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Object Lesson
Aubrey Beardsley’s First Yellow Book

This front cover of the first volume of John Lane and Henry Harland’s London literary quarterly, The Yellow Book (1894–97), was designed by its art editor, Aubrey Beardsley. By their almost unanimous chorus of disapproval, the London critics did much to promote the new venture from the outset in 1894. A risqué article by Max Beerbohm entitled “A Defence of Cosmetics,” for example, so shocked the Westminster Gazette that it called for legislation at Westminster against that sort of thing. Predictably, Oscar Wilde thought Beerbohm on make-up was “wonderful” and “quite delightfully wrong and fascinating.” But the opinion of the Times was typical: as a whole, the Yellow Book was rowdy and salacious, and its cover was “intended to attract by its very repulsiveness and lubricity.” It sold like hotcakes.

 

Beardley’s masked revelers, at once playful and sinister, belong to that larger assembly of Bohemians who populated the ripe dramas of the aesthetic 1890s, much enjoyed by the literary and artistic “days of wine and roses” set. Here, as elsewhere, Beardsley’s dramatis personae lurk in a candlelit interior. They conclude a penumbral transaction; they amuse themselves, and they smile. But their manner of smiling appears to have little in common with the sunny smile of our time.

Our smile, the smile upon which we feast in print and on television, only emerged as a universal symbol of health, happiness, and good will in the early decades of the twentieth century. By that time, improved dentistry had dramatically altered the state and durability of teeth, while the invention of photography and, later, motion pictures utterly transformed perception. Previously, at least in the public sphere, polite people smiled with their mouths closed, and laughter was strictly rationed. (It was not until about 15 years after the first edition of the Yellow Book that the boys of Rugby School established the now almost universal English-speaking convention of saying “cheese” for the camera.)

There may have been more compelling reasons than these to object to the contents of the Yellow Book, along with the literary editors of the Times and the Westminster Gazette—these objections multiplied rapidly with each issue, and exponentially following the arrest of Oscar Wilde, who knew many of the contributors—but no doubt the first cover was designed, at the very least, to tease and puzzle. A preparatory design for the cover, which belongs to the Yale University Art Gallery, may be seen in the Study Room of the British Art Center; this copy of the Yellow Book is from one of two full sets in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Composing a Career

When composer Andrew Gerle ’94 learned last spring that he had won one of the more prestigious awards in musical theater—the Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters—he might have been pardoned for a little deja vu. His musical, The Tutor, had received the prize the previous year. And the year before that.

The award committee has the discretion to divide the prize as it chooses, and it frequently gives awards in different amounts to more than one show. In 2002, it gave The Tutor funding for a staged reading. Last year, the award was enough for minimal sets, and costumes, and actors who weren’t tied to their scripts. This year, The Tutor got enough to partially fund a full production. Now Gerle just needs to come up with the rest of the money and find a theater before the year runs out.

Such burdens, as it happens, lie at the heart of The Tutor. The musical, with book and lyrics by Maryrose Wood, follows the struggles of a young novelist who funds his writing by tutoring rich kids. Such songs as “Me Artist, You Rich” mine the comic potential in patronage, until an encounter with one particularly recalcitrant pupil causes the novelist to question who is teacher and who student.

Gerle can’t quite pay the rent with his writing yet, either. Although he doesn’t have to put up with the kind of self-involved brats who are lampooned in The Tutor, he gets his share of self-involved performers. A classical pianist, Gerle is in demand as a musical director, arranger, and guest conductor, and he’s often hired to play piano for auditions. (Gerle may be small in stature, but his forearms are like Popeye's.) Such jobs bring in more than cash. That singer he’s accompanying might fit perfectly into Gerle’s next creation.

When Gerle started out in musicals, he started too big. He tried, abortively, to adapt Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. His next subject was even less promising: the life of German astronomer Johannes Kepler. It was “enormous and unproduceable,” he says, “what everyone’s first musical should be.” But he finished it. Both Kepler and his next show, The Gift, based on O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” were finalists for the Rodgers Award. His latest work-in-progress—Meet John Doe, a new take on the Frank Capra film, with lyrics by Eddie Sugarman—will premiere, along with 30 other new musicals, as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival in September.

