Greatest Hits Research Articles

Writer in Motion: The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane: Collected Critical Essays by Donald Pizer (review)

Reviewed by: Writer in Motion: The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane: Collected Critical Essays by Donald Pizer Nicole de Fee Pizer, Donald. Writer in Motion: The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane: Collected Critical Essays. Brooklyn, New York: AMS Press, 2013. 153 pp. $76.50. At first blush, Donald Pizer’s Writer in Motion: The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane: Collected Critical Essays is a greatest hits album, if you will, of Pizer’s scholarship on Crane. The author readily admits in his preface: “[I] am offering a book on Crane’s major fiction which is a collection of my previously published essays on the subject” (viii). Like a greatest hits album, the work showcases some of Pizer’s [End Page 270] finest work on three of Crane’s major pieces of fiction, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother, and The Red Badge of Courage. However, Pizer’s book is much more nuanced. His design for his project is to examine “two related major strands” in Crane’s work (viii). The first is that Crane was indeed a writer in motion “who continually grew as an interpreter of the human condition and as an imaginative artist” (viii). Pizer asserts that any critical undertaking of Crane needs to involve studying both the development of Crane’s work and artistry as a whole and over time. The second strand Pizer pursues is “the usefulness of naturalism as a means by which to understand the dynamic of Crane’s changing ideas” (ix). Pizer is successful in both endeavors. The first section of the book focuses on Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Pizer argues that Crane’s use of naturalism allows him to successfully “interpret the human condition” in Maggie. This holds true not just for Maggie, but, according to Pizer, for Crane’s other major works: George’s Mother and The Red Badge of Courage. The primary example Pizer calls attention to in this section surrounds the inclusion/exclusion of the “huge fat man” at the end of Maggie. We can look at the presence or absence of the “huge fat man” as being important in and of itself, but, for Pizer, a specific example like this within the context of naturalism gives us a more complete understanding and appreciation of the nuances of the work. The second section of Pizer’s study mirrors the trajectory of Crane’s major fiction. As Pizer argues that George’s Mother is a bridge between Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage, so does Pizer’s brief section on George’s Mother serve as the bridge between his in-depth studies of Maggie and Red Badge. While the focus here primarily is on a gendered coding of experience for George, as Pizer explains, “George’s defeat also expresses one of Crane’s central ideas about the human condition in any social context, since George’s fall results from his effort to establish his selfhood and find satisfaction in life within the limited possibilities of the false and even self-destructive codes of belief which society has presented him” (62). This observation links George’s fate to both Maggie’s and Henry Fleming’s. For if “the critic is required to grasp both the individuality of a specific work and its role as a bridge from the immediate past to the near future” (57), then this brief section accomplishes what it should. Like the section on Maggie, the chapters on The Red Badge of Courage focus on the controversies surrounding the text, primarily having to do with self/censorship and editing. As in the chapters devoted to Maggie, Pizer places these issues within the broader context of naturalism. In the chapter “Naturalism: An Essay in Definition,” Pizer states “that the naturalistic novel usually contains tensions or contradictions, and that the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience” (92). This is the crux of Pizer’s argument and what this compilation of essays, collectively, defines for Crane’s work. To separate naturalism from Crane’s form is to miss the point of Crane’s (and Pizer’s for that matter) work entirely. [End Page 271] Nicole...

<em>Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism</em>, by James Walter Caufield

Reviewed by: Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism by James Walter Caufield James Najarian (bio) Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism, by James Walter Caufield; pp. 235. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012, £60.00, $109.95. In Overcoming Matthew Arnold James Walter Caufield offers readers an erudite and longoverdue defense of the critic and poet. Part polemic, part reception history, his book argues that Matthew Arnold’s work can only be fully understood through his philosophical pessimism: what Arnold himself called “renouncement” (qtd. in Caufield 4). Caufield draws our attention back to Arnold’s own emphasis on “conduct,” what Arnold called “three-fourths of life” (qtd. in Caufield 187). This study is breathtakingly comprehensive; it takes into account all of Arnold’s prose works, with a substantial look at his poetry, as well as Arnold’s contemporary critics and other voices informing his, particularly Arthur Schopenhauer’s. It takes in Arnold’s heirs, sympathizers, and detractors, including T. S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, Lionel Trilling, Edward Said, Chris Baldick, Francis Mulhern, and Stefan Collini. Arnold has been a prominent target of criticism for a century and a half by now. As Caufield writes, “Arnold manages to draw fire from partisans of all philosophical camps” (13). In the nineteenth century, many writers—from doctrinaire Anglicans, to the Utilitarian James Fitzjames Stephen, to the Comtean Frederic Harrison—castigated Arnold for his lack of system and avoidance of abstraction and overarching theories. They dismissed him as weak-minded and effeminate. And in turn Arnold often (in Culture and Anarchy [1869] and Friendship’s Garland [1871]) pictured himself in their terms, though it seems, like most devotees of system, that they were deaf to his [End Page 350] irony. Arnold preferred experiential and intuitive knowledge and outrightly distrusted system. As he writes in “A French Critic on Goethe” (1878), “the systematic judgment … is the most worthless of all” (qtd. in Caufield 122). Many modernist writers, including Lytton Strachey and Eliot, condescended to Arnold. Voices on the religious right, including Eliot, held him responsible for the disregard of religion, though Arnold was only taking into account movements that reached English shores quite late. On the Left, Baldick and Said have held him personally responsible for all the sins of the British. But, as Caufield astutely notices, Arnold-haters do not seem to have read all that much of him, and they certainly do not regard Arnold in his historical or intellectual contexts. It is easy for late twentieth-century writers to condemn Culture and Anarchy as mere snobbishness, but Arnold wrote it before Britain had universal education, a goal that he worked for all of his adult life and for which he should be given a great deal of credit: his enthusiasm for a shared education is also an enthusiasm for a free education for all, regardless of class. And especially oddly, the New Left and its heirs blame Arnold for the English literary canon, though, as Collini points out, he was skeptical of the academic study of English; his literary essays consistently try to open the English public up to European and classical literatures, especially to minor figures. A great deal of the habitual dismissal of Arnold’s criticism is presentist, that is, it uses the criteria of the present to pass judgment on writers of the past, even when writers in their context were admirably devoted to unpopular and just causes. Arnold is merely a “stock stage-villain” (123). Baldick’s “strategic misrepresentation” of Arnold cherry-picks the author’s greatest hits (93). Vincent Pecora’s classification of Arnold as a racist derives from a fairly sophomoric reading of The Study of Celtic Literature (1867)—a document that admittedly exhibits a conflation of ethnicity and culture we now find absurd. Most importantly, Pecora’s critique fails to balance notions that were commonplace in the nineteenth century with the hostile reception of the work, which took Arnold to task for his sympathy with the Celts. Caufield argues that misreadings of Arnold can be corrected with more attention to Arnold’s ethic of renouncement, and he uses Arnold’s unread religious criticism to point out Arnold’s real sympathies. Literature and...

