Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

R&L Authors to Appear at National Press Club

What do R&L authors Arthur Caplan , Craig Crawford , Bob Deans, Dr. Arthur Garson, and David Yount  have in common with literary luminaries Stephen Hunter, Sebastian Junger, Howard  Kurtz, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and Jay Winik? They are all appearing at the 30^th Annual National Press Club Book Fair to be held this Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 5:30pm.

One of Washington's most prestigious literary events, the National Press Club Book Fair attracts authors from across the nation, and draws hundreds of fans and Club members who enjoy browsing the children's books, cookbooks, photography books, Washington exposés, histories, and fiction, all new on the market this year or as yet unreleased.

Admission is free for members of the National Press Club and $5 for non-members, with tickets available for purchase at the door. The Book Fair is open from 5:30 to 6 p.m. for members only; and from 6 to 8:30 p.m. to non-members.

Books for the event are provided by Barnes & Noble. Because this is a fundraiser, no outside books are permitted. Meet the authors, get the story behind the story, and have them sign your purchase. An ideal place to begin your holiday gift-buying!

For more information, contact Lisa Miller at (202) 662-7564 or at lmiller@press.org

Sponsored by: National Press Club   
Location: Ballroom

The complete list of authors is available on the NPC website.

Witchcraft, Magic, and Superstition in Europe

By Michael D. Bailey
      
            History is often obsessed with beginnings and endings, some more real than others. The Roman Empire fell in 476 when the Germanic warlord Odoacer deposed the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus. The Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther issued his Ninety-Five Theses. The United States was inaugurated with a pen-stroke on July 4, 1776, and the ancient régime fell when the Bastille succumbed to the Parisian mob on July 14, 1789. In 1782, Anna Göldi, a Swiss maidservant, was executed for witchcraft in what is generally regarded as the last fully legal witch trial in Europe. The museum recently opened to honor her in the Canton of Glarus, therefore, memorializes not just any victim of the witch hunts, but Europe’s “last witch.”

           Switzerland has a fair claim to being site of the beginning as well as the end of the European witch hunts, for in the mid-fifteenth century Alpine lands witnessed both the construction of the stereotype of diabolical witchcraft – that is, of witches as demon-worshiping, sabbat-attending servants of Satan – and some of the first applications of that stereotype in trials. Yet these beginnings and endings, and indeed the entire history of European witchcraft, tell only a small part of a much larger story. Belief in the real existence and power of supernatural spirits (demons among them) and of occult natural forces (such as might be contained in witches’ potions and poisons) has been a major aspect of human culture, and certainly of European culture at least until characteristically modern forms of rationality emerged during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perennial too has been the belief that human beings could access and manipulate such power via words and rites, as well as the conviction that certain people would utilize such power for evil ends, and that society needed to be protected from them.

             In my recent book Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present,I have tried to set the important and dismal story of the European witch hunts within this larger history. I have also tried to tell a story without artificial beginnings and endings. I begin in the depths of antiquity and proceed to the twenty-first century. My purpose is not to chart the movement through time of some static construct that modern opinion might label “magic” or “witchcraft,” but rather to trace how successive societies and cultures constructed and categorized such practices, taking into account both what contemporaries might understand as magical (even when they employed no such word) and what modern minds might perceive in the past. I saw no reason to stop in the eighteenth century, with the advent of the Enlightenment, because magical beliefs and practices persist in modern Europe and North America. Modern magical groups, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the early twentieth century, or modern witches (Wiccans) in the twenty-first are often regarded as being wholly separate from the magicians and witches of the past. They certainly occupy a different position in society, and in many ways arise from specifically modern cultural currents. Yet they are nonetheless very much a part of the not-yet-ended history of magic in the West.

Michael D. Bailey is assistant professor of history at Iowa State University.

A Psychoanalytic Call for Peace Between Believers and Non-believers

by Robert Langs, M.D.

          Four highly visible and prominent authors (S. Harris, D. Dennett, R. Dawkins, and C. Hitchens) have recently penned books that attack religion as a sham and the belief in the existence of a transcendental God as more or less delusional. Believers have tended to respond by pointing out first, that God has a divine plan and acts in mysterious ways, and second, that these writers show considerable ignorance regarding, and misrepresentations of, religious beliefs. As suggested by Harold Bloom, the outcome of this rancorous debate is that only the already convinced are convinced.

