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Arts
Marshall Poe
Interviews with scholars of the performing arts about their new books
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Shakespeare's "As You Like It" Part 1: the Story
As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies. It is also his most daring exploration of sex, gender, and identity. In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind flips the script of romantic convention and pursues the man she loves — while she is disguised as a man. In this course, you’ll learn the story of As You Like It, unpack the complex games it plays with gender and performance, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Dr. Will Tosh, research fellow and lecturer at Shakespeare's Globe in London. Dr. Tosh discusses the significance of the play in Shakespeare’s career and of the way that Shakespeare’s company first performed it. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.
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20:0510/04/2023
Celeste Day Moore, "Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France" (Duke UP, 2021)
Celeste Day Moore is a historian of African American culture, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. Her first book, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021), was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of African American History, and the first edited volume of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago and has been a fellow at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. As an associate professor of history at Hamilton College, she teaches courses on African American history as well as histories of empire, race, Black internationalism, and U.S. international relations.
In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.
Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, with a focus on the region of Brittany, the historical and artistic dimensions of radio in France, and podcasting.
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01:34:1510/04/2023
Simon Strange, "Blank Canvas: Art School Creativity and the Development of Punk, Post Punk and New Wave Music" (Intellect, 2023)
In Blank Canvas: Art School Creativity From Punk to New Wave (Intellect Publishing, 2022), Simon Strange explores the relationship between art and music within education in the United Kingdom. Strange examines the diverse range of people who broke down the barriers between art, life, and the creative self. He looks at art school Britain in the 1960s and ’70s, a hotbed of experimental DIY creativity that blurred the lines between art and music. Tracing lines from the Bauhaus “blank slate” through the white heat of the Velvet Underground and the cutting edge of the Slits, Blank Canvas draws on interviews with giants of the genre across the spectrums of music, gender, and race, from Brian Eno to Pauline Black, Cabaret Voltaire to Gaye Advert. What emerges is a portrait of the era as an eclectic range of musical styles and cultures fused, erupting into a diverse flow of outspoken originality. Providing a framework for creativity within the arts and education, the book illuminates a path for the cultural evolution of both musicians and artists hoping to create the future.
Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.
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43:4508/04/2023
Bettina Judd, "Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work.
Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women’s creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women.
Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women’s creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.
Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.
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44:5108/04/2023
The Gospel According to Dorothy (with Kathryn Wehr)
In 1941, Dorothy Sayers, Christian apologist, author of The Mind of the Maker, and even more famous for her Peter Whimsey mystery novels, wrote a cycle of plays on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was produced by the BBC for the radio and was a great success, though Sayers got flak for it from all directions—from secular voices calling it religious propaganda, from conservative voices calling it blasphemy. She also broke an established prohibition against actors playing Jesus and made a number of editorial choices that were astonishing for the time and remain notable in the twenty-first century.
In 2023, Kathryn Wehr annotated, edited, and published a new edition of these plays by Dorothy Sayers, including her commentary on the text and its context. Dr. Wehr is a Catholic apologist and writer, and is the managing editor of Logos: A journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. She also writes and performs devotional songs. She has a Doctorate of Divinity from St. Andrews University in Scotland.
Kathryn Wehr’s website
Kathryn Wehr’s YouTube Channel, which includes many of her songs
A recording of the plays on YouTube, The Man Born to be King (but it is out of copyright and abridged, as Katy Wehr explains in our discussion).
Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.
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01:03:4106/04/2023
Natilee Harren, "Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
In Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (U Chicago Press, 2020), Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making. While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.
Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.
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56:3705/04/2023
Mauro Resmini, "Italian Political Cinema: Figure of the Long '68" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.
Italian Political Cinema: Figure of the Long '68 (U Minnesota Press, 2023) conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.
A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.
Mauro Resmini is associate professor of cinema and media studies and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.
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01:14:5804/04/2023
Frenchy Lunning, "Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Cosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” emerged from geeky Japanese subcultures to become a popular hobby, and even profession, around the world. Frenchy Lunning dives into the reasons why people cosplay through interviews, pictures, and her own firsthand experience of cosplay events in America and Japan. She distills the essence of cosplay to performance and the negotiation of identity, a pair of concepts that she interrogates in part by contrasting cosplay practices in America and Japan.
Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is livened with extensive photographs and fascinating tidbits about key figures in cosplay, such as Mari Kotani. Cosplayers are allowed to speak for themselves, describing what cosplay means to them and how they use it to negotiate their social roles and identities in fascinating detail. Lunning layers individuals’ testimony on a history of cosplay that highlights the changing settings, technologies, and communities supporting cosplay over the decades to leave readers debating what role cosplay will play in the construction of future identities.
Frenchy Lunning is Professor Emeritus of Liberal Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and has written two books: Subcultural Fashion: Fetish Style (2013), and Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (2022). She is working on a third book, Revolutionary Girl: Shōjo. The director of the US- and Japan-based academic conferences Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures, she is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the new biannual Mechademia: Second Arc journal.
Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, is forthcoming in July 2023 from the University of Hawai’i Press. It examines the contemporary media environment through Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels.
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55:0304/04/2023
Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Part 3: the Language
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 3, Professor Emma Smith offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant monologues. You’ll discover the unique kind of speech that Shakespeare develops in this play to reflect his characters’ sense of conscience and guilt, and learn to see how Shakespeare reflects the largest themes of his plays in the smallest units of language.
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20:3203/04/2023
Suzanne Ferriss, "Lost in Translation" (British Film Institute, 2023)
Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. In this close look at Coppola’s multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss’s book, Lost in Translation (British Film Institute, 2023), uses the film’s travel theme as a structuring device to detail the complexities of filming the 27-day shoot without permits in Tokyo, to explore Coppola's allusions to fine art, to examine the subtle color palette, the use of music over words, and the characters' experiences in and around the Park Hyatt Tokyo. Ferriss also evaluates the filmmaker’s distinctive cinematic signature and the elements that make Lost in Translation a cinema classic.
Suzanne Ferris is Professor Emerita at Nova Southeastern University. She has published extensively on fashion, film, and cultural studies.
Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.
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46:3831/03/2023
Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon, "After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon's edited volume After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022) demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles.
The featured speakers in this podcast include:
Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon: Marxist Literary Study and the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
Nikhil Pal Singh: Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
Mark Steven: Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
Joshua Clover: The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
Juliana Spahr: Literature and the State
Jasper Bernes: Poetry and Revolution
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.
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01:52:0431/03/2023
Ethan Warren, "The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution from a brash, self-anointed “Indiewood” auteur to one of his generation’s most distinctive voices has been one of the most remarkable career trajectories in recent film history. From early efforts to emulate his cinematic heroes to his increasingly singular late films, Anderson has created a body of work that balances the familiar and the strange, history and myth: viewers feel perpetually off balance, unsure of whether to expect a pitch-black joke or a moment of piercing emotional resonance.
The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia UP, 2023) provides the most complete account of Anderson’s career to date, encompassing his varied side projects and unproduced material; his personal and professional relationships with directors such as Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr.; and his work as a director of music videos for Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, and Haim. Ethan Warren explores Anderson’s recurring thematic preoccupations―the fraught dynamics of gender and religious faith, biological and found families, and his native San Fernando Valley―as well as his screenwriting methods and his relationship to his influences. Warren argues that Anderson’s films conjure up an alternate American history that exaggerates and elides verifiable facts in search of a heightened truth marked by a deeper level of emotional hyperrealism. This book is at once an unconventional primer on Anderson’s films and a provocative reframing of what makes his work so essential.
Ethan Warren is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and is the writer and director of the film West of Her.
Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm).
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01:01:0329/03/2023
Christina Rice, "Mean...Moody...Magnificent!: Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend" (UP of Kentucky, 2021)
By the early 1950s, Jane Russell (1921–2011) should have been forgotten. Her career was launched on what is arguably the most notorious advertising campaign in cinema history, which invited filmgoers to see Howard Hughes's The Outlaw (1943) and to "tussle with Russell." Throughout the 1940s, she was nicknamed the "motionless picture actress" and had only three films in theaters. With such a slow, inauspicious start, most aspiring actresses would have given up or faded away. Instead, Russell carved out a place for herself in Hollywood and became a memorable and enduring star.
Christina Rice offers the first biography of the actress and activist perhaps most well-known for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Despite the fact that her movie career was stalled for nearly a decade, Russell's filmography is respectable. She worked with some of Hollywood's most talented directors―including Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Josef von Sternberg―and held her own alongside costars such as Marilyn Monroe, Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Vincent Price, and Bob Hope. She also learned how to fight back against Howard Hughes, her boss for more than thirty-five years, and his marketing campaigns that exploited her physical appearance.