From the Extinct Volcano, a Bird of Paradise by Carter Revard

Bulbul Sharma Eating Women, Telling Tales Zubaan Ranging from humorous to touching to sometimes grisly, each of the nine vignettes presented in Eating Women, Telling Tales explore the complex reality of women’s everyday lives in India. When a group of women come together and exchange tales from their personal experiences, what emerges is a subtle commentary on the social hierarchy of village life and a glimpse into the intricate role of food in human relationships. Eduardo Sacheri Papers in the Wind Mara Faye Lethem, tr. Other Press Set within the culture of professional soccer, Papers in the Wind follows the story of three close companions taking on the responsibility of caring for the young daughter of their deceased friend. Despite the tragic loss and the odds against them, they rally with humor, love, and remarkable resourcefulness. Nota Bene hell of the Holocaust in one poem, while others locate her in a dreamscape that bears little resemblance to conventional hells or heavens. This is a hallmark of Medbh McGuckian’s style: she is at home in the fluid language of symbols, some archetypal, some drawn from Irish folklore, and some private. Although this death is the volume ’s focal point, the speaker wends her way through times past, present , and future. We can read this as an act of honor, though she refuses to see her mother in idyllic terms and does not flinch from the view of her suffering. The presence of death can have its own beauty, and the eponymous poem of The High Caul Cap offers us an image of a time in love with endings. Yet the poet herself is also in love with time, perhaps obsessed with it here. Temporal markers placing actions before or after, first or last, singly or all at once, abound in the volume. Perhaps she feels unable to keep up with time’s passage; perhaps there is almost too much to gather in a single valediction, one that begins with the speaker “wearing her belatedness.” One certainly cannot fault McGuckian for not saying enough in these dense, sometimes puzzling poems with their many layers. If anything , one wishes at times for breathing room, perhaps a slightly thinner and clearer air. At times, reading the poems makes us feel as if plunged into an element that we cannot quite master. This is not to suggest that the content of the poems is overly dark—it is not—or that the poet ever scants the concrete weight of her subjects: there is “nothing more earthly” than the departed. There is also nothing more complex, given that a single person contains a treasure trove of experiences and elicits a corresponding wealth of imagined scenarios in the lyricist. McGuckian typically uses elaborate, complex images and situates her characters in situations both oneiric and, sometimes , straightforward. She stitches her images closely together, creating a rich, almost baroque tapestry of loss and difficult love, even as ultimately “there is no peace: / no function for the heart to serve / the dear, the best-known face.” Magdalena Kay University of Victoria, B.C. Carter Revard. From the Extinct Volcano, a Bird of Paradise. Brian K. Hudson, ed. Norman, Oklahoma. Mongrel Empire Press. 2014. isbn 9780985133788 The author’s note at the beginning of From the Extinct Volcano, a Bird of Paradise—a new collection of poetry from Oklahoma writer and Osage poet Carter Revard—brings together multiple genres of writing into a single collection of poetry. For example, Revard sees his work as poetry that September–October 2014 • 89 reviews is composed of history, science, personal narrative, and song. The collection could be seen as a compilation of songs that serve as a greatest hits album. Many of the poems in the volume appear in earlier collections of Revard’s work. More compellingly, however, this volume of poetry represents a lyrical echo. The strongest moments in the collection are those of borrowing and repetition wherein Revard uses words and rhythms from the past to create contemporary art. Revard’s poems “Driving in Oklahoma” and “A Song That We Still Sing” ask readers to consider how ordinary drives and ceremonial practices might be tied together. Both contain elements of...

The pulsation-rotation interaction: Greatest hits and the B-side

AbstractIt has long been known that rotation can have an appreciable impact on stellar pulsation — by modifying the usual p and g modes found in the non-rotating case, and by introducing new classes of modes. However, it's only relatively recently that advances in numerical simulations and complementary theoretical treatments have enabled us to model these phenomena in any great detail. In this talk I'll review highlights in this area (the ‘Greatest Hits’), before considering the flip side (or the ‘B-side’, for those of us old enough to remember vinyl records) of the pulsation-rotation interaction: how pulsation can itself influence internal rotation profiles.

