Tag: Virginia Woolf

Australia’s Helen Garner wins Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize for her ‘addictive’ diaries

LONDON (AP) — Helen Garner, an acclaimed Australian writer whose celebrity fans include singer Dua Lipa, won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction on Tuesday for what judges called her addictive and candid diaries.

Garner, 82, was named winner of the 50,000 pound ($65,000) prize at a ceremony in London for “How to End a Story.” Journalist Robbie Millen, who chaired the prize jury, said Garner was the unanimous choice of the six judges.

Millen said the judges were captivated by the sharp observation and “reckless candor” of Garner’s 800-page book, which covers her life and work between 1978 and 1998.

He said it is “a remarkable, addictive book. Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday, to new heights.

“There are places it’s toe-curlingly embarrassing. She puts it all out there,” Millen said, adding that Garner ranks alongside those of Virginia Woolf in the canon of great literary diarists.

Garner, who has published novels, short stories, screenplays and true crime books, said she was “staggered” to have won the prize for diaries she wrote entirely for herself.

“I never thought that I was writing for anyone but myself and that’s what’s good about them, I think — that I’m free when I’m writing,” she told The Associated Press from Melbourne, Australia.

“Those are the hours of practice that in a sense turned me into a writer. Because I’ve been keeping a diary since I was a girl — and I’ve burnt most of it, of course. I burnt it up until about the late 1970s. But it’s my 10,000 hours and it’s my enormous daily practice. So you never expect that to be out in the public eye. But it is.”

“How to End a Story” is a deeply intimate book that among other things recounts, with unsparing detail and flashes of humor, the breakdown of a marriage.

Despite the risk involved in such public soul-baring, Garner says the reaction of readers has made the experience life-affirming.

“What I write about — my life and my experience and my, not to put too fine a point on it, soul — there are so many people who know what I mean and who’ve been there. And that’s been a great joy to me to discover that,” she said. “The deeper I go, the more other people I find there.”

Garner’s book is the first set of diaries to win the prize, which was founded in 1999 and recognizes English-language books in current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.

Garner’s 1977 first novel “Monkey Grip” – the semi-autobiographical story of a single mother in bohemian inner-city Melbourne – is considered a modern Australian classic. Her work includes the novella “The Children’s Bach,” screenplays including “The Last Days of Chez Nous” and true crime books including “This House of Grief,” which Lipa chose this year for her monthly book club.

The singer said Garner’s work was “a thrilling discovery. She’s one of the most fascinating writers I have come across in years.”

Garner is co-author of “The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial,” a book about Erin Patterson, the Australian woman who killed three of her estranged husband’s relatives with a lunch containing death cap mushrooms. It is published in Australia and the U.K. this month.

Garner is less well known outside her home country, with U.S. and U.K. publishers only recently publishing many of her books.

“It has taken us a long while to work out how good she is,” Millen said. “Finally her status is being recognized, and I hope this will cement it.”

Garner is the second Australian in a row to win the Baillie Gifford prize. Last year’s winner was Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan for his genre-bending memoir “Question 7.”

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November 7, 2025
Katy Hessel Talks About Putting Women Artists Front and Center at Five Major Museums

Katy Hessel Lily Bertrand-Webb

“’Museums Without Men’… ‘The Story of Art Without Men’… these are tongue-in-cheek attention-grabbing titles. Because it raises awareness: why museums without men?” Katy Hessel tells Observer. Championing a fiercely feminist re-reading of art, past and present, is Hessel’s signature. If you’re not familiar with her name, you’re likely familiar with her work. She is behind the Great Women Artists podcast and a runaway-hit Instagram account (@thegreatwomenartists), in addition to having published the best-selling The Story of Art Without Men. Said book—a compendium of women artists from the Renaissance to today in direct response to E.H. Gombrich’s women-absentee The Story of Art—was mostly championed for its corrective historical narrative, shrugging off the occasional dismissive accusations of being “tinged with the boosterism of girlboss feminism.”

To celebrate Women’s History Month, Katy Hessel launched Museums Without Men, a new but ongoing series of audio guides highlighting women and gender non-conforming artists in the public collections of international museums. The series launched with five participating institutions. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were first, and the Hepworth Wakefield in England, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and Tate Britain soon followed.

Observer recently spoke with Hessel—who was included in our 2023 list of The Most Influential People in the Art World—about making museums accessible, non-binary artists to know, and thinking more carefully about museum captions.

To start, how did these guides come to be?