          As a psychoanalyst who has developed a new, adaptation-centered paradigm of psychoanalysis and thus a new view of human life, I want to offer an olive branch to both sides of this conflict. It is based on the insight that coping with death and the three forms of death anxiety it evokes—predatory (the fear of being attacked or killed), predator (the guilt-ridden need for punishment by death for harming others), and existential (the fear of one’s personal mortality)—are the fundamental challenges for all of humankind. Uniquely, we meet these threats using two distinctive adaptive systems of the emotion-processing mind, one that is attached to conscious awareness and the other without such a link. The activities of this deep unconscious system are encoded in narratives such as dreams and daydreams. Comparing the reactions of these two systems to the same death-related events we find that conscious responses tend to be muted, infused with denial, and poorly thought out, while deep unconscious reactions tend to be brutally candid, exceedingly wise, and based on grim images of destruction, devastation, and horror.

          Relevant to the effort to make peace between believing and non-believing combatants, clinical observations of patients’ unconscious efforts to cope with traumatic incidents indicate that there are two basic types of individuals. The first group will consistently encode a series of grim themes that validly reflect the most forbidding meanings of a given trauma and its frightful impact on them. In contrast, the second group will either fail to remember a dream or will report a dream that is bland and without the terrifying imagery that one would expect in light of the trauma with which they are dealing. Both responses are ways of shutting off access to their always terrifying deep unconscious perceptions of the trauma at hand. Furthermore, the narrators will always generate strong themes in response to the least trauma and the non-narrators will always react with mild or absent imagery. There are, then, two very different, rather fixed, archetypal ways of coping unconsciously with the death anxieties aroused by a death-related trauma.

          We can apply these findings to believers and non-believers when it comes to the existence of a supernatural God. Both the belief and disbelief in a transcendental God are, at bottom, psychological ways of dealing with death and its attendant anxieties. Depending on how it is utilized, each approach may be either adaptive or dysfunctional. Each has been successful in bringing peace to many individuals and is responsible for peaceful respites for societies and nations. But each also has spawned madness, violence, and war. Given that a person's adaptive preferences, which are consciously and unconsciously motivated and sustained, tend to be almost set in stone, trying to change this preference is a pointless and generally unfeasible task. Extremely difficult and seldom feasible. This means that there are strong reasons to find ways to enhance the efforts of both secularists and those of faith to cope with their death anxieties, which in turn means that it is unwise and unnatural to try to disassemble belief systems related to the existence of God.

           There is, I think, a moral to this story. Both believers and non-believers ultimately are trying to cope with life and its relentless nemesis, death. Each group has, on the basis of many forces unknown to them, come up with an adaptive solution that is reflected in part in their thoughts about the existence of God. But surely, no one can or should tell another person how to go about resolving their death anxieties nor should they decide for them the role that religious beliefs should play in these efforts. One answer does not and cannot fit all. An individual's chosen mode of trying to cope with death anxiety should be respected and every effort made to improve its chances of success through insights into the needs that are satisfied by these convictions.

          Only a joining of forces based on a deep understanding of the positions of those on both sides of this debate and a combining of resources and understanding can help us to ameliorate the power, often evil and destructive, that death holds over our lives. A familiar phrase captures my message: United we conquer, divided we fall.

Robert Langs, M.D. is the author of 45 books on issues pertaining to human emotional life, including the recently published Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis.

Science and Religion: Toward Common Ground

By Edward F. Kelly   

        Conflicts between science and religion have erupted intermittently since the first stirrings of modern science over four centuries ago, and the past year has witnessed searing new attacks on religion by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and other defenders of Enlightenment rationalism. Critics like these clearly regard themselves, like science itself, as marshalling the intellectual virtues of reason and objectivity against retreating forces of irrational authority and superstition. In their view science has conclusively demonstrated that we human beings are nothing but complicated biological machines. Everything we are and do is in principle explainable in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics. Mind and consciousness are generated by—or in some mysterious way identical with—neurophysiological processes occurring in brains. Mental causation, volition, and the “self” are illusions, by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. And because we are entirely the product of this machinery, we are necessarily extinguished, totally and finally, by the death and dissolution of our bodies. To think anything different is to abandon centuries of cumulative scientific progress and revert to the primitive supernaturalist beliefs of bygone times. Period, end of story.

          In reality things are less clear-cut and much more interesting. My intent here is not to side with the institutionalized religions against science. All seem imperfect human creations, and I do not adhere personally to any. But I do believe that real understanding of human nature will be achieved only by expanding current scientific orthodoxy in directions broadly compatible with the central impulse of religion as characterized by the great American psychologist and philosopher William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, and I further believe that the primary obstacles to doing so reside within science itself.

      The word “fundamentalism” probably evokes for most of us only images of bomb-wielding Islamic terrorists and other examples of religious extremism, but fundamentalism exists within science as well. When scientific opinion hardens into dogma it becomes scientism, which is essentially a secular faith and no longer science. Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition, but in modern times the main opposition to new scientific ideas has derived not from religious orthodoxies but from other scientists for whom contemporary opinion established the limits of the possible.