Effect of Rhythm on the Recovery From Intense Exercise

Motivational music (music that stimulates physical activity) was previously shown to enhance the recovery from intense exercise. The aim of the present study was to isolate the effect of rhythm (presumed to be the most effective factor of motivational music) on the recovery from intense exercise. Ten young adult active men (age: 26.1 ± 1.7 years) performed 6-minute run at peak oxygen consumption speed, at 3 separate visits (random order). At 1 visit, no music was played during the recovery after exercise. In the other visits, participants listened to motivational music that was previously shown to enhance recovery (a Western CD collection of greatest hits of all times converted to dance style, 140 b·min, strong bit, played by portable MP3 device using headphones at a volume of 70 dB) or only to the rhythm beats derived from the same songs. Mean heart rate (HR), rating of perceived exertion (RPE), number of steps (measured by step counter) and blood lactate concentrations were determined at 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 minutes of the recovery. There was no difference in HR changes during the recovery at all conditions. Compared with the recovery without music, listening to motivational music during recovery was associated with significant greater number of steps, lower absolute lactate levels, and greater mean decrease of RPE. Listening only to rhythm beats, derived from the same music, during the recovery was associated with significant greater number of steps and lower absolute lactate levels compared to recovery without music. Music was significantly more effective than rhythm only in the absolute mean number of steps. The beneficial effect of both music and rhythm was greater toward the end of the recovery period. Results suggest that listening to music during nonstructured recovery can be used by professional athletes to enhance recovery from intense exercise. Rhythm plays a very important role in the effect of music on recovery and can be used to enhance nonstructured recovery when music is unavailable or when cultural barriers and individual music preferences may apply. The optimal music and rhythm selection is yet to be determined.

The messier objects as a tool in teaching astronomy

The French astronomer Charles Messier (1730- 1817) compiled a catalogue [1] of astronomical objects which reached109 innumber after additions by later astronomers were added. The catalogue contains galaxies, emission nebulae, a supernova remnant, a double star, globular clusters, open clusters, an asterism, a star cloud, and planetary nebulae. While the objective of Messier in compiling the catalogue was to guide comet hunters not to be confused by his objects which he thought looked like comets [2], the Messier Catalogue as it later became known became a standard guide to astronomers for a study of the sky’s “greatest hits” or the best samples of objects which can be observed and studied. This paper explores the value of the Messier Catalogue in the teaching of Astronomy and Earth Science. The range of objects is wide and contains some of the best examples of their type. The teaching method I propose is the actual observations of the objects through a telescope, with the corresponding explanation. Some principles which will be covered through this process are stellar evolution from the birth and death of stars, galaxy types, formation of galaxies, galactic interactions, life in the Universe, cosmology, and our place in the Universe.

The Three Tenors Antitrust Case: What Did We Learn?

IntroductionOne of the unforeseen aspects of the Three Tenors legacy is that the franchise has been elevated to star status in the U.S. antitrust community (Verscheiden 2007). This group of legal boffins is a niche audience admittedly, but the enthusiasm of their analysis has been noteworthy. The Three Tenors case has been extolled as an important development, clarifying the way certain legal principles will be applied in examining anticompetitive behavior in a joint venture context, with implications for future cases (McChesney 2004; Meyer 2010; Verscheiden 2007). But of what relevance is this to managers working in music organizations?This article will provide the background to the Three Tenors case, summarize the court case, the ruling of the Federal Trade Commission (hereafter referred to as the FTC), the backlash that ensued from lawyers and law professors, the 2005 appeal, and the backlash to the appeal decision. It will then provide some organizational analysis to look more deeply at how the problems arose, before turning finally to what can be learned from the case and its practical implications for music and entertainment managers.Unless stated otherwise, the facts of the case as outlined below are drawn from the Initial Decision (Public Record Version), published by James P. Timony, Administrative Law Judge on June 20, 2002, which is in the public domain and available online (FTC 2002). While Warner and PolyGram were both involved in the antitrust saga, they were treated as separate cases by the FTC, and this analysis focuses on the PolyGram case. The record label Decca also appears in the case. Decca was owned by PolyGram, and was the repertoire center, or location-specific-creativeunit (Bakker 2006, 92) responsible for the Three Tenors recordings within PolyGram at the time of the case. Decca, based in London, distributed its recordings through PolyGram operating companies, each responsible for sales in a given country. In the 1990s Decca's recordings were marketed in the U.S.A. under the label London Records, and its catalog assets are now owned by the Universal Music Group.BackgroundThe first Three Tenors concert took place on July 7,1990 at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The concert united Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti for the first time. The event coincided with the 1990 FIFA World Cup, launching a tradition that was repeated for future World Cups. PolyGram recorded the concert and it became the most successful classical recording of its era, selling more than twelve million audio units and over three million video units (FTC 2002). This first Three Tenors album was referred to in the legal case as 3T1 (and will be henceforth referred to as 3T1).The Three Tenors (Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti) united four years later for a concert on July 16, 1994 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. This concert was recorded by Warner, and is referred to in the legal case as 3T2.The third Three Tenors recording in the case was of an open-air concert in Paris that took place in front of the Eiffel Tower on July 10, 1998. In the spring of 1997 Ahmet Ertegun, the Chairman of Atlantic (a Warner subsidiary based in the U.S.A.), had met with Alain Levy, his counterpart at PolyGram requesting that Pavarotti (who was under exclusive contract to PolyGram) be released to record the project for Warner. Rather than release him (in return for certain considerations), PolyGram proposed that the two organizations create a joint venture agreement. The ensuing joint venture (hereafter referred to as JV) involved Warner distributing the recordings within the U.S.A. and PolyGram distributing them outside of the U.S.A. The parties agreed to a 50/50 split of profits and losses. An US$18 million advance was paid, ultimately shared between the parties, which also included the rights to market a greatest hits compilation and a box set. This third Three Tenors recording was released on August 18,1998 (and in addition to audio products included video and home television broadcast). …

JCE Classroom Activities Virtual Issue: Celebrating 15 Years with the 15 Greatest Hits, 1997–2012

The 15th anniversary of the launching of the JCE Classroom Activity series is highlighted. These hands-on, minds-on activities largely use grocery and hardware store materials to investigate a wide range of chemical concepts. While written for high school students, they are adaptable for use with other levels, from the very young up to adults. The top 15 most downloaded JCE Classroom Activities over the period of one year have been selected as the content of a Journal of Chemical Education virtual issue. This article describes the content and directs the reader to the virtual issue.

