 1919), according to which the whole earth acts like one huge organism or ecological unit?
“Romantic” is often a pejorative term, used to dismiss unrealistic, escapist, woolly, or dreamy ideas. But it now seems likely that if we don’t soon become a little more Romantic, the earth will dismiss us.
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: A portrait of William Wordsworth from Portrait Gallery of the Perry–Castañeda Library of the University of Texas at Austin [public domain via Wikimedia Commons]
Bob Dylan does not want us to know who he is. He recently turned seventy, and if no one has figured him out by now, nobody probably ever will. The Andy Warhol Factory’s Screen Test of Bob Dylan, filmed in 1965 attempts to get close to him, figure out what is underneath the voice and lyrics. He sits impatiently, looking down most of the time, unsmiling. He could be anyone, which is really the point of being Bob Dylan. As David Yaffe points out in Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, the screen test demonstrates that “[b]eing Bob Dylan has apparently already gotten old.”
Yaffe does not set out to find Bob Dylan’s core, but instead gives us a series of portraits that peel back enough layers to understand what the various cores look like. One of these layers is Dylan through the medium of film, which includes numerous documentaries and an appearance singing in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. (The oddness of the commercial diminishes—slightly—after reading this report which claims that in the same year he made Andy Warhol’s film, Dylan said “ladies’ undergarments” might be the only thing that would entice him to sell out.) Even in the cases where the singer was not directly involved in a movie, he still used the production to further complicate his image.
He wrote, directed, and starred in his own a movie, which still has no official video or DVD release because the four-hour-long Renaldo and Clara was, as Joan Baez called it, “a giant mess of a home movie. What makes it worthwhile to Yaffe is that Dylan appeared as another self-constructed version of himself, even if the rest was a surrealist disaster. Documentary makers have tried to show that in film, as in concert, the musician “had a black self, a symbolist poet self, an outlaws self, a misogynistic matinee idol self.” More recently, he gave full reign to the director of I’m Not There, allowing a wide assortment of actors, including a woman and an African American, to add new representation to both his real-life and onscreen character. He is as much one person’s reaction to him as he is all the faces he has willingly presented to his fans.
And speaking of American icons: The Yankee Clipper has had a great run so far this season, thanks in no small part to Jerome Charyn’s new biography, Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil. On Facebook, almost 1,800 fans have gathered this spring for new updates on Joe, his relationship with Marilyn, his status as an American icon, and to share personal stories, music, photos, videos, stats and updates from the treasure troves of info about DiMaggio online.
Don’t miss your chance to hear Charyn speak in person! At noon next Thursday, June 2, he will be at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca, where he will tell all about DiMaggio and sign copies of his book!
It’s the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan, once known as Robert Allen Zimmerman, and as part of our Icons of America series, David Yaffe, a music critic and professor of English at Syracuse University, has uniquely written about the musician in Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown. The subtitle may seem paradoxical for such a ubiquitous persona, but as Yaffe observes:
He exists on stage and in our dreams, our fantasies, our real and concocted histories, our colleges, our state fairs, and our concert halls at the same time. He exists as history, and yet he lives, walking into that dark, foggy unknown.
In the book, Yaffe explores Dylan’s complicated relationship to blackness (including his involvement in the civil rights movement and a secret marriage with a black backup singer), the underrated influence of his singing style, his fascinating image in films, and his controversial songwriting methods that have led to charges of plagiarism. These are the makings of Dylan’s iconic status, as part of the American postwar culture that continues to fascinate contemporaries as well as new generations of fans: in 2009, Dylan’s new album Together Through Life debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, and you can count on his concerts to fill their venues with scores of people, young and old. Check out today’s article on The Daily Beast, where Yaffe has written on Dylan’s legacy and the peculiarities and controversies that have made him such an important and lasting figure in music and pop culture.
We’ve teased for months, but the wait is finally over: today, the exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” opens at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Costume Institute curator, Andrew Bolton, author of YUP’s accompanying catalog, the show features approximately one hundred examples will be on view, including signature designs such as the bumster trouser, the kimono jacket, and the Origami frock coat.
