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Cleopatra’s suicide by asp was an audacious act of self-empowerment: she chose to perish in Alexandria rather than be exhibited as a captive in Octavian’s victory parade in Rome. Octavian, undaunted, substituted a reclining effigy of the Egyptian queen, complete with venomous snake—a riveting tableau that became a favorite subject of later painters and patrons. This oil painting of the scene was commissioned by King Charles II around 1674 from Benedetto Gennari, a Bolognese who had ventured to Paris and London in search of employment. Earlier, Gennari had presented the English king with his risque Diana and Endymion (originally painted for Cardinal Richelieu, who rejected it), and Charles liked it enough to commission Cleopatra as a companion piece. Both works were displayed in the king’s apartments. Over time Cleopatra seems to have disappeared from the court inventory, and it apparently followed Charles’s brother James II into exile. It is now in the Yale Center for British Art. Gennari created an erotic scene for his patron, in which Cleopatra is provocatively naked—she often was in post-antique versions of the suicide—as her voluminous mantle conveniently falls away to reveal her opalescent flesh. But the painter also captured the materiality of the inimitable life of luxury pursued by Cleopatra and Antony in the late first century B.C.E. Still youthful at 39, Cleopatra grasps the wriggling asp that curls around her right wrist like a bracelet, matched by the pearl-encrusted gold filigree band on her other arm. Small pearls are intertwined with her honey-colored hair, and a large teardrop pearl earring dangles from her right lobe. The earring likely represents one of a pair she wore when she banqueted with Mark Antony at Tarsus—an event made famous when she mischievously melted the other earring in vinegar and swallowed it, to spotlight for her dinner guest the extravagant sum she could spend on a single meal. It might be said that Cleopatra was history’s first material girl. But she was also a woman of genuine substance. Cleopatra was a multilingual mother of four who ran a country, commanded an army, oversaw a vast grain supply, commissioned art and architecture at home and abroad, and was revered as a goddess during her lifetime. Paintings like this one confirm that Cleopatra continues to captivate. But what makes the last queen of Egypt matter, 2,036 years after her death, is that we can’t help but marvel at a woman who did it all.
Game Boy To a random passerby, it would have been a strange scene. In the corner of a largely empty video arcade, a disheveled man was playing the Star Wars video game. He was barefoot and wore a back brace, and periodically he leaned back against a stool to rest. Beside him, a video camera recorded the game. Heaped around him were piles of personal effects—spare clothes, ginseng bottles, and a gallon jug into which, behind the privacy of a screen, he occasionally urinated. As spectator Ethan Chessin '02 put it, “If I hadn’t known it was Brandon, I would’ve thought a homeless man had moved in.” Brandon Erickson '02 is one of the world’s top players of the 1983 Atari Star Wars video game. Between 8 a.m. last May 16 and 2:10 p.m. on May 18, he played Star Wars for 54 hours and 10 minutes without a break at Ground Kontrol, a classic-video arcade in Portland, Oregon. During that time, he scored 283 million points, ingested no stimulant stronger than ginseng, took no break longer than the seven seconds between levels, played one level naked from the waist down (after an aborted attempt to change clothes between levels), and spent a total of 25 cents. Although Erickson set a record for the longest continuous play on any arcade game, he gave in to exhaustion still short of Robert Mruczek’s 21-year-old record of 300 million points in 49 hours. Erickson (who is acquainted with the author from college) took up Atari’s Star Wars in May 2004 and quickly won plaudits from the gaming world for his speedy mastery. “He progressed the fastest on this game from inception to mastery of any champion I’ve seen,” says Mruczek. After a game in which Erickson played for more than two hours on the hardest settings without taking a single hit, Mark Alpiger, a master of the Classic Arcade Gaming web site, was moved to declare it “one of the best gaming performance segments in history”—surpassing even the legendary “Perfect Pac-Man” game that earned Billy Mitchell “Player of the Century” honors at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show. “It is a skill, I guess,” Erickson says. “It combines a fast-reacting, highly integrated nervous system with a drive to do things that aren’t necessarily that important.” Erickson is one of a small subculture of players in the gaming world who specialize in the old coin-operated games of the so-called “Golden Age,” before Nintendo crippled the arcade market. Under the supervision of Twin Galaxies, official scorekeeper in the video gaming world, the players pursue records on arcade machines such as Pac-Man and Asteroids. Erickson’s quest is part of a family tradition. His grandfather, the late Willard Centerwall '45W, '52MD, earned a spot in a local newspaper at age 10 by flying a kite for two consecutive days and nights, sleeping with the kite tied around his finger and floating out the window. Later, in the Army, Centerwall set an armed services record for sit-ups, wearing the skin off his back in the process. Since the marathon, Erickson has begun studying for a master’s in counseling psychology at Lewis & Clark College and has taken a part-time job. Despite these distractions, he insists that he will return to break the records that remain before him. “On some level, I feel like I’m the best Star Wars player, and I’ll do what I have to do to prove it.”