      Consider in this light the question of post-mortem survival. The notion that aspects of mind and personality survive bodily death is central to the world’s great religions yet scorned as impossible by present-day establishment science. But few participants in this contentious debate have any inkling that there exists a large scientific literature collectively suggesting that at least some of us, under largely unknown conditions and for some unknown period of time, do in fact survive. The primary threat to this interpretation, ironically, has nothing to do with the quality of the evidence—problems of fraud, credulity, errors of observation or memory, and the like—but with the difficulty of excluding non-survivalist interpretations based solely upon supernormal (“psi”-based or parapsychological) processes involving living persons. The voluminous evidence for such processes includes both spontaneous cases and experimental studies, and in my opinion has long since passed the threshold where competent persons who take the trouble to study it in depth and with an open mind will routinely conclude that these things exist as facts of nature. Indeed, future generations of historians, philosophers, and sociologists will undoubtedly make a good living trying to understand why it took so long for scientists in general to accept this conclusion.

      Either horn of this interpretive dilemma — survival or psi — is lethal to current materialist orthodoxy, which undoubtedly helps explain the hostility of its advocates to both. But many other psychological phenomena pose similarly difficult challenges to conventional ways of thinking. Conditions such as cardiac arrest and general anesthesia, for example, abolish brain conditions regarded by most neurophysiologists as necessary for full consciousness, yet thousands of patients have reported extraordinarily vivid, life-transforming experiences that occurred under these circumstances. Even the most fundamental aspects of everyday mental life including memory, volition, and the qualitative “feels” of consciousness remain unexplained. Everything points, I believe, to the need for an enlarged scientific psychology that can accommodate “transpersonal” or spiritual aspects of human nature without loss of rigor.

      There are more things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in today’s mainstream materialist philosophy, and huge questions that so far have been addressed primarily by the world’s great religions are to some degree accessible to the methods of science. There is middle ground between science and the religions as presently constituted, and noisy partisans on both sides ought to know this! As William James himself declared in A Pluralistic Universe, his last book, “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin.”

Edward F. Kelly is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is also the lead author of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.

Lessing Is Not the Least: Doris Lessing, Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature

By Donald K. Sharpes

She's the kind of writer that Elizabeth I of England would have been if she hadn't had to thwart the Spanish, and connive and scheme to rebuff her domestic conspirators and foreign enemies. As a woman writer one is not necessarily a feminist, just as a man is not necessarily sexist.

Doris Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature on October 12. For years she had been on the Nobel short list, but has been awarded numerous European prizes for literature, and received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1995.

She was born in Iran of British parents, raised in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and at 88 lives today in London. She dropped out of school at 13, fled a painful childhood at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, married at 19 and had two children. She then abandoned her family, married Gottfried Lessing with whom she had another son, Peter, joined the Communist Party and left it in 1954 before Russia crushed the Hungarian uprising. She divorced Gottfried, and she moved to London with Peter where she began her literary career with her first novel, "The Grass is Singing," published in 1950. Her latest novel is "The Cleft," in published in 2007.

The 1962 publication of "The Golden Notebook," is her acknowledged masterpiece and insured her notoriety and critical success. It described, through four colored notebooks, the multiple versions of a woman on life's fretful journey. Women were surprised when they read it at how complicated they really were.

The Nobel committee noted that she "with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." She never completed school and self-educated herself by reading omnivorously. Another fellow Nobel Prize laureate, the South African Nadine Gordimer, also did not finish high school.

Lessing’s early writings are autobiographical, but translate all the tough and raw emotions. Women are better at facing the painful cruelty of their past and giving testimony to it, without a Greek tragic chorus to chant the refrain. The revenge of women is a vivisection of their damaged and sometimes self-destructive youth. Later, in their mature years, they display an almost masculine robustness, not as steely and harsh as Sophocles' Electra's for the death of a father, but equally intrepid.

Her productivity is astounding with over fifty books and twenty-two novels of note. However, most of her critics, including Harold Bloom and John Leonard, bemoan her adventures into science fiction, astral and cosmic mythology, and a kind of spiritualism, and pooh-pooh her latest writings.

Nevertheless, at her best, Lessing reminds us without equivocation or comfort that suffering is contagious and a part of the human condition. Her now well-weathered face still holds a lonely soul trying to find meaning in an insane world. She exhibits the kind of writing that is uniquely personal. Yet somehow it translates into everyone's experience.