Beyond the screen, Rice reveals Russell as a complex and confident woman. She explores the star's years as a spokeswoman for Playtex as well as her deep faith and work as a Christian vocalist. Rice also discusses Russell's leadership and patronage of the WAIF foundation, which for many years served as the fundraising arm of the International Social Service (ISS) agency. WAIF raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, successfully lobbied Congress to change laws, and resulted in the adoption of tens of thousands of orphaned children. For Russell, the work she did to help unite families overshadowed any of her onscreen achievements.
On the surface, Jane Russell seemed to live a charmed life, but Rice illuminates her darker moments and her personal struggles, including her empowered reactions to the controversies surrounding her films and her feelings about being portrayed as a sex symbol. Mean...Moody...Magnificent!: Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend (UP of Kentucky, 2021) offers a fresh perspective on a star whose legacy endures not simply because she forged a notable film career, but also because she effectively used her celebrity to benefit others.
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41:4228/03/2023
Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd, "Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd's book Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South (U Georgia Press, 2022) explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.
In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage—young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to “do” white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?
Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties’ racial work or their investment in it.
With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion—stylized and predictable but ephemeral—has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.
Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.
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01:04:4027/03/2023
Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Part 2: Characters and Questions
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 addresses some of the central questions the play raises, especially questions of evil and guilt. With Professor Emma Smith, you’ll explore the Macbeths’ marriage and the different ways it can be interpreted, issues about joint agency and responsibility, and the question of how Shakespeare can dramatize such evil in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and still make these figures sympathetic.
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20:1727/03/2023
Sarah L. Kaufman, "The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life" (Norton, 2015)
Today I talked to Sarah L Kaufman about her book The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life (Norton, 2016).
Grace as a word comes from Greek, conveying a sense of giving a favor as a gift or act or kindness. It’s related to Hebrew and Muslim words for compassion, and is something today’s society could use more of notes today’s guest. Instead, we have reality TV that thrives on dis-grace. This book began as the author confesses, with her writing an appreciation of how well Cary Grant moves on screen. In this interview, we also had time to hear from the author on the “devastatingly liquid” forehand of Roger Federer, and his overall grace on and off the court. Is grace charming? So much so that Cary Grant even once deliciously said, “Even I want to be Cary Grant.” Learn why Margaret Thatcher (“Atilla the Hen”) qualifies as graceful, and how we might move past today’s penchant for intolerance.
Sarah L. Kaufman is an author, journalist and educator. For almost 30 years, she was a Pulitzer Prize-Winning dance critic for The Washington Post and happy to be a colleague of Judith Martin (aka Ms. Manners). Nowadays, Sarah teaches courses in Harvard’s Extension School on a variety of topics.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals.
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23:1023/03/2023
Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Part 1: the Story
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. Professor Smith outlines the imagery and structure of the play and its relationship to historical events of Shakespeare’s time. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.
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20:3620/03/2023
Rose Marshack, "Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
In Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Poster Children bassist Rose Marshack details her life in the 80s and 90s as part of a heavily touring Indie Rock band. Using her Tour Reports from the 1990s, Marshack relates what life was like during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)--Marshack chronicles the band's day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk's DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman's life in the trenches and online.
Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.
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54:0720/03/2023
Nicholas Brown, "Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2019)
In Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), Nicholas Brown offers a fresh perspective on aesthetic autonomy and its political value, one of the great debates of the twentieth century. The monograph illustrates the viability of the modernist project in the era after postmodernism while offering one illuminating reading after another of contemporary examples in novels, photography, sculpture, popular music, TV, or movies. Brown defends art as a liberatory force in an age dominated by markets. By exploring the nuances of artistic production, Autonomy is a feast of delicious and insightful appraisals of artwork—with surprising turns and twists—within a larger context of the dialectics between art and market.
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01:09:2419/03/2023
The Sharing of Sound Art
In this podcast, Claire MacDonald and Sarah Parry discuss the history of recording, the sharing of sound art between artists, how recording has shaped communities, the impact of technology on artists and their publics, and the artist's voice and the different genres it inhabits.
About the Contributors:
Claire MacDonald is a curator, writer, and editor whose work focuses on the intersections of performance, writing, and art. She is a founding editor of Performance Research and a contributing editor to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She recently served as Director of the International Centre for Fine Art Research at University of Arts London, and is currently Professor II at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. She has a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and has recently written a novel. Sarah Parry has been teaching at the Univeristy of British Columbia since 2005. Her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Alberta, entitled "Caedmon Records, the Cold War, and the Scene of the Postmodern", explored the history of Caedmon Records, a company that pioneered the recording of the spoken word. She teaches critical theory and modern and postmodern American poetry. Other interests include sound recording history and acoustical poetics.