“In the theater,” says Gerle, “you don’t have the luxury of writing material that doesn’t make sense the first time you hear it.” Adapting strong material helps, giving him a solid structure to fill out and a “known quantity” to sell to producers. And his collaborators keep him honest. “If I write something that’s too strange or off-base, they tell me, and I get angry and then I write something better.”

In good musical theater tradition, Gerle’s shows are irreverent with a sentimental streak, or the other way around. His classical training surfaces in harmonic and structural complexity, rich chords, and ingeniously interlocking quartets. Yet he’s learned to use that technique in the service of story and emotion; if he crosses two duets, it’s to juxtapose synchronous plot lines, often to moving effect. One critic has called his music “texturally riveting"; another dubbed it “irresistibly catchy.” When Gerle’s at his best, they’re both right.

“It’s like learning to play chess,” he says. “The mistakes are there, waiting to be made. A beginning chess player has to look at every possible move. A master doesn’t even think of the bad moves. I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle.”

From that position, Gerle can give advice to younger colleagues, like the two teams who won staged readings from the Rodgers Award this year. (Both include Yalies—Daniel Frederick Levin ’98 and Sam Carner ’01.) And he can look forward to the next hurdle of the up-and-coming artist: theaters are beginning to produce his works without him, and he’ll soon have to learn to let go.

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On the Road Again

I thought I knew where I was headed, but three or four wrong turns around the southern tip of Minnesota have made me 30 minutes late for an interview. When I arrive and introduce myself to singer-songwriter Mary Cutrufello ’91 in a flutter of nervous gestures and apologies, she puts me at ease in a voice that soothes like tea and honey. She’s been perfectly comfortable hanging by the bar of a restaurant in downtown White Bear Lake, the kind of idyllic small town that exists in television programs like Gilmore Girls, but never in real life. Cutrufello has lived in this area for the past few years. She decided on Minnesota at age 29, having missed the seasonal changes that just aren’t as apparent in her previous home of Houston. Cutrufello likes antiquing, and she was drawn in by pockets of unreconstructed farm communities near St. Paul. But her permanent residence, it seems, is in the temporary: hotels and motels, highway diners, on the road.

There are hints of a nomadic spirit in Cutrufello’s music, both in her lyrics and in the Woody Guthrie portability of her acoustic guitar. Cutrufello loves trains and highways. At Yale, she read the great road novels. “I got my best study in vernacular culture in the American studies program,” she says. “And you really couldn’t ask for a better degree for a popular-song writer. The road is a constant.” The hard-touring Cutrufello plays weekly in spots all over the upper Midwest, and the road is never far from her mind, even on a rare day off. “I drive at least a thousand miles a week,” she says, “and ironically enough, whenever I have time off, my favorite thing to do is get in the car and drive some more. It just kind of gets in your blood.”

Six years ago, it looked as if Cutrufello was about to become a star. She had left her native Connecticut for Texas upon graduating and made a name for herself playing country music in bars and honky-tonks. Her self-released, Bruce Springsteen-influenced 1996 debut recording, Who to Love and When to Leave, led to a summer gig in the touring band of Austin rocker Jimmie Dale Gilmore. That exposure helped her realize her dream of a major-label contract with Mercury Records. In 1998, Mercury released her album When the Night Is Through, which got her positive mentions in Rolling Stone and People and an appearance on the Tonight Show. But when Mercury was acquired by Seagrams a year later, the label went in a different direction, and Cutrufello negotiated a release from her contract.

Cutrufello viewed her break from Mercury as an opportunity to redevelop as an artist. She soon sent her manager a series of new songs. Says Cutrufello: “She heard the songs and said, ‘I don’t think you really need to bother with making loud things out of these. The messages they tell and characters they present are best suited to an intimate presentation.’ I asked, ‘How intimate?’” Her manager had an inspired idea—one that would take Cutrufello back to her acoustic roots: “‘How about a Motel 6?’”

Cutrufello recorded Songs from the 6 in a Tennessee motel, miles away from the state-of-the-art studio in Los Angeles where an estimated $400,000 had been spent on When the Night is Through. She made the new album in a few days, using the cassette recorder she used to make demos, and released it herself in 2001.

Cutrufello’s fans call Songs from the 6 a break-up record, or even a divorce record. Many of the songs are about rebuilding and reinventing the self. Cutrufello’s voice is dense, lying somewhere between Springsteen and Tracy Chapman. She pores over favorites by Woody Guthrie, Springsteen, and Bob Dylan, along with a number of originals. Her transfixing vocals on Guthrie’s “Slipknot” pull the listener into her lap, as they do again in an acoustic performance I catch a month later.

