Late Letters Research Articles

Flying Leaves: Between Berlioz and Wagner

Abstract This article analyzes the writings of Berlioz on Wagner and, to a lesser extent, of Wagner on Berlioz, emphasizing the covert innuendoes of their verbal sparring during the period surrounding the Tannhäuser debacle at the Paris Opéra (1860) and Berlioz's tribulations with Les Troyens (ca. 1853–63). Because Berlioz's style and subtlety have worked against him in this famous rivalry, the priority goes to him, and especially to his magnum opus as critic, the volume A travers chants (1862). A selection from thirty years of music criticism both serious and light ("flying leaves"), A travers chants reveals itself as an unconventional counterpart to Wagner's treatises; as a tactical response to Wagner, both in the reprinted review of his 1860 concerts and in the structure, themes, and allusions of the text as a whole; as an object lesson in reading Berlioz, whose engaging clarity and humor can be more deceptive, in their ironic undertones, than the thickets of Wagner's famously tangled prose. This article interrogates some of that prose, revealing Wagner's deep ambivalence toward a predecessor of intimidating prestige to whom his music is frequently indebted—as Berlioz occasionally finds coded ways of reminding him. It shows Berlioz, for his part, continually sympathetic to the younger man's practical difficulties and high artistic ideals. And it shows him eventually coming to acknowledge the power and legitimacy of his music, despite strong aversion to Wagner's harmonic idiom and to the two cardinal points of his aesthetic: an "impious" insistence on the primacy of the word; belief in a musical progress culminating in his own Gesamtkunstwerk. In a late letter wrongly omitted from the Correspondance générale (its authenticity and correct date are here established), Berlioz movingly implies the injustice of his earlier prejudice toward a practice sanctioned by his own unshakeable creed of artistic freedom.

A Rather Late Letter from Wrocław

A Rather Late Letter from Wrocław

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, by Catherine Phillips

Reviewed by: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World Cary Plotkin (bio) Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, by Catherine Phillips; pp. xiii + 303. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, £30.00, $75.00. "Wordpainting is, in the verbal arts, the great success of our day," Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in a late letter to his friend Robert Bridges (The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott [Oxford, 1955], 267). His immediate [End Page 190] subject was "modern novels," but the phrase widens the focus to take in his own practice. And indeed he had just written of "Harry Ploughman": "I want [him] to be a vivid figure before the mind's eye; if he is not that the sonnet fails" (265). Yet he has also named, in one sentence, the two poles of his artistic life. Hopkins's early talent for, exercises in, and opinions about visual art developed through his years at Oxford and directed his interest and his eye throughout his life. They and his visual world formed the focus of a travelling exhibition in Great Britain in 1975 of which All My Eyes See: The Visual World of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1975), edited by R. K. R. Thornton, presented both a record and substantial contributions by Norman White, Jerome Bump, Thornton, and others. Catherine Phillips's new book is an enormous expansion of their pioneering work. She proposes to examine thoroughly and methodically what it means to speak of Hopkins's visual world as a part of the Victorian visual world generally. Hopkins is, with John Keats, the most visual of nineteenth-century English poets, his poems often beginning with a simple act of looking or a simple injunction to look: "I caught this morning morning's minion" ("The Windhover" [1918]), "Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!" ("The Starlight Night" [1918]). He filled notebooks with observations of the natural world so precise as to have led one botanist to say that, though he avoids the terminology of science, science should change its terms to his, which are far more expressive and no less exact. Indeed, before his conversion he had considered becoming a professional artist, as two of his brothers would do. What were the influences that formed his way of seeing, and how did this way of seeing shape his poetry? These are Phillips's questions. Widely respected as the biographer of Robert Bridges and the editor of the now-standard reading edition of Hopkins's works, Phillips brings to the task a rare command of archival material as well as of published writings; detailed knowledge of the Victorian art world and its ramifications in book and periodical illustration and art reproduction; acquaintance with techniques of drawing and engraving; and a sharp eye and ear for echoes, linguistic and visual. Cataloguing family influences, analyzing Hopkins's drawings, laying out his views on architecture and their connections to his perceptions of nature, proceeding through the art exhibitions and galleries to which he was attracted throughout his life, relating his criticism of what he saw to that of some of the newly professionalized art critics of his day, comparing Hopkins's drawings to those of his brother Arthur in light of both John Ruskin's influence and that of a flourishing illustrated press before photography transformed it, or developing the relation of the "New Sculpture" (and its pictorial counterpart) to a poem like "Harry Ploughman," Phillips leaves no lead unpursued. Alive to the danger of this method, she is careful to tie in each chase to a relevant Hopkinsian text, drawing, or opinion. Yet sometimes the mass of information overwhelms the insight wrung from it. On the one hand, the breadth and specificity of Phillips's scholarship on this subject are unprecedented and invaluable; on the other, her exhaustiveness hinders the formation of a line of argument. Something like a Victorian visual aesthetics emerges in these pages-and this is not the least of the contributions of this study-but it is an aesthetics without a concept. Nevertheless, in tracing the passage from the world of visual influences to the poet influenced, Phillips...