Beowulf and Other Old English Poems (review)

Reviewed by: Beowulf and Other Old English Poems J. Michael Colvin Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, trans. Craig Williamson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) xxxii + 255 pp. Beowulf is not only the most translated work of the Anglo-Saxon period, it might be the most translated composition of the first millennium, as no fewer than forty translations have been published in the last century. To these may now be added that of Craig Williamson, who collects in his new book the “greatest hits” of Old English poetic literature and presents them in translation. Williamson has offered extremely able translations, and the proems before each translation accurately and adequately summarize the interpretive scholarship on them. In addition to a translation of Beowulf, this book contains translations of forty-six other works, of which thirty are riddles and three are charms. Among the other poems Williamson translates are The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, and The Dream of the Rood. Tom Shippey, a noted Tolkienist and a scholar of Old English verse in his own right, provides a foreword that seeks to contextualize the poems—in terms of their compositional milieux, their historical environments, and the long shadows they have subsequently cast. Williamson’s general introduction is a concise and cogent treatise on Old English poetics and translation. The seven-page bibliography is thorough, if not complete (no attempt is made, for instance, to locate Williamson’s translation in the tradition of Beowulf translation.) The index contains entries only for the apparatus criticus—not for the translated texts themselves. To the end matter are added a Glossary of Proper Names (237–243), and four appendices, the most useful of which (Appendix D) proposes solutions to the riddles translated from the Exeter Book. The translation of Beowulf is a notoriously difficult task, and Williamson is to be commended for producing a fluent and lively text that recalls the language of the original to the beginning student of Old English literature. To give a sense of how difficult and contentious a translation of Beowulf actually is, the opening word “Hwæt”—ostensibly meaning “what” and employed in Old English as something akin to a vocative particle meant to elicit attention and command an audience to hear—has been variously translated as “So,” “Lo,” “Yes,” “Look,” “Behold,” “Well,” and “Attend,” in addition to being left untranslated or omitted entirely; Williamson translates it as “Listen.” That scholarly consensus cannot be established on the opening word does not bode well for the subsequent 3,182 lines of the poem. The root of the issue is the deep-seated affinity that Beowulf seems uniquely able to inspire in scholars of multiple disciplines (e.g., History, English, Linguistics, etc.). The intoxicating allure of the poem has occasioned a multitude of strategies for translation. So, which strategy is the right one? How ought the translator to deal with kennings? How ought the translator attend to his or her duties to the language of the original while still capturing the conceptual essence of the poem well enough to communicate it to a modern audience? What of meter? What of formal conventions? With these concerns doubtlessly in mind, Williamson has produced a satisfactory translation that preserves aspects of the original, but does not depart radically from other tacks taken in earlier translational attempts. Williamson lays out his translational strategy in his introduction (1–28), and endeavors to offer an alliterative verse-translation in an attempt to capture the spirit of the original language. It is clear that he is very capable of doing so; [End Page 161] indeed, Williamson’s alliterative verse is impressively consistent. But the attempt to preserve this convention leads him away from a more literal translation that might have been more appropriate to the enterprise. The heavy-lifting of translation is done behind the valence of the verse itself, and no gloss is offered or attempted. So, instead of preserving the language, Williamson ultimately preserves his own conception of the sense of the language, and twists his translation to fit that sense accordingly. This critique is compounded by the editorial choice not to provide a facing-page edition along with the translated text...

Steam Punks

This article discusses how some amateur engineers are working to design and build a set of tools that would enable self-reliant people to make everything they need. Marcin Jakubowski and his colleagues are among such people who are working for the past many years on the concept of open-source economy. The rationale for this concept is steeped in the language of empowerment. Using an open-source Web platform known as a wiki, Jakubowski worked with a far-flung network of collaborators over the Internet to identify the minimum number of technologies needed to produce a reasonable facsimile of modern life. Some of the items on the resulting list are the greatest hits of industrialism over the past 200 years: the steam engine, the combine, and the induction furnace. So far, the team has completed seven prototype machines: the tractor, a tiller, a hydraulic power unit, a computer numerically controlled plasma torch table, a drill press, a hole punch, and a compressed earth block press.

