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Today is technically the birthday Ted Geisel, an unexceptional student and notorious troublemaker that most know little of. His literary persona, on the other hand, is known and loved around the globe. In Theodore Seuss Geisel, the biography written by Donald E. Pease, we get a glance at the person behind the literary icon. Pease is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African-American Literature at Dartmouth, the Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, the Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth, and the Chair of the Dartmouth Liberal Studies Program. In the following excerpt, Pease chronicles how the man who created the Grinch and the Cat in the Hat, slyly concocted “Ted” into “Dr. Seuss,” the genius we celebrate today.

The year 1925, Ted’s last year of college, began auspiciously: he took over editorial responsibilities for the Jack-O-Lantern and enjoyed the social standing that came with the position. The year before, he had been one of twenty students elected as member of the Casque and Gauntlet, perhaps the most prestigious of the senior honor societies. Campbell, along with Pete Blodgett, Larry Leavitt, and Kenneth Montgomery, initiated him to the renowned Knights if the Round Table and fifteen of the twenty members moved into the Casque and Gauntlet’s house during their senior year. But Ted decided to share a more economical room with Robert Sharp in a clapboard boardinghouse for students and faculty that was run by Ma and Pa Randall.

As graduation approached Ted was surrounded by classmates who had clear plans for their future. Campbell was about to enter Harvard Law School, Blodgett prepared for a career in banking, and Sharp was going to graduate school in English. At a final meeting of the Casque and Gauntlet the members voted their predictions for one another. After ballots were counted the Knights of the Round Table achieved unanimity on only one decision: that Ted was “least likely to succeed.” With a grade point average of 2.45 and an academic ranking of 133 in a class of 387, the vote did not come as a complete surprise. He turned the incident into an occasion to demonstrate his gifts at self-caricature. Having succeeded in becoming the Jack-O-Lantern’s editor, Ted had acquitted the only honor that truly mattered to him. But he was about to undergo an experience that proved almost as disorienting as his family’s misfortunes in Springfield. On the evening of Holy Saturday, April 13, 195, Ted invited nine members of the magazine’s staff to his room at the Randall house, where they part took of the bottle of gin he had purchased that day from a bootlegger who had earned President Hopkin’s seal of approval. At the peak of the evening’s festivities, Ted and Curtis Abel climbed onto the tin roof of the source of the fluids showering down his roof (and deficient of the capacity for merriment), Pa Randall imagined the worst of the offenses and called the Hanover police. Ehen the chief of police raided the apartment, he tool all the young men into custody for violation of liquor laws.

After a hearing Craven Laycock, the roundtable dean of students, placed Ted and his friends on probation for defying prohibition on one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar. Furthermore Laycock removed Ted from the poison of editor of the Lack-O-Lantern and barred him from contributing to the periodical he’d spent four years establishing as a cutting-edge college publication. Ted considered the terms of the punishment excessively severe. Laycock’s decision to remove him from the editorship of the Jack-O-Lantern recalled previous scenes of humiliation that he had undergone: his schoolmates’’ insults during World War I, Roosevelt�

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the success of the internet.

You’ve heard the Luddite gripes about the digital age: computers dehumanize us; text messages are destroying the language; Facebook replaces real friends with imaginary ones; instant messages and blogs give people a voice who have nothing to say. But now a new set of complaints is emerging, this time from computer scientists, internet pioneers who once promised that the digital revolution was the best thing since sliced bread, no, that it was even better, Sliced Bread 2.0.

It started in the mid-1990s with Clifford Stoll. You may remember Stoll as the Berkeley programmer who tracked down a ring of eastern European hackers who were breaking into secure military computers, and wrote up the adventure in the 1990 best-seller, The Cuckoo’s Egg. But a mere five years later Stoll published Silicon Snake Oil, a condemnation of the internet as oversold and underperforming. In a 1995 Newsweek op-ed, Stoll summed up the internet’s failed promise of happy telecommuters, online libraries, media-rich classrooms, virtual communities, and democratic governments in one word: “Baloney.”

More nuanced is the critique of Jaron Lanier, the programmer who brought us virtual reality, but who now labels life online “digital maoism.” In a recent interview in the Guardian, Lanier charged that after thirty years the great promise of a free and open internet has brought us not burgeoning communities of online musicians, artists, and writers, but “mediocre mush”; a pack mentality; recreations of things that were better done with older technologies; an occasional Unix upgrade; and an online encyclopedia. His conclusion: it’s all “pretty boring.”

And although internet guru Jonathan Zittrain praises the first personal computers and the early days of the internet for promoting unlimited creativity and exploration, he warns that the generative systems which enabled users to create new ways of being and communicating are giving way to tethered devices like smart phones, Kindles, Tivos, and iPads, all of which channel our communications and program our entertainment along safe and familiar paths and prohibit inventive tinkering. Zittrain reminds us that the PC was a blank slate, a true tabula rasa that let imaginative, technically-accomplished users repurpose it over and over again, but he fears that the internet appliance of the future will be little more than a hi-tech toaster programmed to let us do only what the marketing departments at Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon want us to do.

It’s easy to ignore the Luddites. The internet isn’t destroying English (you’re reading this online, right?) or replacing face-to-face human interaction (Facebook or no Facebook, babies continue to be born). Plus, we’re all using computers and the ‘net, so how bad can they be?

But what about the informed critiques of experts like Stoll, Jaro

Purdy, Director of Publicity

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

Back in August 2009 Oxford University Press, Inc. was approached by producers at ABC’s Extreme Makeover, “We will be building soon in the DC area for a family that runs a nonprofit afterschool program for children. We will be building a new learning center for the program, and were wondering if Oxford might be interested in providing some books for the children.” This is not the first time we’ve been approached by Extreme Makeover, but it was heartening to see that any titles would benefit a community of children, rather than a single family. I quickly alerted my colleagues and we managed to pull together a number of reference books, children’s classics, and bi-lingual dictionaries from our ELT team we thought the kids might appreciate and find useful. We sent them off to a warehouse to await the inevitable demolition and reconstruction of the house/school. After many months I received word that construction is complete and the episode will air on ABC, Sunday, February 14, 2010. A happier valentine’s day gift we could not have hoped for here at OUP USA, and hope the kids of the Fisher School enjoy and benefit from our modest donation.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the release of the iPad.

Launching Apple’s long-awaited iPad, Steve Jobs promised that his “magical” device will not just let us surf the web, play games, videos, and tunes, and check our email, it will also do for reading what the iPod did for listening to music. Like writing, and the printing press, and the personal computer, it will change our lives.

Jobs’ hyperbole isn’t surprising — he’s launching a product, after all, and he’s got stockholders to answer to, so he wants it to sell and sell big.

What is surprising is the profound skepticism of technophiles — including long-time Apple fans — to the announcement of a device that none of them has tried, and that still remains pretty much a mystery.

Here are some of the complaints that surfaced on the day Jobs rolled out the iPad, which won’t actually go on sale for a couple of months:

* it’s too expensive (new technologies are seldom cheap — an original IBM PC, the workhorse of personal computers, went for over $5,000 in 1983);
* it’s just a big iPhone, only with the phone left out (were you really expecting to make phone calls from something that big?);
* it’s a tablet computer, only with the computer left out (in case you didn’t notice, Apple already makes a perfectly good laptop; the iPad must fill a different niche or risk competing with the MacBook);
* it won’t run Linux (or Snow Leopard, or DOS 1.1, for that matter)
* it won’t run Flash apps, and it has no camera (yes, those will be missed)
* the battery isn’t removable (is it a problem for the MacBook? or the iPhone?)
* nobody really knows what it can do, so it probably won’t do anything (that’s pretty pessimistic considering the many unanticipated uses we’ve found for other digital products)
* it’s no Kindle, but even so it will destroy reading, not promote it (reading has always been a technology — and what threatens reading is not a new way to deliver text, it’s people’s reluctance to read widely and critically)
* it’s got a name that cries out for parody.

Technophobes warn that the digital revolution is destroying life as we know it, rotting our brains every time we click. If the widespread adoption of personal computers is any indicator, no one is listening to them. But what are we to think when cutting-edge technophiles warn us off a new device, one they haven’t had a chance to explore but which they already find profoundly disappointing?

