Star Design Research Articles

Cosmogonic Conceptions of the Udmurt People in Naming Stars and Their Images in Folklore

The cosmogonic concepts of the Udmurt people can be detected through the names of stars, the names of which are usually based on mythological cognition. Additional and very significant information about space objects is contained in folklore texts. The images of stars are included in a stable triad of heavenly bodies along with the sun and moon. Their constant feature is ‘bright’ light, opposed to images of negative energy, forces of darkness – diseases or sorcerers. Therefore, images of stars are frequently used in charms, where they are presented as an insurmountable barrier to those who do evil. The stars, along with the sun and moon, became metaphors and comparisons in the song culture, prayers and charms of the Udmurt people. They are used as analogies in the characterization of family and kinship ties, testifying the relationships within the clan. The stars and constellations, when seen as symbols of unattainability and indivisibility, are a kind of guarantor of stability of the world.

Biometric ‘lapel badge’ attracts $240m funding from star names

Biometric ‘lapel badge’ attracts $240m funding from star names

Rising Star Paradigms: Encoding Seasonal Times in Arabic Sajʿa Rhymes

An ancient art form which may have predated classical Arabic poetry, Arabic rhymed prose—a piece of which is called sajʿa—contains a rhyme at the end of each phrase, but no internal meter, making it easy to memorize and transmit orally. This form of Arabic literature found many uses in pre-Islamic times for orations and in early Islamic times for both religious formulaic practices and secular aphorisms. Among these was a growing set of maxims that used rhymed prose to describe the seasonal conditions that occurred at the heliacal rising of a star or asterism. These pieces of rhymed prose addressed changes in the weather itself, as well as floral, faunal, and social behaviour that occurred during this time. This collection of astronomically-inspired rhymed prose grew over time to incorporate more star names and new rhymed phrases within many of the pieces. This paper draws from original Abbasid-era Arabic sources—including Quṭrub (d. 821 CE), Ibn Qutayba (d. 889 CE) and his contemporary Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 896 CE), and al-Marzūqī (d. 1030 CE)—to provide insight into the content and structure of these pieces of rhymed prose, using the stars of the Scorpion (al-ʿaqrab) as a representative sample.

Subject Metaphors of Stars in Lithuanian and Russian Poetic Texts

The current article, that follows the research cycle analyzing natural phenomena metaphors, examines the star metaphors identified in the works of 40 Lithuanian and 54 Russian poets (mostly 20th century). It also studies the subject metaphors which constitute from the ethnolinguistic point of view the most numerous and most interesting group of six semantic subgroups of star metaphors. The subject metaphors of stars can be both substantive and verbal. However, the article focuses on substantive metaphors. They are divided into nine groups: 1) something written, drawn or embroidered (letters, written texts, books, drawings, figures); 2) lighting devices and other lighting means; 3) clothing, fabrics, yarn, knitted or woven items; 4) small metal, shiny, rounded or sharp objects (jewelry, coins, nails, needles, weapons, etc.); 5) buildings and their parts; 6) kitchen utensils; 7) food and drinks; 8) vehicles; 9) fragments of large objects and debris. The study showed the similarity of the poetic systems of the two languages, in which the same metaphorical models are presented, as well as their differences. The largest number of subject metaphors of stars in both poetic traditions was found in the first four groups, the examples from the following three groups were less common, while the examples in which star metaphors related to vehicles were hardly found. The differences between the two poetic systems may be observed due to the differences in cultures and traditional names of stars and constellations in the languages. The article noted that the author’s poetic metaphor in both Lithuanian and Russian could correlate with folklore tradition, that is with riddles, proverbs, legends and traditional beliefs, which are often common to the two languages.

New Land, New Rubrics: Presenting Diasporic Experience of Asian-American Immigrants in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Selected Short Stories

This research explored the lives and worldviews of Asian immigrants in the United States presented in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's stories in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001). Central characters in Divakaruni's narratives embody the sufferings of immigrants in the New Land. Precisely it was proposed to study the stories from the perspective of the diaspora. In this collection, the researcher has selected five stories, including "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," "The Intelligence of Wild Things," "The Blooming Season for Cacti," "The Names of Stars in Bengali," and "The Unknown Errors of Our Lives." Since the characters like Mrs. Dutta, Mira, Radhika, and Kahuku's mother emigrate from India to different zones of America, they combat issues of cultural contradiction, identity crisis, disruption and family strives. Unlike them, Tarun, Mrs. Dutta's son, and her family are assimilated into the American society, whereas the characters such as Mrs. Dutta, Didi, and Mira recurrently remember their original house and early childhood days with friends. It is because they are fragmented and frustrated in America. The study concluded that the characters in her stories are ambitious and want to live a luxurious life but because of the lack of opportunities, they could not fulfill their desires and even some of them decided to return to their homeland to get a better life.