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37:1018/03/2023
Rick de Villiers, "Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation (Edinburgh UP, 2021) demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology.
Rick de Villiers is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He holds a PhD from Durham University in the UK, and he is the author of articles on modernism, South African literature, alternative assessment practices and more. His first book, Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.
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31:5217/03/2023
Hugh Hodges, "The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britain in 21 Mixtapes" (PM Press, 2023)
This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists.
Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era.
Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure.
Hugh’s author page for PM Press.
Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.
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01:07:4116/03/2023
Laura Kolb, "Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Laura Kolb examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction.
Laura Kolb is an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, the City University of New York.
Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
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54:3514/03/2023
The Wooden O and the Iron Throne: Game of Thrones and Shakespeare Part 3
Dive into the question of why audiences love Shakespeare’s plays and Game of Thrones so much, despite their depictions of prejudice and violence, and discuss the unique power of tragic art.
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38:2513/03/2023
Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)
How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America.
Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries.
Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]).
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01:10:3612/03/2023
Brian Harker, "Sportin' Life: John W. Bubbles, an American Classic" (Oxford UP, 2022)
John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half of the great vaudeville act, "Buck and Bubbles," with his partner pianist Buck Washington. Brian Harker tells Bubbles' story in Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, An American Classic (Oxford University Press, 2022). Bubbles’ long career, which largely ended after a stroke in 1967, spanned several significant shifts in American popular entertainment. He started entertaining audiences in vaudeville just as films began to dominate the landscape followed by television. Harker tells the story of Bubbles’ tumultuous life and situates his career as a Black dancer within segregated America and an entertainment industry that perpetuated racist stereotypes and exploited its workers—especially those from minoritized communities. Although Bubbles originated the role of Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, he has largely slipped out of American memory. Harker restores Bubbles to his rightful place as an innovative dancer and an important figure in twentieth-century American popular entertainment.
Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.
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01:12:0211/03/2023
Joey Merlo, "On Set with Theda Bara" (1080 Press, 2023)
Joey Merlo's On Set With Theda Bara is a one-person four-character play about the nearly-forgotten silent film "vamp" Theda Bara, but also about fan culture, contemporary queerness, and the timeless allure of a mysterious and possibly cursed castle. The play premiered at The Brick's Exponential Festival, and is now available in an expanded edition from Eureka! Press and 1080 Press, including gorgeous artwork by artist, poet, and critic Wayne Koestenbaum. Even people who don't typically read plays will find a lot to love in this book, which is written without traditional character headings or stage directions. On Set With Theda Bara is a strange, beguiling, and brilliant piece of writing.
Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.
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50:4011/03/2023
Jessica Rosenberg, "Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
Today’s guest is Jessica Rosenberg, who is the author of a new book titled Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022). An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Professor Rosenberg has contributed book chapters to Shakespeare and Hospitality and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Literature and published articles on “The Poetics of Practical Address” in Philological Quarterly and “The Point of the Couplet” in ELH: English Literary History.
Botanical Poetics, a wide-ranging study of print culture around poetry between the years 1568 and 1583, investigates the intersection of literary history and horticultural practice. The book includes new interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Romeo and Juliet, as well as George Gascoigne’s A Hundred Sundry Flowers and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay. Botanical Poetics offers a variety of fresh concepts for the study of early modern poetry such as “the ecology of small forms” and “slippery poetics.” Not least of all, this book explores what it meant to “read like a pig” in the 1570s.
John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.
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01:04:4010/03/2023
Lillian Colon, "Lilly: The First Latina Rockette" (Lilly Enterprises, 2021)
Lilly: The First Latina Rockette (Lilly Enterprises, 2021) is the improbable story of a Puerto Rican toddler, confined by her father for 15 years to a Bronx orphanage—the former Kennedy estate--and her emergence as a successful jazz and Broadway dancer on the way to becoming the first Latina Rockette. Equally important: a thoughtful exploration of Roman Catholic charitable institutions, the New York City’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the uncertainties and brutality of Puerto Rican family life and the joy of discovering a Latina identity during a troubled time.
James Wunsch is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Education Studies at SUNY Empire State.
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53:3007/03/2023
Ryan Donovan, "Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Broadway has body issues.
What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body.