Evelyn Waugh's Liturgical Discontent: Two Late Unpublished Letters from Martin D’Arcy to Waugh and One to D’Arcy from Philip Caraman

Evelyn Waugh's Liturgical Discontent: Two Late Unpublished Letters from Martin D’Arcy to Waugh and One to D’Arcy from Philip Caraman

Athanasius (review)

Reviewed by: Athanasius Andrew Louth Khaled Anatolios Athanasius Early Church Fathers London & New York: Routledge, 2004 Pp. viii + 293. Khaled Anatolios, the author of the brilliant book, Athanasius: The Coherence of his Thought, the best recent book on Athanasius, was the ideal person to contribute the volume on Athanasius to the Routledge series, Early Church Fathers. The resulting volume is one of the best in what has become a distinguished series. Following the format of the series, the first third of the book consists of Anatolios's introduction and the rest of substantial passages from Athanasius, specially translated for the book. Anatolios's introduction is masterly, picking his way carefully through the minefield that interpretation of the fourth century has become, well aware of the critical problems that remain but concentrating, as he must, on Athanasius himself without being sucked into the great archbishop's own understanding of the sequence of events that he successfully persuaded most subsequent writers to think of as the "Arian" controversy. Without hagiography, Anatolios gives a clear account of Athanasius's astonishing career and then passes to a lucid and succinct account of his theology. In barely forty pages, we are given a brilliant sketch of Athanasius's theological vision, showing how it sets the Incarnation in the context of a profoundly thought-through doctrine of creation out of nothing, which underlies an anthropology in which the human stands on the frontier between God and the created order. Athanasius's understanding of the Incarnation and the Word's overcoming of death and corruption through cross and resurrection is explored, and the implications of this for the doctrine of the Trinity are drawn out; Anatolios closes by bringing out Athanasius's emphasis on holiness as the foundation of theological insight. Anatolios is thoroughly acquainted with the scholarship on Athanasius, but draws on it with a lightness of touch that keeps the central figure of Athanasius and what Anatolios himself called the "coherence of his thought" in focus. The author seems to have slightly revised his view of Athanasius since the monograph, giving more prominence to what one might call the existential character [End Page 283] of Athanasius's theology and pushing to the background the dialectic between transcendence and immanence that perhaps gave his earlier picture of Athanasius too philosophical a coloring. The selection of passages is to some extent affected by what is already available: nothing from Contra Gentes–De Incarnatione or the Vita Antonii, for example, an omission compensated for in his introduction. There are two substantial chunks from Contra Arianos, in which Athanasius deals with the idea that the Word of God is changeable (treptos) and presents his highly original interpretation of Prov 8.22 and the "creation" of Wisdom. We are given the whole of Athanasius's defense of Nicaea in De Decretis, the central argument of the correspondence with Serapion on the divinity of the Holy Spirit (on which argument Athanasius weaves variations in the rest of the correspondence), and the late letter of Adelphius on the emerging new forms of what Athanasius continued to see as "Arianism." Anatolius then focuses, very properly, on Athanasius's theological arguments, for it is on these that Athanasius's distinction as a "Church Father" depends. In the introduction, he has made clear to the reader other dimensions of Athanasius's thought, and the bibliography shows the reader where to go to follow this up. Each of the translated pieces has a preface that places the work chronologically and introduces its theological significance. This volume is an adornment to a fine series and certainly the best introduction to St. Athanasius the Great and his theology. Andrew Louth University of Durham Copyright © 2007 Johns Hopkins University Press and the North American Patristics Society

An Investigation of Attentional Contributions to Visual Errors in Right “Neglect Dyslexia”

One type of error that is sometimes produced by patients with acquired dyslexia is the substitution of an orthographically similar word with letters that overlap the target either in early or late letter positions. When such errors affect the left sides of words, they are usually produced by patients with focal right hemisphere lesions who typically show evidence of left neglect in non-reading tasks. This pattern has thus been termed “neglect dyslexia”. When the right sides of words are affected, however, patients frequently fail to show any signs of neglect in tasks other than reading. This study presents results from a patient with left hemisphere damage, and a very clear pattern of right “neglect” errors in reading, on a series of tasks testing attentional and imagery processes. Given the magnitude and consistency of the patient's reading errors, there was little evidence that these errors resulted from inattention to the right side of space or to the right side of an internally generated visual image. It is argued that the positional errors result from an impairment to an abstract ordinal code with graded activation of letter positions from first to last, and that this code is specific to tasks involving orthographic representations.