Theater With a Side of Buffalo Wings For that “Let’s put on a show!” vibe, few theater organizations can top the Yale Cabaret, a 37-year-old organization for students at the School of Drama who want to perform dinner theater. Last fall, 12 former drama school students in New York City started a new venture to recreate the Yale Cabaret’s freewheeling spirit. It started in an unlikely venue: a Bennigan’s restaurant just off Times Square. Bennigan’s is a pub-style restaurant chain better known for buffalo wings and fried mozzarella sticks than avant-garde theater. But it was home to the first two shows of the Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret (UNYYC). The inaugural season launched in October with Most Happy, a subversive “proto-feminist drama” about Anne Boleyn by George Tynan Crowley '90MFA. The second show, in November, was the first American performance of Three Children by Malaysian playwright Leow Puay Tin. Elastic staging made good use of the second-floor restaurant space, with the actors moving from spot to spot as they played out evocative episodes about children in colonial Malaysia. Innovative lighting spotlighted the actors but left most of the Bennigan’s prefab-tavern decor in the dark. UNYYC is the brainchild of Heidi Seifert, who worked on the Yale Cabaret as a drama student in the 1980s. “It was the first place where we felt we were independent creative artists,” recalls Seifert. “Faculty didn’t give us a grade. We just did whatever we wanted to. People did crazy nonsense. They took Hefty bags and made curtains out of them. We did a Lizzie Borden musical.” In 2001, the Yale Cabaret produced the musical Zanna, Don’t!, which was eventually mounted Off Broadway. But the Cabaret, its alumni say, is more about taking risks than making the big time. And so is UNYYC, so far. The eight performances of the two shows, Seifert says, brought in an average audience of 30 to 50 people—not enough, apparently, for Bennigan's, which declined to continue the arrangement after Three Children. The January show will be staged at the West Bank Cafe, also in the theater district. But UNYYC is still looking for a permanent restaurant home. (Food and drink are essential, says board member Pun Bandhu '01MFA, to “lubricate the community.”) For now the UNYYC is a Yale-only enterprise. It currently includes Yale School of Drama graduates from 1969 to 2004, and the February 2006 show, which closes the first season, will be a showcase for four plays written by graduates of the Yale playwriting program. The group has received donations and two grants, and a benefit is tentatively planned for March, but money remains tight. Each production has a budget of only $300. Neal Lerner '86MFA, a UNYYC board member, compares the low-end cabaret experience favorably with his day job—which last November was a role in the Off-Broadway show A Mother, A Daughter, and a Gun, starring Olympia Dukakis. Says Lerner, “They spend a million dollars on an Off-Broadway show. This one had a big budget, big producers, two big stars, and lots of publicity, but that’s still no guarantee.” The show closed in under a month. But, says Lerner, who is co-author of the next show, Separating the Men from the Bull, “on a shoestring budget you get creative in really great ways.” Says co-artistic director Mahayana Landowne '98MFA, “In so many other parts of our careers, we’re into selling ourselves, but this is about staying true to the mission of no-frills theater, theater by the seat of your pants, theater for the love of it.”