Maybe the critics are on to something. And yet, nobody knew what to do with iPods when they first came out, and now they dominate the market for mp3 players. The iPhone didn’t take off, initially, because it didn’t do a lot more than just make calls, and it was just too expensive to tempt users. Now it has an app for everything, and it’s the phone to beat. With that sort of Apple track record, it might be more appropria

By Nikita as dictated to Betsy DeJesu, Publicity Manager

My name is Nikita, and I’m an 8 year old domestic shorthair cat with – as I’ve been told more than once – gorgeous green eyes. I live with my mom in a teeny apartment in Astoria where I routinely nap, stare daggers at birds outside the window, and read tons of books. I’m also the unofficial feline mascot for Oxford’s illustrious publicity department. I don’t know if that is a real position or just something my mom made up when she was begging her boss to please stop hating four-legged creatures. Regardless, I’m here to share my love of the written word with everyone, people and furry creatures alike.

I thought long and hard, between naps and inexplicable staring sessions at the ceiling, about what I wanted to chat about for this post. I found myself getting super-sleepy and a little ho-hum, and then I realized what was going on – it’s the doldrums of winter! And they are back with a vengeance. Once the last holiday leftovers have been eaten and right before everyone’s New Year’s resolutions are broken, the long, dark, and boring days of winter set in. With the exception of a few fun days, there isn’t much to look forward to until summer hours kick in around May. So what can you do to help make those cold, snowy months skip by, just like the way that feather attached to a string skips around and drives me nuts? Well, you can read a book! Here are a few good ones that I recommend:

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
Katniss is a 16 year old girl living in a post-apocalyptic America that is ruled by an all-powerful, all evil, totalitarian regime. Once a year the government throws the Hunger Games, an elaborately televised game of survival in which 24 children from the country’s 12 districts are chosen at random to fight against each other to the death. When Katniss takes her little sister’s place in the games, she quickly finds herself in a world where “Survivor” meets Lord of the Flies (with a smidge of a love triangle thrown in for good measure!) Though considered a Young Adult title, Hunger Games should in no way be relegated to just the tween shelf. There is already a sequel, Catching Fire, and the final book in the trilogy will be out this summer. Go Team Peeta!

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
I dare you not to be compelled to devour this book after this first sentence – “After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper…” Seriously, that is a great first sentence. Cox’s The Meaning of Night is a Victorian mystery with all the trappings: murder, romance, dark alleys, big mansions, secrets, and lies. Also check out Cox’s follow-up (and sadly, his last book; he passed away in April 2009) The Glass of Time.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Even if you didn’t go to a prestigious boarding school like the one in Prep, high school was still probably the same for everyone – dramatic, awkward, fun, stressful, and most likely filled with a few all-consuming crushes.

Mark Singleton teaches at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He is the editor, with Jean Bryne, of Yoga in the Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives. In his new book, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, he questions commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today.  In the excerpt below, Singleton introduces the reader to Hatha Yoga.

The techniques and philosophical frameworks of the Saiva Tantras form the basis for the teaching of hatha yoga, which flourished from the thirteenth century CE and which entered its decline in the eighteenth…The term hatha means “forceful” or “violent,” but it is also interpreted to indicate the union of the internal sun (ha) and moon (tha), which symbolically indicates the goal of the system…As Mallinson…has noted, the corpus of hatha yoga is not doctrinally whole and does not “belong” to any one single school of Indian thought.  It is nevertheless closely associated with Goraksanãth and his teacher Matsyendranãth, who is credited with founding the Saiva Nãth sampradãya (twelfth century CE?).  In practice, however, there was a high level of orthopractical and organizational fluidity between the Nãths (also called Kãnphata, or “split eared”) and other yoga-practicing groups.  The yoga-practicing tyãgis of the Vaisnava Rãmãnandis, for example, were closer to the Nãths in terms of ritual and religious experience than to their devotionally inclined (rasik) Rãmãandi brethen…; close organizational trade ties obtained between Nãths, Sufi fakirs, and Dasnãmi samnyãsins, and there was a great deal of interchange between these various groups…; and at least until the late 1800s, Nãth yogins recruited novitiates without regard for caste or religion, attracting many Muslim yogins into their fold…This all contributed to a permeability among hatha yoga practicing groups.

The earliest of the well-known texts of hatha yoga is probably Goraksa Sataka (GS), ascribed to Goraksanãtha, followed by Siva Samhitã (SS, fifteenth century CE), Hathayogapradipikã (HYP, fifteenth-sixteenth century), Hatharatnãvali (HR, seventeenth century), Gheranda Samhitã (GhS, seventeenth-eighteenth century CE), and the Jogapradipakã (JP, eighteenth century). As Bouy (1994) has shown, hatha yoga techniques aroused much interest among the followers of Sankara’s advaita vendãnta, and a number of texts from Nãth literature were assimilated wholesale into the corpus of 108 Upanisads compiled in South India during the first half of the eighteenth century.  Mallinson…has demonstrated that the orthodox vedãntin bias of these compilers resulted in the omission of some key aspects of Nãth hatha yoga, such as the practice of khecarimudrã. As we shall see, a similar process of omission occurred during the modern hatha yoga revival.  Since many of the ãsana systems considered in this study purport to derive from, or to be hatha yoga, a brief examination of the main features of its doctrines and practices is in order…

Hatha yoga is concerned with the transmutation of the human body into a vessel immune from mortal decay.  GhS compares the body to an unbaked earthenware pot which must be baked in the fires of yoga to purify it a

Paul Abramson is a professor of psychology at UCLA and one of the world’s leading authorities on sex.  His new book, Sex Appeal: Six Ethical Principles for the 21st Century, Abramson makes us keenly aware of all the damages irresponsible sex can cause, celebrates the many ways sex can deepen and strengthen relationships, and firmly opposes limiting personal freedom based on sexual orientation.  In the excerpt below, from the beginning of the book, Abramson introduces his first principle: Do No Harm.

Why do I begin with harm? Sexual harm puts people off.  Might a more optimistic principle be a better place to start?  How about enjoyment, ecstasy even?  After all, this book is about sex, so why not start with a bang?

I certainly considered as much and quite frankly in a perfect world would not have hesitated to begin with the most exciting aspects of sex.  But unfortunately the sexual world is anything but perfect.  The best place to ethically improve it, I believe, is with the principle, and more importantly the habit, to do no harm.

Take a look at the numbers.  In 2004 there were 95,089 forcible rapes in the United States reported to the FBI.  In 2005 the number was slightly less, 93,934.  This translates, at least where female victims are concerned, into approximately 32.2 forcible rapes per 100,000 women a year.  Considering that only a small percentage of rapes are actually reported, and that males can also be victims of rape, these numbers are extremely alarming, to say the last.

Or consider our schools.  The frequency of serious violent crime (which is a composite or rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault statistics) committed against 12- to 18-year-old students is staggering.  In the five-year period from 2000 to 2004, there were 639,000 incidences of serious violent crime against students while in American schools.  This translates into a rate of approximately 5 serious violent crimes per 1000 students.  (Incidentally, outside of school it is even worse, with over one million serious violent crimes committed against 12- to 18-year-olds between 2000 and 2004.)

When sexual assault is committed against very young children (under 6) in the home, the perpetrator of it is most likely to be sexually assaulted by an acquaintance over 18 years of age.  The bottom line is this: kids are not truly safe from sexual assault in either the home or at school.

Abroad, the situation is not much better – often much worse, in fact.  Consider for example the incidence of sexual harm in strife-torn countries such as Nigeria.  Amnesty International reports that Nigerian perpetrators of rape are rarely punished and that females have no forum for redressing the crime of rape.  If that were not bad enough, Amnesty International also indicates that Nigerian police and security forces routinely commit rape as well, often as a strategic means of intimidating communities.  This tragedy is by no means limited to Nigeria.  Many countries, like Burundi, have a high incidence of rape, or, like South Africa, a low conviction rate for rape (Nigeria has both.)

There can be little doubt that sexual harm is an epidemic with global impications.

Now imagine this: as a first step in training all children about sex, parents around the globe (and societies more generally) teach the simple rule to “do no harm.”  Imagine too that this instruction was extraordinarily effective.  What would this world look like?  What benefits would accrue?

For the most part, we would have an adult population that did not commit rape or date rape, did not sexually abuse, sexually harass, sexually assault, or perpetrate any of the oth

Sarah Russo, Associate Director, Publicity

Sean Sime is a professional photographer with a personal interest in birds and nature photography. He has photographed two field studies for the American Museum of Natural History in Brazil in 2001 and 2003–a team led by Helen Hays, Director of the Great Gull Island Project/AMNH. As you will learn below, he has a deep fondness for bird guides and reads them as you or I would a novel. He is not alone in this seemingly odd habit as a marketing survey done in 2000 for the National Audubon Society Sibley guide to Birds determined that one in four Americans considers themselves to be a “birder.” Brazil is one of the ultimate birder destinations with 1,712 species third to only Colombia and Peru respectively. You can see more of Sean’s work at www.seansime.com.