The Met was first—it was only sort of meant to be a one-off thing that I was doing with them. The guides are created for lots of different reasons. One was the fact that when you go into museums, oftentimes you’re overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and what you really want to do is spend time with seven or eight works—as much as it kills you—but really sort of get into it and leave the museum being like I really looked at something properly today. The whole point of my work is to get as many people into the museum as possible.

Hessel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Aurola Wedman Alfaro / Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Whenever I go to museums, obviously I always look at the label and see if it’s a woman, because that’s how I’ve discovered and learned about so many artists. Not only does that bring me into these artists’ lives and work but it also makes me realize how many women artists are being collected by these institutions—and reveals the shocking gender imbalance.

You communicate through many media: an engaged Instagram, a book, a column in The Guardian, a podcast. Are these guides a complement to what you’re already doing? Or do you see this as something separate?

I always think: what can I give people that will help them? Instagram serves a purpose, which is a daily dose of artists or artworks; it’s very condensed, it’s surface level. The book is a compilation of everything. It breaks my heart to have written just 400 words on Cindy Sherman—it shouldn’t be allowed—but you could also go to my podcast and listen to an episode with William J. Simmons, who’s one of the leading scholars on Sherman. The podcast is a whole hour to learn about an artist: it’s with a world expert, or it’s with the artist, and it’s hopefully this fantastic insight. It’s about saying to people, no matter where you enter from: welcome. You can go as deep—or not—as you like.

Do you think men will pick up the guides too?

I think it’s for everyone. There’s nothing inherently different about art created by a different gender; it’s more that society and gatekeepers have prioritized one group in history.

The National Gallery—not that I work with the National Gallery yet—has 1 percent women artists. However much I wish I could take out all the works and replace them with women artists, or make it equal, I can’t do that. What we can do is draw attention to these different artists in the museum and hopefully that will help. It’s a tiny way to raise awareness for the visitor, to realize that there’s more work to do, to introduce new names—and also for the museums to be like actually, we really need to focus on our representation here. They’re just missing out on great works.

Barbara Hepworth, ‘Two Forms with White (Greek),’ 1963, Wakefield Permanent Art Collection. The Hepworth Wakefield / © Bowness / Jonty Wilde

But how do we get men to feel implicated? Men may acknowledge it’s unfair that parity is far from being reached in a museum setting, as elsewhere, but that may not necessarily galvanize them to listen. I imagine with other media you’re involved in, it’s primarily women who are engaging?

It’s definitely majority women—but I engaged with so many male curators for this, and museum directors who were men and who were supportive of it. I hope that it’s for everyone. Curator Furio Rinaldi at the Legion of Honor, with whom I worked closely on the Mary Cassatt and the Leonor Fini work is curating the first-ever North American solo exhibition of Tamara de Lempicka, who was one of the most incredible artists of the 20th century yet has never had a major solo show in the U.S.

“Museums Without Men,” “The Story of Art Without Men”—these are tongue-in-cheek attention-grabbing titles. Because it raises awareness: why museums without men? Well, because historically most of these museums were Museums Without Women. And so, we need to talk about that. I want to invite everyone in because it’s about introducing people to artists they might not know. I hope that men enjoy it—it’s for them too, completely. And from a position of privilege that anyone stands in, there should always be interest in a different perspective. I don’t only want to learn about people who look like me. I want to learn about all sorts of people.

The press release mentioned that the artists featured are women and non-binary. Could you give an example or two of some of the non-binary artists?

Absolutely. We’ve got people like Gluck [Hannah Gluckstein], who was a fantastic artist working at the start of the 20th Century. They were based in London, where they did portraits of the queer community in the 1920s and 1930s. Virginia Woolf was writing Orlando.

There’s a fantastic artist called Rene Matić, a photographer whose work is at the Hepworth Wakefield. It’s this really beautiful series where they follow their friend Travis Alabanza, who’s a performance artist. There are gorgeous pictures of dressing rooms and quiet moments and the trust that people have to let each other into their very personal lives.

There’s a forthcoming expansion of the guides to Vienna, Austria—do you have other target venues that you can speak about? What is the scope that you have in mind for the guides?

I would love to take it global: the dream would be to work with museums and have translations. I only speak English, sadly, so I’ve done lots of projects and speaking engagements in America. That’s why we started with English-speaking places. There has been interest from other institutions since we launched. But yes, I hope it’s just the beginning of something—we’ll see.

Has there been more interest in contemporary versus historical women artists? Obviously, there’s a smaller pool historically, but have you noticed people gravitating toward anywhere in particular in the timeline of women artists?