Making the Cut
I once knew a man who applied to Yale almost 90 years ago. He had grown up in the slums of New Haven, and poverty forced him to leave high school and get a job test-firing machine guns in the Winchester factory. Nonetheless, he took the examinations required for entrance to Yale in those days—which in his case included English, mathematics, Spanish, and mechanical drawing. He failed the math exam, but was allowed to retake it twice and eventually was admitted to Yale’s scientific school with a generous scholarship. “Almost anyone could get into Yale in those days,” he told me. He graduated in 1922 and went on to be a successful businessman and one of Yale’s leading fundraisers. The University of California-Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel '72, in his magisterial work The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, has considerable nostalgia for that exam-based system of college admissions of the early twentieth century. To be sure, in that era prior to World War I women were excluded from all of the “Big Three” colleges, while Princeton refused all black applicants, however qualified. And the Harvard of gilded aristocrats like the young Franklin D. Roosevelt, Yale with its all-consuming focus on football and the senior societies, and the Princeton that F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the pleasantest country club in America” were hardly hotbeds of intellectual achievement or microcosms of American society. Even so, Karabel writes, the old admissions standard “was meritocratic in an elemental way: if you met the academic requirements, you were admitted, regardless of social background.” But in the early 1920s, the leaders of the Big Three became unhappy with exam-based admissions for one principal reason: what Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell called “a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews.” If too many academically qualified but socially undesirable types came through the gates, these leaders feared, the universities' preferred clientele—the wealthy, prep school-educated WASP gentlemen—would go elsewhere. And so in 1923, Yale (following Harvard’s lead and Princeton’s example) capped enrollments for the first time and secretly imposed a Jewish quota. The story of these events by now has appeared in a number of accounts, including the landmark study of Jews at Yale, Joining the Club, by Dan Oren '79, '84MD, associate professor (adjunct) of psychiatry. What makes Karabel’s book different and valuable is his focus on how the selection process designed in the 1920s to screen out Jews is essentially the same system of college admissions we have today. The 1920s brought not only reliance on the SAT (on which Jews originally were thought to perform poorly), but also the requirement that the applicant submit letters of recommendation and be subjected to a personal interview, an assessment of character as well as academic fitness. In addition, there was a negative disposition toward candidates whose sole perceived strength was intellectual excellence and a preference for legacies and athletes. Karabel argues that however normal these features of the admissions process may seem to us, “many of them are in fact extraordinarily strange.” He finds it odd that the emphasis on highly subjective qualities like “character” and “personality,” which had its origin in attempts to solve the “Jewish problem,” persists in present-day admissions. He points out that most of the world would find it “laughable” that athletic ability should have any importance in determining entrance to the country’s greatest research universities, while the preference shown to the children of alumni and major donors at many institutions strikes him as “unmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst.” Overall, he writes, the admissions system at elite colleges “has striking affinities to the system of selection to a private club.” The system has survived, in his view, because it does not rely on objective measures (like test scores) but on subjective assessments of merit. The main lesson that emerges from the history of Big Three admissions, according to Karabel, is that “the qualities that come to define 'merit' tend to be attributes most abundantly possessed by dominant social groups.” In an era when merit meant “character,” admissions offices discerned great merit in athletes, St. Grottlesex grads, and alumni sons, but precious little in intellectuals, public high school graduates, and Jews. It is astonishing to find that during the 1930s and '40s, Yale seemingly preferred insolvency to any lessening of its social cachet. The college rejected large numbers of Jews even during the Depression and World War II, when enrollments were imploding, and refused to recruit beyond its traditional feeder schools for fear of stirring up applications from the wrong element. Yale’s rivals pursued similar paths. Karabel is at