Just when I needed you most.

So you’re wondering why I’m dropping quotes from Randy VanWarmer, the one hit wonder king of 1979. I just got a look at Ber van Perlo’s A Field Giude To The Birds of Brazil. It hit me like a freight train, like running into an old girlfriend on the street…a girlfriend you begged and pleaded to stay. The one who, when all was said and done made you feel frustratingly numb, staring cross-eyed at the wall.

Let me backtrack. In 2001 and again in 2003 I traveled to Brazil with researchers from the AMNH tracking Common and the endangered Roseate Terns. We traveled up the coast from Sao Paolo north to Recife by boat, plane, and automobile. Although my duties were of the photographic nature and quite intense, I am a birder and by definition that means any spare minute would be spent looking for all things avian.

At the time my choice of field guide was either the two volume biblical tome The Birds of South America, by Ridgley and Tudor or Birds of Southern South America and Antartica, a pocket guide by De La Pena and Rumboll.

The choice wasn’t that difficult. Dragging around 60 pounds of camera gear left little room for extra weight. Ridgley and Tudor would stay home. How hard could Brazilian birds be? Especially given the fact I was going to be predominantly on the coast.

After 26 hours of travel I awoke in Bahia. There’s my first bird sallying across the hotel lawn. It’s a flycatcher. It’s black and white. This should be easy. Break out my handy field guide. Plate 75 … It’s a black and white, well…something. Now to say the illustration was of a skunk, or an Oreo may be an exaggeration, but let’s just say I wasn’t counting the number of primary feathers from these drawings. By the time I found the correlating range maps (in the back of the book) I realized I was trying to turn this bird into a one that lives in Argentina! The bird had flown. Now it’s down to the memory of my brief glimpse before I started fumbling through my guide. Did it have white

Way back in October the OUPblog announced that in honor of the National Book Awards we were hosting a friendly contest, to see who could predict the most winners.

Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail!

In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

In third place with one point was Christopher Elias who will get a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition).

A great big thank you to everyone who participated and to all the fabulous authors who wrote books we enjoyed this year.  2009 was chock-full of great literature and we can’t wait to read what you publish next year!

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone.

1. They’ve turned into a robot.
“People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.”

That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends you never hear from except when they want you to join a cause, sign a petition, donate money, become a fan of a product, or otherwise promote something. Farmville robots are increasingly becoming problems as well, but are not yet grounds for unfriending.

2. You don’t know who they are.
“A few days ago, Facebook suggested I reconnect with a friend whose name I didn’t recognize,” said Jessica Kay, a lawyer in Kansas City. “She’d recently gotten married, but I hadn’t even known she was engaged. I’ll probably unfriend her later. Along with some random people I met at parties in college.”

“You’re tired of seeing [that mystery name] your newsfeed,” said Jonathan Evans, a contract specialist in Seattle. “You haven’t talked to that person since the random class you took together, and you’ll probably never talk to them again.”

3. They broke your heart.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, shared that his number one reason to unfriend someone is “because they just broke up with you on Facebook.”

So, maybe they didn’t break your heart. But if the only reason you were friends on Facebook is because you two were somehow involved, it might be time to play some Beyoncé, crack open the Haagen-Dazs and click “Remove from Friends”.

4. You don’t like them anymore.
In the early years of Facebook, users would  friend everyone their dorm, everyone from high school, and every person they had ever shared a sandbox with. But now, many people are finding they no longer like a number of their friends, and spend time creating limited profiles, customizing the newsfeed, and avoiding Facebook chat.

Teresa Hynes, a student at St. John’s University, pointed out that it’s silly to be concerned one of these people might find out you’ve unfriended them and get angry. “You are never going to see them again,” she said. “You don’t want to see them ever again. You hated them in high school. Your mass communications group project is over.”

5. Annoying status updates.
“I don’t want to see ‘So-and-so wishes it was over,’” said Andrew Varhol, a marketing manager in NYC. “Or the cheers of bandwagon sports fans—when suddenly someone’s, ‘Go Yankees! Go Jeter!’ Where were you before October?”

Excessive status updates are one example of Facebook abuse. Amy Labagh of powerHouse Books admits she is irritated by frequent updates. “It’s like they want you to think they’re cool,” she said, “but they’re not.”

A professor at NYU, agreed, and said he finds a number of these frequent updates to be “too bourgie.” “It’ll say something like, ‘So-and-so is drinking whatever in the beautiful scenery of some field.’ I mean, really?!”

The style and type of each update is also important. A number of users agree that song lyrics, poetry, and literary quotations can be extremely annoying. Updates with misspellings or lacking punctuation were also noted. “I once unfriended someone because they updated their statuses in all caps,” said Erin Meehan, a marketing associate in NYC.

6. Obnoxious photo uploads.
Everyone has a different idea about what photos are appropriate to post , but a popular complaint from Facebook users in their 20s concerned wedding and baby photos. “It’s just weird,” said a bartender in Manhattan. “I know that older people are joining now, but if you’re at the stage in your life when most the photos are of your kids, I mean, what are you doing on Facebook?”

“I think makeout photos are worse,” said his coworker. “My sister always posts photos of her and her boyfriend kissing. Sometimes I want to unfriend and unfamily her.”

Across the board, a number of users found partially nude photos, or images of someone flexing their muscles as grounds for unfriending. Another reason, as cited specifically by Margitte Kristjansson, graduate student at UC San Diego, could be if “they upload inappropriate pictures of their stab wounds.”

7. Clashing religious or political views.
“I can’t handle it when someone’s updates are always about Jesus,” said Robert Wilder, a writer in New York.

In the same vein, Phil Lee, lead singer of The Muskies, said he’s extremely irritated by “religious proselytizing and over-enthusiastic praise and Bible quoting. Often in all caps.”

An anonymous Brooklynite shared that he purged his Facebook account after the last Presidential election. “It was a big deal to me,” he said. “I found it hard to be friends with people who didn’t vote for Obama.” After which his friend added, “I voted for McKinney.”

8. “I wanted a free Whopper.”
In January, Burger King launched the Whopper Sacrifice application, which promised each Facebook user a free Whopper if they unfriended 10 people. It sounded simple enough, but if you chose to unfriend someone via the application, it sent a notification to that person, announcing they had been sacrificed for the burger. Burger King disabled the application within the month when the Whopper “proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Since Facebook has made the home page much more customizable than it used to be, you might wonder, “Why unfriend when I can hide?” More and more, Facebook users are choosing to use limited profiles and editing their newsfeed so undesirable friends disappear from view. “I find lately I’m friending more people, then blocking them,” said Gary Ferrar, a magician in New York. “That way no one gets mad, no one’s feelings get hurt.”

Do you have another reason? Tell us about it!

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

Laura Pappano, co-author with Eileen McDonagh of Playing With The Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal, is an award-winning journalist and writer-in-residence at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. She blogs at FairGameNews.com . In the original post below, Pappano discusses  Elizabeth Lambert’s hair-pulling and sportsmanship in women’s athletics.  Read Pappano’s previous OUPblog posts here.

Outrage over New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert’s dirty play – including her ponytail-yanking an opponent to the ground – is justified given this egregious act of poor sportsmanship.

But as the conversation and video have gone viral – from SportsCenter to NFL pre-game shows to David Letterman – the subtext has become less about comportment and more about the gendered expectations of female athletes.

Guys fighting in sports – whether ice hockey or baseball – is considered a “natural” by-product of intense play and, well, testosterone. They can’t help it. When women get heated in competition (ask any high school female athletes about trash talking and you’ll get an earful) there is a perception that they’re supposed to act…differently.

In a season of throw-backs, you can add this to the list: Just as our grandmothers insisted that girls don’t sweat, they “perspire,” there remains a narrow range of acceptable behavior for female athletes. Such rigidity is not new (in previous eras women basketball players were required to wear makeup in competition and submit to half-time beauty contests), but until Lambert we had thought the rules had evolved – at least a little.