Earlier this year, we interviewed Bolton on his reflections on how McQueen’s designs have contributed to fashion and the most memorable aspects of his influence.
Yale University Press: McQueen’s designs are popular with celebrities and the public alike; what is it about his designs that make them so special/appealing?
Andrew Bolton: Much of the appeal of McQueen's fashions derives from their theatricality, often conveyed through their historicized silhouettes. McQueen was drawn to periods in which fashions were particularly extreme and exaggerated, such as the 1860s, the 1880s, the 1890s, and the 1950s. But while he looked to these epochs for inspiration, his fashions always appeared emphatically contemporary.
YUP: For McQueen fashion was an art form, and his runway shows were often theatrical productions. Did you have a favorite show/collection?
AB: One of my favorite runway presentations was McQueen's spring/summer 1999 collection, entitled "No. 13." The collection was inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, and featured the athlete and model Amy Mullins in a pair of hand-carved prosthetic legs. McQueen's promotion of beauty rarely adhered to classical or platonic ideals. For him, beauty was to be found in difference, in anomalies and irregularities.
YUP: McQueen has been called the most influential designer of his generation; do you think his work will stand the test of time? Where would you place McQueen in the fashion pantheon?
AB: McQueen’s impact on fashion is uncontestable. You only have to think of his “bumsters” to appreciate the extent and enormity of his influence. But his legacy extends beyond specific designs to his general philosophy of fashion. For McQueen, fashion was not just about utility and practicality but also about ideas and concepts. In this respect, he was an artist whose medium of expression happened to be fashion. Like many artists, McQueen’s fashions were reflective of his personality and state of mind. They were intensely autobiographical.
YUP: Other than McQueen's frequent use of tartan, are there specifically "British" qualities about his work?
AB: There are many British qualities to McQueen’s fashions. The most obvious is his tailoring. McQueen trained with the Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard, and as early as his MA graduate collection in 1992 the influence of menswear tailoring could be seen in his fashions.
Typically, however, he would upend or subvert the principles of tailoring in his pursuit of modern, innovative silhouettes. He has turned suiting inside out, upside down, and back to front– ripping and tearing it apart like a demonic Edward Scissorhands. In fact, this punk attitude is typically British and typically McQueen. For McQuee
Matters of personal choice easily become the defining qualities of celebrity scrutiny. When Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg decided not to play in the 1934Yom Kippur game against the Yankees, baseball went into an uproar. American Jews loved him, and many fans were furious. That Greenberg was to be identified with religiosity was peculiar, Kurlansky writes, because Yom Kippur “is a solemn day of fasting and prayer that is so significant in the Jewish religion that it is often observed by secular Jews—so-called Yom Kippur Jews. Greenberg was not even a Yom Kippur Jew. And yet his Jewish observance had become a national issue.”
This becomes the lens through which Kurlansky investigates Greenberg’s life, looking at his character both on and off the field to arrive at a portrait that wholly encompasses the at times conflicting demands of Judaism, athleticism, and heroism. When asked what quality most defined Greenberg as a man, Kurlansky responded: “his humility, without a doubt.”
Tomorrow at the 92nd Street Y, Mark Kurlansky will appear for a talk about Hank Greenberg in conversation with David Margolick. And on April 8, Kurlansky will begin a national twenty-city radio tour. For more news and updates, be sure to follow Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One on Facebook.
Only one month away from the Royal wedding, and the anticipation will only go up from here. Earlier this month, Prince William and Kate Middleton made the cover of Entertainment Weekly titled, "You are invited to a MEDIA FRENZY!", photo slideshows on websites, and this doesn’t even count all the tabloid coverage and junk news sites. And of course, everyone wanted to know about the dress, to be designed by Alexander McQueen design lead, Sarah Burton, Style List leaked earlier in March after months of speculation. There’s a rumor going around that it’s going to be red…but that shouldn’t be a stretch for the McQueen team. The dress will be a nice lead-up to the Met’s Costume Institute exhibition, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” opening in early May, looking back on McQueen’s transformative power on fashion.