Specters of Northampton

Specters of Northampton Matt Bell (bio) The River Gods. Brian Kiteley. FC2. http://fc2.org. 194 pages; paper, $16.95. Brian Kiteley's The River Gods is a novel-in-collage, constructed of monologues delivered by a broad cast of historical and fictional characters drawn from the history of Northampton, Massachusetts. In less than two hundred pages, Kiteley delivers dozens of different speakers covering the eleventh century to the 1990s, including such historical characters as Jonathan Edwards, Richard Nixon, Mike Nichols, Jonathan Edwards, William Carlos Williams, Sojourner Truth, Sylvia Plath, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Alongside these more famous voices are other characters discovered, invented, or else remembered, including some of the novel's most effective characterizations, like that of a teenage girl exploring her sexuality in the 1700s, or else an American soldier lying injured beside his Japanese counterpart until at last he solves "this problem of dying...as though [his] body, which moments ago had been a large complicated knot, was untied with a single firm tug." A preoccupation with death and dying permeates the book from the beginning: The first death belongs to a high school tailback in the 1970s, and the second to Israel Williams, a lesser-known historical figure who was one of the so-called "river gods," a group of powerful men who once ruled much of this region of Massachusetts in the eighteenth century. Williams is dying in jail while wishing he "believed in ghosts," so that he might catch up with his already-passed wife, Sarah, "hear the news, listen to her wisdom and sense of restraint, and be told where [his] shoes and [his] pipe are." The conjuring of these ghosts—of other river gods, both major and minor—is one of the novel's finest effects. Throughout, Kiteley moves confidently between characters and time periods, creating connections between these many individual lives and also to Northampton itself, the common thread that ties them together even across the many permutations of what Northampton has meant as a place and as a community. Despite the rich vastness of this historical material, Kiteley is at his best when he's channeling the members of the novel's presumably autobiographically based Kiteley family, including his mother and father, his grandfather, his siblings, and of course some version of himself. In a book mixing fact and fiction at this high a level, it's perhaps fitting that the facts Kiteley is presumably closest to are also the ones that produce the richest fictions: Kiteley's family's story begins with his mother in 1962, shortly after the family's arrival in Northampton, and ends in 1993, with his brother Geoffrey's death from AIDS. One of the book's most affecting passages comes in a section narrated by Kiteley's dying (or perhaps dead) grandfather, who tells Kiteley's fictional self a story about seeing a train stopped upon a set of railroad tracks in the woods years earlier, only to realize he's remembered all the details wrong. "What was the purpose of these easily recognizable flaws in the story?" he wonders, before Kiteley's persona supplies both the answer to the grandfather's question and a key to unlocking the pleasures of this book: "Maybe you wanted to know it was a dream, so you could enjoy the experience more. If it were a pure return to that time, how would you be able to savor the sensations?" The grandfather narrates his response, saying that My grandson continues talking, despite having exposed this lovely revelation to me.... He is telling me stories from my past, which he does well now, although he has difficulty keeping straight the fictions he is writing and the facts he has gleaned from my own probably inaccurate stories. Of course, this "difficulty" in keeping fiction separate from fact and telling accuracy from inaccuracy is part of what's so enjoyable about reading a book like The River Gods, which offers its own well-drawn sensations above and beyond the dry assertions of history. It's worth remembering that even the best histories are a selected story, a greatest hits list of events and places and peoples complicated by varying levels...

Astronomy’s Greatest Hits: The 100 Most Cited Papers in Each Year of the First Decade of the 21st Century (2000–2009)

ABSTRACTThe first decade of the 21st century and the last few years of the 20th have been transformative for ground- and space-based observational astronomy due to new observing facilities, access to digital archives, and growth in use of the Internet for communication and dissemination of information and for access to the archives. How have these three factors affected the characteristics and content of papers published in refereed astronomical journals, as well as the journals themselves? In this and subsequent papers I will propose answers to this question. The analysis in this, the first paper of a series, is based on an examination of the 100 most cited papers in astronomy and astrophysics for each year between 2000 and 2009, inclusive, and supplemental data from 1995 and 1990. The main findings of this analysis are: Over the 10 yr period the total number of authors of the top-100 articles year-1 has more than tripled. This increase is seen most strongly in papers with more than six authors. The number of unique authors in any given year has more than doubled. The yearly number of papers with five or fewer authors has declined over the same time period. Averaged over the 10 yr period the normalized number of authors per paper increases steadily with citation rank—the most highly cited papers tend to have the largest number of authors and vice versa. This increase is especially notable for papers ranked 1 through 20 in terms of number of citations and number of authors. The distribution of normalized citation counts versus ranking is remarkably constant from year to year and, except for the top-ranked half-dozen or so papers in each year, is very closely approximated by a power law. Nearly all of the papers that show the most divergence from the power-law fit—all in the sense of having a high number of citations—are based on the results of large observational surveys. Among the top-100 papers there is a small but significant correlation of paper length with citation rank. More striking, though, is that the average page length of the top-100 papers is one and a half times that for astronomy papers in general. For every year from 2000 to 2008, the same five journals account for 80 to 85% of the total citations for each year from all of the journals in the category of “Astronomy and Astrophysics” by ISI’s Journal Citation Reports. These numbers do not include Nature or Science. Averaged over the 10 yr time period studied in this article, these same five journals account for 77% of the 1000 most cited papers, slightly less than the journals’ fractional contribution to the total number of articles published by all journals. The five journals are A&A, AJ, ApJ, ApJS, and MNRAS. Two samples of the top-100 cited papers, both for the 6 yr from 2001 to 2006 but compiled 2.5 yr apart, show that a significant number of articles originally ranked in the top 100 for the year, drop out, and are replaced by other articles as time passes. Most of the dropouts address topics in extragalactic astronomy; their replacements for the most part deal with non-extra-galactic topics. Finally, some additional findings are noted that relate to the entire ensemble of astronomical journals published during the century’s first decade. Various indicators of Internet access to astronomical Web sites such as data archives and journal repositories show increases of between factors of 3 and 10 or more. I propose that there are close complementarities between the communication capabilities that Internet usage enables and the strong growth in numbers of authors of the most highly cited papers. Subsequent papers will examine this and other interpretations of the analysis presented here in detail.