The increasing skill level and intensity of women’s sports even at high school and college levels should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Problem is, of course, many have not been paying attention. Women’s sports remain poorly covered by the mainstream male sports media. News outlets hardly feel obligated to report on even major events (it took digging to get the result of the WNBA final). And chatter about Lambert on sports talk radio last week on the Boston station I listen to was preceded by the admission that “we have never talked about women’s college soccer on this program and we will probably never talk about women’s college soccer again, but…”

The fact remains that while female athletes have developed skills, hard-charging attitudes and leave-it-all-on-the-field seriousness about their play, we still view them as grown-up girls (in ponytails) who might be doing cartwheels in the backfield if they thought they wouldn’t get caught.

Some little girl-female athlete affinity is purposeful marketing. That’s the justification for Saturday afternoon college basketball games and cheap tickets. And, certainly, why shouldn’t women’s teams, from college basketball to professional soccer build a fan base from those who can relate to them as role models? Isn’t that the NFL’s goal fulfilled when millions of boys paste Ladanian Tomlinson Fatheads on bedroom walls and wear Peyton Manning jerseys to school?

Promoting athletes as role models, of course, is always tricky. But where men get a pass for bad behavior, women draw fire.

We forgive Michael Vick, and gasp when Serena Williams screams at a line judge’s late call at the U.S. Open.

We must get past the notion that female athletes are “nice” first and good second, and women’s games should be peddled as “family fare.” It is tiring to hear enlightened men describe themselves as “supporters” of women’s sports as if they are charitable donors. No one likes dirty play. But if Elizabeth Lambert just made people see that women’s sports are highly intense, competitive, and exciting, well, good for her.

Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the original post below we learn five new things about West Side Story.

1. Did you know that choreographer Jerome Robbins insisted on making the Jets snap their thumbs against their index fingers instead of their middle fingers? Try it, it’s much harder. That’s the point. Robbins wanted to make the Jets stand out from other finger snapper.

2. Did you know that in Arthur Laurents first two libretto drafts Maria kills herself with dressmaking shears. Starting with the third draft, five more drafts, and the final draft, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria alive, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

3. Did you know that some of the great tunes in West Side Story contain recognizable connections with famous classical melodies? My favorites are the allusions to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the theme Wagner created to depict the Redemption through Love in his Ring cycle, since in these cases Bernstein’s references are so interesting dramatically as well as musically.

4. Did you know that Sondheim was originally listed as a co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein? When the early reviews ignored Sondheim’s contribution, Bernstein offered the Broadway newcomer sole lyricist billing and the royalty split that went with it. In an unthinking moment he would always regret Sondheim replied, “Don’t be silly. I don’t care about the money,” and turned down the opportunity to split the 4% lyric royalties. Instead of receiving 2% of the lyric royalties, Sondheim thus retained his original 1%.

5. Did you know that the film soundtrack of West Side Story was the Number 1 best selling album of 1962 from May 5 to June 16 and again for the week of October 6-13?

Our OUP-UK friends Helen Eaton, Assistant Commissioning Editor, Academic Science and Dewi Jackson, Publishing Editor, Higher Education, recently went on a trip to South Africa.  In honor of our 2009 Place of the Year selection they have shared their experience with us and some stunning photos.  Be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here

We recently spent 20 days in South Africa split between Cape Town, the Garden Route, and Kruger National Park.

Cape Town is a beautiful and unique city filled with plenty of things to do and see whatever your taste. It is watched over by Table Mountain – an imposing 1000m rocky mountain that fills every vista. The views of the city and surrounding sea from the top are incredible – you can either hike up it or take the easy cable car option (as we did). Day trips to Cape Point (the site of many shipwrecks) and inland to the famous Cape Winelands are highly recommended. We certainly enjoyed eating and drinking in the ‘Mother City’!

The Garden Route is a verdant strip of coast stretching east from Cape Town. Its towns are small and friendly and its beaches pristine. South Africa is famous for having some of the best whale watching in the world and it didn’t disappoint. The whales swim so close to land that you can easily watch them from the shore, but we took the boat option and got within feet of 18m long Southern Right Whales. Just inland from here we visited Oudtshoorn in the Little Karoo, the home of ostrich farming, where we saw, rode, and ate the largest bird in the world.

You can drive yourself around National Parks and Game Reserves in South Africa – in a VW Polo in our case – making for a more personal experience. Be aware, however, that this means if you get into trouble there may be no one around to help you, as we found when trapped between a lone elephant bull walking down the road towards us and a large herd crossing behind. We’ve never wanted a Humvee more.

In the Kruger National Park we were lucky enough to see the Big Five (Africa’s ‘trophy’ animals) – Elephant, Lion, Leopard, Buffalo, Rhino. But there’s much more to the Kruger experience – its smaller creatures and bird life, the views, the unique sounds of the African bush at night, and cooking an enormous steak on your braai make it truly memorable.

South Africa is a worthy winner of ‘Place of the Year’. Nowhere else in the world can you experience beautiful landscapes and incredible wildlife at the same time as eating in exquisite restaurants and relaxing on empty beaches. We had a wonderful holiday there and I’m sure that anyone who visits after reading this will do too!

1. Table Mountain viewed from Cape Town harbour. Photo by Dewi Jackson
2. Growing wine outside Cape Town. Photo by Dewi Jackson
3. Ostriches in the Little Karoo. Photo by Helen Eaton
4. Spectacular scenery on the Garden Route. Photo by Helen Eaton
5. Buffalo in the Kruger Park. Photo by Dewi Jackson
6. Lions in the Kruger Park. Photo by Helen Eaton

Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

Jancis Robison, wine connoisseur and editor of  The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition, recently revealed the drawbacks of South Africa’s stringent wine standards: because South African wine law mandates that 100 % of the grapes must be grown in the appellation (geographic location) specified on the bottle, consumers usually have no idea exactly where their wine is from. According to Robinson this is a shame given that there are more than 80 appellations in South African wine country; terroir clearly shapes how a wine tastes and this law precludes wine drinkers from learning anything about “the Cape’s wonderfully varied geography.” But on the plus side, the average quality of wine being exported from South Africa has improved immensely.

In continuation of our “Place of the Year” celebration, I offer you some quick facts on the growing South African wine industry from The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition. After successfully gleaning two or three talking points for your next tasting or wine/cheese mashup, be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Beginner
You have a case of “Two Buck Chuck” in your kitchen. Wine falls in two categories: white and red.

• South Africa has only 1.5% of the world’s vineyards, but it is one of the world’s top ten wine producers.
• The winelands are widely dispersed throughout the Western and Northern Cape, some 700km/420 miles from north to south and 500 km across, strung between the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
• Just as Europe and America people are drinking less, but better, South Africa has shifted away from a beer-and-spirit-only consumption pattern. This coupled with a tenfold increase in exports between 1993 and 2003 has shifted the focus to quality not quantity for South African vine-growers.

Intermediate
You have been a member of the Wall Street Journal wine club (WSJwine) for over a year now. When out for drinks you are confident in returning a glass to the bar because “it has turned.”

• The father of the South African wine industry was 33-year-old-Dutch surgeon Jan van Riebeeck, sent to establish a market garden to reduce the risks of scurvy on the long sea passage between Europe and the Indies. In 1652, seven years after sailing into Table Bay, he recorded: ‘Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes.’
• The Benguela current from Antarctica makes the Cape cooler than its altitude may suggest, which means many new vineyard areas south towards Agulhas as well as on the west coast offer the prospect of a long, slow ripening seasoning.
• White varieties constitute by far the majority of Cape vineyeards. Chenin Blanc, known sometimes as Steen, has for long been the dominant grape variety in South Africa.

Advanced
“Education and Work” on your Facebook profile includes “seasoned viticulturist.” If you are a devout Catholic you steer clear of the chalice—even on religious holidays. And you have this commited to memory.

• Controlled malolactic fermentation, reduced dependence on flavour-stripping filtration and stabilization processes, as well as new canopy management strategies and increasing vine densities have all played a role in the increase of wine quality.
• The definition of ‘dry’ in relation to South African wines sold on the domestic market has recently been changed: the maximum residual sugar content is now 5 g/l rather than 4 g/l/.
• Pinotage, the Cape’s own crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, is becoming increasingly popular and was the single most planted new red vine variety in 1996 (Chardonnay was the white) although it still represented only 6.7 per cent of the nation’s vines in 2004.

Purdy, Publicity Director

The National Book Award nominees were announced earlier this week. Kudos to all nominees, especially to our friends & compatriots at the nominated University Presses. I am glad to see the great good wisdom of the nominating committee at the NBAs. Congratulations aside, it is tradition here in the OUP publicity dept to host a little friendly contest to see who can pick the most NBA winners. This year I am inviting our blog readers to join the fray and send me your picks.  Details below.