Our Sales Conference is the same day as the wedding; the Brits get a national holiday.
Still, I invoke bragging rights as a UP with an office in London because of the kinds of books acquired there and published here. (If you’re fans of ours, be sure to check out the London Yale Books blog and Facebook pages.) In one case, the author was right here on campus and I never knew until the book was nearly out: The Eagle and the Crown: Americans and the British Monarchy, by Frank Prochaska, lecturer in Yale’s History department. His book let me know that I’m not alone; quote me.
I had a poster of the monarchy from Alfred the Great to Elizabeth II, brought back from a trip to London, at age eight; it accompanied one of those classic-style Ladybird books. I hung it on the wall and memorized the lineage and successions, actually a great party trick: just give me a year and I’ll tell you the British monarch or vice versa. And there was all the American news about Diana and Fergie and Charles—somewhere around the house there was a commemorative china dish for Elizabeth’s coronation, coffee table biographies of Diana and Vicotria. I never heard others’ families talk about the Royalty, never rummaged through their belongings for the obscure trinket. People collect all kinds of this stuff!
From the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, to Princess Diana, members of the royal family have been major players in the emergence of America’s obsession with fame, offering and exclusive and classy contrast to the instant creations of the media. Hereditary kingship also propels British ceremonial, which has dazzled the citizens of a young nation comparatively lacking in hallowed settings and traditions. American expressions of joy and sorrow at royal marriages and funerals, coronations and jubilees have been extraordinary, given the rej
Watch on YouTube for a brief interview with Jerome Charyn, author of Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, on the many sides of Joltin' Joe and the legacy of this iconic player!
And once that whets your appetite, listen to Charyn speak at length with Chris Gondek on the newest episode of The Biography Podcast.
Another book in our Icons of America series has just been published: The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon, by Leo Braudy. Braudy, University Professor and Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California, has written the first comprehensive history of the Hollywood Sign, which was erected in 1923 as a temporary real estate advertisement only to become a permanent part of our cultural heritage.
Last week, Braudy interviewed with CBS/KCAL 9 in Los Angeles to talk about the book and the evolution of the sign from its “Hollywoodland” days to its present landmark status, and the many LA visitors who come every year to snap a photo. Check out the video here, and read more on the sign’s history with a slideshow at Slate.
The Facebook page for Jerome Charyn’s Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil has nearly reached 1,000 fans (more than the official Joe DiMaggio page!), and the book’s official publication date isn’t even until tomorrow! The page is loaded with stories about Joe and from fans, fun facts, videos, and photos from yesteryear, when Joe’s image took center stage on magazine covers and front-page recaps.
If you need a little incentive, check out Charyn’s interview on NBC’s All Night with Joey Reynolds. Timed for our celebration of Women’s History Month, we’ll have a guest post from Charyn on the romance between Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe going up shortly on the blog. Help Joe’s fandom reach 1,000 today and stay tuned for more updates!
P.S. For e-reader fans, the long vigil ends tomorrow when the book is released from your favorite eBook provider.
In September 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered by white supremacists in Money, Mississippi, his grieving mother, Mamie Till Bradley, distributed to newspapers and magazines a gruesome black-and-white photograph of his mutilated corpse. Asked why she would do this, Mrs. Bradley explained that by witnessing, with their own eyes, the brutality of segregation and racism, Americans would be more likely to support the cause of racial justice and equality. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” was her reply. The publication of the photograph transformed the modern civil rights movement, inspiring a new generation of activists to join the cause.
Organized by curator Maurice Berger of the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institute, the exhibition “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights” has traveled from the International Center of Photography in New York to its current location at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. For those unable to see the images in person, there is an extensive website with an online exhibition, film festival, and information about the Yale University Press companion catalog.