Years of playing live have given Cutrufello an opportunity to pay close attention to her fans. She has seen members of her audiences brought to tears by a song. “Sometimes it can be very moving,” she says. “What I enjoy—you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time—is making that connection.”

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Deconstructing the Pop Fly

The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do
by Michael Mandelbaum ’68

Public Affairs Books, $26

There may be nothing rarer in the sports fan’s world than a reasoned argument. When callers on sports talk radio in Boston, for instance, address the generations-long failure of the Red Sox to win the World Series, they say things like None of these overpaid clowns wants to step up at crunch time, or We’re due, or Yeah, but the Yankees still suck, or they propose extravagantly unlikely trades on the order of sending two slumping journeymen (hey, they’re due) and the headless cadaver of Ted Williams to the Giants for Barry Bonds. Radio hosts sneeringly dismiss callers for being so dumb and wishful, then return to shouting each other down on the subject of who’s not stepping up at crunch time and who’s due and how much the Yankees suck and who should be traded. The conversation often takes the superficial form of an attempt to break down a problem to arrive at a solution, but none of the participants has much interest in asserting a point about baseball and supporting it with evidence. Mostly, they repeat ritual formulas: Hi, guys, it’s Bob from Dorchester. First-time caller, long-time listener. I’m a die-hard Sox fan and I have two questions. My first question is: Your show is the greatest! My second question is: Derek Jeetah’s a queeah! Such incantations have everything to do with faith, therapy, and regional identity and almost nothing to do with reasoned argument. What they’re really saying is We care about our team more than we care about our tedious jobs and our loving spouses. God help us all.

But that’s what sports radio is for, and it’s probably unfair to hold it to any standard other than the sentimental. If you want reasoned argument, Michael Mandelbaum’s your man. Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter Professor and director of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns Hopkins' Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, has been harboring a sports jones while building a distinguished reputation as an expert on foreign policy, the subject of his eight previous books. In The Meaning of Sports, he proposes a reasoned interpretive argument in plain speech about the meaning he finds in America’s three major team sports.

At the heart of his argument lies an account of how the games we watch tell stories about the work we do and the social order in which we do it. Mandelbaum arranges his thinking around two sweeping transformations of modern life, the industrial revolution and the shift to a postindustrial economy. He begins with the preindustrial symbolic charge of baseball, which evokes the nature-dictated work rhythms and priorities of what he calls traditional rural life. Others have portrayed baseball as agrarian idyll, but Mandelbaum adds nuance to even the most familiar aspects of the discussion. An observation about the organic quality of bats and gloves—“specialized rather than standardized” implements made from wood and leather—leads to a larger insight: “If the tools of baseball players resemble those that men and women in traditional society used, so, too, do the habits of mind and skills necessary to make optimal use of them.” A rural life that features hunting and fishing teaches the value of patience, local knowledge, superior reflexes, and the ability to weather chronic failure—exactly the virtues necessary to hit .300 and play left field in Fenway Park.

Next up is football, which Mandelbaum characterizes as “the sport of the machine age.” Players resemble industrial workers or soldiers in mechanized combat, trying to achieve sophisticated collective synchronization in a climate of closely measured time and space, externally imposed deadlines, hyperspecialization of skills, interdependence of tasks, and studied indifference to nature, no matter how hard it may be snowing in Green Bay. Also, “change in the game of football is normal, natural, deliberate, and constant. While a fan transported from a baseball game at the outset of the twentieth century to one being played at the beginning of the twenty-first would be witnessing essentially the same sport, a football fan similarly transported would not.” The forward pass, the place kick, one-way and situational players, the ever-changing variety of defensive and offensive systems—all have resulted from the ceaseless R & D efforts of competitors seeking advantage through innovation. Baseball, by contrast, still hasn’t decided whether to fully implement a comparatively minor change like the introduction of the designated hitter.

So far, so good. It helps that the noted cultural theorist George Carlin has prepared some of this ground already, and Mandelbaum’s argument develops greater momentum and originality as it progresses.

