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AskOxford - One of the features of this website is A Word a Year: 1905-2005. Here are the words chosen for the last five years:

2000  speed dating
2001  war on terror
2002  SARS
2003  freedom fries: an alternative term for 'French fries', chosen by some Americans as a critique of the French protest against the invasion of Iraq.
2004  podcasting

Another feature we found at the famed dictionary and reference company site is Ask the Experts, "a database of some of the questions sent in to the Oxford Word and Language Service team, so it is likely that if your question is a fairly broad one on grammar, usage, or words then it will be answered here."

If you want ideas for great word games to play, check out the Oxford Word Challenge. There are easy games like Anagrams or Awful Authors, slightly harder games like Plurals, or fiendishly difficult games like Russian Dolls and Kangaroo Words.

MapToMovies

MaptoMovies - Angela Pressburger's site to inform and review movies for those interested in purchasing, renting or borrowing (from a library) DVDs of movies. Here's the genesis of that site:

The MAP was started in answer to requests from my friends and acquaintances to keep them informed of good films coming out on DVD and sources for acquiring them. Many of them live in rural areas where the only option is renting or purchasing on-line — but they had no idea how to go about doing this. Others felt intimidated by the numbers — the thousands of titles retailers, critics and other information sites have on their shelves or in their databases. What my friends wanted was someone to sift through all those new releases each week and make some recommendations they could respect. The MAP is the result.

Here is part of the site's features:

If your taste runs to films that are genuine and expand your experience of the world we live in — from deep issues to good entertainment — then The MAP is for you.

We sift through the hundreds of new titles released each week and recommend just a few you can enjoy and respect.

You can have a copy of MaptoMovies' newsletter recommendations
sent directly to your in-box, each week.

Looking at Art

An excerpt from an essay, Unnatural Beauty by historian and essayist Simon Schama in the Guardian Unlimited

But the paintings that most haunt us are most often those that hint at their own instability; the unbridgeable distance between technical bravura and the world it ostensibly doubles, even when the illusion is more compelling than the material reality. It is precisely the unattainable serenity of Vermeer's Delft, fictitiously repaired as a civic paradise from the blackened ruins of its gunpowder explosion, that makes it lodge in our imagination. That Delft is forever barred to us, not just by a breadth of water and an array of towers, gates and walls, but by the distance between a shimmering vision projected on a back wall by a camera obscura, and the mundane reality of a small provincial Dutch town past its prime. The image cast by the lens on the wall is sharp but trapped in the unforgiving brilliance of a dream. It is also upside down.

Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit (in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan) bathes in a light strong enough to register with uncanny precision the misty bloom on the skin of its black and green grapes. And there is an apt apple - for this is, among other things, a vision of the fall - the most arresting detail of the fruit, the blackened wormhole, marring its rosiness. A pear shows the early freckles of its own decay. But the tip-off that this is a vision, not of substantial, but precarious naturalism is the artist's refusal to let us see, comfortably, how the basket is set in space. Its bottom edge rests on a slight support that is scarcely thicker than the picture edge itself (and could easily be altogether hidden by a frame). That support might be readable as a ledge or a shelf, but the dead flat, shadowless paint behind it refuses to let us know whether this ledge is connected to anything, or give us any clue as to the breadth of the support. The effect is to turn a still life into a visual thriller, precariously perched on the tip of collapse, a fatalism signalled, in case we'd missed it, by a vine (or possibly a fig) leaf, folded and faded about the stem.

Other extracts from fiction and non-fiction are available at the Guardian site.

Susan Sontag & Virginia Woolf

Excerpt from Regarding the Pain of Others

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists. We hope only (so far in vain) to stop genocide and to bring to justice those who commit gross violations of the laws of war (for there are laws of war, to which combatants should be held), and to be able to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated alternatives to armed conflict. It may be hard to credit the desperate resolve produced by the aftershock of the First World War, when the realization of the ruin Europe had brought on itself took hold. Condemning war as such did not seem so futile or irrelevant in the wake of the paper fantasies of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which fifteen leading nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy; even Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate with a public exchange of letters in 1932 titled "Why War?" Woolf's Three Guineas, appearing toward the close of nearly two decades of plangent denunciations of war, offered the originality (which made this the least well received of all her books) of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man's game — that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male. Nevertheless, the temerity of Woolf's version of "Why War?" does not make her revulsion against war any less conventional in its rhetoric, in its summations, rich in repeated phrases. And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.