In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West’s Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside?
In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway’s inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.
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01:14:0407/03/2023
The Wooden O and the Iron Throne: Game of Thrones and Shakespeare Part 2
Explore the moral tensions and dilemmas that Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin force their audiences to confront, especially in the storylines of their most notable political leaders.
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32:1906/03/2023
Measure for Measure Episode 4: Movies
We’d rate today’s episode a ten out of ten, five star, certified fresh, two thumbs up. But we can’t speak for its IMdB score.
This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman.
Measure for Measure is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas.
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16:0205/03/2023
Error, Ego, Humility and Music: A Discussion with Tony Monaco
For today’s episode we welcome jazz organist Tony Monaco to the show. Tony is a master of the Hammond B3 and has collaborated with many other great jazz musicians, including fellow jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco, drummer Steve Smith, as well as guitarists Pat Martino and George Benson, among many others. Downbeat Magazine named Tony in the top 5 jazz organists internationally for the years 2005-2011 and his albums have been both commercially successful and critically acclaimed, with several climbing to the upper levels of Jazzweek’s annual top 100 listings. Our conversation covers much ground related to error, ego, humility and music, but also Tony’s struggles with alcoholism over the course of his career. And be sure to listen all the way to the end for a great live rendition of Tony’s composition I’ll Remember Jimmy.
John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.
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58:4405/03/2023
Girish Shambu, "The New Cinephilia" (Caboose, 2022)
Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today's "new cinephilia" and the classical cinephilia of the 1950s is the robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated. Each activity of today's cinephilic practice - viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films - is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction facilitated by the Internet. As with their classical counterparts, the thoughts and writings of today's cinephiles are born from a vigorous and broad-ranging cinephilic conversation. Further, by dramatically lowering the economic barriers to publication, the Internet has also made possible new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models.
The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2022) both describes and theorises how and where cinephilia lives and thrives today. In this expanded second edition, author Girish Shambu revisits some of his original ideas and calls into question the focus in cinephilia on the male canon in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the lack of racial and gender diversity in contemporary cinema. As Dr. Shambu writes:"There is more to the cinephile experience than simply surfing from one link to another in a state of perpetual motion. How does this movement - this daily proliferation of encounters - power one's cinephilia? What special affective charge does this experience hold? In other words, how is the experience of the Internet cinephile affectively different from that of a 'traditional' cinephile who spends little time online?"
In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Shambu talks working as a Professor of Management while maintaining his profile as a prolific cinephile, explains why auteurism is a "manspreading machine," and offers recommendations on what films exemplify a "cinema of the future."
Girish Shambu is Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches sustainability and supply chain management. In a dual career as film blogger, critic and scholar, Girish is also the author of The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2020, 2nd ed.) and editor of Film Quarterly’s online column Quorum. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection, Framework Journal of Film & Media, and Film Quarterly.
In addition to being a host on New Books in Film, Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television. You can read her reviews and essays at Literary Hub, Public Books, LA Review of Books, The A.V. Club, Little White Lies, Film Quarterly, and The Washington Post.
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45:5704/03/2023
Margaret Hall, "Gemignani: Life and Lessons from Broadway and Beyond" (Applause Books, 2022)
Margaret Hall's Gemignani: Life and Lessons from Broadway and Beyond (Applause Books, 2022) is the definitive book on Broadway's greatest music director. From a youth playing in jazz bands to a storied career conducting Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, Evita, and Into the Woods, Gemignani's life story provides a behind-the-scenes look at many of the pivotal moments in musical theatre history. The book also provides a vivid sense of Gemignani as a person: a warm, avuncular, yet passionately opinionated figure whom many Broadway legends rely on to make their shows come alive.
Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.
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46:1201/03/2023
Dan DiPiero, "Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (U Michigan Press, 2022) offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.
Dan DiPiero is a musician and Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Ithaca College, soon-to-be Assistant Professor of Music Studies, UMKC Conservatory.
Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.
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01:25:3727/02/2023
Lara Gabrielle, "Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies" (U California Press, 2022)
From Marion Davies's humble days in Brooklyn to her rise to fame alongside press baron William Randolph Hearst, the public life story of the film star plays like a modern fairy tale shaped by gossip columnists, fan magazines, biopics, and documentaries. Yet the real Marion Davies remained largely hidden from view, as she was wary of interviews and trusted few with her true life story. In Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies (U California Press, 2022), Lara Gabrielle pulls back layers of myth to show a complex and fiercely independent woman, ahead of her time, who carved her own path.