Please note there is a point system in this contest. Correct picks in Fiction and Non-fiction will each receive 1 point each, 2 points for a correct pick in YA literature, and 3 points for a correct pick in the Poetry category. Please, only one submission per person. Send your entry to [email protected].

In the event of a tie, all entrants with the highest score will be placed in a raffle for prizes. Prizes include a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition), the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. One prize per player. I reserve the right to disqualify anyone I feel is trying to game this friendly competition. Awards are announced on November 18th. Winners here will be announced on November 20, 2009. Good luck.

FICTION (1 point)
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

NONFICTION (1 point)
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE (2 points)
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

POETRY (3 points)
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Jennifer Fisher, is Associate Professor of Dance, University of California, Irvine, and co-editor of When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders with Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies at Pomona College.  The book offers a progressive vision that boldly articulates double-standards in gender construction within dance and brings hidden histories to light in a globalized debate.  In the original article below Fisher looks at the Tom DeLay’s appearance on “Dancing with the Stars.”  You can watch the video of his appearance here.

It would be easy to say that Republicans shouldn’t dance because they are out of step with the times, so I won’t say that. Exactly. But sometimes, dance metaphors are really useful—like when you’re confronted with the image of former house majority leader Tom DeLay, who shook his booty as a contestant on this season’s “Dancing with the Stars.” It has to make you wonder if dancing doesn’t always reveal more than we suspect it might. It’s true that the popular TV series has traditionally been used to boost the image of fading or disgraced “personalities,” along with some merely adventurous athletes and soap stars, but this had to be a first. It was not only a moment designed to sell the products in commercials between the action (because it is, after all, television), it was one to make us ponder who should be dancing and who should not, bless their publicity seeking hearts.

I used to get a big laugh when I invited my dance history students to imagine a world in which then-president George W Bush had to study dancing in order to look powerful on the ballroom floor. That’s what world leaders from Louis XIV to George Washington had to do, in an age when a manly image did not exclude the wearing of silk brocade breeches and mastering the art of the pirouette. Alas, guys just don’t dance now if they want to be taken seriously as world leaders—they have to keep both feet on the ground, like John Wayne would have if he’d held elected office. A shame, really. Leaders in many locations in Africa, of course, have always danced to look powerful, taking up space, keeping their own rhythm, ruling a whole bunch of people not afraid to move.

But in today’s American political climate, nearly every man fears looking dorky while dancing—just picture Bush in that youtube clip trying to “get down” with between an African drummer and dancer on Africa Malaria Day. It’s no wonder it’s impossible for my students to imagine a conservative man in a suit who can let his hair down and boogie in flashy clothes like John Travolta. Could a solid but goofy looking Republican dip his partner? Let his backbone slip? Bust a serious move? The very idea was hilarious. And yet, in an odd twist of fate, this fantasy became reality on “Dancing with the Stars”. Tom DeLay actually became the poster boy for Republicans gone wild. When he made his first entrance as a contestant, wagging his nether regions and playing air guitar to the strains of “Wild Thing,” it was hard to know where to look. Maybe the intent was to look fun and vulnerable. He only succeeded in looking out of step.

Of course, because there is always a need for “news of the very weird” somewhere between the real news and the sports, we had been prepared for the event. Journalists must have burned the midnight oil winnowing down the number of catch phrases to describe it—“Republican Steps Left,” “The Hammer does the Hustle,” and, more to the point, “DeLay dances back into the limelight.” After all, no one mistook Delay’s decision to compete on a TV dance competition as a bid to master another skill or find his next career as a comedian. “Dancing with the Stars” is all about gaining visibility for the “stars” (the personalities) and, for the producers, it’s all about selling products with personal tales of triumph over the odds. Very quickly, dance metaphors in the press pointed to the real subject—partisan politics and a possible comeback for the disgraced politician. “DeLay dances all over the leaderless GOP,” one said after DeLay was interviewed, and “Delay cha-cha-ing back into the GOP fray.”

Stephen Colbert came up with a joke about how DeLay “gerrymandered” the bones in his feet in preparation for the competition—not a great laugh but a reminder about the fact that the former congressman had been accused of gerrymandering schemes and was indicted by a Texas grand jury for breaking campaign finance laws. “DeLay is no wild thing,” his reviews said, and surely they were referring to his terpsichorean skills rather than trying to counter the allegations that shadowed his political career. Or were they?

In the process of covering this painful (for dance lovers) DeLay dance debut, a lot was revealed about perceptions of dance, as well as the fear most men have of dancing. A few examples: An ABC interviewer started out by pointing out that DeLay’s daughter is a professional dancer, but DeLay himself was a very serious guy, so how did he put the two things together? Strike one for the seriousness of dance. But that wasn’t the point. DeLay answered that conservatives can also let their hair down and have fun. Strike two—we’ve all seen Bush wave his hands in imitation of dance and Obama sway with the instincts of the adept, so we know not everyone has success letting their hair down. Strike three was a rhetorical slip when Delay responded to, “Why go on Dancing with the Stars?” He said, “I love dancin’, I’ve been dancin’ all my life—I haven’t danced for about 20 years, but I love dancin’.” Yes, congressman, but are you or have you ever been a member of a dancing party? Dance-wise, he should have taken the fifth before he proved so inconsistent a witness.

But, you say, give the guy a break—he gave dancing a try, big-time. At least you might have said that after seeing him struggle in that “Wild Thing” number (check youtube if your stomach is strong). Does that make him part of that maverick breed of American men who don’t care about the “real men don’t dance” stereotype? It’s a very brave category of individualists who choose to dance despite the obstacles for men. It takes a man who is secure of his masculinity to let go of the iron man mentality and embrace his softer, more bodily articulate side. Now, they are brave, bucking macho trends and creating new visions of what men can do. Is Tom DeLay one such guy? Nah. In a pre-show interview, DeLay exhibited the classic timid male fear of sequins and pink and, although there was much kidding about developing his “feminine side,” this seems more of a gimmick that a growth experience for the man who’s house when he was a bachelor used to be known as “Macho Manor.”

You want to give him credit for wearing a sequin lined vest for his first cha-cha appearance, and for the sheer nerve of risking choreography in an arena where he couldn’t hide his incompetence. But then you feel an agenda somewhere, based on the knowledge of DeLay’s past views and inflexibility. Somehow, his dancing doesn’t look like he’s learning how to go with the flow or make a move in the right direction. It looks a whole lot more like faking it to get attention. “The body never lies,” Martha Graham said famously. But the jury is still out on that one.

Last week Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, appeared on The Daily Show.  Below you can watch her interview with Jon Stewart.  Then scroll down and read the top three questions everyone has been asking her since her appearance.

1. Is Jon Stewart as short as they say? I met Jon a few minutes before the show started in the “Green Room,” which is where guests wait before going on air. Basically, so many people told me he was so short that I was expecting a midget to walk in the door. Compared to that preconception, Stewart is not that short! I certainly think I’m taller than him, but his stature didn’t really make an impression. What struck me instead was how quick and smart he is, with an immediate rapid fire patter and stream of jokes. I was also surprised at how he looked different in real life than on TV. There are subtle distortions to the face on camera and in person he was leaner with more defined features. He has mesmerizing blue eyes which I focused on during the interview so I could keep up with what he was saying!

2. What does Jon Stewart say to you after the interview is over and the cameras are still rolling? I wish I could remember! I have no recollection of our last exchange, it was probably some basic thank you’s or pleasantry, and I think he probably helped me step off the stage. By the time I exited the set, I had completely forgotten what we talked about – it must have been a psychological reaction to the high pressure of the situation. Our conversation came back to me in great detail when I watched the show later that evening.

3. Are you mad he plumped the books of two Daily Show staffers at the end of the show? Not at all! It was a huge honor to be chosen for the show and has exposed my book to a wide and enthusiastic audience who might not have heard of it otherwise. There’s nothing like TV for legitimating intellectual production! Seriously, I appreciate that Jon Stewart is both a consummate entertainer and a really smart guy who values books and ideas, and I think his ability to blend humor and serious discussion is a great gift to contemporary America.

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.  His newest book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they serve, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.  It is with this monstrous perspective (sorry I know it is an awful pun) that Asma looks at Where the Wild Things Are in honor of its release this weekend.

With hindsight it seems fitting that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) first appeared in cultural space somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Where the Wild Things Are is a rock’n’roll story, about being misunderstood, rebelling against authority, letting your hair down, and generally indulging in the Dionysian rumpus. It’s not surprising, then, that the new film version (Warner Brothers) is brought to us by skateboarding music-video director Spike Jonze and literary mega-hipster Dave Eggers.