Teaching “Tonio Kröger” in 2010: Loss, Repetition, and Art

Hee, hee, the small, wizened German professor laughed. Who else thought it was really Hans and Inge? I don't understand it. Even good students of German make this mistake. I too had believed it was the original Hans and Inge who arrived at the Danish resort to revive a j aded Kroger. A coward, I pressed my lips firmly together and let my fellow student take the heat. The same professor had some weeks earlier laughed at me for a naive observation, and at nineteen, I didn't relish making myself a target a second time. But in fact I loved this course on Mann. I took it in English when my German was not yet good enough to speed through Mann's principal works in a single semester. I thus knew through H. T. Lowe-Porter's translation before I knew him in his own German words. When asked about my favorite author in the following decade, I'd reflexively answer, Thomas Mann - and not without a little intellectual arrogance. Later on I wondered why I had swallowed hook, line, and sinker, hadn't been more critical, hadn't, like fellow feminists of my generation, considered whether this pompous German male writer had anything to say to a Midwestern teenage girl in late twentieth-century America. Indeed, why hadn't I, like rebellious students of my generation, questioned whether I had to defer to the authority of greatness? In the mid 1990s, although my romance with was over, I myself began teaching Tonio in English in a course designed to introduce German majors and curious Anglophone students to thirteen of the greatest hits of German letters. I had repeated occasions to cringe at my early love for and recall my disenchantment. Tonio Kroger embarrassed me. After a decade of literary criticism devoted to overcoming binaries, Mann's use of antithesis struck me as facile and unsubtle; Tonio's self-pity, his moaning over his mixed heritage seemed silly and solipsistic in an era of multiculturalism and multi-ethnic classes of students. But I dutifully historicized and explained and then felt compromised when I noticed that students were entering Mann's game of oppositions and repetitions. I had trouble presenting the young Mann's belief that the opposition between art and life was the most important modern problem, even if I understood the historical moment and the biographical circumstances that made it such for him and that inform this text. It was thus a source of relief when one semester a student irreverently referred to as a drama queen, enabling us to talk about the protagonist's self-absorption and the pretention of the text. Usually I simply found myself longing for the following week when we'd be discussing Kafka, whose work invariably teaches like a dream. Forme, Kafka is a safe bet for teaching; Mann, perhaps because I'd once been so fond, a hard sell. Time passes, things change. I've now taught Tonio in this course at least ten times. In the process, I've come to look forward to picking it up again, largely on account of the return of Hans and Inge in Denmark, now in David Luke's words rather than in Lowe-Porter's, now lodged between the dark blue cover with Noyes's Venetian Gondola that has replaced the once ubiquitous teal, brown, green, and yellow cover of my undergraduate days.1 My anticipation of that silent walk before the empty backdrop of the sea awakens anew each time I read this text with students. The narrator dramatizes the moment: Then suddenly it happened: Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm walked through the dining room. I don't laugh at the students who fail to notice that Hans is still wearing his reefer jacket and sailor's cap and thus can't be the real Hans of Tonio's childhood. I tell them that I took the sentence literally when I first read it at their age and ask them why one does. After all, the narrator says it's Hans and Inge; readers tend to rely on narrators and one has not learned to distrust this one. …

From Patrick Madden

from Patrick Madden Patrick Madden (bio) Essay Collections Old and New. For a decade now, I've been reviewing books in Fourth Genre, always aiming to praise the most insightful and beautiful collections of essays—works that are driven by thinking, that collect events and ideas associatively, that mediate experience by meditating. I've sought the long-ranging influence of Montaigne's sixteenth-century experiment in self-knowledge, and I've found it, again and again, in wonderful books by wonderful writers, typically unknown to the larger world, yet toiling away without fame or fanfare—rewarded, perhaps, only by the increase in knowledge and humility brought about by the essays they have wrought. Here, then, in brief review, are six essay collections, three recent and three not-so (and in the public domain). All are, as you'd expect, wonderful and worthwhile. Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country Alexander Smith London: Strahan & Co., 1863. 296 Pages. http://books.google.com/books?id=6ge-aaaayaaj. This collection locates the Scottish poet in the fictional town of Dreamthorp, leading a seemingly "staid and humdrum" life, keeping "eye and ear open; tak[ing] note of man, woman, and child, find[ing] many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and out of what I see and hear, weav[ing] my own essays" in beautiful, resplendent fashion. His theoretical "On the Writing of Essays" is not to be missed by any serious student of the form. [End Page 187] Essays in Idleness Agnes Repplier Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893. 224 Pages. http://books.google.com/books?id=snmk15plfzsc In this one of her many essay collections, Repplier offers her wisdom on "Wit and Humor," "Ennui," "Leisure," and other subjects, but is especially valuable for her take on writing and revision: "While the impatient thinker, eager only to impart his views, regards [laws of language] as a restriction, the true artist finds in them an opportunity, and rejoices . . . to work within conditions and limits." Patrins Louise Imogen Guiney Boston: Copeland And Day, 1897. 334 Pages. http://books.google.com/books?id=doevaaaayaaj. A patrin is a trail of leaves left by gypsies, a sign to those who come after, as is an essay, Guiney tells us. Most striking among Guiney's 20 essays is "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket," a largely narrative piece pervaded by distanced wisdom. Though she's lost her Christmas money, she's "transported with admiration and unholy sympathy" for the art of the thief, continuing home in conversation with Marcus Aurelius, welcoming "everything that happens as necessary and familiar." Awkward: A Detour Mary Cappello New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2007. 224 Pages, Paper, $16.95. In the spirit of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Cappello makes an exhaustive, essayistic study of awkwardness, through heights of essential reverie and depths of captivating meditation, chasing the trait through 10 gerunds ("breathing," "touching," "breaching," etc.) and 77 adjectives ("spasmodic," "untoward," "cumbersome," etc.), hitting bone with erudition and association, personal stories, and layered research. "Once you learn the thing you didn't know," she offers, "you're forced to see yourself for who you had all along ignorantly been." You never knew you wanted to know so much about awkwardness. [End Page 188] The Wet Collection Joni Tevis Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2007. 169 Hages, Clotp, $20. Tevis's metaphor is the wet collection, a natural history museum's jars of miscellaneous parts, brought together for study and meaning. The essays inside ponder odd jobs, historical footnotes, fantastic miniatures, gymnastics, dams, the legacy of Bigfoot. Her project, built of exquisite sentences, rescued imaginings, seems guided by her claim, "Only what's broken can be fully used. Nothing too humble; nothing too good." Words of the Grey Wind Chris Arthur Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2009. 250 Pages, Paper, £12.99. After happening upon 1989's Best American Essays anthology, Chris Arthur turned to writing his own essays, which labor he's been faithfully pursuing for the past two decades, unassumingly publishing in dozens of literary journals and four books. This collection includes his greatest hits, 13 glowingly lovely essays, incisive explorations of everyday things, carrying on the spirit of Montaigne...

