University of Chicago Press

‘Reading through a hundred years of Poetry, week after week of issue after issue after issue, some forty thousand poems in all, Don and I, when we weren’t rendered prone and moaning, jolted back and forth between elation and depression.’ So Christian Wiman writes in his introduction to this elating, and never depressing, new anthology celebrating one hundred years of Poetry Magazine. Bear in mind that he and fellow editor Don Share did this while continuing with their day jobs as editors of the magazine, which receives some one hundred thousand submissions a year, and you will have some idea of the task they undertook.

What are we to do about education? Few other human enterprises are discussed more often – family, money, sex, and politics, perhaps – but the practice of education never comes close to satisfying us.

Marion Mahony (1870–1961) was that rare commodity in late nineteenth-century American society: a woman functioning as an equal in a professional world dominated by men. Born to progressive parents, and a household and wider circle of strong and socially engaged women, Marion Lucy Mahony was only the second woman to graduate from an American university (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1894) with a full degree in architecture, and the first to be licensed to practise under any state regulatory structure anywhere in the world (Illinois, 1898).

At the beginning of his new book, Terry Smith writes that one of the fundamental qualities ‘of the contemporary: [is] its contemporaneousness’. He writes of the contemporary, contemporaries, contemporaneity, contemporaneous, noncontemporaries, cotemporality, cotemporalities, and cotemporal. It is a kind of tautological word game that goes down well in academic conferenceville, which is where some of this book first appeared. The function is to distinguish art of the last two decades, called ‘contemporary’, as distinct from that of earlier periods, labelled ‘postmodern’ and ‘modern’.

As his title suggests, Jonathan Rosenbaum tackles two subjects in his latest collection of essays, neither of them easy to define. In an era when films are mostly viewed at home, not on the big screen, cinema can no longer mean what it once did. Cinephilia, too, is an alluring but indefinite concept – love of movies, yes, but not any old love, and probably not the devotion felt by your average fan of Transformers or Twilight.

Early in this magisterial and exhaustively researched examination of Duke Ellington’s role in American music and society, the author offers a succinct summary of the musician’s significance as an American artist. It is worth quoting at length, as it encapsulates most of the questions addressed over the book’s 577 pages of text and almost 100 densely packed pages of notes:

Anyone browsing in bookstores in the past five years has undoubtedly come across one of the dozens of life narratives that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Centre and the consequent ‘war on terror’ produced a new market for the publishing industry – and it has deluged us with offerings. Prominent among them are the sensational, eroticised best-sellers by Muslim women recounting their persecution under the Taliban; journalistic accounts of war by ‘embedded’ Western news correspondents from Afghanistan and Iraq; edited oral histories offering testimony by refugees to the trauma of war in the Middle East; and memoirs of exile by Iranian women living in the United States.

At the centre of this book is the story of the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York on 9/11. Terry Smith’s focus is architectural: what does it mean for buildings that are supposed to shelter and sustain our lives so spectacularly to collapse? The WTC’s destruction raises this question so singularly, not only for those who immediately suffered – traumatised by the obliteration of family members or their own escape from death – but for contemporary Everyman and Everywoman, who encountered the WTC not first-hand but as an image, what Smith calls an ‘iconotype’ in an ‘iconomy’ of architectural images.

Divas and scholars is the work of a scholar who is no stranger to the world of divas. Philip Gossett is a music professor at the University of Chicago and is principally in the business of preparing scholarly editions of nineteenth-century operas by Italian composers. We might think of the academic institution and the opera house as antithetical spaces, but Gossett is frequently called upon to advise and assist with the staging of works that belong to his area of expertise. In other words, not only does he know the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi as historical artefacts and texts that take all manner of forms –fragments, drafts, complete manuscripts, variant manuscripts – but as phenomena that take shape on stage and in the orchestra pit in contemporary realisations that, as he argues, owe a responsibility to the fruits of scholarship. Divas and Scholars, then, is part personal and professional history, part history of nineteenth-century Italian opera (and operas in French by Italian composers), part manifesto, treatise on the transmission of opera and handbook for present-day singers, conductors and opera producers. In a happy coincidence, the author’s surname is a near-homonym for gossip, and this excellent book is leavened with timely and beautifully judged accounts of vanity, ignorance and arrogance: three vices which, while not indigenous to the opera house, are often depressingly at home within its gilded ambience.