Invoking this hypothetical shared experience ("we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses"), Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will. Does it? To be sure, Woolf and the unnamed addressee of this book-length letter are not any two people. Although they are separated by the age-old affinities of feeling and practice of their respective sexes, as Woolf has reminded him, the lawyer is hardly a standard-issue bellicose male. His antiwar opinions are no more in doubt than are hers. After all, his question was not, What are your thoughts about preventing war? It was, How in your opinion are we to prevent war?

From Regarding the Pain of Others. Susan Sontag died on December 28, 2004.

Excerpt from Three Guineas

"Here, fortunately, the year, the sacred year 1919, comes to our help. Since that year put it into the power of educated men’s daughters to earn their livings they have at last some real influence upon education. They have money. They have money to subscribe to causes. Honorary treasurers invoke their help. To prove it, here, opportunely, cheek by jowl with your letter, is a letter from one such treasurer asking for money with which to rebuild a women’s college. And when honorary treasurers invoke help, it stands to reason that they can be bargained with. We have the right to say to her, ‘You shall only have our guinea with which to help you rebuild your college if you will help this gentleman whose letter also lies before us to prevent war.’ We can say to her, ‘You must educate the young to hate war. You must teach them to feel the inhumanity, the beastliness, the insupportability of war.’ But what kind of education shall we bargain for? What sort of education will teach the young to hate war?"

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf may be read in its entirety at The University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection.

Television

Two quite different PBS programs explore sides of those firmly on the political stage and those who observe and comment on the political scene.

The First Lady; Public Expectations, Private Lives examines the how the wives of presidents sought to define their roles.

Extended interviews are given by Laura Bush, Teresa Heinz-Kerry, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barbara Bush.

Challenges that First Ladies Face includes these quotes from the commentators:

They're expected to incarnate some impossible feminine ideal, that is rather outmoded; and because it's outmoded, it's almost impossible, in the modern world, to fulfill.

That gap between who Americans want to be and what they actually are is one that's very problematic for the first lady. Her life is rooted in the complicated realities of modern America and yet for those four years or eight years there's a kind of demand that the first lady be perfect and the first family be this kind of ideal Father Knows Best family, rather than a more Simpsons- type family.

About Laura Bush, Ann Gerhart notes:

Laura Bush is one of the most serene women I have ever met. She has a degree of self-composure and control which is remarkable; and she can glide through the messiest, most turbulent times without ever appearing to be upset, or nervous, or frazzled. She has an inner core of steadiness that keeps her going.

And Gerhart's assessment of Teresa Heinz-Kerry:

Teresa Heinz Kerry is a woman for whom mothering is everything, both of her own children and, by extension, the world. She believes that she has a responsibility to change things, and she's very passionate about doing so. Born in Africa, she's the most exotic of creatures, a white African, who speaks five languages.

Independent Lens looks at Theodor Seuss Geisel with a documentary entitled The Political Dr. Seuss. There are interviews given by biographers Judith and Neil Morgan (Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel) and Richard H. Minear (Dr. Seuss Goes to War). Also heard from is his Random House publisher Robert Bernstein and editor Michael Frith as well as historian Michael Kazin. Geisel's own words through voice-overs are part of the program and clips can be viewed on site.

What fascinates, though, " is a side of Dr. Seuss’s work that is rarely discussed. Most Americans don’t know, for example, that during World War II he drew editorial cartoons for the left-wing New York newspaper PM, or that he made army propaganda films with Frank Capra. Many readers didn’t know that The Sneetches was inspired by Seuss’s opposition to anti-Semitism, that Horton Hears a Who! was a political statement about democracy and isolationism, or that The Lorax and The Butter Battle Book were parables about the environment and the arms race. Dr. Seuss’s true genius may lie in the fact that all of this was done with such humor and finesse, that few realized he was being political at all. "

At the site is also a very brief history of American political cartooning from before Benjamin Franklin's time to the present day.

Building America

The online exhibition, Building America, is presented by a marvelous Washington, DC museum, the National Building Museum.

Building America explores the broad scope of US achievement in architecture, engineering, design, construction, planning, and landscape architecture. Hundreds of images showcase highpoints in American building, from the US Capitol to the Empire State Building, as well as places like shopping centers, offices, and suburban homes where many live their daily lives.