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

Sendak’s monsters are just repulsive enough to be alien, foreign, and mysterious, but they’re also vaguely cute and familiar enough for us to identify with them and recognize our emotional selves in them. Sendak claimed in later interviews that the monsters were based loosely on his boyhood perceptions of his frightening aunts and uncles. Like a distant relation, our uncanny monsters are alien aspects of our own identity –they are parts of who we are, unfamiliar aspects of our psyches. This common way to read monsters –as primitive, uncivilized versions of ourselves –is obvious in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the forthcoming Universal Pictures remake The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Monster stories have a cathartic function, in the sense that they give our tamed, repressed impulses a brief holiday of Bacchanalian revelry. And after these virtual trips to our own hearts of darkness, we can better return to our everyday social world of compromise, accommodation, and compliance. On this account, the monster story is the favorite genre of our reptilian brains (the real home where the wild things are).

However, every era has its own uses and abuses of monsters. The lesson of Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often taken as a liberal lesson in tolerance: we as a society must not create outcasts, or persecute those who are different. Or consider that the medieval mind was obsessed with giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. And the medieval period also began the Church’s long fascination with demon possession. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies –warnings of impending disaster.

Besides the cuddly monsters of Where the Wild Things Are, our present day fascination seems dominated by zombies, vampires, and serial killers. Why are we so entranced by these specific creatures –why do we love to hate them?

Not only are there more zombies around these days, but they seem to be getting faster and more aggressive. Gone are the slow lumbering goons of the George Romero-era zombies, and in their stead we have lightning fast undead predators. Zombies, just like vampires, serial killers and most other monsters are terrifying because you cannot really reason with them. Unlike your other enemies, you cannot appeal to monsters to recognize that you’re a good hearted person, or you’ve got kids, or you really understand their pain, or you only want to understand them in the name of science. They’ll pummel you and eat you anyway. There’s not much common ground, in terms of rationality or emotional solidarity. One suspects there is a link between a decade of American fear of terrorists, and a rise in zombie monsters that do not respond to negotiation.

But zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. Everybody wants to live forever. That’s a given. If you can’t remember wanting to live forever, then you’re probably a successful and functional adult. But the inner narcissist –the one that thinks he’s God and wants to live forever –is still in you somewhere, buried deep. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death. No one actually cheats death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic inner-child is impossible given the brute facts of our animal mortality. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed, as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative –from something we like, to something disgusting (just like in potty training).

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

Vampires are a much more glamorized and sexualized version of the attraction/repulsion dynamic. From Polidori’s original Vampyre, to Stoker’s Dracula, to today’s teen vampires of Twilight, the blood drinkers are, generally speaking, totally hot. The play of sexual taboos in vampire stories is well appreciated. But in addition to the always titillating presence of neck-kissing and the exchange of bodily fluids, we have to recognize that vampires are romantic monsters. They are incarnations of the irresistible but damaging femme fatal for boys, and the “bad boy” or cad for girls. A vampire is frequently an archetype of the charismatic, handsome, man, who seduces women by his very indifference toward them. Women find him alluring and seek chase, only to discover too late that they are broken upon his heartless unmovable nature. The vampire holds out the promise of love, but alas lacks even humanity.

Vampires and zombies share another well-spring of horror: you could easily become one. You or your loved one is just a little bite away from contracting the disease. In the age of AIDS, swine flu, SARS, and myriad pandemic anxieties, it’s easy to see why monsters who transmit their monstrosity through bites (both sexual and gustatory) are especially frightening. In the medieval mind, monsters and demons were metaphysically different from you and I, and in the unlikely event that you were transformed into one you could be sure it was the result of serious sin. Nowadays, however, casual, accidental contact can make you “one of them.”

One suspects that losing one’s humanity, or becoming one of them, is also at play in our dread fascination with serial killers –real and imagined monsters. We have extensive media coverage, and corresponding public appetite, for real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and so on. Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and of course eat their innocent victims?

Before the 1950s, very few people would have suggested that a serial killer was anything like you, or I, or churchgoing folks. And yet, now it is commonplace for people to think of psychopaths as just slight (albeit horrifying) deviations on the otherwise normal brain or psyche. A murdering psychopath is not a demon-possessed creature or an offspring of Cain, but a guy who failed to develop normal levels of human compassion. Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some combination, but we don’t think that Gacy, Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, or Leatherface, are metaphysically different from us. We have secularized the evil of such psychopaths only recently, and maybe this is one reason why we love to hate them.

Just as Sendak’s monsters give us a kind of Rousseauian view of going “back to the wild” (wherein the authentic self is discovered, uncorrupted by society), so too Leatherface and similar monsters of “torture porn” give us a kind of Freudian view of going native. We’re attracted to serial killers because they lack conscience, hurt their enemies with impunity, and feel very little. They do the stuff we might do, if we had not been socialized properly. We’re attracted to their animalistic primitive powers. But we’re simultaneously repulsed by them because they lack the precise qualities that make us human.

If Rousseau and the hippies are right, then our inner primitive monsters will be more like Sendak’s beasties; weird, a little dangerous, but ultimately helpful. If, however, Freud is right about the kinds of monsters inside us, then we shouldn’t go too often or too long to where the wild things are.

Like rock’n’roll, the wild primitivism of monsters is tempered by bourgeois (and simply human) needs for security, safety and stability. Howlin’ Wolf is sanitized into Elvis, the “long haired” Beatles have to wear suits, the mud-soaked Woodstock kids are ready to go home after the weekend, and Sendak’s little “Max” misses his mom and leaves his monsters to return to “his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.”

I’m having a rough day so I thought it might help my mood to browse through the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations edited by Ned Sherrin.  Below are some quotes the restored the smile to my face.

Mistakes and Misfortunes

“My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents…is to stay in bed all day.  Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.” – Robert Benchley 1889-1945: Chips off the old Benchley (1949) ‘Safety Second’

on premature calls of a win in Florida in the presidential election of 20oo:
“We don’t just have egg on our face.  We have omelette all over our suits.” – Tom Brokaw 1940-: in Atlanta Constitution-Journal 9 November 2000.

“I was mistaken for a prostitute once in the last war.  When a GI asked me what I charged, I said, “Well, dear, what do your mothers and sisters normally ask for?” – Thora Hird 1911-2003: in Independent 27 February 1999

“If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.” – Leon Trotsky 1878-1940: My Life (1930).

Technology

“No man can hear his telephone ring without wishing heartily that Alexander Graham Bell had been run over by an ice wagon at the age o four.” – H. L. Mehken 1880-1956: Marion Elizabeth Rodgers Mencken: The American Iconoclast (2005)

“Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories – those that don’t work,those that break down, and those that get lost.” – Russel Baker 1925- : In New York Times 18 June 1968.

“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.” – Paul Ralph Ehrlich 1932- : in Saturday Review 5 June 1971.

“The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.” – David Hockney 1937- : in Observer 10 July 1994 ‘Sayings of the Week’

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

For years, the public has not been able to get enough of Paris Hilton. She’s famous as a socialite, heiress, model, and now for joining the likes of Socrates and Mark Twain on the pages of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. No, she’s not quoted for saying, “That’s hot.” Ms. Hilton is instead immortalized for her advice, “Dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”

But Paris’s entry is only one of more than 20,000 new quotations added to 7th edition. Other notable inclusions come from Sarah Palin, Stephen Hawking, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Philip Pullman. Here, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations editor Elizabeth Knowles reflects on the history of the almost 70-year-old treasury, and how new entries are chosen.  To learn more check out the companion site here.

A classic reference book like this has to be regularly remade, without compromising its essential identity. Can we in fact have the modern and frivolous without damaging our book? I would say most definitely yes, where usage so dictates, and adduce in support two luminaries of the Oxford University Press of over sixty years ago. In 1931, planning the book, Kenneth Sisam, who identified an “intelligent elasticity” as an essential editorial quality, wrote to a colleague, “We shall have to guard against things quotable, as apart from things commonly quoted.” And in 1949, when the second edition was being planned, Humphrey Milford (formerly Publisher to OUP) commented, “I think the levity—comparative—of ODQ is partly the reason for its success.” In other words, the diversity of the book, and its mixture of the deeply serious and the frivolous, based on what people are quoting, is part of its essential nature.