The Spiritual Regeneration of the Duchesse de Longueville

IN A LETTER OF LATE 1650 OR EARLY 1651, to Mere Marie de Jesus at the main Carmelite convent in Paris, Anne-Genevieve de Bourbon, duchesse de Longueville, writes of her hope that 'Dieu me ramenera un jour chez vous it l'abri de tous ces orages du siec1e,.1At the end of the Frondes in 1653 she began to put this wish into effect. Does her relatively young age of 33 point to the depth of her disgust with her previous existence, or at the very least to the profound effect on her of the civil wars? In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we have come to regard experience of war as a form of trauma, and Longueville's letters contain evidence of weariness and longing for change. The juxtaposition of mind and body in a letter of 1653, which speaks of 'toutes les pensees qui troublent et accablent mon esprit', and adds 'rna sante ne me permet pas une si longue et si triste narration', might be construed as an indication of her distressed condition. In August 1654, she made a confession generale, to her parish priest in Normandy, and embarked on a new way of life; seven years later, on November 24, 1661, she made another such confession, on this occasion to the pere Sing1in.A piece entitled Retraite de Madame la Duchesse de Longueville explains why; she also records Singlin's instructions to her after this second confession and analyses her spiritual state over a period of about a week around Christmas 1661. Commentators at the time and since have been sceptical about the sincerity of this, often very public, transformation. At one end of the spectrum, Mme de Sevigne, tongue-in-cheek, in a letter of March 13, 1671, writes of having been 'en Bourda10ue, ou etaient les Meres de 1'Eglise; c' est ainsi que j' appelle les princesses de Conti et de Longueville'.3 At the other, is the thoroughgoing reductionism of the Jesuit Rene Rapin, for whom Longueville's motives were, essentially, a desire to attract attention through rigorous piety, together with the

The Timing and Information Content of Auditors' Exhibit Letters Relating to Auditor Changes

This study examines auditors' exhibit letters that are filed as part of reporting requirements for auditor changes. The two other reporting requirements (an initial 8-K filing by the client and the AICPA notification letter sent by the auditor) have been the subject of prior work (Schwartz and Soo 1996a; Ettredge et al. 2001). The auditor's exhibit letter, in which the auditor is required to comment on client disclosures in the initial 8-K, is intended to ensure accurate reporting by the client particularly on potentially troublesome conditions such as reportable events, disagreements, and resignations. I investigate the content, timeliness, and informativeness of the auditors' letters. The results indicate a low incidence of inconsistencies between the initial 8-K and the auditor's letter, and a low degree of noncompliance with the timing requirements suggesting that the auditor's exhibit letter contributes positively to the monitoring of corporate disclosures concerning auditor changes. Importantly, a relatively high proportion of inconsistencies between the initial 8-K and the auditor's letter are associated with reportable events and accounting disagreements. Delays in filings are associated with client size, auditor type, auditor resignations, and with the presence of inconsistencies between the initial 8-K and the auditor's letter. Market tests indicate that the market response to the initial 8-K is negative for nonconcurrent filings (filings that do not contain the auditor's letter), but not for concurrent filings (filings that include the letter), suggesting that investors take an adverse view of the absence of the auditor's letter. Late letter filers and filers whose letters point out omissions or inadequacies in the disclosures made in the initial 8-K experience a significant negative reaction from the date of the initial 8-K filing to the date of the filing of the auditor's letter. This is consistent with the possible presence of information leakage prior to the actual filing of the auditor's letter, for example through analyst reports. However, despite this information leakage, late letter filings experience a significant negative reaction at the time of the letter filing. Filings involving inconsistencies between the auditor's letter and the initial 8-K also experience a negative, albeit weaker, reaction on the date of the letter filing. Thus, investors react negatively to the absence of the letter at the time of the initial 8-K filing, and negatively in the period following the initial 8-K filing to late letter filers and filers with inconsistencies. Overall, the results provide support that the auditor's exhibit letter has information content.