I have never noticed that. My pool spans a whole millennium… I think it’s a mix. It’s always exciting talking about someone historic because you can talk about that from a very contemporary point of view. The work has outlived this person maybe for 500 years, but that doesn’t make it any less contemporary than works we’re looking at. And thinking about where the work is in the space, as well, and how it feeds the other works around it and how maybe we can look differently at them… When I was in San Francisco in November, I did the Louise Nevelson tour, and I looked at Robert Motherwell next to her and I saw him in a completely different light because of that.

Lee Krasner, ‘Siren,’ 1966, Oil on canvas, from The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981. Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. / Cathy Carver

In terms of the way museums have been pledging to aim for parity—however far away that may be—you used the word “accelerate” relative to the guides changing the pace at which people are focusing on women artists. How much have you seen that acceleration at play? As you’re speaking with curators and directors in institutions, what is your sense of the future?

I think it’s about having certain people who have the power at the moment. They’re conscious of what is in museums and what work needs to be done. I remember speaking with Emily Beeny, a curator at the Legion of Honor, about Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Cupid and Psyche. It’s a really interesting painting of this well-known Greek myth, but Cupid is not even present. Benoist was really telling this work from Psyche’s point of view. I find it fascinating that certain curators, and those who have power in museums, are saying: We need to be collecting this kind of work because we need a balanced perspective of what history is. Otherwise we’re getting a skewed idea of what happened before us. I wouldn’t say it was by chance that there’s a plethora of female directors, which ties in with the correlation of more representation.

Not to say that the men in charge aren’t conscientious—of course they are. Let’s just say the people who are in charge of a lot of museums are now very conscientious about representation. We can all do things that are in our own remit to help accelerate equality for anything, whether it’s supporting a business or buying a book. My thing is: I can make audio guides and I have a platform to do that, so why not use that in a positive way?

Do you get pushback from people who feel that using a gendered lens to go through a museum is flattening in some way? What is your response to that criticism?

I haven’t personally received any feedback like that. This is totally not prescribing that this has to be the way that people enter museums. I think it’s nice that it’s an option. People are excited about it because perhaps they won’t realize that a work is by a woman. In the Met audio guide, we were in this room in the European galleries—a sea of Courbet nudes! The female nude in her glory. Then there is this huge painting by Rosa Bonheur of the horse fair, and it just towers over every other work. To know that that’s by a woman, in this room, is extraordinary—the lengths she had to go to, to paint that.

Rosa Bonheur, ‘The Horse Fair,’ Painting: oil on canvas, 96 1/4 x 199 1/2 in. (244.5 x 506.7 cm), gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887. Trujillo Juan / Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art,New York

Similarly, in the de Young Museum, there’s a fantastic moment of American realism in the 1930s with these images of farms and quite mundane family dinner settings in a working environment. And in the middle is this amazing sculpture from 2020 by Elizabeth Catlett. It’s the center of all these works that are by men, and the story is very much dominated by the male narrative—but then you have Stepping Out, which puts her in a very important place.

People don’t need to abide by my guides; they’re just to help them through. I often take friends to museums and pick out five to seven works I want to show them. What I do for my friends, I made into a guide.

There was a Rosa Bonheur exhibition in France last year at the Musée d’Orsay, and I was appalled by the text in the museum, which was very elliptical about her queer identity, saying instead that she ‘lived with a friend for a long time.’ The text refused to engage overtly with her queer identity. Some museums remain very conservative.

It’s ridiculous. How we contextualize artists is so important. I was at the National Gallery the other day, and I went to look at works by women artists—and every single gallery label for women artists, all about fifty words, included a male artist’s name. For Artemisia Gentileschi, it said she was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, who was the contemporary of Caravaggio. Or for Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who—it said in the first line—this work is a response to a Rubens self-portrait. No one is writing of Orazio Gentileschi that Artemisia Gentileschi is his daughter—which is really what they should be saying.

It’s about making sure you contextualize them in a respectful way. Personally, to say someone has a queer identity, it’s just a normal thing, and it’s about normalizing the way that people live. Because there is no shame in that. And I hope I can be respectful to all different people with these guides.

I don’t assume that people know who Artemisia Gentileschi is. It’s not a definitive thing for the artists. It’s a nice resource. I hope it encourages people to take something from it and have their own interpretations. Creating these was even great for me to get to know new work—it led me down rabbit holes for artists I thought I knew so well!

Sarah Moroz

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April 2, 2024
The Surreal Oscar Campaign for ‘The Hours,’ 20 Years Later

Julianne Moore as Laura Brown.PARAMOUNT/EVERETT COLLECTION.