Quotations are part of the fabric of the language: we use, and meet them, every day. We quote when we find that the words of another person, in another time and place, express exactly what we want to say. Or, events bring certain quotations to prominence, as the last year has given new relevance to Thomas Jefferson’s comment that, “Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

A dictionary of quotations is not a roll-call of the great and the good, nor a listing of an editor’s favorite passages. Although having said that, of course we all do have items in which we take a particular pleasure. I was especially pleased that the formulation, “We must guard even our enemies against injustice” (attributed to the radical Tom Paine) was revealed as the writer Graham Greene’s paraphrase of Paine’s more formal eighteenth-century diction. The history of this misquotation—linking two significant figures across the centuries, and coming to light through its resonance today—was very satisfying to explore.

At Oxford, we track language to ensure that we have the quotations people are most likely to look up, so that the next time a half-remembered quotation is on the tip of your tongue, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is ready with the answer. Inclusion is based on usage: evidence that a spoken comment or written passage is being quoted by others. And while there is a common quotations stock (Shakespeare, the Bible), we all have our own quotations vocabulary, that which we remember and quote because we encountered them at a time when they were particularly significant. The antique and serious often rubs shoulders with popular culture. The same newspaper column, for example, may quote from both the Book of Common Prayer and the Rolling Stones. The result is marvelously diverse, and properly so.

Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Warwick University, and has written widely on European culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the mass media, the cultural aspects of politics, and the impact of American modernity on European popular culture. His latest book, Glamour: A History, is recently published in paperback, and below is an excerpt from the book, dicussing the glamour of the late Diana, Princess of Wales.

You can read Professor Gundle’s previous OUPblog post here.

When Lady Diana Spencer became engaged to Prince Charles in February 1981, she was a young woman from an aristocratic family whose modest education and limited experience of life were reflected in her demure appearance. A pretty and naïve 19-year-old, she seemed the archetypal English Rose. Thrust unknowingly into the media spotlight, she quickly became the nation’s darling. Her wedding to Prince Charles in St Paul’s Cathedral in July 1981 was given blanket press coverage and was watched by an estimated worldwide television audience of one billion people. The marriage was presented as a fairy-tale union of an eligible prince and a beautiful commoner, the aristocratic standing and royal ancestors of Diana’s family receiving less emphasis than her more commonplace status as a young working woman. A decade later, Diana’s public image was quite different. Her marriage to Charles bore two sons, but by the late 1980s it was on the rocks. The Prince and Princess of Wales formally separated in December 1992 and were divorced in 1996. Throughout this period, the press scrutinized every aspect of their body language and public appearances, separately and together, for indications of the state of their relationship. Both the prince and Diana briefed the press through friends and blamed each other for the breakdown of the marriage. Public sympathy was firmly with Diana and the affection for her was amply demonstrated in the emotional public reaction to her death following a car accident in Paris in August 1997. As she emerged from the shadow of her husband, Diana invested ever more energy in charitable works. Having herself suffered from the acrimonious divorce of her parents, and living the breakdown of her own marriage, she was in a position to offer comfort to others. Subsequently, she helped publicize the international campaign against landmines and to overcome discrimination against AIDS sufferers. Like a secular Mother Teresa of Calcutta, with whom she established a connection, she became identified with selfless devotion to the causes of the ill and suffering.

Diana was not originally associated with glamour. Mainly, she was presented within the framework of royalty. In the course of the twentieth century, the British royal family had had a complex relationship with glamour. It had flirted with the press, the movies, and publicity, but fundamentally it remained a thing apart, an institution that was theatrical, certainly, but respectable and not a little stodgy. Its capacity to enchant was founded on history and tradition, and was more ceremonial than personal. Thus Diana’s spectacular wedding endowed her with a conventional aura, that of the fairy-tale princess. With its puffed sleeves, nipped waist, embroidered pearls and sequins, and 25-foot taffeta train, the bride’s creamy silk dress contributed to the fantasy. The pomp of the wedding impressed not only the thousands who lined the streets leading to St Paul’s, but the millions who watched the ceremony on television or read about it in the press. Over time, Diana’s image evolved as she became more womanly and the press found that use of her image never failed to boost sales beyond measure. Designers competed to dress her and magazines ran features on her wardrobe, knowing that women regarded her as an inspiration. In subsequent years, as she acquired an independent profile and began to detach herself from the royal family, her conventional aura was displaced by glamour. She became a figure of beauty and style whose photogenic qualities turned her into the most photographed person of the age. Speculation about her love life in the final stages of her marriage and in the period prior to her death intensified interest in her to the point that almost her every move was tracked by paparazzi.

Diana’s beauty was central to the transition she made from demure and virginal princess to woman of glamour. Her girlish good looks at the time of her courtship and engagement drew some favourable comment but no one in those early days saw her as a great beauty. Rather, Diana grew into her body, which she turned by sheer dint of effort into one of her main tools of communication. A tall and well-proportioned woman, her appearance became splendid; she was toned, tanned, slim, blonde, and radiant and at no time more so than in the five years between her separation and her death. ‘Providence gave her beauty, but it was she who contrived to project it until it radiated to every quarter of the globe,’ noted the historian Paul Johnson in the days after her death. The most important thing about her in this regard was that she was superbly photogenic. ‘This was not merely beauty,’ commented another senior male observer; ‘this was beauty that lept through the lenses. She seemed chemically bonded to film and video.’

The most remarkable series of photographic portraits appeared too late to shape responses to her, although they may have had some small influence on the reaction to her death. In 1997 Vanity Fair published in its July issue a series of pictures under the title ‘Princess Di’s New Look by Mario Testino’. The Peruvian photographer’s work ensured that she exited the world at the height of her splendour. More than any of his colleagues, Testino had a gift for giving his subjects an electric charge of fabulousness. They positively glowed and glistened and always looked like euphoric, yet not unnatural, versions of themselves. In Testino’s lens, Diana looked relaxed, rich (her rumoured £80,000 per annum grooming budget was evident in her beautiful skin, cropped and highlighted hair, and movie-star smile), and totally confident. The spectator could not but be mesmerized by her relaxed air and sleek surface. It took Diana some time to understand how she could use fashion to establish a public identity and communicate messages but, once she did, she harnessed its power to maximum effect. Her glamour was inextricably bound up with her dazzling use of fashion. In 1994 one newspaper estimated that her wardrobe had a value of around one million pounds. In fact, the charity auction of seventy-nine of her dresses in New York in June 1997 (for which the Testino photographs were a promotional pitch) raised a total of $3.25 million. As the Prince of Wales’s wife, her choice of designers was limited to the British or British-based, with exceptions being made only on royal visits for designers from the host countries. The London designers Catherine Walker and Bruce Oldfield were perhaps the first to see her glamour potential. They helped her forge a fashion identity that was varied but generally discreetly eye-catching during the day and fabulous for evening occasions. Diana dressed at first to please—to please above all her distracted husband by showing she could win the adoration of the gallery—but then increasingly for effect. Demure dresses gave way to striking red and black gowns, chic pastel combinations, and toned down looks for everyday charity work. By the mid-1990s, she had turned into a toned, tanned, and designer-clad blonde vision of incomparable allure. She wore international labels and showed a particular predilection for the creations of Gianni Versace, the Italian designer who was hailed after his murder in Miami Beach in July 1997 as the ‘king of glitz’. Versace showered her with suits and dresses and she became a regular customer at the label’s Bond Street store. She did not wear his starlet numbers but rather opted for the simple, sexy outfits that suited her fashion persona. One of the last memorable pictures of Diana is of her comforting a disconsolate Elton John at Versace’s funeral in the Duomo in Milan.

Today, Thursday 10th September, sees the UK publication of the new, seventh edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, edited by Elizabeth Knowles.

To celebrate, OUP have teamed up with Waterstone’s to conduct a national poll asking what Britain’s favourite memorable quotation is. Below is a selection of the thirty quotes you can choose from, as well as details about how to take part.

Classic Quotes

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men…
Robert Burns

1940s and 50s

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
Winston Churchill

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley

1960s and 70s

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged on the colour of their skin
Martin Luther King

The Answer to the Great Question Of…Life, the Universe and Everything…
[is] forty-two.
Douglas Adams

1980s and 1990s

There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded
Diana, Princess of Wales

I’ll have what she’s having
When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron

2000s

We have not found any smoking guns
Hans Blix

The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice
Barack Obama

British readers can vote in the poll via the Waterstone’s website, and Waterstone’s loyalty card holders are also able to enter a prize draw to win a luxury stay in Oxford. So, what’s your favourite quotation? Tell us below.