Development and Evaluation of a System for showing Star Attribute Information with Sounds on a Virtual Planetarium

Currently, there are many contents related to celestial bodies in the world. However, their systems introduce constellations mainly. Most of them don’t introduce information about each star. Existing systems read aloud names of stars and constellations and show their color and brightness only visually. Therefore, in this research, we developed a system that can quickly present information of the color and brightness of stars by associating them with pitches and volumes of sounds. In the evaluation experiment, we compared experimental group using this system with control group using the voice reading system. We verified the speed and accuracy of grasping the information of stars in each system.

Burhan SönmezLabyrinth by Ümit Hussein

lips, leaving everything else to the imagination . Similarly, the story focuses on the lovers’ passion, evoking in a few sentences the entire life of a once-famous man now defeated, tormented, unrecognizable to his close friends, and a stranger to himself. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers Ed. Elissa Washuta & Theresa Warburton. Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2019. 266 pages. THE BEST ASPECT of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers is its intrinsic anthological quality. This anthology of indigenous writers features one or multiple pieces from twenty-seven Canadian and US authors, a veritable feast of First Nations and Native American writers that readers may otherwise never have discovered. This is not a collection of instantly recognizable literary rock star names—Joseph Boyden, Joy Harjo, David Treuer, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Linda LeGarde, Natalie Diaz, and the newest addition to the canon of bright Native writers, Tommy Orange, are conspicuously absent—which leaves this fan of Native literature curious. Still, this book serves up plenty of new discoveries. Consider Stephen Graham Jones’s essay, “Letter to a Just-Starting-out Indian Writer —and Maybe to Myself.” This essay could serve as a summary for this book’s intent and of expectations of indigenous literature overall. This piece asks heavy questions: What topics should we expect to find in an anthology of Native writers? How should we expect them to write? The publishing industry will package Native writers as “exotic,” Jones warns. He Books in Review Burhan Sönmez Labyrinth Trans. Ümit Hussein. New York. Other Press. 2019. 192 pages. COMPACT, thought-provoking, and gently exquisite, Labyrinth, the fourth novel by Turkish author Burhan Sönmez, quietly establishes him as one of Europe’s great contemporary authors. From page one, we are drawn into the immediacy of the main character, Boratin, a youngish jazz musician who has lost his memory following a suicidal leap into Istanbul’s Bosphorus strait. Moved home from the hospital, we follow his studied reimmersion with once-familiar objects and with the family, friends, and social mores that have formed the trappings of his life until then. Largely shut out from this previously ingrained reality, Boratin progresses through clouds of impressions, reflection, reasoning, and evaluation, seizing each new-old thing he meets—propelling the narrative with an etched clarity that sends out sparks at every turn. The effect of the book’s simple clauses, infused with a continual stream of sensual description, is hypnotic. Sönmez has a knack for finding just the right offhand detail to throw a scene or stream of thought into perfect philosophical relief—akin perhaps to Don DeLillo’s prose, yet tempered here with a sort of European humility. In place of DeLillo’s hard irony, a brilliantly earned sensuality restores a sense of narrative wholeness in how we experience this novel’s unfolding: They had heard that in the beginning was the Word, now they can hear from the book dealer’s voice that in the end too there will only be the Word. Life is comprehending the word. And when the book dealer’s slow-moving lips eventually say that death too consists of words, the young pair raise their heads and BURHAN SÖNMEZ 100 WLT WINTER 2020 also instructs: “Don’t let people shame you about not being an expert on your own culture,” and “You don’t have to be able to define what an Indian is in order to write ‘Indian.’ Putting a definition on us, that’s playing their game.” These authors ask when exactly is it okay to stop talking about the fact that their people suffered genocide at the hands of whites for hundreds of years and that Western corporations continue to desecrate the land and rights of indigenous people today from Canada to Chile. They talk about trying to hold onto their traditions yet simultaneously progress. They are not writing for the acceptance of a white audience but for all the judging of and by each other and the lack of identity they sometimes feel as individuals. Deborah A. Miranda’s “Tuolume” is a grueling, haunting personal narrative...