The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel would have been proud of her selection. He made his fortune by inventing dynamite, and established the Nobel prizes in 1895. Lessing's best novels are a kind an explosion in the mind and gut.

Donald K. Sharpes is professor emeritus at Arizona State University and author of an upcoming book Outcasts and Heretics: Profiles in Independent Thought and Courage.

Mark Dewalt Receives Bank of America Endowed Professorship

ROCK HILL, S.C.-Winthrop University recently selected Mark Dewalt as a recipient of the Bank of America Endowed Professorship for the Richard W. Riley College of Education.

He will use the endowed professorship to continue the next phase of his already 20-year research project of Amish education in the United States and Canada. During the professorship, which is renewable for up to three years, Dewalt will begin his next book on Amish Education, and write articles on Amish Mennonite Schools and the 1972 Supreme Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder which ruled that Amish children do not have to attend school after eighth grade. In addition, he will design two symposium courses for the Winthrop honors program.

University leaders chose Dewalt because of his continuous record of excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. "Mark is well respected as a teacher, scholar and contributor to the life of the university. His research is well grounded and addresses a unique area of education in North America," said Patricia Graham, Dean of the Richard W. Riley College of Education.

The Winthrop professor of education grew up in Pennsylvania near an Amish community and has traveled to dozens of communities stretching from New York to Iowa to observe Amish schools. He used the information as the basis for his latest book, Amish Education in the United States and Canada, which portrays the culture and history of the one-room schoolhouses of the Amish community. National and local media turned to Dewalt in the fall of 2006 to explain the Amish culture in the wake of a horrific shooting in an Amish schoolhouse near Nickel Mines,Pa.

Dewalt will be the second recipient of the Bank of America Endowed Professorship, which supports teaching and research for an outstanding faculty member in education. Winthrop's first recipient was Marshall G. Jones, who studied how those familiar with and those unfamiliar with digital technologies learn differently.

Brokeback Mountain: A Short Story, a Film, Now an Opera?

By Eric Patterson

            During the summer of 2007, fans of Brokeback Mountain, the short story and the film, may have noticed rumors in the press and on the internet about the possible production of Brokeback Mountain, the musical. Many assumed it must just be another "joke" generated by the endemic discomfort the movie's success seems to have caused, at least for some, and dismissed the additional gossip that movie stars Hugh Jackman and James Marsden might be cast as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist as wishful thinking on the part of gay fans. Then at the end of the summer, it turned out that what actually might be in the works was Brokeback Mountain, the opera. This came from an unlikely source for opera information, the "Rush and Molloy" gossip column in the tabloid New York Daily News. But it was confirmed when representatives of the distinguished modernist composer, Charles Wuorinen, announced that he had received permission from Annie Proulx to compose an opera based on her short story. For all those who were moved by the story and the movie, and particularly for opera lovers, this raises intriguing possibilities about what the next representation of the lives of Ennis and Jack may be like.

First, a little about the composer. Over the past half-century Charles Wuorinen has composed an extraordinary array of music, much of it in the challenging twelve-tone or serial style that originates in the work of Arnold Schoenberg, although Wuorinen has a highly distinctive individual voice, and in recent years has composed some music that is less strictly atonal. He has created works in virtually every form, including eight numbered symphonies, a "microsymphony," an "ecclesiastical" symphony, four piano concerti, tone poems, chamber and solo works, and vocal and choral pieces; some of his works have descriptive religious titles, such as Theologoumenon and Pentecost. Wuorinen already has done one opera, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on the novel by Sir Salman Rushdie, with a libretto by the British poet James Fenton. Haroun is a highly imaginative children's story on the serious subject of freedom of imagination and expression, which Rushdie published in 1990, after the Ayatollahs had issued their notorious fatwa ordering his assassination. The opera first was staged in 2004 by the New York City Opera, and has met with considerable critical success. Like Annie Proulx, Wuorinen is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, which he won in 1970 for Time's Encomium.