his most revisionist in criticism of Harvard president James Conant (1933-53), usually revered as one of the patron saints of meritocracy. Far from it, says Karabel: while Conant spoke eloquently about equality of opportunity, Harvard retained its Jewish quota and continued to privilege the privileged. The only real exception to the rule, in Karabel’s view, came in the persons of Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr. '41 (1963-77) and his first dean of admissions, R. Inslee “Inky” Clark '57 (1965-70), whom Karabel credits with nothing less than “the most radical transformation ever witnessed in an Ivy League institution.” The elements of the admissions overhaul are well known: a much greater emphasis on intellectual ability, a vastly expanded search for talent, a “definitive end [to] Yale’s long history of anti-Semitic discrimination,” the total elimination of financial need as a factor in admissions decisions, the admission of women and greater numbers of minorities and people from unprivileged backgrounds, and a sharp and sudden drop in admission rates for prep school graduates, athletes, and legacies. The result was Yale as it is now. (Karabel himself was one of “Inky’s kids,” admitted to Yale with the Class of 1972, although he transferred to Harvard after freshman year.) So controversial was the change, and so high the stakes, that Brewster and Clark are still passionately loved and hated today, making them unique among university presidents and admissions deans of the time. Even so, according to Karabel, Yale in the Clark years was never a meritocracy—it merely came closer to being a meritocracy than any of the Big Three had been before or has been since. Merit, as the admissions office defined it, continued to take account of subjective qualities like character—though now it was often minorities for whom character and leadership qualities provided an edge. Legacies still received an admissions boost (though less than before), Yale students continued to be disproportionately affluent and private school-educated, and Clark’s second class actually had 16 percent more varsity captains than the last class of previous admissions dean Arthur Howe '43. Karabel does not deny that elite universities have “ideal interests,” to use the clunky sociological term. As he puts it, “overt contradictions between their ideals and practices are particularly costly, depriving them of the legitimacy and prestige that are their most precious resources.” But he sees the late-1960s changes at Yale, for all the controversy and lost alumni donations they caused, as driven by institutional self-interest rather than idealism. He points out that Yale’s transformation was a successful effort to reverse decades of falling further behind Harvard, that the admission of women doubled the limited pool of intelligent and wealthy applicants needed as “paying customers,” that any elite university failing to admit sizable numbers of minorities amid the racial turmoil of the '60s would have lost its legitimacy, and that continuing to privilege the “social capital” of the old elites over the “cultural capital” of a rising professional class would have “tethered Yale to a group in decline.” Ultimately, he considers Brewster a conservative reformer who, by allowing people to keep faith in the traditional belief of upward mobility through education, helped fend off the '60s critique of America’s essentially inegalitarian socioeconomic system. The epic scale (and scale-straining size) of The Chosen reflects decades of effort on the part of Karabel and his small army of research assistants. Although recondite thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault inform much of Karabel’s analysis, the book is strikingly well written, and the author makes his points clearly and forcefully. He also shows admirable restraint, for an academic, in omitting all charts and graphs. But while Karabel’s work is the most thorough and incisive study of twentieth-century undergraduate admissions, it is unlikely to be the last word on the subject. Like many writers on meritocracy, he gives insufficient attention to the education that students receive at elite universities, and the ways that genuine educational ideals influence the admissions process. Although subjective assessments of character were used to keep out Jews during the first half of the twentieth century, Yale’s concern with shaping the character and leadership qualities of its students was real and arguably quite successful. Similar concerns still shape Yale education today. Take Brewster’s widely disseminated 1967 letter to John Muyskens, Inky Clark’s assistant. Though Karabel dismisses it in a paragraph as a public relations maneuver to reassure alumni that Clark was under control, the Muyskens letter has in fact been Yale’s official philosophy of admissions for almost 40 years now. Brewster wrote that Yale wanted its graduates “to be leaders in their