Featuring a broad range of media including photography, television, film, magazines, newspapers, and advertising, the images narrate the struggle for civil rights with the often excluded visual history of the period: the startling footage of southern white aggression and black suffering that appeared night after night on television news programs; the photographs of black achievers and martyrs in Negro periodicals, which roused pride or activism in the African-American community; the humble snapshot, no less powerful in its ability to edify and motivate. In each case, the war against racism and segregation was waged not with brick or flesh or words but with pictures—potent weapons that forever changed a nation. It is a legacy and reminder of what was hard-fought and gained on public ground, the advancement of equal rights for all to see.
Last Thursday, Adam Bradley, one of the editors of The Anthology of Rap, appeared on Minnesota Public Radio alongside Mark Anthony Neal and Toki Wright to discuss the past 30 years of rap and hip-hop and how they have risen to become the cultural tour-de-force we know today.
Meanwhile, the phenomenon has never been exclusive to the United States. Check out the Yale London Blog to read up on how the book is being received by critics overseas.
Boxing is arguably the most intense of individual sports—high stakes, blood, sweat, and (involuntary) tears, all eyes on you in the ring. It’s no mean feat to hold the title of world heavyweight boxing champion for nearly twelve years. In fact, it’s a record still held today, over sixty years after it was set. Under these lights is how Joe Louis obtained his iconic status.
Like so many of the sports figures we best remember and celebrate, Joe Louis contributed greatly to the wider culture of blacks’ place in America. An instant hero for African-Americans, Louis’ rise to nationwide hero came in 1938 when he entered a rematch with German boxer Max Schmeling, who had brutally defeated Louis in 1936. As Randy Roberts notes in his biography, Joe Louis: Hard Times Man, nearly 100 million people heard the broadcasted fight, and at a time when anti-Nazi and anti-fascist sentiments were on the rise, Louis was symbolically poised to defend American values by facing off against Schmeling, one-on-one. The fight took place on June 22, 1938, a year to the day after Louis had secured his title, back in Yankee Stadium where Schmeling had won before.
The second Louis-Schmeling match connected democratic America and fascist Germany in a compelling, dramatic narrative. The contest focused America’s attention on the differences between American and Nazi ideologies, throwing anti-Semitism and racism into sharp relief. Making the matter even more vivid, a black man became the symbol of the American way of life. Joe Louis, the son of a sharecropper, carried the mantle of democracy, racial equality, and the rule of law. On the surface, the fight would settle once and for all who was the rightful heavyweight champion. But just beneath the surface, visible to all, swirled important political, social, and cultural issues. The fight tracked in conflicts between political orders and world systems, between shining goods and indescribable evils. As America and the world pitched toward war, Joe Louis became one of the iconic images, the irreducible core, of the conflict.
In just over two minutes, Schmeling was out.
Louis became a touchstone figure for all Americans throughout the mid-century and into the Civil Rights movement. When he volunteered to enlist in the army, his image was widely used in the media to recruit African-Americans for WWII. He was the first African-American to appear at a PGA Tour event in 1952. Noted figures like Lena Horne, Jackie Robinson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jimmy Carter referenced the inspirational qualities of his career fights. We remember him as a fighter, but Roberts’ portrait, removing certain mythologies of his celebrity, presents the true legacy of Joe Louis as a man.
Hollywood Sign: The famous icon is ever a tweetable mention. @amanduhh417 @Miss_Savory @DJSamSneaker are among the many to pass it today. With the Oscars coming up next weekend, we’re getting ready with Leo Braudy’s The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon.
@AlisaCosta @kaydora1 @RichardAlbert: February 18, 1688 marked the first formal protest against slavery. Meanwhile, revolution was brewing in England. What a year! (February 18, 1861 was the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as provisional President of the Confederate States of America.)
The preeminent mistress of all book clubs has turned her readers ' attention towards the Victorian past. Yesterday, Oprah announced two Charles Dickens classics, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, rounding off the 2010 Oprah's Book Club selections for discussion on Dickens to follow in January 2011.