Two Museums

192 nonfiction When our Parisian friend Isabelle asked which part of the Louvre I wanted to look at first, I responded like a cretin, an infidel, and told her the nineteenth-century French painters: the equivalent, I suppose, were someone to come to my country and ask to be taken to the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown. But we went there, navigating through the maze of art, and it was wonderful. There’s an intoxicating emotional impact, a compressed intensity, in viewing great paintings by the masters in a smaller gallery—the greatest hits, for example, in the hushed intimacy of a museum like the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC— but I had never before experienced anything like the quantitative intensity of the Louvre: the steady scrolling, in room after room, wall after wall, painting after painting, of history, seemingly stroke by stroke. Viewing so many paintings, wave after wave of them stretching across time and place (the landscapes and styles of the Italian and Spanish impressionists not differing all that much from the neighboring French painters, as if back then political boundaries were less resolute), you begin to see, here and there, glimpses of what is to come, Museums Rick Bass Two 193 stylistically. The Sargent-like sheen of white sunlight pouring down upon someone’s shoulder and the left side of a face, thirty years before Sargent picked up a brush; the luminosity, the Renoir-like glistening merriment of the eyes in a painting a quarter century before Renoir began work. It is as if these visions of the world (for surely it was only the vision that began to shift, not the world itself, across such a short time span) crept in on their own, not summoned by any one artist or group of artists, but possessed of their own yearnings to be in the world, like spirits, or living things. After only an hour in the Louvre, my lower back was already cramping with that strange ache specific to gallery watching—the stress of leaning in forward and peering closely at individual strokes, then stepping back and arching your back the other way to stare with perspective, forward and backward, like an adder, with your pulse and your breath coming faster, tensing yourself unconsciously in that agitated state of admiration and awe—and in some of the rooms I had to sit down on one of the viewing sofas like an old man and just stare up, neck tilted at the large paintings as I rested. I’d forgotten how damn big they used to paint in Europe, all those gigantic works wherein turmoil swirls below—battles with horses overturned in the mud with whitened eyes rolling, Christian saints and martyrs wailing and moaning, barefoot women in nighties baring their breasts to heaven—while higher up in the huge paintings angels swarm with trumpets, clearly defining the space between earth and heaven, toil and peace. The museum was crowded—we were often shoulder to shoulder with strangers—but when we came to the Mona Lisa, this thronging below was made strangely tolerable by the immense openness overhead: the vertical freedom, the airy boundlessness of that vacuum, created the space necessary to accommodate the exaltation you encountered. It’s why we like cathedrals; it’s why we feel good when we’re in towering We like cathedrals; we feel good when we’re in towering old forests, or looking up at a roof of stars. 194 ecotone old forests, or looking up at a roof of stars. (And may also be why we are sometimes discomforted by the endless blue sky above a prairie: we’re ready for ascension or exaltation, yes, but not, perhaps, for infinity .) You could almost hear echoes of other voices far above the heads of the museumgoers and the paintings themselves. In nearly every room living artists practiced: schoolgirls with tablets in hand sitting on stair steps, sketching a likeness of one of the drawings , and painters, sometimes older men in berets, crouched at their easels, mimicking the work of a master while the flow of museum­ goers parted left and right around them in a never-ending stream. Crawling through...

Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (review)

Reviewed by: Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England Ginger Frost (bio) Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England, by Adam Kuper; pp. 304. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2009, $27.95, £20.95. The laws of consanguinity and affinity in Victorian England were notably peculiar. English law prohibited marriages between close kin both by blood and marriage, yet first-cousin marriage was not only legal but positively encouraged. In other words, one could marry one’s first cousin but not one’s deceased wife’s niece. A book-length exploration of this anomaly has long been needed, and Adam Kuper, an anthropologist, has taken on this task. Kuper limits his study to the “upper bourgeoisie,” a group that emerged from the Industrial Revolution. (His definition of this group is largely the same as “upper middle class,” except he excludes landed gentry.) Kuper argues that “marriage within the family—between cousins, or between in-laws—was a characteristic strategy of the new bourgeoisie, and that it had a great deal to do with the success of some of the most important Victorian clans” (27). Twenty years ago, in Family Fortunes (1987), Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall asserted that relationships between brothers- and sisters-in-law and between cousins were vital to the success of the family enterprise, but few subsequent studies have explored this connection in depth. Incest and Influence, based entirely on secondary sources, unfortunately, does not focus exclusively on family marriage and business and is clearly geared toward a popular audience. The first part of the book is a good example of its impressionistic approach. Chapter 1 offers a brief survey of literary descriptions of cousin marriage from Jane Austen to Anthony Trollope; the summaries are well executed but include little analysis. The second is a discussion of the law of incest, which argues in part that the oddities of England’s marital law emerged both from its tortured history (Henry VIII’s marital troubles, for example), and the fact that England continued to have both ecclesiastical and secular control of moral issues for far longer than revolutionary states. Kuper then briefly surveys the arguments for and against marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, the major controversy of the Victorian period, and ends the chapter with the criminalization of incest in 1908. The “greatest hits” approach continues with the next chapter, which discusses the idea of intermarriage and heredity, primarily focusing on the efforts of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton to determine any ill effects from cousin marriages (both found very few). This chapter is the most disappointing of the book. The topic offers an opportunity to analyze the contradictory and overlapping ideas of Victorians on intermarriage, heredity, and degeneration, but Kuper simply describes their various studies superficially. The author does not give a satisfactory explanation of the change from incest as a category that included in-laws and stepfamily to one that was based solely on blood (as in the 1908 Incest Act). Why did this happen? And what does it say about Victorian and Edwardian ideas of family? The rest of the book concentrates on intermarriage as a business strategy, the ostensible focus of the work. This part of the book begins with a chapter that describes the intermarriages of famous banking houses—both Quaker (the Barclays) and Jewish (the Rothschilds). This section clearly demonstrates the interconnection between cousin marriage and business success in the age before corporations and limited liability, though one must wonder how typical the author’s examples are. Both of these family groups had small minority religions as an additional tie, one that excluded them from a large number of possible marriage partners. It is not clear, [End Page 499] however, if such strategies worked in Anglican families who did not have as many reasons for endogamy. Answering this would require a much broader research sample. Kuper then turns to a number of case studies of famous groups of people who intermarried (or had sexual affairs) within a small cadre of like-minded individuals. The Clapham Sect had evangelicalism and reform to bind them together, and remained a strong group for several decades, in part...