generation. That means we want as many of them as possible to be truly outstanding in whatever they undertake.” He also emphasized that Yale should admit those “who will make the best use of Yale’s resources,” including the non-academic resources and opportunities of the university. A liberal arts education for leadership in a residential setting is a different proposition from graduate study in a specialized field, and Yale’s admissions decisions almost of necessity will have to involve subjective judgments of an individual’s overall capacities beyond strictly testable strengths. One way to judge an admissions dean, at least in the long run, may be to determine whether the individuals he or she admitted have in fact gone on to become successful. On this point, while Karabel is able to document (and decry) the degree of preference that athletes have received in Big Three admissions, the longitudinal studies of college graduates undertaken by Derek Bok and William Bowen show that athletes significantly outearn their non-athlete peers. A salary is a narrow indication of success, no doubt. But what makes admissions at today’s controversy-averse universities so mysterious is precisely their leaders' reluctance to publicly define or debate what individual success might mean, how early indications of its potential are to be detected in teenagers, and how exactly the education they provide will contribute to that success. This opacity, in turn, makes it difficult for them to respond to a critic like Karabel, who simultaneously accuses them of falling short of meritocratic ideals and strongly implies, along the same lines as the egalitarian philosopher John Rawls, that any definition of merit or success is bound to be arbitrary anyway, in which case admissions decisions might as well be determined by lottery. The most troubling aspect of current admissions at the Big Three, which Karabel raises toward the end of the book, is the lack of class diversity. A recent study showed that only three percent of students at highly selective institutions come from families in the bottom socioeconomic quartile. According to Yale’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR), the college’s financial aid initiatives for families with less than $60,000 in annual income affect about 800 of the university’s 5,300 undergraduates, or 15 percent. (The median household income is about $50,000.) The problem is that meritocracy, which throughout the twentieth century meant raising up talented youngsters from the lower classes and casting down less gifted upper-class scions, no longer seems to be working that way. As Karabel notes, nowadays “the privileged are the meritorious; of all students scoring over 1300 on the SAT, 66 percent come from the top socioeconomic quartile and only 3 percent from the lowest quartile.” Further, while Karabel blasts legacy preference as affirmative action for the privileged, according to Yale president Richard Levin, “the grades and test scores of the legacies we admit are higher than the average of the rest of the admitted class” (see “Why Yale Favors Its Own,” November/December 2004). This statement has to be sifted for statistic-speak. Bok and Bowen agree that on average legacy applicants to selective institutions have stronger academic credentials than other applicants, but point out that legacies still receive a significant admissions boost relative to non-legacies who aren’t recruited athletes or minorities. Levin affirms that “legacy status is given positive weight” in Yale’s admissions process. But he also argues (and Yale’s OIR confirms) that “the legacies that matriculate achieve higher grades at Yale than non-legacy students with the same high school grades and test scores”—an assertion that probably would not have been true at any other point during the twentieth century. What’s going on here? It could be that the elite colleges need a more extensive outreach to turn up promising candidates in rural or inner-city communities and convince them to apply. (Many, including Yale, are trying this.) It could be that by now the rich have so thoroughly mastered the admissions process that what’s needed is either a new and better determination of aptitude or (as Karabel recommends) some form of affirmative action for the poor. Or it could be, now that Inky’s kids are having kids of their own, that legacies are in fact better qualified than non-legacies for admission by virtue of environment, preparation, or genetic inheritance (a topic that Karabel avoids). If so, then the percentage of legacies at Yale may return to levels last seen during the un-meritocratic 1930s, which may put Yale in an uncomfortable position if the gap between rich and poor in this country continues to widen. Karabel has done a great service in synthesizing the admissions debates of the twentieth century. But it’s hard not to feel that there will be few easy answers in the admissions battles of the future.