Weinstein and Rudin had feuded across several previous projects, so some headbutting was to be expected on The Hours. Rudin developed the script with Hare for about a year, though, and had final cut. He toyed with the mercurial Weinstein by showing off the film’s bold creative decisions—prosthetic included. “Scott won most of the fights,” Cunningham says. However, according to New York magazine at the time, Weinstein nixed a premiere for The Hours at the Venice International Film Festival, which Rudin interpreted as retaliation. He sent Weinstein—a notorious chain-smoker—a crate of cigarettes, which quickly became legend. The enclosed note read “Thanks as always for your help.”

Weinstein was coming off of getting “caught” waging a smear campaign against the real-life subject of the previous year’s best picture winner, A Beautiful Mind, says Press: “That’s the year that Harvey started to pay a price in the press—he got caught really being abusive and spreading that stuff about John Nash. The next year you would’ve seen a subtle shift because the press was focusing more on the dirty tricks.”

Even so, the fact that Weinstein and Rudin were firmly established as bullies made for good copy—which they didn’t seem to mind. “One of the reasons filmmakers seek to work with Harvey and me is they want that combative ability,” Rudin told the Los Angeles Times weeks before the Oscars. “They don’t want you to be nice and sweet. They want you to go and kill for them. And that is the job. You are supposed to go out there and mow down the opposition.”

Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf.PARAMOUNT/PHOTOFEST.

The true extent of the two men’s alleged misconduct hadn’t yet been reported, of course. Weinstein has since faced dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct, and he’s currently serving a 23-year prison sentence after being found guilty of a criminal sexual act and rape in New York. Allegations of abusive behavior against Rudin, first printed by The Hollywood Reporter in 2021, detailed instances of physical violence and bullying against employees. His career has since stalled.

Back in their glory days, however, they served as their own hype machines. “You had them spending millions and millions of dollars,” Press says. Sometimes, as with Kidman, it worked; other times, not so much. “Absolutely everybody told me I was going to win,” Hare says of the best adapted screenplay category, which he lost to The Pianist’s Ronald Harwood. He spent months on the trail with victory in mind. “When I didn’t win, I was pretty pissed off for about two and a half hours.” The next day, he says, “I didn’t care anymore.”

Outside of Kidman’s win, The Hours slightly underperformed at the Oscars, at which Catherine Zeta-Jones won best supporting actress; both Streep and Moore went home empty-handed. A few months before, however, it won best drama picture and actress (Kidman) at the Golden Globes, which wound up being the peak of its awards run. All three Hours actors were nominated and in attendance; Streep even won the supporting actress award for Adaptation, her first win since 1982’s Sophie’s Choice, which prompted the star to begin her speech by saying, “I’ve just been nominated 789 times, and I was getting so settled over there for a long winter’s nap!”

Cunningham attended the Globes as well. He remembers the “great party,” sitting in the same room as Kidman, Streep, Moore, and Rudin, as a validation of The Hours’ most hotly debated (facial) feature. “In some parallel dimension, the movie went down over Nicole Kidman’s plastic nose,” he says. “It didn’t happen in this dimension.”

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.

David Canfield

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February 20, 2023
Jeremiah Green, Modest Mouse Drummer, Dies Of Cancer At 45

NEW YORK (AP) — Jeremiah Green, the founding drummer for the rock band Modest Mouse, has died just days after the band announced he had been diagnosed with cancer. He was 45.

“Today we lost our dear friend Jeremiah. He laid down to rest and simply faded out,” according to a statement posted Saturday on the band’s social media accounts. “Please appreciate all the love you give, get, have given, and will get. Above all, Jeremiah was about love.”

Green was barely in his teens when he joined the newly formed Modest Mouse, which featured singer-guitarist Isaac Brock and bassist Eric Judy among others. Modest Mouse was originally based in the Seattle suburb Issaquah and later relocated to Portland. Its name originates from a passage by Virginia Woolf, who once described everyday individuals as “modest mouse-coloured people.”

Influenced by Talking Heads and XTC among others, Modest Mouse debuted in 1996 with the album “This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About” and built a substantial critical following before having mainstream success with their fourth release, “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” and the singles “Float On” and “Ocean Breathes Salty.”

Green had a breakdown around the time of “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” released in 2004, and briefly left the band. He was back for more recent albums, including “Strangers to Ourselves” and “The Golden Casket,” which came out in 2021.

