I’m currently looking at a copy of Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty and there is one burning question I can’t dislodge: What, exactly, qualifies Bono to write introductions to books on global economics? Presumably not his extended research or in-depth knowledge; I certainly couldn’t claim it was no better than mine, but I’m somewhat dubious as to the insight he can give into Jeffrey Sachs’s economic theories. Then again, what qualifies me to have an opinion on world hunger and the moral status of the World Trade Organisation? I have been fairly vocal on these subjects. I believe I have a right, perhaps even a duty, to stand in the street and yell my ill-founded opinions to the world but, unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I am not Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General. My credentials for valid political commentary are basically that I am not a rock star. Bono’s credentials are precisely the opposite. Political causes become cool. Celebrities are expected to make pronouncements on them and we’re all supposed to express our opinion, provided it’s the right one. The Make Poverty History campaign and the Iraq war are probably the most obvious recent examples. Kids were yelling about global injustice in the street. Political apathy didn’t seem like such a problem when town centres were shut down because anti-war protesters were blockading the roads. Bono’s Mother Teresa antics may seem a bit pretentious, but does it matter if it means we can answer in the affirmative to the question, “does anybody care about the starving children?” We have a popular culture, or at least a very widespread sub-culture, in which we are supposed to care. But what kind of culture is it?

Last year the Oxford Literary Festival took over the town. Zadie Smith spoke in the town hall, Richard Dawkins in the debating chambers, Jasper Fforde in the Union building, and a whole host of other events spread out across the city as though trying to capture the imagination of passers-by through the process of literary osmosis.

A “defence” of any musical period is both superfluous and impossible to accomplish with a mere thousand words, if at all. So why this article? Well, because too often contemporary music is mercilessly written-off due to its ostensibly “difficult” nature, which is rather sad. The music itself doesn’t need defending, but the charges of pretentiousness frequently levelled at it must be addressed, allowing it to have a chance to be appreciated as something more than narcissistic indulgence by a quasi-intellectual elite, and a bandwagon for bourgeois pseuds to jump on.

Six billion single solipsisms
Each screaming simultaneously
As squall of soul madness
Presses against case,
Iron exterior tinged with blazing copper.

In around 750 BC an anonymous poet put the finishing touches on his epic The Odyssey. It is no accident that Odysseus’s name means “trouble”, or indeed, that the ancients called the unknown bard “Homer” or “Homeros”–which literally translated means “someone displaced and vulnerable”, a word with similar connotations to the modern terms “asylum seeker” and “refugee.” It is this idea of asylum, and Odysseus as the “eternal traveller” which, nearly three millennia later, has captured David Farr’s imagination. A synopsis of his stage adaptation of Homer’s work could easily be mistaken for a modern story of a refugee: “a man is washed up on a foreign shore and confronted by immigration officers as he wakes up on the beach. Refusing to answer his questions, they throw him in a detention centre with a torrent of abuse.”

You made a career of indecision
Of wavering between dull angel
And fearsome, beautiful animal
Walking wildly far from every path.

It has been 35 years since President Nixon declared drugs to be “America’s public enemy number one”. The latest manifestation of the “ideology of prohibition” has since seen much of the world consumed by the “War on Drugs”. Drug prohibition has seen such illicit substances as heroin, cocaine and ecstasy outlawed, and its consumers universally criminalised, condemned as social pariahs. Through innumerable sound-bites, politicians and officials have claimed that outlawing illicit substances keeps the innocent safe, and the drugs off our streets. George W. Bush recently proclaimed, “Illegal drugs are the enemy of ambition and hope… When we fight the war on drugs, we also fight the war on terror”. The strategy is attractive to voters because it deals in absolutes: No Drugs, No Tolerance, at any time, in any place. It is assumed that utter prevention and complete expulsion will control the drug problem. Prohibition is sold to the public in these terms, and the illusion is lapped up. However, the substance of prohibition does not support the illusion. As in America in the 1920s, prohibition has failed. The War on Drugs has been a massive and tragic failure which has been perpetrated by fraudulent, superficial sound-bites. All counter-arguments and critiques are branded and demonised as soft on drugs, and soft on crime. The truth is stifled behind the rhetoric of base emotional pandering rather than rational debate.

Since Russia’s re-invasion of her rebellious Chechen province in 1999, officially 5,362 Russian military personnel have been killed on operations there. Unofficially this figure is estimated at being nearer 11,000 with 25,000 wounded (Russian Union of Soldiers’ Mothers). The number of civilians killed is conservatively believed to be approximately 20,000 dead with many more displaced and made homeless. These figures stand as a damning indictment of the failure of Russia’s “Counter-terrorist” operations and attempts to restore order to this small satellite state. By comparison to the above casualty figures, the cost of the unpopular Coalition operation in Iraq appears almost light–around 2,600 Coalition soldiers. There have in fact been two “Chechen wars” in the last two decades (one in 1994 and another from 1999) and Russia’s policies and the performance of her security forces reveal much of the change and continuity in post-soviet Russia.