Already Dickens is quickly remembered at the holidays for the eternally popular Christmas Carol and spin-off creations, and the bitter, hard winters in urban England that are fixed in our cultural imagination of the Victorian era. Without question, he was the most popular writer of his time, enjoying fame and recognition when many struggled to sell a story, and his prominence in the English language has burgeoned over the past two centuries. As Robert Gottlieb wrote earlier this year in the New York Review of Books: "There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there’s no such thing as a boring biography of them."
This was the opening to a collective review of Dickens biographies, the most recent among them, Michael Slater's Charles Dickens. Gottlieb, who knows a thing or two about publishing books, goes on with the praise that "Michael Slater makes the most original contribution: his command of Dickens’s occasional writings and of his work as an editor seems complete." Slater, who is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck, past President of the International Dickens Fellowship, and former editor of its journal, The Dickensian, has served for many years as a Trustee of the Charles Dickens Museum, including several periods as Chairman; he has no shortage of expertise on his subject. Even to the native British audience, Slater's tremendous work resonates as what the London Times called a "once-in-a-generation biography."
Although Oprah herself has not read the two classic selections, fans of Dickens, old and new, will have more to contribute to the conversation from reading Slater's biography and discovering the joys and turmoils of this most highly esteemed novelist and writer.
If you’ve been missing the buzz about Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois’ new Anthology of Rap, there’s a chance to catch them on the East Coast at DC’s Lincoln Theater on Tuesday, November 16 and in New York on Wednesday, November 17 at the 92nd Street Y-Tribeca.
The editors’ entourage at each venue includes Common and Kurtis Blow in DC and Touré, Grandmaster Caz, and LaTasha Diggs in New York, to name a few. Be sure to grab a ticket while they’re still available.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the popular Doonesbury comic strip, first published in 1970 by Garry Trudeau. Doonesbury’s origins lie in Trudeau’s undergraduate strip, Bull Tales, for the Yale Daily News. Trudeau first published Doonesbury shortly after graduating Yale College, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Record, and he continued at Yale, earning his MFA in graphic design in 1973.
To celebrate the milestone, Trudeau has appeared on NBC’s Today Show and NPR’s Morning Edition to discuss forty years in syndication of “some of the most memorable characters ever sketched”: B.D., Zonker, Joanie Caucus, Mark Slackmeyer, and, of course, Mike Doonesbury. Meanwhile, Brian Walker, author of the new Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau, has contributed an adapted piece for Slate.com, accompanied by a slideshow of Trudeau’s art, and the site features tributes from several others, including Gail Collins, and “Doonesbury’s 200 Greatest Moments.”
Next Wednesday, November 3, look for both Walker and Trudeau to appear at the Yale Barnes & Noble for a book signing from 12:30 – 1:30pm and a talk at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at 5:15pm. Both events are free and open to the public.
If you’re a Doonesbury fan, be sure to grab a copy of Walker’s book and check out the accompanying Facebook page for more updates.
Is this awesome or what? The long-awaited trailer for The Anthology of Rap, edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, is finally here. By bringing together more than three hundred lyrics written over thirty years, from the “old school” to the “golden age” to the present day, the book doubles as both a fan’s guide and a resource for the uninitiated.
Check out the trailer and more updates will continue to flow as the book's November 9 publication date approaches!
This
summer, the InternationalCenter for Photography in New
York is presenting the exhibition For
All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,
curated by Maurice Berger, a professor at University
of Maryland, BaltimoreCounty.The show presents film and television clips, photography,
newspapers, and other objects in order to demonstrate the role that they played
in enabling civil rights changes and in establishing the character of the
movement.
For those
of you unable to get to the exhibition, reviewed
by Laila Pedro in Idiom magazine as “one
of the most careful and engaging curatorial efforts I’ve seen in a long time,”
there are a host of other ways to experience the exhibit.There is an online version
of the exhibition, which offers some of the images and written ideas behind the
organization of the show, and an online film
festival which matches seventeen films with short essays. All of the films are easily available on DVD,
and the corresponding essays establish their connections to and influences on
the civil rights movement.