Through meticulous research, unprecedented access to archives around the world, and interviews with those who knew Davies, Captain of Her Soul counters the public story. This book reveals a woman who navigated disability and social stigma to rise to the top of a young Hollywood dominated by powerful men. Davies took charge of her own career, negotiating with studio heads and establishing herself as a top-tier comedienne, but her proudest achievement was her philanthropy and advocacy for children. This biography brings Davies out of the shadows cast by the Hearst legacy, shedding light on a dynamic woman who lived life on her own terms and declared that she was "the captain of her soul."
Lara Gabrielle is a film writer and researcher whose work on Marion Davies has been featured in The Missouri Review, The Wall Street Journal, and on PBS’s American Experience. She has spoken about Davies at film festivals and retrospectives worldwide and has served as a consultant on her life and legacy for books, dissertations, and film projects. Gabrielle’s biography of Davies, Captain of Her Soul, is included in Alta Journal’s Top 16 Books to read this September. She lives in Oakland, California.
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47:2127/02/2023
The Wooden O and the Iron Throne: Game of Thrones and Shakespeare Part 1
Discover the real-life history that inspired Game of Thrones and Shakespeare’s history plays, and learn the distinctive ways in which Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin each transform history into art
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29:0327/02/2023
Frances Howard, "Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference" (Policy Press, 2022)
How can the arts make the world a better place? In Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference (Policy Press, 2022), Frances Howard, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University, analyses the opportunities for social change and social justice offered by youth arts programmes. The book combines a detailed ethnography of a youth arts programme in the UK, along with rich and detailed comparative case studies. Drawing on a wealth of cross- and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, the book is both a critique and defence of the possibilities offered by engagement with the arts. The book will be essential reading across arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone with an interest in the arts.
Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.
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41:2427/02/2023
Jen B. Larson, "Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983" (Feral House, 2022)
In Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983 (Feral House, 2023), Jen B. Larson takes readers throughout the United States on a punk history lesson. Dividing the country into regions, Larson documents local and regional bands and scenes, many of which have stories that were in danger of being lost. Profiling over 80 bands and artists, Hit Girls shares women's experiences as pioneers of punk. Highlighting their successes and documenting the sexism and racism within the scene, Hit Girls includes over 100 images, a comprehensive playlist of all the artists, and interviews with many of the artists including Texacala Jones, Alice Bag, Nikki Corvette, and Penelope Houston. Hit Girls is an important text in the history of popular music and punk and adds to the work of centering women in music history.
Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.
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57:3226/02/2023
Alexandra Chiriac, "Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest" (de Gruyter, 2022)
Alexandra Chiriac's book Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest (de Gruyter, 2022) examines the reach of modernism in design and performance in interwar Romania. It follows the transnational trajectories of several remarkable Jewish avant-garde artists, actors, and directors based in Bucharest, the country's capital, in the 1920s and 1930s. The first part of the book recovers the history of Bucharest's first modern design institution and investigates its links with German design and the Bauhaus. The second half focuses on several innovative collaborations in the realm of Yiddish theatre, including the time spent in Romania by the world-renowned Vilna Troupe. Based on extensive original research, the book shows how Bucharest was connected to Berlin, Riga, and Chicago, highlighting the contribution of Jewish cultural production to avant-garde movements in Europe and beyond.
Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements.
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01:08:3425/02/2023
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" Part 3: the Language
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 3, Professor Kewes and Professor Palfrey offer detailed close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches, including Hamlet’s famous soliloquies. You’ll watch critical interpretation in action as our featured scholars offer contrasting readings of a single speech; you’ll uncover the images and metaphors behind Hamlet’s words that reveal the unique bent of his imagination; and you’ll learn the precise linguistic techniques Shakespeare uses to convey a living mind in the act of thinking.
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40:5020/02/2023
Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson, "Failures in Cultural Participation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
For the past two decades, the arts and cultural establishment in the UK has been trying to engage a broader set of audiences in their work. Countless initiatives to make the arts more accessible to the public and to make them more relevant have been advocated for in policy and funding settlements.
But the dial on who participates and how much has not shifted, despite many thousands of projects trying to address the problem. And this isn’t even the punchline. Not only do the interventions not work, nobody involved in them admits that the interventions may have been a failure.
Having spent many years working in cultural policy studies and in arts practice, Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson take the arts and culture sector to task over this fiction. Their book Failures in Cultural Participation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) puts a mirror to the industry and invites cultural policymakers, organisations, and practitioners to confront their failures.