A Century’s Worth of Yale
When I was an undergraduate at Yale during the tumultuous later years of the Vietnam War, the student body did not give the university’s rich traditions much respect. We were less “Boola Boola” and a lot more “bow wow wow.” In our yearbook, one misguided member of my class (oh, dear, I see now that it was me) quoted James Joyce: “Ivy, ivy up the wall. Did anyone ever hear such drivel?” But life is full of little ironies, isn’t it? Not long ago my son became a tenor with the Whiffenpoofs, an a cappella group said to have something to do with Yale tradition. Over the past year, I have spent many Monday nights at Mory’s, an institution I never once visited as an undergraduate. And as I write these words, my first-born child is away on the Whiffenpoof annual world tour singing “baa-baa-baa” in Hanoi. At the Hilton. Holy Mother Yale. So I come here today, mildly chastened, to do homage. Homage to the college, which I admire more for what it is today than for what it was in my own time, and also to the Whiffenpoofs. Reborn each year with 14 men from the senior class, the Whiffs are now the oldest collegiate a cappella singing group in the world. The 100th anniversary of their founding in 1909 is fast approaching. Richard Nash Gould, a bass with the Whiffen-poofs of 1968, originally set out, when the 90th anniversary was still in prospect, to compile a little history of the group. His archival labors plainly grew on him. In this extravagantly illustrated two-volume boxed set, self-published and sold on his own website, he has ended up producing a scrapbook history of Yale in the twentieth century. Volume one is Yale College: Twentieth Century; volume two, which includes a four-CD musical anthology, is Whiffenpoofs: Twentieth Century. Browsing through the result will delight and disturb almost anyone who came of age at Yale. The peculiar power of these books, particularly the weightier first volume, derives from Gould’s prudent decision not to impose his own narrative on the reader. (“The Yale of one moment cannot be the Yale of any other,” he writes.) He has simply compiled images and news items from university publications and arranged them handsomely, generally allotting four pages to each year from 1900 to 2001. (A sampling of World War II-era items from the book appeared in this magazine in May/June 2004.) There is something shockingly piquant about these snippets of history. In his introduction, former Yale College dean Richard Brodhead '68, '72PhD, calls them “less like records of events than bursts of recovered vitality.” Posters, pamphlets, shop fronts, lapel buttons, and faces, all long forgotten, suddenly leap back into one’s consciousness. It is a little disheartening, but probably accurate, that almost every image from my own time at Yale reflects protest and disaffection. (What in the world was the world thinking then? Even the cover of the 1971 pamphlet “Sex and the Yale Student” seems joyless. It featured two stone blocks, male and female, mashed together forehead to kneecap, lips locked in a geologic act of osculation.) For better and worse, Gould’s artful clippings allow us to experience not just our own Yale, but also other Yales past and future, with the tang of “present time.” We enter the century via Phelps Gate on the heels of Dink Stover anticipating “the best, the happiest” four years he will ever know. The Yale Daily News reports with approval that the city will not be dumping “huge piles of snow” on the Green this winter. It urges the hiring of more than one postal carrier “to deliver the three mails each day to all the rooms on the Campus.” The century unfolds like real life, with only vague inklings of what today’s headlines portend for tomorrow. (Hence the books' shared subtitle, “A History in Present Time.”) For 1911, an image of the sheet music for “Bingo Eli Yale” appears beside a News item on the first successful test of a bomb dropped from an “aeroplane.” For 1939, the News headline says, “All-American Enrolls in Yale Law School. Whizzer White To Finish Rhodes Scholarship Here. Pro Football Not Concern.” Gould allows readers the pleasure of recalling for themselves that White was saving his knees for his later career as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White '46LLB. The frivolous and the foreboding often tango cheek-by-jowl across the page: for 1964, under the headline “Blonde Stuns Freshmen,” the News notes that yesterday’s appearance in Commons of “a silent, smiling, beautiful blonde” nearly caused the roof to collapse with the strength of the ovation from love-starved freshmen. And for 1968, the year George W. Bush graduated, Gould quotes without comment a talk by University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. '49, '56BDiv, urging his audience to refuse to serve in an ill-considered war, not least as an example that will “nourish my grandchildren and yours” 30 or 40 years in the future. Some caveats: while readers generally benefit from Gould’s avoidance of commentary, a key or guide would have been helpful. Gould demonstrates the Yale