New Books in Performing Arts

Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi (Factory 25, 2015) is the most comprehensive collection of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi possible with 36 films including: A Little Stiff, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, In the Bathtub of the World, Tripping with Caveh, I Am a Sex Addict, and The Sheik and I.

Writings by Bill Brown, Arnold Barkus, Greg Watkins, Thomas Logoreci, Alison Bechdel, Amanda Field, Richard Clark, Britta Sjorgren, Matthew L. Weiss, Jay Duplass, Lena Dunham, Akira Lippitt, Don Lennon, Josh Safdie, Jay Rosenblatt, and Caveh Zahedi.

Caveh Zahedi is an independent filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Screen Studies at the New School.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Twelfth Night, named for the celebration that is both the culmination and the close of the Christmas festivities, is a bittersweet romantic comedy at once melancholy and merry. Through its central plot, in which the female Viola takes on the guise of the male Cesario and becomes beloved of both men and women, this play is also one of Shakespeare’s most modern approaches to identity and sexuality. In this course, you’ll learn the story and context of Twelfth Night, explore the questions it raises around genre and gender, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. Professor Smith offers key historical context for understanding the wide variety of relationships depicted in the play. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean. 

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Who was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (FSG, 2023) reveals, Smith was all of these and more. Best known for editing The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith was also a pioneer in experimental film who Jonas Mekas considered one of the leading lights of the New American Cinema. He created paintings that attempted to transcribe bebop recordings. He acted as mysticism consultant on the 1967 effort to levitate the Pentagon. But he also spent years living in poverty, in SROs, at the Chelsea Hotel, or at the apartments of famous friends like Allen Ginsberg. The story of Harry Smith is thus also a story of a vanished New York Bohemia that mixed high and low, the street and the gallery, the Bowery and MOMA, to create one of the most remarkable outpourings of cultural production this country has even seen. And Smith was at the center of it all.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Art of Transition: The Field of Art in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2022) investigates contemporary art in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union. By drawing on historical and ethnographic research, this study examines the challenges faced by Russian artists in building a field of art as their society underwent rapid and significant economic, political, and social transformation. In doing so, the book constructs a genealogy of the contemporary field of post-socialist art, and illuminates how Russians have come to understand themselves and their place in the world.

Elise Herrala is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Haverford College. She is a sociologist of art and culture, and her research examines the dynamics of cultural production, and in particular the ways in which culture functions to reproduce inequality.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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In A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023), Diana W. Anselmo queers the earliest development of the "fangirl." Gathering an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs, A Queer Way of Feeling explores how, in the 1910s, girls coming of age in the United States used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos on personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, adolescent girls from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of mental states, actions, and proclivities self-described as "queer" or "different from the norm." Material testimonies of a forgotten audience, these autobiographical artifacts show how early movie-loving girls engendered terminologies, communities, and creative practices that would become cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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While there is little doubt that women were active participants in medieval musical culture, their role has nevertheless been variously obfuscated, undermined, and overlooked, in large part because of the relative absence of named women composers. Work from recent decades has sought to re-insert women into our music-historical narratives, often by broadening their scopes and shifting away from strictly author-focused surveys. 

Female-Voice Song and Women's Musical Agency in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2022) brings together seventeen essays, each of which newly identifies contributions to musical culture made by women before 1500 across Europe. Encompassing not only medieval French, English, and Italian culture, but also stretching to Iceland and the Islamicite courts, this volume speaks to the various ways in which we can hear women’s voices through history.

Prof. Lisa Colton and Dr. Anna Kathryn Grau jointly edited this collection, in addition to contributing chapters to it. In this episode, they speak with Áine Palmer about the study of women’s participation in medieval musical culture, the process of putting together an edited volume such as this, and share insights on their own analyses of 13th-century French motets.

Further Reading and Listening:

For those interested, you can here performer’s renditions of some of the songs and motets mentioned in Anna’s chapter here, here, and here, and a rendition of the motet Lisa’s chapter focuses on can be found here.

Those interested in Bahktinian approaches to early music should also read Helen Dell, Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song (Woodbridge: Suffolk, 2008), particularly chapters 5 and 6, and Anna Kathryn Grau ‘Hearing Voices: Heteroglossia, Homoglossia, and the Old French Motet’ in Musica Disciplina 58 (2013), pp. 73-100.

Prof. Lisa Colton can be found on Twitter at @elsie33, and you can find Dr. Anna Kathryn Grau at @AnnaKathrynGrau.

Aine Palmer is a PhD candidate in the Music Department at Yale.

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Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (Oxford UP, 2022) looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue durée study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death.

Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.

Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. A literary and cultural historian of early modern Europe, she is also the author of Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici (2016). She has held positions at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Kent and Queen Mary University of London

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood. 

Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds (U Chicago Press, 2023) attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions—including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope—participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon’s revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University. Email: [email protected]

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The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing over 2300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career. 

In Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness (Duke UP, 2023), musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group’s official releases to fan-produced tapes, bootlegs to “Betty Boards,” and Dick’s Picks to From the Vault—have shaped the general history and popular mythology of the Grateful Dead for over fifty years. Drawing on a diverse array of materials and documents contained in the Grateful Dead Archive, Live Dead details how live recordings became meaningful among the band and their fans not only as sonic souvenirs of past musical performances but also as expressions of assorted ideals, including notions of “liveness,” authenticity, and the power of recorded sound.

John Brackett is Instructor of Music at Vance-Granville Community College, the author of John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression and a coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. 

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Hamid Keshmirshekan's book The Art of Iran in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Tracing the Modern and the Contemporary (Edinburgh UP, 2023) deals with the exploration and theorization of Modern and Contemporary art of Iran through the examination of art movements and artistic practices in relation to other cultural, social and political discourses during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on discourses and their impact on art movements and practices and aims to selectively explore certain prevailing debates in action during this time. To come to grips with the way that artistic trends in Iran can be traced within the intellectual and political landscape of the country mainly from the 1940s to the present, Keshmirshekan articulates new ideas for relating art to its wider context--whether social, cultural or political--and to bring together critical and historical evidence in order to provide an insight into current artistic concerns. The book explores these underlying themes and discourses through a series of case studies, including through close scrutiny of works of artists.

Kaveh Rafie is a PhD candidate specializing in modern and contemporary art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation charts the course of modern art in the late Pahlavi Iran (1941-1979) and explores the extent to which the 1953 coup marks the recuperation of modern art as a viable blueprint for cultural globalization in Iran.

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