The news that Wuorinen is working on an opera based on Proulx's story has led to speculation about what such a work might be like. The film already has a subtle, beautiful, and evocative score in a style quite different from Wuorinen's, which raises the question of what relationship his opera might have, if any, to the music from the movie. Using a small group of players, including guitar, pump organ, pedal steel guitar, and percussion, the Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla created music wonderfully suggestive of the beautiful, lonesome landscapes in the film, the awakening desire between Ennis and Jack, and the fear, frustration, and sadness they and their wives endure. Santaolalla's own instrumental compositions are integrated with popular country hits of the Sixties and Seventies, such as "King of the Road," "The Devil's Right Hand," "It's So Easy to Fall in Love," and "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," performed by artists including Rufus Wainwright, Teddy Thompson, Roger Miller, Steve Earle, Linda Ronstadt, and Tammy Wynette, along with traditional songs such as "He Was a Friend of Mine," sung by Willie Nelson. Santaolalla and his collaborators also composed original songs in an appropriate country style, including "A Love That Will Never Grow Old," "No One's Ever Gonna Love You Like Me," "I Will Never Let You Go," and "I Don't Want To Say Goodbye," which are performed by Emmylou Harris, Mary McBride, Jackie Greene, and Teddy Thompson. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences certainly demonstrated its limitations in its failure to recognize the quality of the acting in Brokeback Mountain or the overall quality of the film (which may well have been the result of the widely reported failure of many of its members even to watch the film), but it did honor Santaolalla with the award for Best Score. Given the success and popularity of Santaolalla's music, those who are curious about the possible opera wonder whether it would refer to the film score. Would Wuorinen use a similar tonal style, or even quote Santaolalla's music, or quote some of the country music characteristic of the time and place in which the story is set? Or would he compose completely original and different music? Though the film music is beautiful, probably the best approach would be to create something entirely new.

                Some have suggested that the spare, restrained nature of the story and the lyrical, subdued quality of Ang Lee's film should incline the composer toward a work on a small scale, a chamber opera, but Howard Stokar, Wuorinen's manager, has said instead that "It would be a big piece, something for an actual opera house." What sort of big opera would Brokeback make? Opera is perhaps the most wonderfully complex and artificial of art forms, and for many Americans is almost synonymous with extravagance, with music, singing, acting, and staging on a giant scale. Though some of the most moving and popular operas, such as La Boheme or Tosca, are in the verismo style, presenting relatively realistic characters and situations, they often have gorgeously dramatic music, and of course many other operas transport their audiences to utterly fantastic realms inhabited by kings and princesses, gods and valkyries. Apart from the magnificent landscape, the world of Brokeback Mountain is about as far from the mythological grandeur of The Ring or Turandot as you can get. Certainly the brilliant technical staging skills of a major opera company could evoke a sense of the rough beauty of the mountain wildernesses where Jack and Ennis are able to be together, and could effectively contrast this with the shabbiness of the places they live in Wyoming and the gaudiness of the Newsomes' world in Texas, but what would the singing be like? Even operas with realistic settings usually have powerful music to express the characters' big emotions. Jack certainly has his share of these, but central to the tragedy is Ennis's fear to express what he feels. He's naturally a man of few words, and though he opens up to Jack, and eventually feels overwhelming loss and grief, he does so without grand gestures that would seem to lend themselves to a big operatic performance. In the film, perhaps the most powerful of many powerful scenes comes when Heath Ledger depicts Ennis finding the two shirts Jack has saved and hidden for twenty years in what amounts to a closet within a closet at the Twists's ranch house. Ledger's understated acting is superb, but in the scene he is virtually silent. How do you write a music drama about a character who's inherently so inexpressive and undramatic as Ennis?

So far no libretto has been completed for Wuorinen's project. The composer must decide what his relationship to Santaolalla's music will be, but the writer of a libretto will have to decide how to respond to both the story and the screenplay. The film has an outstanding screenplay, in which Larry McMurtry and Diana Osanna perceptively and subtlely adapted and expanded Annie Proulx's brilliant story. They treated her work with great respect, for the most part only adding sections that developed the implications of what Proulx had written, as in their development of Alma and her daughters and Lureen and her family. As those who've read about the making of the film are aware, when it was shot some episodes not in the story, particularly one involving Ennis and Jack assisting a group of hippies whose van gets stuck, wisely were dropped. Some have criticized the movie for not presenting more scenes depicting the love between Jack and Ennis, though it does have the courage to affirm the directness of the story's depiction of their sexual relationship in several important scenes, one of which-- their second night together in the tent-- is original to the film. Others have noted that one of the sources of the power of the story is Proulx's use of a frame at the beginning and end, describing Ennis's thoughts about Jack some months after Jack's murder; she implicitly presents her account of the love between Ennis and Jack as Ennis's nostalgic recollection, and this quality is lost in the film, since it presents the story in simple chronological sequence, beginning in 1963. Writing the libretto provides the opportunity to respond to such criticisms, but does pose the danger of expanding or changing the narrative in ways that may not work. Also, though one of the richest aspects of the story is Proulx's extraordinary ear for the Western vernacular, and the filmmakers bring this to the screen effectively in the dialogue, you have to wonder how the ungrammatical, earthy, pungent, vivid language of the characters will sound when it's sung.