HD 126516: A Triple System Containing a Short-period Eclipsing Binary

Abstract From numerous radial velocities as well as Johnson B and V differential photoelectric photometry, we have determined the orbital elements and other properties of the single-lined triple system HD 126516. This system consists of a narrow-lined F5 V star and an unseen M dwarf companion in a 2.1241 day circular orbit. The small, low-mass secondary produces detectable eclipses of the primary, and that pair has been given the variable star name V349 Vir. Variations of the center-of-mass velocity of this short-period system have an orbital period of 702.7 days or 1.92 yr and an eccentricity of 0.36. The third star is likely a K or M dwarf. From an analysis of our photometry, we conclude that the primary of HD 126516 is not a γ Dor variable. Comparison with evolutionary tracks indicates that the primary is slightly metal-poor and has an age of 2.5 Gyr. The projected rotational velocity of the primary is very low, just 4 km s−1, which is 10 times less than its synchronous rotational velocity. Thus, either that component’s rotation is extremely non-synchronous or the inclinations of the rotational and orbital axes are very different, and so the primary has a very large spin–orbit misalignment. Because of the moderate age of the system and the fact that its orbit is already circularized, neither situation is expected theoretically.

Gwiazdy zachodniej muzyki rozrywkowej w rosyjskim slangu młodzieżowym

The article is devoted to the names of music stars in Russian youth slang. The number of English borrowings, which appear in the Russian youth’s language, is growing rapidly. Russian youngsters are open for western music. The paper presents the processes of implementation of English names into Russian slang. The studied material shows how English words are transformed to adjust to Russian phonetics. The author of this paper proves that young people do not copy foreign words and phrases, but treat them as a basis for further modifications. They play with foreign words in order to adjust them to Russian phonetics and add humour which is a characteristic feature of youth slang.

A Royal English Medieval Astrolabe Made for Use in Northern Italy

This article describes a medieval English astrolabe usually known as Mensing-26 and now in the Adler Planetarium and Astronomical Museum in Chicago. Details of its star positions and names, saints feast days, metallurgy, construction, and general style (featuring a “quatrefoil” rete) are examined and used to place the instrument as one of a small group of astrolabes, epitomised by the great Sloane astrolabe, which has been associated with King Edward III. Using this hypothesis, potential original owners of the instrument in c. 1330–1340 are proposed. It is also shown how the astrolabe was later modified to have a second life as a working instrument in Renaissance Florence.

Hely- és személynevek a magyar internetes gasztronómiai blogok és receptgyűjtemények ételneveiben

The paper examines the names of dishes on Hungarian gastronomy blogs from a linguistic point of view. The author has collected 1380 names from one hundred blogs and collections of recipes on the Internet. The collected names include a Hungarian or a foreign place or personal name and were analysed with respect to their semantics and grammar. Place names in the names of dishes include the Hungarian names of settlements, regions, mountains, rivers; also the foreign names of countries, cities, regions, islands; and even the name of a continent. The names of famous people, politicians, historic figures, well-known chefs, TV stars and fictional characters, e.g. film or fairy tale characters can be found among the personal names listed. The examined names of dishes are most often qualifying, possessive or adverbial syntactic units. In many cases, the names include the blogger’s own name or that of the person from whom the blogger borrowed the recipe, or to whom the blogger dedicated the dish.

Road to the Future and the Prolongation of Traditions: the 15th International Tchaikovsky Competition

The 15th International Tchaikovsky Competition took place in the year of the Russian composer’s 175th anniversary and is remembered for an extremely high level of its contestants. Names of new stars illuminated the musical firmament. Undoubtedly, their future will henceforth be under the spotlight of art lovers from all over the world - so magnetic was the talent of the young performers, so intense were their mastery and charisma. The Competition is memorized for a lot of remarkable features, which are represented by the author of the article on the basis of her own impressions of this great musical festival

Biblical stars in medieval Jewish thought (tenth–twelfth centuries)

The twelfth century witnessed a new Jewish interest in the fixed stars, which finds its major expression in the first-ever Hebrew lists of constellations and fixed stars. These are in fact translations into Hebrew of Arabic lists, which ultimately go back to the star catalogue in Ptolemy’s Almagest . This article focuses on one limited but eye-catching aspect of this intellectual phenomenon: stars names found in the Bible appear in twelfth-century Hebrew lists of fixed stars side by side with other names that are either Hebrew translations or transliterations of the Arabic names. To explain this metamorphosis, we begin with the Scriptural references to stars and look at the Talmudic relevant comments. Then we examine the contribution by Saadia Gaon, who, we argue, was the first to link biblical and Arabic star names. Finally, the bulk of this article is devoted to the role of biblical stars in the writings of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya and Abraham Ibn Ezra.