A special selections section of the website includes an audio from women settlers diaries recording their experiences on the Oregon Trail, braving daily trials and hardships: The Oregon Trail was a principal route used by Western settlers during the early 19th century. For about thirty years, until the 1870s, wagon trains traveled the grueling 2,300-mile trek from either Westport or Independence, Missouri, to Wyoming, and then across the Rocky Mountains to Oregon.

Another audio diary covers tenement life in New York City: By 1900, nearly three-quarters of New York City residents lived in tenements within neighborhoods that were the most densely populated places on earth. The majority were immigrants, not unlike Josephine Baldizzi, who moved to 97 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side in 1928 with her Sicilian-born parents and brother. She moved out of the building in 1935, but returned to visit 97 Orchard Street after it had been transformed into the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Enjoy the exhibit and the quotations of two characters used in the House and Home section, one fictional and one real: Frank Baum's Dorothy and William Levitt, creator of Levittown, LI, NY:

"There's no place like home."

"No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do."

Leonora Carrington

An excerpt from The Hearing Trumpet

"Every week brings a certain amount of mild enjoyment; every night, in fine weather, the sky, the stars, and of course the moon in her season. On Mondays, in clement weather, I walk two blocks down the road and visit my friend Carmella. She lives in a very small house with her niece who bakes cakes for a Swedish teashop although she is Spanish. Carmella has a very pleasant life and is really very intellectual. She reads books through an elegant lorgnette and hardly ever mumbles to herself as I do. She also knits very clever jumpers but her real pleasure in life is writing letters. Carmella writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own. Carmella despises anonymous letters, and of course they would be impractical as who could answer a letter with no name at all signed at the end? These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella's delicate handwriting. No one ever replies. This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.

When she unwrapped the hearing trumpet I was at a loss to know whether it could be used for eating or drinking or merely for ornament. After many complicated gestures she finally put it to my ear and what I had always heard as a thin shriek went through my head like the bellow of an angry bull. "Can you hear me Marian?"

Indeed I could, it was terrifying."

Read the remainder of the excerpt of The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington at La Vitrina Literature

Here's a brief review by librarian Keith at the Invisible Librarian site:

"A coven of little old ladies, with the help of a pack of wolves, a nest of bees and a freelance mailman named Taliesin, steel the Holy Grail from the descendants of the Crusaders and return it to the Goddess from whence the Christians stole it in the first place. While illuminating the pagan roots of the Christian Mythology, Leonora Carrington also admonishes the church for its historically cruel treatment of women, especially the elderly variety, as second class citizens. But more then that, Carrington, a surrealist painter and writer, manages to evoke a brilliant sense of dreaminess and real emotion, something conspicuously absent from most surrealist writings. Personally, this is one of my all time favorite books. I’ve read it three times, and will probably read it for a fourth very soon."

Dawn Powell

At the Dawn Powell website presented by the Library of America, Gore Vidal's essay includes a quote:

" ... it is considered jolly and good-humored to point out the oddities of the poor or of the rich. The frailties of millionaires or garbage collectors can be made to seem amusing to persons who are not millionaires or garbage collectors. Their ways of speech, their personal habits, the peculiarities of their thinking are considered fair game. I go outside the rules with my stuff because I can't help believing that the middle class is funny, too."

Diary entries (edited by Tim Page) include the following:

March 1, 1939: Wits are never happy people. The anguish that has scraped their nerves and left them raw to every flicker of life is the base of wit — for the raw nerve reacts at once without any agent, the reaction is direct, with no integumentary obstacles. Wit is the cry of pain, the true word that pierces the heart. If it does not pierce, then it is not true wit. True wit should break a good man's heart.

Excerpts from her books exist on the site as do sections on her life, her work and lengthy commentary by Vidal, Edmund Wilson, Richard Lingeman and James Gibbons.

In the biography section, Powell is again quoted about her writing: When asked about the characters in her novels and plays, Dawn Powell said, "I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses."

Becky, the Original

We would recommend buying the BBC Vanity Fair series, shown on A&E in 1999. The television series on DVD is delectable.

By the way, the actress playing Becky in this version is Natasha Little who assumes the role of Lady Jane Sheepshanks in director Mira Nair's current version.