I will admit that, as I approached the chapter on basketball, I doubted that Mandelbaum could convince me of that sport’s postindustrial character, but his case for it turns out to be the book’s freshest and most inspired phase. He portrays basketball players as figurative “knowledge workers” who deploy their skills in a more fluid, flexible shop-floor environment than do football players. Basketball players cooperate to achieve improvisational team chemistry within relatively flat hierarchies of authority that feature decentralized decision-making power and managers who lead by therapeutic suasion rather than top-down edict. Compare Vince Lombardi, who led like an old-time captain of industry, to Phil Jackson, who leads like a Silicon Valley connectivity guru. Throw in greater gender equality, windowless workplaces utterly divorced from nature, and a genuinely global reach (including, I would add, a current situation in which foreign strivers with sound fundamentals take jobs from Americans who spend too much time in the weight room reassuring themselves of their potency), and basketball really does begin to seem like the paradigmatic postindustrial game.

There’s more to the book—accounts of each sport’s development, exemplary franchises and careers, big games, memorable plays—but not all of this conventional sports-history material bears the weight of the argument as satisfyingly as does the agrarian-industrial-postindustrial throughline. The Meaning of Sports is at its best as a think piece, not a history of American team sports or—despite the book’s subtitle—an attempt to determine through research why fans care about them. It should be enough that Mandelbaum explains what he sees in baseball, football, and basketball; it’s a pleasure to follow the line of his thinking, which he pursues with admirable clarity and modesty, especially considering the world-historical scale on which it unfolds. If I happened upon the author sitting at the end of a bar, riffing on the jump shot and the postindustrial workplace, I’d happily buy him a beer and hear him out at length. And I can’t help hoping that the book’s enthusiastic critical reception will lead to his becoming a regular guest on sports talk radio, which could use a dose of reasoned argument.

Go ahead, caller. You’re on with Professor Mandelbaum.

Yeah, it’s Bob from Dorchester again. So listen, Professor, if baseball evokes the agrarian and all, like you say, does that mean the Yankees suck or what?

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Land’s End

The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and His Family, Alone in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness
by James Campbell ’84

St. Martin’s Press, $24.95

In 1977 John McPhee’s Coming into the Country chronicled the invasion of the Alaskan bush by young men and women from the Lower 48 who aimed to live off the land while reclaiming the mythic spirit of the American frontier. If McPhee had returned to the cabins and traplines of the Upper Yukon River some five or ten years later, he might have found that the solitudinous rigors of bush life had got the better of most of his “white Indians” and posted them out of the country—to Fairbanks or Anchorage, or to Fresno or Milwaukee whence they came.

In the quarter-century after McPhee, there have been more than a few accounts of loners who burnt out in wild Alaska. It is our good fortune that James Campbell found one who stayed and survived. Heimo Korth came into the country from Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1975. He was 20, fleeing an abusive father and hoping there was truth in the saying that if you can live in the bush for two years, you can live there forever—“your feet will be frozen in.” On the edge of starvation, Korth nearly did freeze in the lonely winter of his first year near Birch Creek. Then he flew out to St. Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea, to live and hunt with Siberian Yupik Eskimos. Having completed his apprenticeship as a hunter and trapper, the sourdough from Appleton finally turned north to a slice of Alaska that has anchored his feet ever since—the foothills of the Brooks Range, in the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Campbell calls Korth’s adopted homeland the “Frigid Zone.” In this maze of glacial rivers and spongy tundra north of the 68th degree of latitude, winter temperatures of 50 below are not uncommon. The nearest villages are more than 100 miles away; the nearest hospital is in Fairbanks, 350 miles southwest. Korth is one of just seven hunter-trappers with permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain cabins within the Arctic Refuge. Campbell suggests that only Korth, who rotates his hunting grounds to preserve wildlife, can be counted a bona fide resident.

This is James Campbell’s first book, and he is a splendid expository writer, examining in good detail such issues as subsistence hunting and the debate over drilling or not drilling into the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. (Korth, though in many respects an anti-enviro, is convinced drilling would be inimical to the refuge’s wildlife.) The author is less successful in his narrative voice, exhaling a kind of low-calorie gonzo journalism that relies on long quotes and abbreviated anecdotes that profile Korth’s relationship with his wife, Edna, a Yupik woman he met on St. Lawrence Island, and their two daughters, Rhonda and Krin. But if you scratch beneath the surface of this narrative fluff, and imagine your own psyche stretched across the cutting edge of sunless days and endless nights, then you just might appreciate why, without a joking, adaptable, cabin-hopping family, Heimo Korth might not have been strong enough to stay the course, and might have instead, like so many others, shuffled back to Appleton.