Beginnings of Indian and Chinese Calendrical Astronomy


 
 
 Calendrical astronomy had a parallel but separate development in China and in India. Both were eventually lunisolar and utilized circumpolar stars, which made Ursa Major and the pole star ideologically important. Initially the Early Harappans could orient their towns according to cardinal directions and the sun probably symbolized the king. Their calendar was heliacal with Aldebaran as the new year star. Indus Civilization created the lunisolar calendar, the nakṣatras, started the new year with the Pleiades, used the gnomon, and knew planets (Dravidian names of stars and planets, preserved in Old Tamil, occur in Indus inscriptions). “Bull of Heaven” and “Sky Garment” were borrowings from Mesopotamia. The paper also deals with the heavenly crocodile and its connection with crocodile cult, the Śunaḥśepa legend, and God Varuṇa’s heavenly banyan tree, which is connected with the pole star’s Dravidian name and its function in Purāṇic cosmology.
 
 

An Ancient Egyptian Diagonal Star Table in Mallawi, Egypt

Diagonal star tables (also called diagonal star clocks) are ancient Egyptian texts that relate sequences of star names to 10-day periods of the Egyptian civil year. The surviving examples are from the early Middle Kingdom (around 2100 b.c.), with one partial New Kingdom version (around 1200 b.c.). Geographically, the coffins on which the tables occur are predominantly from the necropolis of Asyut in Middle Egypt, with single examples from each of Thebes, Gebelein, and Aswan being the exceptions. The partial New Kingdom version is unique in layout and location, occurring in a monumental context in the Osireion at Abydos.The number of known diagonal star tables is small: thirteen were discussed in 1960 by Neugebauer and Parker in vol. i of their Egyptian astronomical texts (hereafter EAT 1), the first collection of the genre.1 This number had risen to twenty-three well-described examples by the beginning of 2013,2 with a further two tables whose existence was known but whose details were not.3 This paper describes one of these two tables (the other remains out of the sight of academia in a private collection in Europe).The coffin designated by the siglum S2Mal has been noted in Willems,4 Zitman,5 and Lapp.6 Its original location in the necropolis at Asyut is unknown, but it was apparently excavated by Kamal in the 1913-14 season7 and now is on public display in the Monuments Museum in Mallawi, Egypt. The museum number for the coffin is 567 and the owner's name is Hr-htp(w).& The coffin is one of three in the back right corner of the main hall of the museum.The coffin is in a glass case with access to all four sides. The lid is displayed on top of the coffin but raised about eight inches and supported by three wooden frames. The star table itself on the underside of the lid is well spaced and generally clearly legible. The decan (star or asterism) names are rendered in a style typical of Asyut in turquoise with black outlines, and each decan name is followed by a large star determinative in light yellow or white with no central dot. The table's columns are separated by thick turquoise vertical lines outlined in black; thinner black lines separate other regions. The background is yellow and some areas of chipping reveal bright white plaster beneath.The lid's three cross-braces or battens are all present and attached to the lid. The plaster and paint on these battens appear darker than the other parts of the table and the signs are largely illegible. However, traces of decan names and separating lines indicate that all three battens belong to this coffin and are correctly placed.The table is laid out in standard format for a diagonal star table.9 It is divided into four quadrants by a horizontal strip with an offering formula across the middle of the table and a vertical band with four figures (mainly obscured by the middle support). The order of figures in the vertical band can still be determined: the sky goddess Nut and Meskhetiu (the Foreleg, our Big Dipper or Plough) above the horizontal strip and Sahu (approximately equivalent to Orion) and Sopdet (Sirius) below. The offering formula starts with the large red dot characteristic of diagonal star tables, followed by an offering to Re in all his places, to Meskhetiu in the northern sky, and a voice offering of bread and beer to Hr-htp(w), the coffin's owner. The formula then becomes largely illegible because of a horizontal crack between the lid planks. The middle support also obscures part of the formula.The top row of the table contains the decades of the civil year in red. A further four rows precede the horizontal strip and five rows follow it. This table is therefore the only nine-row diagonal star table so far described. The uneven distribution of rows around the horizontal strip is not unique, but is a feature only previously seen in one other partial table, K6, S23L (see Table 1 for an index of tables) which has thirteen rows. …

Perceptual load effects on processing distractor faces indicate face-specific capacity limits