David Stevenson speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the culture sector’s refusal to acknowledge failure in widening participation and moving the debate from the ‘value’ of culture to considering how policies can be designed and implemented. David argues for an honest and transparent acknowledgement of failure at individual, organisational and governmental levels.
The Failspace Project tools
A special issue of the Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation edited by Leila and David
David’s “I hate opera” paper.
Leila Jancovich is a professor of Cultural Policy and Participation at the University of Leeds. Before entering academia, she worked for many years in the arts and festivals sector as a producer, researcher, and policy maker.
David Stevenson is the Dean of The School of Arts, Social Sciences, and Management at Queen Margaret University. His research focuses on relations of power and the production of value within the cultural sector.
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.
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01:07:3820/02/2023
Ying Zhu, "Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market" (New Press, 2022)
With her book Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market (New Press, 2022), media scholar Ying Zhu explores the 100+ year relationship between what are now the world's two largest movie markets: China and the United States.
Zhu is a Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University's Academy of Film, and the founder/chief editor of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. Hollywood in China (July 2022, The New Press) is her fourth book, and it offers a comprehensive chronology of the Hollywood-China relationship, with numerous specific case studies.
In this podcast, Anthony Kao chats with Zhu about the book, and delves into matters like reactions to "China-humiliation films" during the 1911-1949 Republican Era, Madame Mao's penchant for Hollywood classics, and what the future might hold for relations between China and Hollywood.
Some movie recommendations from Ying Zhu (learn more by listening until the end of this episode):
From the 1990s: Zhang Yimou's To Live and Tian Zhuangzhuang's Blue Kite (discussed more in one of Ying's earlier books)
From the 2000s: Li Yang's Blind Shaft (analyzed in one of Ying's articles)
From the 2010s: Feng Xiaogang's I Am Not Madame Bovary (explored in Hollywood in China)
Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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47:1318/02/2023
Maya Phillips, "Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse" (Atria Books, 2022)
When Maya Phillips first saw the opening of Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, she knew her life would change forever. She then spent her formative years loving not just the Star Wars saga but superhero cartoons, anime, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Doctor Who. In Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria Books, 2022), Phillips, a critic at large for the New York Times, presents an incisive essay collection that explores race, religion, sexuality, class, and gender through the lens of pop culture fandoms.
Maya Phillips received her BFA in writing, literature, and publishing with a concentration in poetry from Emerson College and her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers.
Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in humanities. Her research and writing interests include reading in popular culture, the public history of fiction writing, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.
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53:4814/02/2023
Nic Brown, "Bang Bang Crash: A Memoir" (Counterpoint, 2023)
In his memoir, Bang Bang Crash (Counterpoint, 2023), Nic Brown shares his experiences as a rock and roll drummer who abandons his successful music career to pursue his true passion and discovers a deeper understanding of artistic fulfillment in this episodic memoir of swapping one dream for another In the mid-1990s, fresh out of high school, Nic Brown was living his childhood dream as a rock and roll drummer. Signing a major label record deal, playing big shows, hitting the charts, giving interviews in Rolling Stone, appearing on The Tonight Show—what could be better for a young artist? But contrary to expectations, getting a shot at his artistic dream early in life was a destabilizing shock. The more he achieved, the more accolades that came his way, the less sure Brown became about his path. Only a few years into a promising musical career, he discovered the crux of his discontent: he was never meant to remain behind the drums. In fact, his true artistic path lay in a radically different direction entirely: he decided to become a writer, embarking on a journey leading him to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, publish novels and short stories, and teach literature to college students across the country. Bang Bang Crash tells the story of Nic Brown’s unusual journey to gain new strength, presence of mind, and sense of perspective, enabling him to discover an even greater life of artistic fulfillment.
Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.
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42:0014/02/2023
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" Part 2: Characters and Questions
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 turns from the political to the philosophical and psychological, as Simon Palfrey, professor of English at the University of Oxford, analyzes Hamlet’s character, language, and thought. You’ll learn what makes Hamlet one of the most complex and lifelike characters in literature and what strategies Shakespeare used to create this character. You’ll also explore the play’s deep questions about action, freedom, existence, and death--and learn how questions like these keep Shakespeare’s work open and alive.
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25:2213/02/2023
Jane Hwang Degenhardt, "Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage" (Oxford UP, 2022)
How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency?