An opera performance, of course, is very different from a film. The filmmakers show much of what goes on between Ennis and Jack, and their families as well, through close-ups rather than through dialogue. Fortunately, all of the actors are gifted, and succeed effectively, often eloquently, in presenting what their characters feel and think through looks, gestures, posture, and expressions. For those who liked the film, so many moments stay in the mind: the way Jake Gyllenhaal sits and concentrates on peeling potatoes by the campfire, resolutely not looking, but entirely aware, as Ledger washes, naked, behind him; the way Ledger's face becomes more relaxed and open, expressing Ennis's attraction to his friend, and then how severe and closed it becomes when they part at the end of their summer together; the look of mingled fear and dying hope in Gyllenhaal's beautiful eyes as Ennis dismisses him… The movie shows rather than tells. But there are no close-ups in an opera. It takes place on a stage far away from the audience, and the performers must signal what their characters feel and think through big gestures and powerful singing in order to reach those watching and listening. There's little possibility of the kind of quiet, subtle intensity that distinguishes the movie. Indeed, opera often requires considerable resolve on the part of the audience in suspending disbelief, particularly depending on who the performers are; even though certain opera stars may have great voices and histrionic ability, it can be challenging for some viewers to believe that they are the delicate maidens and athletic heroes they're meant to portray. Those who watch video recordings of opera sometimes wish that those operating the cameras would recognize this, and avoid close-ups in an art whose performers are meant to be seen from far away.

               Gay opera fan sites on the internet are full of speculation about what Wuorinen's opera may be like and who might be cast. Clearly the principals need to be right in age, appearance, acting ability, and, perhaps most important, the apparent chemistry between their characters. Many seem to perceive Ennis as a baritone, and Jack as a tenor, a discussion that's led to some interesting speculation about whether baritones should be thought of as "tops" and tenors as "bottoms." Names that have been mentioned (with enthusiastic acclamation by various fans) are those of Stephen Costello, Nathan Gunn, Scott Hendricks, and Norman Reinhardt. Not surprisingly, there continues to be discussion of the rumor that Hugh Jackman and James Marsden might be cast, though neither is an opera singer. Perhaps this isn't as far-fetched as it may seem. Jackman has substantial successful experience in stage performance in musicals, including his role as Curley in the London production of Oklahoma!, and was acclaimed for his portrayal on Broadway of fellow Australian Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, for which he won a Tony Award. Not only can he sing, but he also seems quite capable of playing a role a lot gayer than either Ennis or Jack. (It's a little scary to think of what Jack and especially Ennis might have thought of Peter Allen.) Marsden-- a former Versace model-- has played gay characters in two movies, Heights, with Jesse Bradford, and The 24^th Day, with Scott Speedman. Marsden's also worked with Jackman in the three X-men films, playing cool, leather-clad Cyclops to Jackman's lupinely hirsute Wolverine. And he can sing, as demonstrated in his performance as Corny Collins in Hairspray. Still, it's quite a ways from a John Waters musical to the opera house. Nonetheless, the speculation and anticipation continue. At least for all the fans of the X-men comics and movies who perceive a gay subtext in the stories about misunderstood mutants with special powers, it's gratifying to imagine Cyclops and Wolverine finally locked in each other's arms. And Jackman and Marsden certainly would look good in cowboy hats and jeans. Or out of them.

The United States has great opera companies and American composers have contributed to an impressive list of varied and distinctively American operas: Scott Joplin's Treemonisha, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Howard Hanson's Merrymount, Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe, Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, Aaron Copeland's The Tender Land, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street, John Adams's Nixon in China, Phillip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, to name just a few. With Brokeback Mountain Charles Wuorinen has the opportunity to contribute another, and to address the subject of love between men, a theme that's been marginalized in too many areas of artistic expression for far too long. It's high time for a great American opera about men who love men, especially considering the number of gay opera fans. So we'll have to wait and see-- and listen.

Eric Patterson is associate professor of American studies and American literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of an upcoming book On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film.

Museums Outside-In

“Museums are in the midst of another transition … from the government/corporate sector to the realm of civil society.”

So says Gail Dexter Lord in her remarks to the second Stephen Weil Memorial Lecture on August 20, 2007 at the International Council of Museums General Conference in Vienna, Austria.

 Visit http://www.lord.ca/Media/MuseumsOutsideIn.pdf for her provocative and inspiring speech.

Here is an excerpt from the speech entitled “Museums Outside-In”:

Over the past few decades there has been a slow stealthy transition of museums from the government to the civil society realm; and like most change in museums, it is not always by choice. This momentous change started with small cutbacks in government grant aid. On average, government subsidy to individual museums has declined by 20% to 50% over the past 30 years. However, it needs to be said that overall government subsidy to the sector may even have increased. But there are more museums and museums are more professional so they want to do more - selling even better quality services at below the cost of production!