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January 1, 2023
Sherlock Holmes To Finally Be Public Domain In 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sherlock Holmes is finally free to the American public in 2023.

The long-running contested copyright dispute over Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of a whipsmart detective — which has even ensnared Enola Holmes — will finally come to an end as the 1927 copyrights expiring Jan. 1 include Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes work.

Alongside the short-story collection “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” books such as Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Men Without Women,” William Faulkner’s “Mosquitoes” and Agatha Christie’s “The Big Four” — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023.

Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost. The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years.

While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to “all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided.”

“For the vast majority—probably 99%—of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason,” Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding “Public Domain Day 2023.”

That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn’t be used by others. On the Duke list are such “lost” films like Victor Fleming’s “The Way of All Flesh” and Tod Browning’s “London After Midnight.”

1927 portended the silent film era’s end with the release of the first “talkie” — a film with dialogue in it. That was “The Jazz Singer,” the historic first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue also notorious for Al Jolson’s blackface performance.

In addition to the Alan Crosland-directed film, other movies like “Wings” — directed by William A. Wellman and the “outstanding production” winner at the very first Oscars — and Fritz Lang’s seminal science-fiction classic “Metropolis” will enter the public domain.

Musical compositions — the music and lyrics found on sheet music, not the sound recordings — on the list include hits from Broadway musicals like “Funny Face” and jazz standards from the likes of legends like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, in addition to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “(I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream” by Howard Johnson, Billy Moll and Robert A. King.

Duke’s Center for the Public Domain highlighted notable books, movies and musical compositions entering the public domain — just a fraction of the thousands due to be unleashed in 2023.

BOOKS

— “The Gangs of New York,” by Herbert Asbury (original publication)

— “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather

— “The Big Four,” by Agatha Christie

— “The Tower Treasure,” the first Hardy Boys mystery by the pseudonymous Franklin W. Dixon

— “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” by Arthur Conan Doyle

— “Copper Sun,” by Countee Cullen

— “Mosquitoes,” by William Faulkner

— “Men Without Women,” by Ernest Hemingway

— “Der Steppenwolf,” by Herman Hesse (in German)

— “Amerika,” by Franz Kafka (in German)

— “Now We Are Six,” by A.A. Milne with illustrations from E.H. Shepard

— “Le Temps retrouvé,” by Marcel Proust (in French)

— “Twilight Sleep,” by Edith Wharton

— “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” by Thornton Wilder

— “To The Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf

MOVIES

— “7th Heaven,” directed by Frank Borzage

— “The Battle of the Century,” a Laurel and Hardy film directed by Clyde Bruckman

— “The Kid Brother,” directed by Ted Wilde

— “The Jazz Singer,” directed by Alan Crosland

— “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock

— “Metropolis,” directed by Fritz Lang

— “Sunrise,” directed by F.W. Murnau

— “Upstream,” directed by John Ford

— “Wings,” directed by William A. Wellman

MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS

— “Back Water Blues,” “Preaching the Blues” and “Foolish Man Blues” (Bessie Smith)

— “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” from the musical “Good News” (George Gard “Buddy” De Sylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson)

— “Billy Goat Stomp,” “Hyena Stomp” and “Jungle Blues” (Ferdinand Joseph Morton)

— “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “East St. Louis Toodle-O” (Bub Miley, Duke Ellington)

— “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Ol’ Man River,” from the musical “Show Boat” (Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern)

— “Diane” (Erno Rapee, Lew Pollack)

— “Funny Face” and “’S Wonderful,” from the musical “Funny Face” (Ira and George Gershwin)

— “(I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream” (Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, Robert A. King)

— “Mississippi Mud” (Harry Barris, James Cavanaugh)

— “My Blue Heaven” (George Whiting, Walter Donaldson)

— “Potato Head Blues” and Gully Low Blues” (Louis Armstrong)

— “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (Irving Berlin)

— “Rusty Pail Blues,” “Sloppy Water Blues” and “Soothin’ Syrup Stomp” (Thomas Waller)

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December 30, 2022
2023 public domain debuts include last Sherlock Holmes work

WASHINGTON — Sherlock Holmes is finally free to the American public in 2023.

The long-running contested copyright dispute over Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of a whipsmart detective — which has even ensnared Enola Holmes — will finally come to an end as the 1927 copyrights expiring Jan. 1 include Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes work.

Alongside the short-story collection “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” books such as Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Men Without Women,” William Faulkner’s “Mosquitoes” and Agatha Christie’s “The Big Four” — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023.

Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost. The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years.

While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to “all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided.”