Leoš Janácek (1854-1928) is recognized to be “one of the most substantial, original and immediately appealing opera composers of the twentieth century” (John Tyrrell). As a composer he is not noted for his piano writing, instead famed primarily for his operatic writing (e.g. Jenufa, 1904 and The Cunning Little Vixen, 1923) as well as his instrumental pieces (e.g. Sinfonietta, 1926). As a result the beautiful piano miniatures that form On An Overgrown Path (1901-8) have been unjustly neglected. Indeed many pianists do not encounter Janácek’s piano music at all (except perhaps his four larger pieces In The Mists, 1912). His piano music is certainly not included in the core repertoire of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries that is performed in the professional concert hall.

So, this was going to be the showdown between two of the most controversial and influential writers, philosophers, scientists, artists and whatnots perhaps ever: Strindberg vs. Nietzsche. In the end it turned out to be a little bit of everything. A defence of good writing, a critique of good writing, morality, religion, an insight into two men’s lives and what a great thought requires (nothing).

In February of this year there was a concert curated by Ph.D. student, Felipe Otondo at the Rymer auditorium, here in our very own music department. This concert featured the work of renowned York-based composer Trevor Wishart. In this article I shall try to give some insight into the work of this composer and the importance of electronic music.

Once upon a time, in a land not so far, far away, in a pretty drab and cheaply constructed high-rise office building perched on top of a hill–possibly in Islington or somewhere similar–lived a few young men. These were not the type of men who smiled only when genuinely happy, nor were they anything like pleasant young men. No, these men, while they might have been nice once, had now gone some way towards concealing their better attributes beneath public personas. They were defined more than anything else by their ostentatiously expensive personal accessories, and their bizarre jobs, which revolved around selling things that they never actually saw.

If you were to mention the simple words “Don Quixote”, most people, whether they have read the book or not, muster up images of a battered knight. This picture would not be complete without his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza. So what is it about this novel that so captures people’s imagination? Last year was the 400th anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and its popularity is still going strong.

When looking at the modernist canon, the innovators that tower above all others are inevitably James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Virginia Woolf is grudgingly also granted a place, less for her innovation than for her femininely aestheticized version of the modernist novel. But, as Gertrude Stein furtively asked, “Who came first?” Why is it that most students at university today are unaware that Gertrude Stein published her Three Lives in 1909, that “Pointed Roofs”, the first chapter of Dorothy Richardson’s epic novel Pilgrimage, came out in 1915 and May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier was published in 1919? All incredibly innovative–and truly modernist–yet published long before Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Why are these works not on every syllabus, to be compared to the male modernist tradition? Why are they not even mentioned?

Art, says Justin Mullins, whose recent exhibition Mathematical Photography: an exhibition of the world’s most beautiful equations has intrigued journalists from sources as varied as The Guardian and the London Mathematical Society. Surprisingly, Mullins is not a mathematician; he regards himself as a kind of “photographer”, retracing the steps of “great explorers returning from distant shores with tales of fantastic lands and magical creatures”. His presentation of equations as works of art is certainly striking, but what emotions do these pieces inspire in their observers?

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council resolution 827 on 25 May 1993. Since its establishment, on hundred and sixty one people have been indicted for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and yet of these only one hundred and thirty three have appeared before the tribunal to date and only forty-five have been found guilty. The question that arises is why only a minority of the perpetrators have been sentenced and how in some cases they are still able to evade arrest. After all, it has been over fifteen years since the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo started.

The image of Jimi Hendrix burning an electric guitar on stage has emerged as an emblem of 20th century music. We read that: “The set ended with Hendrix burning his guitar onstage, then smashing it to bits and tossing them out to the audience. The show instantly catapulted Hendrix into US stardom”. A few years prior to that near sacrificial ritual taking place, a well-known and too frequently referred to political group burned books in a square of Europe. No particular sociological insight is required to discern that acts of middle class vandalism–the Western underclasses have always been perfectly aware of the status they enjoy globally, for all the supposed solidarity with the poor of the world–are instigated, staged and promoted by agents whose main interest may only be extraneous to literature or music.

On a train in Canada last year, I was reading a copy of Ulysses when a Canadian guy stopped beside me and said, “Whoa, you’re reading Ulysses? Good luck!” It was an experience that was often repeated during my trip, and even when I returned home. The novel carries a fearsome reputation, even among the best-educated. Yet why should the majority of the reading public be so frightened by a novel that is, after all, more than eighty years old? Shouldn’t the controversy surrounding it have died down by now? The answer to these questions seems to lie not merely in Joyce’s novel, but also in the work of later writers and in our own contemporary fiction.