Jane Hwang Degenhardt's book Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented around discerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities. The popular theater played an influential role in dramatizing the new prospects and dangers opened up by nascent global economics and fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortune's unpredictable turns. While largely derided as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also reveals how a new philosophy of fortune led to economic exploitation and racialized exclusions.
Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the history of the English commercial theater--like that of English seaborne expansion--was also a history of fortune. The public theater not only shaped popular understandings of fortune's role in a culture undergoing economic transformation, but also addressed this transformation from a unique position because of its own implication in London commerce, its reliance on paying customers, and its vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of live performance. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, this book shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as modeling proper ways of acting in the face of unknown outcomes and contingency. In short, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the public theater offered the first modern understanding of fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon.
John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.
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01:10:5110/02/2023
Natasha Lance Rogoff, "Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
It’s the early 1990s, and the USSR is no more. An intrepid young American TV producer has been given a seemingly foolhardy task: bringing the beloved children’s show Sesame Street to Russia, and the rest of the post-Soviet sphere.
This is the premise of Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)—a memoir from that aforementioned producer, Natasha Lance Rogoff. Amidst car bombings, soldiers kidnapping Elmo, and a collapsing ruble, Lance Rogoff assembles a team of Russian creatives to adapt Sesame Street into Ulitsa Sezam, as the show is known in Russian. While culture clashes ensue at first, they eventually give way to cross-cultural empathy, as Lance Rogoff poignantly illustrates in the book. It’s a story that feels especially resonant in the present day, with Russia and the West again at opposite ends of a daunting geopolitical divide.
Lance Rogoff talks with the New Books Network's Anthony Kao about how she came to produce Sesame Street in Russia, and gives us a taste of the adventures contained within Muppets in Moscow.
Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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31:3310/02/2023
Steven Hyden, "Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation" (Hachette Books, 2022)
Ever since Pearl Jam first blasted onto the Seattle grunge scene three decades ago with their debut album, Ten, they have sold 85M+ albums, performed for hundreds of thousands of fans around the world, and have even been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of A Generation, music critic and journalist Steven Hyden celebrates the life, career, and music of this legendary group, widely considered to be one of the greatest American rock bands of all time. Long Road is structured like a mix tape, using 18 different Pearl Jam classics as starting points for telling a mix of personal and universal stories. Each chapter tells the tale of this great band -- how they got to where they are, what drove them to greatness, and why it matters now.
Much like the generation it emerged from, Pearl Jam is a mass of contradictions. They were an enormously successful mainstream rock band who felt deeply uncomfortable with the pursuit of capitalistic spoils. They were progressive activists who spoke in favor of abortion rights and against the Ticketmaster monopoly, and yet they epitomized the sound of traditional, male-dominated rock 'n' roll. They were looked at as spokesmen for their generation, even though they ultimately projected profound confusion and alienation. They triumphed, and failed, in equal doses -- the quintessential Gen-X tale.
Impressive as their stats, accolades, and longevity may be, Hyden also argues that Pearl Jam's most definitive accomplishment lies in the impact their music had on Generation X as a whole. Pearl Jam's music helped an entire generation of listeners connect with the glory of bygone rock mythology, and made it relevant during a period in which tremendous American economic prosperity belied a darkness at the heart of American youth. More than just a chronicle of the band's career, this book is also a story about Gen- X itself, who like Pearl Jam came from angsty, outspoken roots and then evolved into an establishment institution, without ever fully shaking off their uncertain, outsider past. For so many Gen-Xers growing up at the time, Pearl Jam's music was a beacon that offered both solace and guidance. They taught an entire generation how to grow up without losing the purest and most essential parts of themselves.
Written with his celebrated blend of personal memoir, criticism, and journalism, Hyden explores Pearl Jam's path from Ten to now. It's a chance for new fans and old fans alike to geek out over Pearl Jam minutia--the B-sides, the beloved deep cuts, the concert bootlegs--and explore the multitude of reasons why Pearl Jam's music resonated with so many people. As Hyden explains, "Most songs pass through our lives and are swiftly forgotten. But Pearl Jam is forever."
Steven Hyden is the author of This Isn't Happening, Twilight of the Gods, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, and (with Steve Gorman) Hard to Handle. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Billboard, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Grantland, The A.V. Club, Slate, and Salon. He is currently the cultural critic at UPROXX.
Steven Hyden on Twitter.
Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
Bradley Morgan on Twitter.
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46:3306/02/2023