“For the vast majority—probably 99%—of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason,” Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding “Public Domain Day 2023.”

That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn’t be used by others. On the Duke list are such “lost” films like Victor Fleming’s “The Way of All Flesh” and Tod Browning’s “London After Midnight.”

1927 portended the silent film era’s end with the release of the first “talkie” — a film with dialogue in it. That was “The Jazz Singer,” the historic first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue also notorious for Al Jolson’s blackface performance.

In addition to the Alan Crosland-directed film, other movies like “Wings” — directed by William A. Wellman and the “outstanding production” winner at the very first Oscars — and Fritz Lang’s seminal science-fiction classic “Metropolis” will enter the public domain.

Musical compositions — the music and lyrics found on sheet music, not the sound recordings — on the list include hits from Broadway musicals like “Funny Face” and jazz standards from the likes of legends like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, in addition to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “(I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream” by Howard Johnson, Billy Moll and Robert A. King.

———

Duke’s Center for the Public Domain highlighted notable books, movies and musical compositions entering the public domain — just a fraction of the thousands due to be unleashed in 2023.

BOOKS

— “The Gangs of New York,” by Herbert Asbury (original publication)

— “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather

— “The Big Four,” by Agatha Christie

— “The Tower Treasure,” the first Hardy Boys mystery by the pseudonymous Franklin W. Dixon

— “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” by Arthur Conan Doyle

— “Copper Sun,” by Countee Cullen

— “Mosquitoes,” by William Faulkner

— “Men Without Women,” by Ernest Hemingway

— “Der Steppenwolf,” by Herman Hesse (in German)

— “Amerika,” by Franz Kafka (in German)

— “Now We Are Six,” by A.A. Milne with illustrations from E.H. Shepard

— “Le Temps retrouvé,” by Marcel Proust (in French)

— “Twilight Sleep,” by Edith Wharton

— “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” by Thornton Wilder

— “To The Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf

MOVIES

— “7th Heaven,” directed by Frank Borzage

— “The Battle of the Century,” a Laurel and Hardy film directed by Clyde Bruckman

— “The Kid Brother,” directed by Ted Wilde

— “The Jazz Singer,” directed by Alan Crosland

— “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock

— “Metropolis,” directed by Fritz Lang

— “Sunrise,” directed by F.W. Murnau

— “Upstream,” directed by John Ford

— “Wings,” directed by William A. Wellman

MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS

— “Back Water Blues,” “Preaching the Blues” and “Foolish Man Blues” (Bessie Smith)

— “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” from the musical “Good News” (George Gard “Buddy” De Sylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson)

— “Billy Goat Stomp,” “Hyena Stomp” and “Jungle Blues” (Ferdinand Joseph Morton)

— “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “East St. Louis Toodle-O” (Bub Miley, Duke Ellington)

— “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Ol’ Man River,” from the musical “Show Boat” (Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern)

— “Diane” (Erno Rapee, Lew Pollack)

— “Funny Face” and “’S Wonderful,” from the musical “Funny Face” (Ira and George Gershwin)

— “(I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream” (Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, Robert A. King)

— “Mississippi Mud” (Harry Barris, James Cavanaugh)

— “My Blue Heaven” (George Whiting, Walter Donaldson)

— “Potato Head Blues” and Gully Low Blues” (Louis Armstrong)

— “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (Irving Berlin)

— “Rusty Pail Blues,” “Sloppy Water Blues” and “Soothin’ Syrup Stomp” (Thomas Waller)

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December 30, 2022
A ‘downtown’ choreographer brings her craft to the opera

NEW YORK — It was a delicious challenge that came as a total surprise.

As choreographer Annie-B Parson tells it, she was walking down a Brooklyn street when her phone rang. It was the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, wondering if she’d be interested in choreographing for the Met.

Parson, based in Brooklyn, founder of the Big Dance Theater and also known for choreographing David Byrne’s joyous “American Utopia” on Broadway, had never done an opera and acknowledges she knew little about the art form.

But of course she was interested. It was the Met’s buzzy, commissioned production of “The Hours,” about the interior lives of three women connected — across generations and an ocean — by Virginia Woolf and her writings (one of them Woolf herself). Parson would be the only woman on the creative team.

And so one of her first decisions when she came on board was that all dancers should be female, or female-identifying.

“We auditioned probably 150 people,” she said in an interview, for a dance cast of 13. “And as the only female creative team member in a piece about an extremely radical feminist voice, it was very important to me to bring that feminism to the stage.”