But something very exciting is also going on. Because the museum must look outside for support -- not only financial but social – it becomes a more outward focussed organization with more links to the community. Good reviews are very important--not just for your professional standing--but because it is important that your museum is embraced by your community. The Deputy Director now needs to learn about the tourism industry and the Head of Education has to learn how to welcome learners of all ages and all ethnic groups exhibitions becomes more of a dialogue and less of a monologue and so a more vital type of museum has emerged. A more outside-in museum has emerged.

I would suggest that, whether or not a museum becomes de-linked from government, there is a tipping point in the proportion of government versus income from other sources at which the museum becomes de facto a civil society institution. Whether this tipping point occurs at 50% or 75% or 85% single source funding is relative to the local culture, politics and the size of museum. Does the museum director and his or her team have a different role before and after this tipping point has been reached?

Much of the recent business literature on this subject makes a big distinction between the two roles:

These texts say that Management is about “doing the thing right”.

But Leadership is about “doing the right thing”.

I question whether this distinction is valid for museums?

Gail Dexter Lord is the author of many other speeches as well as the co-author of The Manual of Museum Management (1997) and The Manual of Strategic Planning for Museums (2007), and co-editor of The Manual of Museum Planning (1991) and The Manual of Museum Exhibitions (2001), published by AltaMira Press. Visit http://www.lord.ca for more information.

In Amelia Earhart’s Shoes: Return to Nikumaroro

by Thomas F. King

Readers of Amelia Earhart’s Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved? (Altamira 2004) may be interested in the results of this year’s return expedition to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands, Republic of Kiribati. The expedition, like all our work in pursuit of the elusive aviation pioneer, was sponsored by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR); information on the work and our ongoing analyses can be found  on TIGHAR’s website, www.tighar.org.

To recap briefly: We hypothesize that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, when they disappeared on July 2 1937, made their way to Nikumaroro and landed safely, but were not seen by the search planes that flew over a week later, and eventually died on the island. We’ve found a variety of pieces of evidence supporting this hypothesis – airplane parts in the ruins of Nikumaroro’s colonial village, anecdotal accounts of wreckage and human bones being found, a detailed official British government account of the discovery of a partial human skeleton and a woman’s shoe at the southeast end of the island in 1940, our own discovery of a woman’s shoe from the 1930s, and so on.

This year we had two major goals on the island we fondly call “Niku.” One was to look at a portion of the old colonial village (1938-1963) where we’d found plane parts in the past, and where the village carpenter shop stood before it blew away in a storm in about 1990. The other was to give serious attention to the “Seven Site” at the other end of the island, which we think is where a partial human skeleton was found in 1940 along with a sextant box, a Benedictine bottle, a woman’s shoe, and other interesting artifacts; we think this may have been Amelia Earhart’s skeleton. Our physical anthropologist, Kar Burns, was also to carry out a taphonomic experiment – putting out the remains of a pig and seeing how fast and in what directions the coconut crabs and strawberry hermit crabs took its parts away. Biologist/forester Josh Gillespie was to identify key tree species to allow construction of a general vegetation map. Finally, we wanted to do some detailed topographic mapping of the reef where we think Earhart landed her Lockheed Electra, to permit detailed hindcasting of tidal conditions there at the time she would have landed. Remarkably enough, we got all these things done.

We flew to Nadi in Fiji on July 14^th, and from the nearby port of Lautoka embarked on the motor-sailor Nai’a for the five-day trip to Niku. We were 16 in all – the basic TIGHAR team, a videographer, and the representative of the government of Kiribati. The trip was uneventful but for various cases of seasickness; the weather was good but the swells were pretty high. We landed as usual in the ship’s inflatables, going ashore every morning and returning to the ship in the evening. Gary Quigg took charge of work in the village, while I ran the Seven Site project. As it turned out, members of the ship’s crew helped a lot on both projects; they said they were bored aboard, as it were, and wanted some shore time.

The village work involved clearing largish areas of coconut deadfall, metal detecting, mapping and excavating test units. Suffice it to say that Gary’s crew were able to define and pretty definitively survey the carpenter’s shop and the debris field created downwind when it blew away, and they collected a number of bronze bushings and other parts that just might have been salvaged from an airplane. These are currently being cleaned and catalogued at TIGHAR Central in Wilimington, DE and sent out for various kinds of analysis.