Or, why not read the original as, thankfully, it's online:

" For it may be remarked in the course of this little conversation (which took place as the coach rolled along lazily by the river side) that though Miss Rebecca Sharp has twice had occasion to thank Heaven, it has been, in the first place, for ridding her of some person whom she hated, and secondly, for enabling her to bring her enemies to some sort of perplexity or confusion; neither of which are very amiable motives for religious gratitude, or such as would be put forward by persons of kind and placable disposition. Miss Rebecca was not, then, in the least kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice. This is certain, that if the world neglected Miss Sharp, she never was known to have done a good action in behalf of anybody; nor can it be expected that twenty-four young ladies should all be as amiable as the heroine of this work, Miss Sedley (whom we have selected for the very reason that she was the best-natured of all, otherwise what on earth was to have prevented us from putting up Miss Swartz, or Miss Crump, or Miss Hopkins, as heroine in her place?) — it could not be expected that every one should be of the humble and gentle temper of Miss Amelia Sedley; should take every opportunity to vanquish Rebecca’s hard-heartedness and ill-humor; and, by a thousand kind words and offices, overcome, for once at least, her hostility to her kind."

From the second chapter, In Which Miss Sharp and Miss Sedley Prepare to Open the Campaign in Part One of Vanity Fair at Bartleby's Great Books Online

CultureWatch

Read Julia Sneden, Rose Mula, David Westheimer, Margi Cullison, Liz Flaherty, Martha Powers, Jane Shorthall, Roberta McReynolds and others.

Art Sighting: Virtue & Beauty and '50 truisms, half-truths, blatant lies and childish wishes about art'

Virtue and Beauty, an aptly named exhibit, is the first exhibition on the subject ever organized, surveyint the phenomenal rise of female portraiture in Florence from c. 1440 to c. 1540. Since images from the exhibit are not present online, stroll through the portraiture section. There's also an in-depth study of Rembrandt's works and techniques to be seen a the National Gallery site.

A controversial writer, dramatist, aesthete, wit, and self-proclaimed "lord of language" is the subject of the Morgan Library's display of photos depicting Oscar Wilde.

The effort to describe art without seeming clichéd or trite seems to be a universal one; the Washington Post outlined a list of "50 truisms, half-truths, blatant lies and childish wishes, fundamental to the way we think about art, and none of them very useful:"

1. Art is a universal language.
2. It captures the eternal human spirit.
3. It brings us closer to our fellow man.
4. It makes us better people.
5. It is timeless.
6. It expresses the inexpressible.
7. It is our secular religion.
8. It makes us human.
9. It heals.
10. We can't live without it.
11. Art is the greatest creation of society.
12. Genius requires suffering.
13. Only people who make a living from art are artists; unless they are geniuses, in which case they suffer (see No. 12).
14. Geniuses get "paid" after they die, when they are discovered and loved posthumously.
15. Art makes artists immortal.
16. Happy artists make uplifting art; unhappy artists make depressing art.
17. Except for comic artists, who are unhappy but mask their true feelings.
18. Artists are prophets.
19. Art falls into distinct periods, generally corresponding to the centuries.
20. If an artist's work doesn't represent his period, he's either a rebel (genius) or a conformist (hack).
21. Young artists struggle until they find their voice.
22. An artist's voice first appears in his/her "masterwork."
23. Art is constructed in layers; the "deeper" layers matter the most.
24. Art isn't about ordinary things; art transforms the ordinary.
25. To make great art, artists must separate themselves from the world.
26. But artists also hang out together in glamorous social circles.
27. Artists make art to get sex; or they sublimate sexual thoughts into art.
28. Artists have particularly large libidos.
29. Artists are too busy with their art to care about politics.
30. Artists who care about politics are either (a) rebels (geniuses) or (b) propagandists (hacks).
31. Art transports us.
32. But art also centers us in the world.
33. Nature can make "art" too.
34. Art and craft are the same thing (both express the eternal human spirit; see No. 2).
35. The important thing in art is self-expression (compare No. 1).
36. Young artists make turbulent art; old artists make serene art.
37. European artists are generally "young" (they make turbulent art).
38. Asian artists are generally "old" (they make serene art).
39. African artists make "primitive" art.
40. Primitive art helps rejuvenate decadent (European) art.
41. Collecting primitive art is a kind of apology for colonialism.
42. Violence in art offers us a cathartic release; but violent art makes us violent. 43. Misuse of metaphor helps "explain" art (luminous music, harmonic colors, etc.).
44. Ambiguity in art is profound.
45. Anyone can make art (because we all have a little "genius" in us).
46. My kid could do that (because art is a fraud).
47. Art transcends class barriers.
48. Critics don't "get" art; but "critically acclaimed" art is a good investment.
49. Art exposes the collective unconscious.
50. By studying "top 50" lists you can learn the general drift of culture.

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