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Collections

Somewhere in America
by Mark Singer ’72

Houghton Mifflin, $24

Worm farming in Oklahoma; Timothy McVeigh’s last days in Indiana; a Vermont ban on skinny dipping—New Yorker writer Mark Singer presents a collection of non-fiction “stories about how people, one way or another, are trying to hold on to something.”

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Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier
by Hampton Sides ’84

Anchor Books, $13.95

“The older I get, the surer I am that I have no idea what America ‘means,’” writes Sides. But in these finely crafted articles, many of which appeared first in Outside, the writer looks for America as he travels from the caves of Tennessee to a training center in Kuwait for Gulf War embeds.

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Elated by Details
by Adam Freedman ’87

Mayhaven Publishing, $24.95

The author’s debut collection of short stories features wise-cracking and amiable protagonists whose pursuits of brass rings—dot-com riches, the right partner for a menage a trois, upper-class respectability—go imaginatively and delightfully awry.

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Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme
by Calvin Trillin ’57

Random House, $12.95

The “deadline poet” for The Nation and NPR takes on all the news that’s fit to spoof: “W,” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Gore, cabinet members, pollution. "Though arsenic’s in what we drink,/ It’s not as nasty as you think."

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The Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit
by Elizabeth Kolbert ’83

Bloomsbury, $23.95

The veteran political writer for the New Yorker offers previously published profiles of, well, New Yorkers, pre- and post-9/11. Former mayor Giuliani, the title’s “prophet of love,” is thoroughly dissected. So are “Boss” Tweed, Hillary Clinton, Regis Philbin, and other luminaries.

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More Books by Yale Authors

Myron Arms 1963, 1964MAT
Servants of the Fish: A Portrait of Newfoundland After the Great Cod Collapse
Upper Access Books, $24.95

Chloe E. Atreya 2004PhD
Invisible Cities: A Metaphorical Complex Adaptive System
Festina Lente Press, $25

Tony Bancroft 1995MM
Growing Your Musician: A Practical Guide for Band and Orchestra Parents
MENC, $29

Emily Bernard 1989, 1998PhD, Editor
Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendships
Amistad/HarperCollins, $23.95

Hilary J. Bernstein 1988
Between Crown and Community: Politics and Civic Culture in Sixteenth-Century Poitiers
Cornell University Press, $57.50

John Morton Blum, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History
A Life with History
University Press of Kansas, $35

Eric Brende 1984
Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology
HarperCollins, $24.95

James Comer, Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry
Leave No Child Behind: Preparing Today’s Youth for Tomorrow’s World
Yale University Press, $28

Lewis B. Cullman 1941
Can’t Take It with You: The Art of Making and Giving Money
John Wiley and Sons,  $29.95

Ileen A. DeVault 1985PhD
United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism
Cornell University Press, $49.95

Eric Jay Dolan 1988MEM
Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor—A Unique Environmental Success Story
University of Massachusetts Press, $34.95

Erwin Fleissner 1957
Vital Harmonies: Molecular Biology and Our Shared Harmonies
Columbia University Press, $32.50

Christian M. Fletcher 2000MAR
The Chronicles of a Cynic
IUniverse,  $26.95

Kenneth H. Goldman, 1969
USS Charles Carroll APA 28: An Amphibious History of World War II
Trafford Publishing, $23.95

Mark Kroll 1971Mmus, Editor
The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance
University of Illinois Press, $45

Herman Lebovics 1965PhD
Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age
Duke University Press, $29.95

Ethan J. Leib 1997, 2003JD, 2004PhD
Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government
Penn State Press, $27.50

Robert M. Leich 1965
Not My Father’s War
AuthorHouse, $19.95

Jeffrey Lewis 1966
Meritocracy: A Love Story
Other Press, $18

Mary Loeffelholz 1986PhD
From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry
Princeton University Press, $24.95

E. Eric Muirhead Jr. 1969
Cab Tales: Short Stories
Panther Creek Press, $16.95

Kent Nelson 1965 and Dylan Nelson 1996, Editors
Birds in the Hand: Fiction and Poetry about Birds
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux/North Point Press, $24

Teresa Godwin Phelps, 1989MSL
Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions
University of Pennsylvania Press, $39.95