“That’s a personal statement on my part,” she added. “None of the men can do that … Nobody knows what it’s like to be anything unless they’re it, right?”

The opera, by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce, is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel (later adapted into the film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar) about three women connected specifically by Woolf’s 1925 novel “Mrs. Dalloway.”

It stars a powerhouse trio of Renée Fleming as Clarissa Vaughan; Kelli O’Hara as Laura Brown; and Joyce DiDonato, as Woolf herself. Directed by Phelim McDermott, it runs through Dec. 15, including a Dec. 10 matinee simulcast to movie theaters worldwide.

Gelb says he reached out to Parson because he’d been impressed by her work in “American Utopia,” and thought she’d be a great fit with McDermott: “Part of my job as general manager is to be a creative matchmaker.”

He said in an interview that he feels Parson’s contribution has been to amplify and richen the story of “The Hours” for everyone in the vast, 3,800-seat theater, “as far back as the last row of the Family Circle.” (And on a recent evening, it looked like every one of those seats were taken.)

The opera unfolds over one day in three different places and eras. Woolf is attempting to write, and feeling suffocated in a country home outside London in 1923; Brown is an unhappy housewife and mother in 1949 Los Angeles; and Clarissa Vaughn is an editor arranging a party — organizing flowers and food – for her dear, ailing friend Richard, a novelist who has AIDS, in late 20th-century New York.

Parson says she was acutely aware of the challenge of illustrating the interior lives of the women, but did not set out to psychoanalyze them in movement. “I feel like if I had tried to do that, it wouldn’t have worked,” she says. She wanted to get there, but in a different way.

So, in a process she modestly describes as more “mundane,” the choreographer focused on actions, not thoughts.

“I don’t want to describe someone’s unconscious,” she says. “So for Virginia Woolf, I looked at, what does she DO? She writes, she reads. I worked on those actions. What does Clarissa do? She buys flowers. What does Laura do? She bakes. She takes pills.”

Another example: When Clarissa’s ailing friend Richard’s apartment rolls onto the stage, Parson’s dancers are hanging off the platform in what looks like a chilling metaphor for illness. Parson agrees, but says her aim was actually, “there’s this platform and it’s moving, and how can I animate it?”

The choreographer spoke from Lyon, France, where she is now working on her second opera. She said that even though “The Hours” was her first, it wasn’t as difficult as it sounds to adjust her craft.

“I have worked so much with musicians, great musicians,” she says, like Byrne and many others. “So thinking about how a show rolls out and how to choreograph to music so it’s supportive and at the same time has its own life … it didn’t seem that different.”

It was, however a dream to have so much time to rehearse, and to have the opera’s resources behind her. She was thrilled, for example, that when she rehearsed by herself, she had a pianist. “I mean, I’ve never had that experience before,” she said with a laugh. “I’m always listening on my iPhone to music when I’m working on my own. Everything about making dance at the Met is heightened and supported. I can’t tell you how much fun it was.”

An added bonus for Parson, who hadn’t read Woolf since working on a play of hers more than a decade ago, was getting to read her again, especially her diaries and “A Room of One’s Own” — and especially now, in 2022.

“Her writing is so profound,” Parson said. “And the world’s changed a lot in terms of gender and feminism. So she reads really, really well right now. It was really exciting. I actually want to cry right now, I’m so moved by thinking about her.”

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December 9, 2022
Why Does Chronic Pain Hurt So Much?

You never forget the first time a doctor gives up: when they tell you that they don’t know what to do—they have no further tests to run, no treatments to offer—and that you’re on your own. It happened to me at the age of 27, and it happens to many others with chronic pain.

I don’t remember what film I’d gone to see, but I know I was at The Oaks Theater, an old arts cinema on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, when pain stabbed me in the side. This was followed by an urgent need to urinate; after bolting to the bathroom, I felt better, but a band of tension ran through my groin. As the hours went by, the pain resolved into a need to pee again, which woke me up at 1 or 2 a.m. I went to the bathroom—but, as if I was in some bad dream, urinating made no difference. The band of sensation remained, insusceptible to feedback from my body. I spent a night of hallucinatory sleeplessness sprawled on the bathroom floor, peeing from time to time in a vain attempt to snooze the somatic alarm.

My primary-care doctor guessed that I had a urinary-tract infection. But the test came back negative—as did more elaborate tests, including a cystoscopy in which an apparently teenage urologist inserted an old-fashioned cystoscope through my urethra in agonizing increments, like a telescopic radio antenna. It certainly felt like something was wrong, but the doctor found no visible lesion or infection.