penchant for abbreviations, attributing many news items either to YDN or to the somewhat more cryptic OCD. Even insiders may not recognize that he is following the Yale Daily News practice, after 1916, of referring to itself as the “Oldest College Daily.” A more serious flaw has to do with the shape of the two volumes. The Whiffenpoof material is excellent (we learn, among other things, that the tune for “The Whiffenpoof Song” was written by a Harvard man). But it belongs for the most part in the second volume. Instead, Gould has attempted to make the Whiffenpoofs the framework for Yale College: Twentieth Century, and the reader just ends up being confused by the double dose. In particular, the inclusion of a roster and a row of Whiffenpoof head shots for every class adds little, and it seems particularly unrepresentative of Yale after 1969, when coeducation began. There is no doubt “something centrally ‘Yale’” about the Whiffenpoofs, as Richard Brodhead argues in his introduction. But just as the Yale of one moment cannot represent the whole, neither can the Yale of one male singing group. What’s even more odd is Gould’s decision to end the first volume with an extended remembrance of the World Trade Center attacks and New York’s subsequent “Tribute in Light,” which Gould himself, an architect in New York, co-conceived and co-designed. However epochal that attack may be for us now, it tells us nothing particular about Yale. And it didn’t happen in the twentieth century. Still, the reader has reason to be grateful to Gould. The single most melancholy and evocative lyric of “The Whiffenpoof Song” comes at the end of the second stanza. “We will serenade our Louis while life and voice shall last,” the Whiffs sing. “Then we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest.” Some day, no doubt, the Yale and the Whiffenpoofs of the twentieth century will be forgotten. But thanks to these two volumes, we can say: not just yet.
Earthquake Days: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the earth under San Francisco shook hard for about a minute. Historian Burkhart, an ardent collector of period stereoscopic images, has put together an eye-catching coffee-table chronicle of the quake and the subsequent fire that brought disaster to the city. The book comes with 3-D glasses for viewing the remarkable stereo pictures. The Ballet Companion: A Dancer’s Guide to the Technique, Traditions, and Joys of Ballet “Ballet’s joy lies not just in doing steps; it’s in dancing them—in the pleasure of expression through movement, of union with music, of singing with your body,” writes Minden, who studied dance extensively and is now president of a dancewear company. In an exquisite volume full of how-to photographs, history, and practical advice (“getting the most out of grand rond de jambe”), the author provides a wealth of information for balletomanes. “I hope [this book] encourages you to soar,” she writes. Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany To Western observers, gray and functional typified the clothing of Cold War East Germany. But according to Stitziel, an independent scholar who has taught at Cornell and Wesleyan, a kind of East Bloc haute couture with its own flashes of color and style developed, as the socialist government attempted to create a consumer culture. The author explores how the gap between expectation and reality in clothes, as well as in most consumer goods, helped fuel popular discontent and the eventual demise of the country. Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights “Everyone covers,” says Yoshino, a legal scholar who is also the deputy dean for intellectual life at the Law School. “To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” FDR covered his disability; Joseph Levitch (Jerry Lewis) covered his Judaism; and these days, the practice persists among people attempting to cover their sexual orientation and race. Yoshino, who is gay, discusses the personal costs and legal ramifications of “the dark side of assimilation.” Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy The Republican takeover of Congress and the White House was an act that defied the law of political gravity—the theory that power comes from close to the center. Hacker and Pierson, both political scientists, describe how this dramatic shift to the right came about. They propose that the movement away from the center poses a threat to democracy, and they describe how more moderate views might again prevail. Whose Bible Is It? A History of Scriptures through the Ages Professor Pelikan, who has spent a lifetime studying various aspects of religion and culture, traces the development of the Old and New Testaments and the distinct ways Jewish and Christian communities have interpreted the scriptures. Rather than seeing the Bible as the basis for division, Pelikan calls for interfaith dialog and suggests that Scripture is best understood from multiple viewpoints. “In an ultimate sense, it is presumptuous for anyone to speak about 'possessing' the Bible,” he writes. “It does not really belong to any of us.”