37. John Nelson (Jackson) to Thomas More (9 November 1612) (AAW A XI, no. 197, pp. 565–7.)

Much reverenced & as much beloved SirIn the last I receaved from yow I had newes of mr Hairsteins for the which I hartely thank yow and yow shall hear more thearof hearafter. I suppose the untymely death of owr yong prince wyll be come before thease. he died on the 6th of novembre in the evening. Thowgh the L. Sanchar died with great edification yet if the speech which is thear come abroad it will be very scandalous and much impayre the estimation of that holy sea and give our adversaries greater ground of their slanders of our canonizing of wilfull murderours & wicked men which aspersion they have cast upon us in their writings from tyme to tyme. yow know the state of an heret. cowntry & thearfore may with greater freedome lett them know the harme that ensues such blind zeall. His cheif & I may say soole helper was one of owrs, namely the party that hath written the late large letter to his hol. which I sent yow word of & I suppose yow have ere this receaved.

The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley by Michael P.Branch and Daniel J. Philippon (review)

Breece came from and his letters to his mother that fill the second half of the book are full of homesickness as well as the estrangement he felt at the changes that had taken place there. Douglass hints at placing Pancake's work in the context of other Appalachian writers, but could have done more with this. We know he read and lent out his copy of Chuck Kinder's Snakehunter, and we know he was friends with Mary Lee Settle and presumably knew her work-but we get no sense oftheir influence (if any) or that of Davis Grubb or of the book of Tom Kromer's stories he was editing. Pancake in turn has influenced such younger writers as Chris Offutt, Chris Holbrook, and Pinckney Benedict. At times Douglass is off-base (as are many others) who use the word "Appalachian" loosely and list such writers as Bobbie Ann Mason and Marsha Norman under this rubric. The second half ofthe book is a collection of Pancake's unpublished writing, mostly the letters to his mother-which add to our knowledge of the author. The letters are a bit of a chore to wade through, but ifone is interested in Pancake they have their rewards. And occasionally, like the unsent letter to his girlfriend Emily Miller or the late letter to his friend and teacher John Casey, they are loaded with intimations ofthings his suicide sheds light on in a new way. There are also the beginnings of a few stories and two sketches for a novel. A few newspaper portraits he had published are mentioned, but not included (one wonders if they might not have been more interesting than so many letters to his mother which have a tedious sameness to them). Pancake's suicide was not from lack of publication, for his work had been published in the Atlantic and editors in New York were soliciting stories as well as a novel. Ironically, two artists' colonies sent him letters unknowingly offering fellowships within days ofhis death. His small output has also been published in England and has been translated into German and Portuguese. Unfortunately, A Room Forever has its quota of typos. For example on page 112 there are two separate quotes from "Trilobites," each with its own annoying, easily found typos. But anyone interested in Pancake's work, which would mean anyone interested in contemporary Appalachian fiction, needs to read this book-both for what light it sheds on Pancake's work and for the peripheral issues his life and work have provoked. -Jonathan Greene Branch, Michael P., and Daniel J. Philippon. The Height ofOur Mountains : Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998. 448 pages. Hardcover $39.95. Paperback $18.95. 68 The attention given to nature writing in the past two decades has intensified dramatically, so much so that it now forms an increasingly distinct discipline ofliterary study. What once was the topic ofan occasional "special offerings" course is now the center of graduate concentrations and even programs. With this progression comes the creation of such works as Michael P. Branch and Daniel J. Philippon's The Height of Our Mountains. This anthology focuses on Virginia's Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Valley, drawing selections from seventy writers ranging from the colonial period to the present. That the work seeks an academic audience is immediately evident. Following a foreword by distinguished environmentalist John Elder, the editors present an extensive scholarly introduction putting forth a clear ideological statement of their approach to nature writing as a discipline. It succinctly sketches the academic considerations that customarily define the field and, in distinction, arranges the broadened boundaries for the editors' own choices. Most notably, they extend beyond that form most closely associated with nature writing, the personal essay, to include not only the more intuitive additions such as journals, discovery narratives, and travel writing, but even fictional works grounded in the region. In fact, the only exclusion based on genre is that all the works included are prose-and that with the admission that "regional nature poetry . . . could easily fill another volume." Given the fine geographical focus ofthe book, to...

Preface to the study of the Alleluia

There is a passage in Willi Apel's discussion of the Alleluia of the Mass that nicely epitomises several of the difficulties that music historians have experienced with the genre. Apel found himself faced with a dilemma: on the one hand there was that undeniably late characteristic of the Alleluia, its notorious instability of liturgical assignment; and on the other hand there was literary evidence of the Alleluia's antiquity, its appearance in fourth-century patristic literature as the melismatic jubilus, and Gregory I's late sixth-century letter in which he admitted to extending the use of the Alleluia beyond Paschaltime.