Read: The enduring mystery of pain measurement

What followed were years of fruitless consultations, the last of which produced a label, chronic pelvic pain—which means what it sounds like and explains very little—and a discouraging prognosis. The condition is not well understood, and there is no reliable treatment. I live with the hum of pain as background noise, flare-ups decimating sleep from time to time.

That pain is bad for you may seem too obvious to warrant scrutiny. But as a philosopher, I find myself asking why it is so bad—especially in a case like mine, where the pain I feel from day to day is not debilitating. To my relief, I am able to function pretty well; sleep deprivation is the worst of it. What more is there to say about the harm of being in pain?

Virginia Woolf may have invented the commonplace that language struggles to communicate pain. “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,” she wrote, “has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Woolf’s maxim was developed by the literary and cultural critic Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, a book that has become a classic. “Physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content,” she wrote. “It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.”

But as someone who has lived with pain for 19 years, I think Woolf and Scarry are wrong. Physical pain has “referential content”: It represents a part of the body as being damaged or imperiled even when, as in my case, it isn’t really. Pain can be deceptive. And we have many words for it: Pulsing, burning, and contracting are all good words for mine.

That pain represents the body in distress, bringing it into focus, helps us better understand why it is bad. Pain disrupts what the philosopher and physician Drew Leder calls the “transparency” of the healthy body. We don’t normally attend to the bodies itself; instead, we interact with the world “through” it, as if it was a transparent medium. Being in pain blurs the corporeal glass. That’s why pain is not just bad in itself: It impedes one’s access to anything good.

This accounts for one of pain’s illusions. Sometimes, I think I want nothing more than to be pain free—but as soon as pain is gone, the body recedes into the background, unappreciated. The joy of being free of pain is like a picture that vanishes when you try to look at it, like turning on the lights to see the dark.

Philosophy illuminates another side of pain—in a way that has practical upshots. This has to do with understanding persistent pain as more than just a sequence of atomized sensations. The temporality of pain transforms its character.

Although I am not always in notable pain, I’m never aware of pain’s onset or relief. By the time I realize it has vanished from the radar of attention, it has been quiet for a while. When the pain is unignorable, it seems like it’s been there forever and will never go away. I can’t project into a future free of pain: I will never be physically at ease. Leder, who also suffers from chronic pain, traces its effects on memory and anticipation: “With chronic suffering a painless past is all but forgotten. While knowing intellectually that we were once not in pain we have lost the bodily memory of how this felt. Similarly, a painless future may be unimaginable.”

We can draw two lessons from this. The first is that we have to focus on the present, not on what is coming in the future: If you can treat pain as a series of self-contained episodes, you can diminish its power. I try to live by what I call the “Kimmy Schmidt rule,” after the sitcom heroine who endured 15 years in an underground bunker with the mantra “You can stand anything for 10 seconds.” My units of time are longer, but I do my imperfect best not to project beyond them. You can have a good day while experiencing pelvic pain. And life is just one day after another.

Read: The long history of discrimination in pain medicine

The second lesson is that there’s less to what philosophers call “the separateness of persons” than might appear. Moral philosophers have argued that concern for others does not simply aggregate their harms. If you have to choose between agony for one person or mild headaches for many others, you should choose the headaches, no matter the number. The relief of minor pain for many cannot offset the agony of one, because the pains afflict distinct and separate people. They don’t add up.

Do trade-offs like this make sense within a single life? Philosophers often say they do, but I’ve come to believe that’s wrong. If what I was experiencing was just a sequence of atomized pains, without effects on memory or anticipation, I don’t think it would make sense to trade them for short-lived agony—a three-hour surgery performed without anesthetic, say—any more than it would make sense to trade a million mild headaches for the agony of one person. If I would choose to undergo that surgery, it would be because of the temporal effects of chronic pain, the shadow it casts over past and future.

A lot has been made of pain’s unshareability, how it divides us from one another. In fact, pain is no more shareable over time. My mother-in-law once asked, rhetorically, “Why can one man not piss for another man?” But you can’t piss for your past or future self either. And as we bridge the gulf between now and then to sympathize with ourselves at other times, we sympathize too with the suffering of others. Self-compassion is not the same as compassion for other people, but they are not as different as they seem. There is solace in solidarity, in sharing the experience of chronic pain, in compassion’s power to breach the boundaries that separate us from other people, and ourselves.

This article has been excerpted from Kieran Setiya’s new book, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Kieran Setiya

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November 1, 2022