Leave it to Turkish soap operas to conquer hearts and minds.

As a result of the popular soaps (which by the way are watched not only by women but entire households), Turkey has carved out a strong place for itself on the Arab street. Thousands of rich Gulf Arabs flock to Turkey on every occasion, as Istanbul has lately rivaled London and Paris as a favorite tourist destination. While enjoying touring the Topkapi Palace or reminiscing in the glory of the Muslim empire, Arab tourists also hope to catch a glimpse of the handsome actors as they film in one of Istanbul’s many suburbs. In 2009, Arab tourism to Turkey took a dramatic rise, including a 21 percent rise from the United Arab Emirates and a 50 percent rise from Morocco.

Since Noor’s inception in 2006, there have been a slew of other Turkish soaps on Arab screens, the latest of which, Asi, is an adaption of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. Its main leading characters were played by two rising stars, Murat Yildirim and Tuba Buyukustun. Both are becoming instant celebrities in the Arab world, with some reports even suggesting that one of them was requested for an audience with a member of the Saudi royalty. The soaps’ success lay on several elements: the quality of production, the stories of ordinary people wrapped in glamorous lifestyles, and the easy-to-listen-to Syrian accent in which these soaps are dubbed. The Turkish actors in these shows have become known throughout the Arab world by their translated character names — whether “Muhanned,” “Amir,” “Lamis,” or “Noor” — and many viewers don’t even know their real Turkish names. Continue reading here.

Click here to view an episode of Asi.

Jay McInerney, novelist and ladies’ man, describes his serial crushes on Jane Austen’s heroines – and how they shaped his romantic life.

We love Jane Austen through her heroines. Knowing so little about her, we worship her surrogates. And generally speaking, unless we are cranky scholars or celibate critics, we love and rank the novels according to our regard for the female principals. I can’t help finding my own response to the novels coloured by the degree to which I find the heroines attractive, although over the course of some 30 years of reading and rereading, I find my admiration shifting among the young ladies; unlike Frederick Wentworth, longtime lover of Persuasion’s leading lady Anne Elliot, I could be accused of inconstancy, but I like to think my tastes show an underlying consistency.

Like most Austen readers, I first loved Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice, and I loved her more for reminding me of the great love of my freshman year in college, or perhaps it would be just as accurate to say that I loved Christine better for reminding me of Elizabeth. Later, I came under the spell of Emma Woodhouse, the eponymous heroine of Austen’s penultimate novel, believing this to be a more mature love. By the time I read Emma I was a graduate student and I may have been susceptible to the general academic opinion that Emma was the more serious achievement. There is no question, though, that I imagined her to share many desirable qualities, as well as a few not quite so desirable qualities, with my fiancée.

My affections have oscillated between these two most spirited of the Austen protagonists over the course of the years, although just lately, much to my surprise, I have developed a bit of a sneaker for Fanny Price, the diffident heroine of Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park. Continue reading here.

On 14 June 1814 Jane Austen, who was in Chawton, wrote to her sister Cassandra and included the following snippet of family news:

“It appeared so likely to be a wet eveng that I went up to the Gt House between 3 & 4, & dawdled away an hour very comfortably, tho’ Edwd was not very brisk. The air was clearer in the Eveng & he was better.— We all five walked together into the Kitchen Garden & along the Gosport Road, & they drank tea with us.—“ (1)

The “Gt [Great] House” referred to in the letter was Chawton House, now Chawton House Library. The Gosport Road was one of two main roads that ran through the village. Today the Gosport Road is the lane that leads from the centre of Chawton, opposite Jane Austen’s House Museum, and runs past the drive to Chawton House Library before what is left of the road disappears into a footpath. Jane Austen’s use of the term “Great House” is one that was, and still is, a form of cultural shorthand that describes a particular type of historic building within its setting. The term “Great House” usually refers to a manor house within a village and it is readily understood, even today, by those who live and work in the English countryside.

The Great House

Sarah Parry
I first met Sarah when she gave a wonderfully informative, elegant presentation on Pemberley as the real star of Pride and Prejudice at the 2008 Chicago JASNA Annual General Meeting. Sarah both leads and organizes the impressive general educational programs and study tours at Chawton House Library, and she one of the most knowledgeable authorities I know on the history of the manor houses and estates, both in fact and fiction, that play such a pivotal role in the history of British culture and literature, and of course in Austen’s novels! I have benefitted greatly from Sarah’s expertise and the generosity with which she shares her research during my stay at Chawton House Library, and I am grateful to her for sharing her insights on the impressive history of the house with the Graham School and its students.
– from Elisabeth Lenckos

In those first few moments at the table, you try not to look at the empty place where his jaw used to be. You wonder how it feels to receive your nourishment through a tube directly into your stomach. You cringe when the waitress offers him a menu and asks if he wants something to drink.

But soon, in a flurry of hand gestures, glances, scribbles in a little spiral notebook and patient asides from his wife, Chaz, he’s having a conversation. You’re laughing. And you get to ask the question: How bad do you miss eating?

“For a few days I could think of nothing but root beer,” he said about the weeks after the surgery that removed much of his jaw. He passed through a candy fixation, romancing Red Hots and licorice-flavored Chuckles.

And he circled back time and again to a favorite meal served at Steak ’n Shake, an old-fashioned hamburger chain beloved in his part of the Midwest. When he wrote about it last year on his blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, people saw that the legendary movie critic for The Chicago Sun-Times could also knock out some great food writing.