The
exhibition will also be travelling to the National Museum of American History
in WashingtonD.C. and the Center
for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at University of Maryland Baltimore County.Whether or not you make it to the
show, you can bring the experience home with the exhibition catalogue, which is
available from the Yale Press website.
To
learn more about the exhibition, check out this video from PBS’s Sunday Arts.They featured the exhibition in their August
1 show, and posted the piece online.
Many are
likely looking forward to the upcoming three-day weekend in celebration of
Independence Day.Perhaps you are headed
to visit with friends and family, or having them over yourself.No matter where you are going, you’ll
probably want to relax sometime between eating and the fireworks.If you are still looking for a book to bring
along with you, consider picking up one of the books in Yale Press’s Icons of America series.Each short book examines American life and
culture—no matter what your interests, there is a book that will intrigue you.
For those
interested in reading about the founding of America on this fourth of July,
Gore Vidal’s Inventing
a Nationoffers an
intimate look at George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson as a trio
vital to creating today’s America, examining their writings, relationships, and
ideas closely.The book is both a
telling of the founding of the nation, while also weaving together the history
with the personal lives and writing of the three.This is an excellent read if you are
interested in delving in the past this July 4th, coincidentally the
date on which both Adams and Jefferson pass away, albeit years after the events
in Vidal’s work.
The most
recent installment in the series also covers early America, though it continues up
until the present.Gary Nash’s The Liberty Bell is a cultural
history which tells the story of how the bell cast in 1751 in England as a
replacement for a smaller Philadelphia State House bell becomes a major cultural
icon which seems to continually reflect issues of the day.It becomes strongly connected to the history
of the nation on July 8th 1776, the bell rang when the Declaration
of Independence was fir
Although photography has been around since the late 1800s, its prevalence in today’s society has been a recent rise. With the advent of digital cameras and a more celebrity-oriented society, everyone can be paparazzi. Exposed, a collection of photographs by Sophie Calle, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol and many more, asks the question: when does exposure become overexposure? Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides essays and commentary about some of the more invasive aspects of photography, such as hidden cameras and questions the morality behind the voyeuristic background of cameras. For a budding photographer or just the occasional picture-snapper, this book provides artistic, political and even moral dilemmas behind many artists’ most famous works.
The Tate Modernwill be showcasing some of these famous images from 5/28/10 –10/03/10, where viewers can judge for themselves whether these images are invasive or artistic—or perhaps both.
Can’t make it out to the Tate Museum? Check out this clip here where Sandra Phillips talks about the themes behind camera exposure, with images of the exhibit at the Tate in the background.
Philip Gefter at The Daily Beast also wrote a feature about the exhibit, with a gallery of images that you can peruse at your leisure. From Jackie Kennedy running from the camera, to a close up of Paris Hilton’s face inside a vehicle, events of all different natures have been captured on film.
In an interview with PBS reporter Bob Abernethy, Marilynne Robinson, the award-winning author of Gilead and Home discusses her Protestant faith and its deep roots in her Idaho home. She also reveals her abiding suspicion of the writings of the so-called new atheists, much of which is covered in her new book published by Yale University Press, Absence of Mind.
An excerpt from the interview follows the video:
ABERNETHY: Robinson has great respect for the 16th-century reformer John Calvin, who she says was far more compassionate than his stern reputation suggests—for instance, about forgiveness.
ROBINSON: The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know, so you err on the side of forgiving. You assume your fallibility, and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God—or is God himself.
ABERNETHY: So you cannot judge. You have to forgive. But Robinson is very critical of the work of the so-called new atheists.
ROBINSON: I think this sort of avalanche of literature we have gotten lately is very second-rate. It simply is not well informed and not well considered. I mean I consider it to be kind of noise.