New feature: pathways and important genes from PharmGKB

In this issue of Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics, we are pleased to introduce a regular new feature, provided in collaboration with the Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase (PharmGKB, http://www.pharmgkb.org/). Each issue of our journal will highlight two elements from the PharmGKB site. First, we will present an important pathway of drug metabolism (usually affecting the pharmacokinetics of a drug) or an important pathway of drug action (describing its targets and mechanism of action or pharmacodynamics). The PharmGKB has a staff of PhD and MS level biologists who constantly survey the literature and create these summaries for users of the database. In addition, members of the NIH-support Pharmacogenetics Research Network and others often coauthor those pathways that figure significantly in their own work. PharmGKB currently offers 57 such pathways, all provided with a downloadable graphic, an extended caption, a set of links into the database describing more about the genes and drugs, and an excel file with pertinent literature references. In each issue, we will feature one of these pathways and provide a useful summary of the significance and scientific understanding of these pathways, along with links back to the PharmGKB for more information. We hope that these summaries will serve both as a starting point for new scientists getting interest in pharmacogenomics, as well as a way for established researchers to expand their understanding of current challenges in the field. Second, we will present detailed gene summaries for PharmGKB ‘Very Important Pharmacogenes’ (VIP genes) which are, in many ways, the field’s greatest hits – genes that have been shown to be important for modulating the response to one or more drugs, and whose variants have been shown to impact drug response phenotypes. The PharmGKB curators and/or collaborators (from Pharmacogenetics Research Network and elsewhere) create these summaries along with specific mention of important variants. The summaries not only provide a textual summary of the gene’s significance, but also provide extensive links to the literature, as well as lists of pertinent drugs, diseases, and side effects. At present, PharmGKB offers 39 VIP gene summaries. We hope these summaries will serve both as a tutorial and continuing education function for the field. PharmGKB tracks its usage patterns carefully and the pathways and VIP gene summaries are two of the most popular features of the site. We are happy to collaborate in bringing them to the readership of the journal to increase their impact and utility, and encourage readers to learn more on the PharmGKB site. We understand that in rapidly changing field such as pharmacogenomics, knowledge can become outdated. For this reason, we encourage our readers to provide feedback and commentary about the presented information. Each of the pathway diagrams and VIP gene summaries are time stamped, and are rereviewed on a regular basis, however experts in the field may become aware of new developments sooner than our staff. Therefore, the PharmGKB curatorial staff would be happy to interact with the readership to improve these summaries in an ongoing manner, and we hope that they will continue to be an important resource for our discipline.

Taste of Astronomy Lacked International Flavor

In his short history of astronomy (“Astronomy's greatest hits,” News Focus, 16 January, p. [326][1]), T. Folger amply demonstrated Anglo-Saxon parochialism. Almost all major discoveries mentioned in his text are attributed to those from Britain or the United States. Why didn't Folger name great

Monkeys Greatest Hits

EthologyVolume 115, Issue 4 p. 399-400 Monkeys Greatest Hits First published: 17 March 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0310.2009.01612.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume115, Issue4April 2009Pages 399-400 RelatedInformation

Hidden treasures: the Paris Observatory

Giovanni Domenico Cassini helped to create an institution that pinpointed Neptune, showed that light had a finite speed — and even mapped France, explains Alison Abbott. Marking the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), Jeff Kanipe takes a look at the prospects of the 'big four' major new telescopes. They have a tough act to follow, as a trawl through 'Hubble's greatest hits' reveals. The 'Dark Skies Awareness' campaign is part of IYA 2009; Malcolm Smith argues the case for a transformation that would not only help astronomers but would also benefit human health and energy conservation. Also part of IYA 2009 is the celebration of 400 years of the telescope; Owen Gingerich tracks the link between technology and our changing world-view. Robert Poole's book Earthrise focuses on the psychological impact of the Apollo 8 image of Earth over the lunar horizon, though our reviewer feels that our attitudes towards our planet have not changed enough. 'Hidden treasures' visits the Paris Observatory and astronaut Alan Bean talks about his moonscape paintings. In Futures, David Blair looks back on 2009 and in a Letter, Alyssa Goodman et al. reveal the importance of self-gravity in star formation. See the Editorial and visit http://www.nature.com/astro09 for more. COVER PICTURE: Hubble Space Telescope/Christian Darkin