Stephen J. Pitti 1991
The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans
Princeton University Press, $19.95

John Portmann 1985
Bad for Us: The Lure of Self-Harm
Beacon Press, $25

Harsha Ram 1995PhD
The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire
University of Wisconsin Press, $39.95

Bryan Mark Rigg 1996
Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe
Yale University Press, $26

Jonathan Rosen 1985
Joy Comes in the Morning
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $25

Patricia Sawin 1978
Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories
Utah State University Press, $19.95

Susan M. Schultz 1980
And Then Something Happened
Salt Publishing, $15.95

Theodore Sizer 1953
The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education
Yale University Press, $23

Emily R. Transue 1992
On Call: A Doctor’s Days and Nights in Residency
St. Martin’s Press, $23.95

W. Warren Wagar 1959PhD
H. G. Wells: Traversing Time
Wesleyan University Press, $34.95

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scientist in Sociology
The Uncertainties of Knowledge
Temple University Press, $59.50

Lori Frank Weinrott 1980 and Jane Cohen
The Ultimate Bar/Bat Mitzvah Celebration Book: A Guide to Inspiring Ceremonies and Joyous Festivites
Clarkson Potter/Crown, $18

Rose Weitz 1978PhD
Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us about Women’s Lives
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $24

Carol Weston 1978
Girltalk: All the Stuff Your Sister Never Told You, Fourth Edition
Quill/HarperCollins, $14.95

George S. Williamson 1996PhD
Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche
University of Chicago Press, $24

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arts

When the clean, crisp lines of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building first emerged from the corner of 12th and Market streets in Philadelphia in 1932, it knocked that famously conservative city on its ear. One of the first important Modern works in the United States, the building defied convention with its unornamented façade and enormous red neon rooftop sign. Now, Yale’s Art & Architecture Gallery is celebrating the building and its impact with an exhibition, “PSFS: Nothing More Modern,” which runs through November 5.

PSFS was born of the collaboration of two architects and a forward-looking executive. James Willcox, president of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, hired George Howe, a Philadelphia architect trained in the traditional Beaux Arts manner, to design a signature skyscraper for his bank. But Howe (who was chair of Yale’s architecture department from 1950 to 1954) was dissatisfied with his first ideas, and he sought out a collaborator: William Lescaze, a Swiss-born Modernist architect who had recently come to America. “Lescaze’s was really the hand that put the building together,” says Dean Sakamoto '98MEvD, who organized and designed the exhibit. (Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins were guest curators.)

The exhibit chronicles the building’s design and construction and includes samples of its furniture and fixtures. “The architects designed almost everything in the building,” says Sakamoto, “doorknobs, hinges, coat hooks, signage. It was a total work of art.”

 

 

 

Calendar

In Search of Giant Squid
Peabody Museum of Natural History
(203) 432-5050
peabody.yale.edu

Architeuthis, the giant squid, has never been observed in its natural habitat. But remains of the invertebrate, which can reach nearly 60 feet in length, have been discovered all over the world, and tiny, young giant squid have been captured alive off New Zealand. “In Search of Giant Squid” explores how the giant squid hunt, move, mate, and defend themselves, and features a preserved giant squid beak and suckers and interactive displays, as well as a video presentation from the Discovery Channel. The Peabody’s life-size model of a giant squid, which has not been on display for several years, returns for the event.

Alfred William Hunt
Center for British Art
(203) 432-2800
yale.edu/ycba

A display of approximately 70 watercolors, drawings, and oil paintings by landscape painter and watercolorist Alfred William Hunt (1830–1896) follows the artist’s development from his early Pre-Raphaelitism towards a more atmospheric and poetic approach to landscape painting, inspired by the work of J. M. W. Turner.

The Clean House
Yale Repertory Theatre
(203) 432-1234
yalerep.org

A family is forced to face its buried dysfunction after hiring a Brazilian maid who loves to tell jokes but hates to clean. Written by Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House is the winner of the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Blue Yale in Red Hues: Watercolors by Harry Wasserman
Jonathan Edwards College
(203) 432-0356

Watercolors by Harry Wasserman, the Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus and senior research scientist in chemistry, have graced the cover of the Yale Summer Programs catalog for the past 15 years and appeared in many Yale posters. This fall about 50 of Wasserman’s works will be displayed at Jonathan Edwards College. The exhibit is open most Thursdays or by appointment.

 
 
 
 
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