The claim that face perception is mediated by a specialized “face module” that proceeds automatically, independently of attention (e.g., Kanwisher, 2000) can be reconciled with load theory claims that visual perception has limited capacity (e.g., Lavie, 1995) by hypothesizing that face perception has face-specific capacity limits. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of face and nonface perceptual load on distractor face processing. Participants searched a central array of either faces or letter strings for a pop star versus politician's face or name and made speeded classification responses. Perceptual load was varied through the relevant search set size. Response competition effects from a category-congruent or -incongruent peripheral distractor face were eliminated with more than two faces in the face search task, but were unaffected by perceptual load in the name search task. These results support the hypothesis that face perception has face-specific capacity limits and resolve apparent discrepancies in previous research.

From “The Tranquilized Tongue”

116 ERIC BAUS FROM “THE TRANQUILIZED TONGUE” The frequency for speaking through feathers decoded the owls in the distance. The projector posed as the skin of a parchment devoted to datura leaves. The codex spliced a photo of hives with the names of newborn stars. The references bred. The curtains corroded. The foam pools painted over a locust. The feral entrails of fireworks powered the clouds. The river beneath the river milked dust from the ground. The city’s saliva swarmed. The expelled breath knotted. The cocoon in the king’s mouth cursed into dross. 117 The ashes on the banks reprised the pollen diffused in the city’s soot. The blind spots inscribed in the organs of an iris ignited the bodies of bees. The stingers hovered. The blank space blinked. The speaker absorbed the view from inside the skull of a pulverized asp. The microphone embedded exploding glass in the mouth of the king’s collapse. The microphone married a flock of shrouded grouses to the hydrogen behind an iris. The microphone unwound the wool in the chests of one hundred surly lions. The microphone trained the ants to pray to the birds colliding with windows. The microphone learned to swim inside an urn. ...

A Staggering Machine of Desire

A Staggering Machine of Desire Amy Henderson (bio) Marlis Schweitzer . When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. The rise of a culture of consumption in the early twentieth century catalyzed a sea change in the campaign for women's rights. The growth of urban centers, and particularly New York City, created an economy of abundance, desire, and choice: the modern idea of "fashion" emerged, and women learned that a desire for certain commodities could be transformative. Indeed, an unanticipated consequence of abundance was the "eureka" recognition that the right to choose particular products could change personal identity. In the years leading to the passage of woman's suffrage in 1919, the transformative power to "shop"—i.e., to choose—generated what one observer called "a staggering machine of desire." It also led to an epochal change in women's sense of control over their own lives. These cultural strands weave throughout Marlis Schweitzer's new study, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Because of centrifugal urban growth, large-scale immigration, and enormous technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York emerged as the hub of a new American identity. New York became the vital center of the corporate and advertising world, and—as symbolized by Broadway—the heart of show business. It was "the imaginary if not geographic heart of the United States, the epitome of all things American" in these years; New York was also the site of convergence where consumer culture flourished (p. 5). Schweitzer finds the linkage to women's self-perception an integral offshoot of consumer culture, both as a result of theater's penchant for spectacle and "stars" and because of the new vogue for shopping. She writes, "theater managers aggressively pursued . . . female theatergoers by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle." Nearby department stores absorbed this path to consumer success and became arenas for spectacle themselves, fusing "theatrical spectatorship and consumption" as they formed [End Page 709] a mass market for consumer goods and helped generate the rise of celebrity culture (p. 4). Broadway played a very special role, providing the words and music for the American Dream. From the 1890s to the 1920s, the Lower East Side witnessed the arrival of twenty-three million new immigrants. German beer gardens, Irish brass bands, and curbside minstrel shows created a commotion of cultures that resonated through the Bowery, lower Broadway, and Union Square in the 1880s—and then migrated north toward West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where the din of tinny pianos clanging out new tunes led to the area's sobriquet as Tin Pan Alley in the early 1900s.1 The "genteel tradition" that had been central to America's mainstream culture dissolved in the new urban, industrial stew. Replacing it was a vernacular culture that rose from the streets and was captured best by vaudeville—the most successful entertainment of the time, and one that literally evoked the "voice of the city." Legendary performer and composer George M. Cohan brought a red-white-and-blue sensibility to Broadway musicals that were quintessential expressions of the American melting pot, including such notable songs as "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag." Schweitzer describes the theater—with its extensive ties to department stores and the emerging mass media—as "a central locus for producing modern consumers." The potential audience for both was vast: in the 1914-15 season, there were 133 productions on Broadway in forty-two theaters, with the names of such stars as W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn, Bert Williams, and Irene Castle illuminating marquees along the "Great White Way." The rise of these popular stage stars—as well as Maude Adams as Peter Pan and such other Ziegfeld Follies' headliners as Fannie Brice and Eddie Cantor—helped give birth to celebrity culture: star images and stories flooded newspapers and magazines to feed an insatiable public appetite that demanded to know more about their anointed favorites.2 To broaden theater's appeal, impresarios such as...