John Evelyn is best known for his Diary, second only in reputation to that of his friend and fellow diarist, Samuel Pepys. But during the seventeenth century, as well as recording the events of the English Civil War, the Restoration of Charles II and the Great Fire of London, he was also writing notes on the upkeep of his garden at Sayes Court, London ‘which may be of use for other gardens’. In the post below, OUP UK Publicity Manager (and our resident green-fingered garden expert) Juliet Evans chooses a selection of her favourite top gardening tips from Directions for the Gardiner and Other Horticultural Advice.

Give now also all your hous’d plants (such as you do not think requisite to take out) fresh Earth at the surface, in place of some of the old Earth (a hand-depth or so) and loosning the rest with a fork, without wounding the Roots: let this be of excellent rich soil, such as is thoroughly consumed, and will first, that it may wash in the vertue*, and comfort the plant: Brush and cleanse them likewise from the dust contracted during their Enclosure. These two last directions have till now been kept as considerable Secrets amongst our Gard’ners…

[* trace elements/the goodness in the soil]

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(March) Now do the farewell-frosts, and Easterly-winds prejudice your choicest Tulips, and spot them; therefore cover such with Mats or Canvas to prevent freckles, and sometimes destruction.

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Never cast the water upon plants newly planted, nor on flowers, as Auricula, Hepatica, primeroses, or other fibrous plants, but at some convenient distance; so as to moisten the earth about the Roots, and not wett the leaves; for it makes them apt to scorch.

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One may sow Reddish, & Carrots together on the same bed: so as the first may be drawn, whilst the other is ready: or sow Lettuce, purselan, parsneps, carrots, Reddis on the same beds, & gather each kind in their season, leaving the parsneps to Winter.

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Prepare all Dung & Composts before winter, that it may be frosted, & become short, sweete & mellow.

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The Tooles are to be carried into the Toole-house, and all other instruments set in their places, every night when you leave work: & in wett weather you are to clense, sharpen, & repaire them.

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Fruit-Trees, which are planted by Walles, as peaches, Apricots, &c: are best watred by pouring it in at holes, made halfe a foote, or more from the stem (but not so deepe as to wound the rootes) with a wooden stake pointed. Make up of good rich water, especially during the time the Fruite is forming: and at other dry seasons.

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‘The Gardiner should walke aboute the whole Gardens every Monday-morning duely, not omitting the least corner, and so observe what Flowers or Trees & plants want staking, binding and redressing, watering, or are in danger; especially after greate storms, & high winds and then immediately to reforme, establish, shade, water &c what he finds amisse, before he go about any other work.’

Megan Branch, Intern

In his new book, The Andes: A Cultural History, Latin American Literature professor Jason Wilson looks at the dramatic influence The Andes have had on South American history and on literature from all over the world. Since we’re nearing the end of travel season, I’ve excerpted a passage below about the uniqueness of rail travel in the Andes—including altitudes that tend to make most people sick.

Crossing the Andes has always meant building bridges, roads and, more recently, railways. In 1934 a recently-married Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, a naturalist and prolific publicist of Latin America, reached Ecuador by boat to visit Chimborazo and the Galapagos Islands. Before the railways had been built from the tropical disease-ridden coast at Durán, across the river from Guayaquil, to Quito 290 miles away, the journey on horseback had taken eight days. Then the American Harman brothers (Archer and John) built their track, switchbacking up the Nariz del Diablo after the Chan Chan river gorge. Work had begun in 1897 and was completed in 1908 in what was a great feat of railway engineering (until suspended in 1983 and again in 1998). It climbed 10,626 feet in fifty miles and reached a pass at 11,841 feet, which von Hagen likened to the tundra in its bleakness, before descending to the Quito plateau. Theroux had wanted to ride this train, but it was overbooked.

Another railway engineering feat is the pass at Ticlio, on the line from Lima to Tarma in Peru, the highest railway pass in the world built above the Rimac gorge by the “indefatigable” and “unscrupulous” New York-born Henry Meiggs (actually at 15,865 feet). According to Wright, over 7,000 Andean and Chinese labourers died building a railway that has 66 tunnels, 59 bridges and 22 switchbacks. You can ask for oxygen masks on the train that now runs from Arequipa to Puno on Lake Titicaca, where the station of Crucero Alto is 14,688 feet high. The 1925 South American Handbook warned that soroche or mountain sickness was “usually the penalty of constipation”. Paul Theroux felt dizzy and sweated up this line, and the “astonishing” beauty of the landscape from the train window was ruined. Then a molar ached. He later learned that blocked air in a filling creates pressure on the nerve: “it is agony,” he wrote. The passengers started vomiting, until balloons filled with oxygen were handed around before they passed through the highest railway tunnel in the world. As a train enthusiast, Theroux marveled at the engineering, supervised by Meiggs between 1870 and 1877 the year he died, but surveyed by a Peruvian called Ernesto Malinowski. There is a Mount Meiggs near Ticlio.

Another gringo, Dr. Renwick, took a train from Arequipa to Cuzco, spotting the extinct volcano of Vilcanto at 17,000 feet, “one of the best known in all Peru”, and nearby Ausangate, towering over all others at 20,000 feet and visible a hundred miles away. He acutely remarked that Peruvians were so accustomed to these mountain giants seen from the train that they hardly noticed a peak like Huascarán, which “anywhere else would fill the mind with astonishment.” He is still right.

Megan Branch, Intern

The only foods that I can think of as being as “American as apple pie” are recipes that have been lifted from other countries: pizza, sushi and, of course, Chinese food. College in New York has meant that I eat a lot of Chinese food. In his new book, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, Andrew Coe chronicles Chinese food’s journey across the ocean and into the hearts of Americans everywhere. Below, I’ve excerpted a passage from Chop Suey in which Coe details the earliest written account of an American’s experience eating Chinese food for the first time almost 200 years ago.

Nevertheless, the first account we have of Americans eating Chinese food does not appear until 1819, thirty-five years after Shaw’s visit. It was written by Bryant Parrott Tilden, a young trader from Salem who acted as supercargo on a number of Asia voyages. In Guangzhou, he was befriended by Paunkeiqua, a leading merchant who cultivated good relations with many American firms. Just before Tilden’s ship was set to sail home, Paunkeiqua invited the American merchants to spend the day at this mansion on Honam island. Tilden’s account of that visit, which was capped by a magnificent feast, is not unlike the descriptions Shaw or even William Hickey wrote a half century earlier. First, he tours Paunkeiqua’s traditional Chinese garden and encounters some of the merchant’s children yelling “Fankwae! Fankwae!” (“Foreign devil! Foreign devil!”). Then Paunkeiqua shows him his library, including “some curious looking old Chinese maps of the world as these ‘celestials’ suppose it to be, with their Empire occupying three quarters of it, surrounded by ‘nameless islands & seas bounded only by the edges of the maps.” Finally, his host tells him: “Now my flinde, Tillen, you must go long my for catche chow chow tiffin.” In other words, dinner was served in a spacious dining hall, where the guests were seated at small tables.

“Soon after,” Tilden writes, “a train of servants came in bringing a most splendid service of fancy colored, painted and gilt large tureens & bowls, containing soups, among them the celebrated bird nest soup, as also a variety of stewed messes, and plenty of boiled rice, & same style of smaller bowls, but alas! No plates and knives and forks.” (By “messes,” Tilden probably meant prepared dishes, not unsavory jumbles.)

The Americans attempted to eat with chopsticks, with very poor results: “Monkies [sic] with knitting needles would not have looked more ludicrous than some of us did.” Finally, their host put an end to their discomfort by ordering western-style plates, knives, forks, and spoons. Then the main portion of the meal began:

Twenty separate courses were placed on the table during three hours in as many different services of elegant china ware, the messes consisting of soups, gelatinous food, a variety of stewed hashes, made up of all sorts of chopped meats, small birds cock’s-combs, a favorite dish, some fish & all sorts of vegetables, rice, and pickles, of which the Chinese are very fond. Ginger and pepper are used plentifully in most of their cookery. Not a joint of meat or a whole fowl or bird were placed on the table. Between the changing of the courses, we freely conversed and partook of Madeira & other European wines—and costly teas.”

After fruits, pastries, and more wine, the dinner finally came to an end. Tilden and his friends left glowing with happiness (and alcohol) at the honor Paunkeiqua had shown them with his lavish meal. Nowhere, however, does Tilden tell us whether the Americans actually enjoyed these “messes” and “hashes.”