NHS Executive will not give single definition of hours of work Debate opens on accountability in the NHS Reductions in defence medical services causes BMA concern BMA will join managers in top level talks Labour party accuses government of privatisation by stealth

# NHS Executive will not give single definition of hours of work {#article-title-2} NHS Executive will not give single definition of hours of work The NHS Executive has decided that a single definition of junior doctors' hours of work would be too narrow and restrictive. But in his latest letter to health authorities, NHS trusts, and regional task forces on implementing the new deal the executive's medical director, Dr Graham Winyard, says that in broad terms “doctors on duty are at work when they are not resting. For example, a doctor contracted for a 72 hours on call rota must have 16 hours of rest in order to meet the target of an average of 56 hours work a week.” The letter sets out in detail the action that should be taken to ensure full implementation of the new deal “at the earliest possible date.” Dr Winyard says that where work is too high for an on call rota—for example, when out of hours calls are so frequent that reasonable periods of uninterrupted rest cannot be secured—efforts should be concentrated on moving junior doctors to a partial or full shift system. The new monitoring arrangements, which were announced at the end of 1994, should ensure that nationally and regionally there was an accurate and consistent picture of the working lives of junior doctors. Dr Winyard emphasises that junior doctors must be directly involved in developing monitoring systems, collecting data, and validating results. To improve the monitoring arrangements task forces have been asked to collect data on the comparative performance of units. This will be made available to purchasers and may …

Henuttawy's Guilty Conscience (Gods and Grain in Late Ramesside Letter no. 37)

In Late Ramesside Letter no. 37, the singer of Amun Henuttawy explains how she was twice cheated out of grain consignments. She attributes these mishaps to the intervention of her patron god, Amun-Endowed-with-Eternity, who is avenging himself on her for allowing him to run out of grain offerings by depriving her of grain in turn. This article discusses the text and provides an overview of the background.

Egyptian Manuscripts in the Wellcome Collection

Publication of Wellcome Egyptian Manuscripts 2 to 10: part of a late Ramesside letter; a Third Intermediate Period Amduat papyrus including Hours 1 to 3; a Ptolemaic Book of the Dead in hieratic; the Demotic Bryce Papyrus; a Coptic homily on the Three Holy Children; two frames of Coptic fragments; and three modern liturgical books in Coptic. A note is included on Wellcome Egyptian Manuscript 1, fragments from hieratic prescriptions of the New Kingdom.

Henuttawy's Guilty Conscience (Gods and Grain in Late Ramesside Letter No. 37)

Henuttawy's Guilty Conscience (Gods and Grain in Late Ramesside Letter No. 37)

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Letters

Gerald Manley Hopkins has been admired as a letter writer for the vividness, sense of humour and honesty with which he expressed his opinions and feelings. Though he died young, his life overlapped some of the great poets of the Victorian era, such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, W.B.Yeats and his life-long friend Robert Bridges. This collection, drawn from the three volumes edited by C.C.Abbott, covers the whole period of Hopkins' life and adds some letters that have recently come to light. They range in date from his schooldays to his final days in Dublin, and include a letter to his German master at Highgate, one to an Irish colleague on the political situation in Ireland and a late letter to his brother Everard on art and his poetry. There are also letters to Oxford friends, to John Henry Newman and Coventry Parmore, as well as many to his family.

The Ox and the Donkey

A parallel from the medieval Arabic The Thousand and One Nights is adduced to throw light on a Late Egyptian letter in which a workman contrasts the kindly treatment accorded the ox with the burdens heaped on the donkey.

Having the EN face that fits.

I felt I must write a reply to the latest letter on enrolled nurse conversion courses - especially in reply to Wendy Larsen's letter (Nursing Standard May 30 - June 5).

Alphanumerical order and category effects in visual search

Is regular alphanumerical order so overlearned that it can aid visual search? Regular (vs. random) order did not help letter or digit search, whereas reverse order (e.g., 987654, FEDCBA) hurt, perhaps because it evoked a tendency to scan in an unnatural, right-to-left fashion. The same order effects were found on between-category trials as on within-category trials. There was a between-category speed advantage on letters versus digits, as well as on early (A to J) versus late (Q to Z) letters, but not on odd versus even digits. The between-category speed advantage was only slightly larger when the target set size was 2 rather than 1, which indicates that its main locus was at the initial encoding or perceptual analysis.

In My Latest Letter to the Free World I Said

In My Latest Letter to the Free World I Said