So it came to pass that a couple of poets ‐‐ congenially munching their bagels in the spacious basement refectory of a bagelry called Finagle‐a‐Bagel on JFK in Harvard Square, all the while conjecturing upon the potential mental, spiritual and perhaps even physical salubriousness of occasional social interface with other human beings likewise blest or cused to pursue the word, to ply their craft or sullen art, in isolation ‐‐ gave birth to the idea of Bagelbards.

Sarah Caldwell, the leader of the Opera Company of Boston from 1958-1990, was a groundbreaking and idiosyncratic woman who established her own career as a conductor and stage director in an environment resistant to change. This book investigates her choices as an opera director, her influences, her philosophies, and her methods, and situates her work within the history of opera in America. Though she is remembered primarily as a conductor, her passion, and her greater influence on American opera, was through stage directing. With a repertoire that included ground-breaking interpretations of works such as Nono's Intolleranza 1960, Prokofiev's War and Peace, and Bernstein's Mass, Caldwell continually pushed her own artistic limits, provoked critics, intrigued audiences, and challenged the status quo of opera production. Her passion for opera, her creative use of new technology and her influence in bringing opera to all sectors of American society, culminated in 1997 when she was awarded the National Medal of Arts for her work as a pioneering woman in the American musical landscape, and a tireless and innovative arts entrepreneur.

..". sophisticated, provocative, and thoroughly documented.... Strongly recommended... " -- Choice ..". a welcome addition to the literature on this contentious issue." -- Journal of Communication "This book does an excellent job of portraying the complexity of the legal and philosophical debates among women about the status and effects of pornography, and it is an important interdisciplinary scholarly contribution for that reason." -- Signs In an attempt to advance our society's debate on pornography beyond the current political and legal stalemate, these essays examine explicit portrayals of violence in pornography from multidisciplinary perspectives: history, literary criticism, religious studies, ethics, political science, film studies, law, and psychology.

In this issue we are thrilled to have the work of such noted poets as: Martha Collins, John Skoyles, Jennifer Barber, Daniel Bosch, Dan Tobin, Andrea Cohen, Marge Piercy, Alfred Nicol, Fred Marchant, Kathleen Spivack, and many others. This is the first issue edited by our new managing editor Rene Schwiesow. We are sure you will be pleased with the issue she puts together. Schwiesow and Lawrence Kessenich work on alternate issues and we are lucky to have these skilled folks on Ibbetson Street. Also - in Ibbetson Street 34, we have the artwork of Bridget Galway that adorns the front and back covers. Bridget's artwork and poetry have appeared in a number of issues and we are glad she continues to contribute her fine work to our magazine.

The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy is a wide-ranging anthology of criticism devoted to the literary, cultural, and political work of the writer Irving Howe. The book offers a broad cross-section of critical and biographical writings about Howe. Collected here are assessments of Howe's work written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, and Arthur Schlesinger. The critical estimates of Howe's major books, collected here and framed by a major biographical introduction by John Rodden, constitute a sharply focused lens through which readers can re-evaluate the legacy of one of American's leading intellectuals and thereby understand the main issues of twentieth-century Anglo-American cultural history. Contributors: Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Newton Arvin, Charles Angoff, Edward Dahlberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Richard Chase, H.D. Lasswell, Dennis Wrong, Michael Harrington, Christopher Lasch, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Solotaroff, Clive James, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and William Phillips, among others.

Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (published in 1970 and adapted to film in 1979) was prescient in its vision of a simple man without discernible talent or political experience whose knowledge of the world comes almost exclusively from television. Yet his very shallowness establishes him as a TV celebrity and propels him to the pinnacle of American government. Both an incisive satire and a clarion call to resist the collectivizing force of the media that influences American life and shapes, distorts, and ultimately corrupts politics and culture, Being There offered a trenchant comment on the nature of “being” in the modern world of power. And it critiqued the tendency of Americans to seek mindless distraction rather than engagement and to find profundity in banal slogans and slick visuals. Issued a half century ago, Kosinski’s warning not to let hollow imagery trump our good sense and become our new reality is even more urgent today. The first book-length examination of Kosinski in more than a decade, Being There in the Age of Trump goes beyond conventional literary and film analysis to a larger interdisciplinary and cultural study of a work still timely and popular.