More Books by Yale Authors Elizabeth Alexander 1984, Associate Professor (Adjunct) of African American Studies, Editor Brian F. Atwater 1979 Keller Easterling, Assistant Professor of Architecture Brian Edwards 1990, 1998PhD Carol Eliel 1976 John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History Denise Gigante 1987, Editor Mary Habeck 1996PhD R. Philip Hanes 1949 Stephen Kieran 1973 and James Timberlake Diana E. E. Kleiner, Dunham Professor of the History of Art David J. Kupfer 1965, Helena C. Kraemer, and Karen K. Lowe Howard R. Lamar 1951PhD, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History Robert E. Litan 1977JD, 1987PhD, and Benn Steil Florencia E. Mallon 1980PhD Michael Mandelbaum 1968 Alfred W. McCoy 1977PhD Eric Metaxas 1984 Edith Milton 1964PhD Katherine G. Morrissey 1978, 1990PhD, and Kirsten Jensen 1988, Editors Glenn W. Most 1980PhD, Translator and Editor Arvid Nelson 1987MFS, 1998PhD, Assistant Professor (Adjunct), School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Ken Pasternak 1973, Richard West, and Mark Jenkins Vincent Pieribone, Associate Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, and David F. Gruber Gretchen Rubin 1989, 1994JD John Sack 1963 Lisa Sanders 1997MD, Clinical Instructor, Internal Medicine Barnet Schecter 1985 Robert A. M. Stern 1965March, Dean of Architecture Eric Tyson 1984BS N. Carter Volz 1957 Lily Whiteman 1988MEM, 1990MPH Kenji Yoshino 1996JD, Professor of Law and Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life at the Law School Carl Zimmer 1987
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Offset Show-offs Long before inkjets, offset printing was the publishing method of choice for poets, fanzine editors, and others whose big ideas were doomed to small circulation. As an exhibit at Sterling Memorial Library demonstrates, offset was also a favorite medium for book artists. These imaginative reconfigurers of words and images could produce offset artworks in limited editions, to specifications that might include how the books were shaped, bound, or punched through with holes. “Production Not Reproduction: The History of Offset Printed Artists' Books,” curated by Tony White of Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and spanning 1960 to 2005, continues through April 20. Some offset artists were aware of the process’s limitations, and embraced them. In Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), the artist—whose love of easily reproduced art also extended to silkscreen and film—plays with the sharp contrasts provided by the blunt printing style, and studs the typically thick offset pages with stiff pop-up images(top). Buzz Spector used offset for The Passage, a book of multiple copies of a single page of text (bottom); each page is precisely and artistically ripped. |
Calendar A Book of Her Own This exhibition displays books that were owned by women who lived before the eighteenth century. It features volumes from convents and private libraries, including richly illuminated medieval manuscripts. Through January 31 The People Next Door In post-9/11 Britain, Nigel would rather keep to himself in his comfy little flat. But the police have other plans for him. Henry Adam’s black comedy deals with the war on terror. January 13 through February 4 Mozart Turns 250 The School of Music celebrates the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with a series of events: The Yale Philharmonia Orchestra performs Mozart’s overture to The Marriage of Figaro, clarinet concerto, and “Jupiter” Symphony. Morse Recital Hall. Call for tickets. January 27, 8:00 p.m. The Yale Opera stages Cosi fan tutte. Shubert Theatre. Call for tickets, (203) 562-5666. February 10-12 Marriner Conducts Mozart: renowned English conductor Sir Neville Marriner visits Yale for a weeklong residency culminating in an all-Mozart concert with the Yale Glee Club, Camerata, Schola Cantorum, and Philharmonia. Free; tickets required. February 24, 8:00 p.m. London: John Virtue Eighty recent works by British artist John Virtue (b. 1947) reflect the artist’s deep-rooted relationship with the European landscape tradition in the context of contemporary London scenes. February 2 through April 23 |
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