Magyar és német népi csillagnevek és csillagképnevek jelentései

By observing popular star names we can get an insight into ancient people’s beliefs, into their way of thinking and into their everyday life. The author wants to present how human realities and attitudes are reflected in the sky by comparing official Arabic and Greek star names with Hungarian and German popular names for stars, using the methods of cognitive semantics. Langacker’s conceptual archetypes (human body and face, physical object, agent, action, instrument, etc.) can also be identified in the case of star names, though here on most occasions these cognitive domains can not easily be separated. Star names most frequently display the following concepts: persons, body parts, animals and less frequently plants, objects, places, notions as well as features.

<i>The Opera Singer and the Silent Film</i>, and: <i>Carmen on Film: A Cultural History</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Opera Singer and the Silent Film, and: Carmen on Film: A Cultural History Richard Fawkes (bio) Paul Fryer, The Opera Singer and the Silent Film (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2005), 312pp. Phil Powrie, Bruce Babington, Ann Davies and Chris Perriam, Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (Indiana University Press, 2007), 320pp. In 1915 the young film producer Jesse Lasky went to see Geraldine Farrar backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, after a performance of Madame Butterfly, to try and sign her up for a film version of Carmen. Farrar was intrigued by the thought that her performance (for which she would not have to sing as films were at that time silent) would be immortalised on film and be seen by thousands more than would ever be able to see her in an opera house. The money Lasky was offering – $2 a day whether shooting or not, plus a share of royalties and profits (she actually settled for a flat fee of $20,000) – was further temptation, and Farrar duly signed a three-picture deal, all three to be directed by Lasky’s young house director, Cecil B. DeMille. A silent operatic film? It sounds strange, but Lasky and his partner Sam Goldfish (who later changed his name to Goldwyn) had an ulterior motive. The fledgling film industry was still looking to Broadway, the stage and vaudeville for its actors, but the star names were having nothing to do with an art form that was considered, at best, vulgar. To keep ahead of their rivals, Lasky and Goldfish needed someone of stature to demonstrate that the ‘flickers’, as they were known, were respectable: they needed a star like Geraldine Farrar. Lasky’s hunch paid off. Farrar became a huge box-office draw and went on to appear in a further thirteen movies, none of them remotely operatic. She had become one of the first great stars of the silent screen. Farrar’s appearance in Carmen was neither the first nor the only connection between the world of grand opera and the movies. Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri, for example, publicised as the most beautiful woman in the world, had appeared the previous year in Manon Lescaut opposite her husband, the French tenor Lucien Muratore. It is this relationship between opera singers and the silent screen that Paul Fryer charts in his extremely thorough and readable book. ‘The simple fact,’ he writes, ‘that more than seventy operas appeared in silent [End Page 261] film versions by 1915 is one of those curious truths that have passed most of us by’. He is right about people being in ignorance, but has, I believe, underestimated the number of silent operatic films made at this time – not of complete performances of opera but of arias or scenes lasting no more than fifteen minutes, the length of a reel. There were well over a hundred even by 1909. So what was this strange attraction, this desire to marry two totally different and apparently incompatible art forms? There can be no doubt that Lasky was correct: opera singers appearing in films did add a certain class. Equally, and this lies at the heart of Fryer’s exposition: opera singers played a significant, and to date unsung, role in the development of the cinema. Inventors from Edison onwards had been striving to put sound to pictures, and if they wanted a test piece, what better to choose than an aria of which there was already a recording available? It made economic sense. Fryer is not content just to chronicle the story of those singers who swapped the stage for the studio. Rather, he spends four chapters dealing with the background, first concerning the way the media deals with opera stars from Caruso to Domingo, then looking at the effect caused generally by the arrival of cinema, and at the way the film camera changes stage performance. It is central to his hypothesis, and a very important point, that whatever the problems of synchronising lip movement with sound, the appearance of opera stars in films often gives us our only record of their acting skills. The expression ‘silent films’, as Fryer reminds us...