At the Seven Site, we first had to clear a lot of scaevola, a nasty shrub, in a way that wouldn’t mess up the site surface. We accomplished this using a lot less of the traditional tools (bush knives and chainsaws), in favor of long-handled pneumatic loppers powered by dive tanks; they worked remarkably well (See airphoto). We then undertook a variety of excavations, metal detecting, and surface scanning for teeth and bones using a solar-powered daylight ultraviolet scanner designed by team member John Clauss. We also did kite aerial photography (KAP) to help document the site in its environment (hence the photo below), and used a robotic total station to update and correct the site map prepared in 2001. The UV scanner worked but didn’t get us any teeth or bones. The total station strained our technological competence but gave us what we needed, and the KAP worked great, as did our state-of-the-art PVC sifting screens. We excavated several fire features that will help us (we hope) figure out what sort of person was camping at the site – lots of fish, bird, and turtle bone for dietary analysis. And we found some things – a zipper, a snap perhaps from an article of clothing, part of a small pocket knife, a piece of beveled glass that may be from a small mirror – that aren’t easily associated with use of the site by Gilbertese colonists and U.S. Coast Guardsmen, the two groups known to have been there at various times. One of the fire features, too, contained the broken and mostly melted remains of two bottles, one of them apparently a heavy brown bottle similar to Benedictine. Lots of analysis to be done there, too.

And the crabs duly carried away bones, posing for time-lapse photography, while the total station made it possible to obtain detailed elevation and topographic data on the reef.

So as usual, we didn’t exactly find what we went out looking for, but we did find other stuff, and we actually did pretty much everything we planned to do. We then sailed uneventfully to Apia, Samoa, flew to Nadi, and then flew back to the States. Good weather the whole time (130 degrees f. recorded on the Seven Site, but a pleasant breeze) and it was great to have one more visit to the island.

We’re grateful as always to the financial sponsors who made the trip feasible, to our faithful shipping sponsor Federal Express, and to the various people and corporations who donated equipment and services – Brooks Leffler and David Wheeler for KAP technology, the Sokkia Corporation for total stations, Stihl Inc. for chain saws and hand tools, and Focus Design for screens.

Analysis of the material and data we brought home will take awhile, but results will be forthcoming on the TIGHAR website and in other media.

The Seven Site under excavation, after much lopping

 

Sunrise over Nikumaroro

 

 

What we had to dig through – typical coral rubble “soil.” The PVC screens, however, donated by Focus Design (http://www.focusdesign.org/), were wonderfully durable despite their light weight.

UEFA Efforts to Eliminate Racism

By Christos Kassimeris

Racism has long tarnished the game of football in quite a few European countries, though it seems that it has recently emerged with a new -– even uglier -– face, since a number of racist incidents now involve not only fans but players and officials as well. The apparent lack of ethos that characterizes a section of fans, predominantly, has certainly disturbed national and European football governing bodies alike. Nevertheless, their attempts to rid the popular game off all forms of discrimination have rarely been crowned with success. Even though some players and clubs have already been fined by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), racist incidents across the continent continue to blemish football. It is not surprising, therefore, that Michel Platini, President of UEFA, has condemned the phenomenon of racism in football on more than one occasion, ever since his election on January 2007, while also emphasizing UEFA’s commitment to secure a racism-free environment in all European stadiums. In this respect, it is important to note that his determination to combat racism in European football is likely to materialize following his latest statements. Platini recently declared that UEFA would openly support any referee’s decision to bring a football match to an abrupt end, after having consulted the match delegate, when fans engage in racist chanting or abuse a player in a similar fashion. For the record, Rene Temmink belongs to that rare breed of referees that took such action in a game between ADO Den Haag and PSV Eindhoven during the 2005-2006 Dutch football season. Such measures may, indeed, prove more successful than previous UEFA-sponsored tactics to eliminate racism from football, such as the Ten Point Plan of Action for Professional Football Clubs, intended to promote the participation of ethnic minority communities in football. In any case, Platini’s remarks should be treated with some skepticism. Unless referees are officially backed by UEFA the popular game will only suffer more, given that certain supporters of clubs may not hesitate to resort to racist abuse in order to halt a game that is likely to find their beloved team on the losing side. Hence, supporting such courageous referees should definitely be regarded as the starting point of what would be a promising anti-racism campaign in European football, but ‘support’ alone is clearly insufficient. It is essential that the actions of the men-in-black are followed by severe penalties imposed by the European governing body, regardless of the clubs’ record and status in national or continental competitions. Racism has no place in football and must be eliminated with effect.

Christos Kassimeris is assistant professor in political science and heads the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Cyprus College in Nicosia and author of European Football in Black and White: Tackling Racism in Football forthcoming in December 2007.