“A downstate Illinois boy loves the Steak ’n Shake as a Puerto Rican loves rice and beans, an Egyptian loves falafel, a Brit loves banger and mash, an Indian loves tikki ki chaat, a Swede loves herring, a Finn loves reindeer jerky, and a Canadian loves bran muffins,” he wrote. “These matters do not involve taste. They involve a deep-seated conviction that a food is absolutely right, and always has been, and always will be.” Continue reading here.

Diner’s Journal: Q. and A. With Roger Ebert
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: August 31, 2010
The Chicago film critic, and now cookbook author, answers questions about food, movies and his life.

Jane Austen and the Body
This program is presented in partnership with the Jane Austen Society of North America / Greater Chicago Region.
Two Jane Austen aficionados join forces to plumb the many themes, undercurrents, and references to the body in Austen’s novels. Medical doctor Cheryl Kinney diagnoses “Austen-itis” as the recurrent use of sickness, health, frailty, and injury to develop Austen’s characters, drive her plots, and establish the comedic side of characters’ suffering. University of Chicago comparative literature and philosophy scholar Elisabeth Lenckos focuses on Austen and intelligent love; she inspects the notion of the “desiring body” and physical expressiveness in Austen’s work. Together, Dr. Kinney and Lenckos celebrate the complexity and enduring popularity of this Romantic writer.

Harold Washington Library Center – Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
400 South State Street
Sunday, November 7, 3:30 – 4:30 PM
Click here for ticket information on the Chicago Humanities Festival website.

WHEN the renowned educators Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins first decided to expand their Great Books course beyond the University of Chicago’s walls, they recruited some of Chicago’s most prominent businessmen. In what was called the Fat Men’s Great Books Course, the executives and their wives started meeting every other Friday evening in the fall of 1943 to discuss Plato, Shakespeare and Goethe.

The course eventually evolved into the Basic Program in Liberal Education and is now run out of the Graham School of General Studies, the university’s continuing education arm. And despite the recent recession, enrollment has increased in recent years, said Daniel Shannon, dean of the school.

Other continuing education programs around the nation have noticed a similarly strong interest in their arts and humanities courses. This growth comes amid a vigorous debate in the broader world of education about whether courses and material should be tied more tightly to the job market. Training more engineers and technicians is a constant refrain. Continue reading the New York Times article here.

“I think a lot of [the financial crisis] could perhaps have been avoided if our business leaders had a broader vision,” Bogle told me. “I’m skeptical about the narrowness of the business school curriculum. I happen to believe it should have a much greater liberal arts emphasis, and even a much greater emphasis on the classics. The Odyssey will tell you an awful lot about human nature and life, and therefore about business, and societal values. Read the Odyssey. Read Dante’s Inferno. You can also learn a lot by reading Seneca’s essay on the shortness of life or Montaigne’s essay on vanity.”

What makes a study of history and the Classics so important for business?  “It involves critical thinking,” Bogle explained. “It involves some kind of perspective, it involves some ability to think ‘you know, this has happened before and it could be happening again now.’ It would certainly shun the argument that this time is different when the stock market goes to an all-time high. And, as Einstein said, ‘there are some things that count that can’t be counted, and there are things that can be counted that don’t count.’ There’s a lot of terrific stuff out there that gives you an understanding of the broad world in which we live, rather than the very narrow world in which we play our games. Continuing reading Original Sin on Wall Street  – The Atlantic.

Click here for the philosophy course, Plato’s Theatetus and the Current Financial Crisis.
This course is a rare opportunity to explore philosophy in tandem with current events. Was the current financial crisis foreseeable? What counts as “knowledge” in the financial world? These questions spring from enduring human concerns about the nature of knowledge. We begin each class with a close reading (in English translation) of the conversation between Socrates and the young star Theatetus as they consider the question “What is knowledge?” We then consider comparable aspects of the current financial crisis each week, including popular ideas about financial markets- from George Soros’s theory of reflexivity to Dan Ariely on behavioral economics.

Previously, Montaigne had often imagined death. His reading in classical philosophy – the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics – encouraged him to brood on mortality and he had endured the recent deaths of his best friend (the humanist writer La Boétie), his father, younger brother and first-born child. But the riding accident cured him of morbidity. He awoke from it confused and vomiting blood, but went on to reinvent himself. He resigned from his position in Bordeaux and resolved to devote himself to writing the essays that would bring him immortality. As Sarah Bakewell writes in her new biography: “Don’t worry about death became his fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live.” Continue the Guardian review here.

Read the Prospect review here.

Check out the upcoming course, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws.

The legendary Baltimore Clipper schooner
Captain Thomas Boyle, the famous American privateer, used his legendary clipper schooner Chasseur to great effect during the War of 1812.  Sailing Chasseur throughout the British Isles, Boyle captured or sank seventeen ships, forcing the British to bring ships home from the American war in order to protect merchant convoys.  Upon her return to Baltimore, the Chasseur and her crew were known as “the pride of Baltimore.”

The Pride of Baltimore, an authentic reproduction of Chasseur, was lost at sea in 1986.  Two years later, the Pride of Baltimore II was launched.  While it replicates the look of a Baltimore Clipper, it was built to contemporary standards for maneuverability and interior comfort.  Owned by the citizens of Maryland, Pride II has six berths set aside for guest-crewing passages “for those who have the desire to experience the hands-on challenge of sailing a traditional ship. As a guest crew passenger you’ll work alongside Pride II‘s professional crew and may participate in all aspects of life aboard up to your level of interest and ability.”

Click here to view Pride of Baltimore II sailing schedule.

Click here to see Pride of Baltimore II on Facebook.

But Yunte Huang, who was born and grew up in China, can’t get enough of Chan and has written a book about his obsession: “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History.” The book, which comes out from Norton next week, is part memoir, part history, part cultural-studies essay and part grab bag of odd and little-known details.

Biggers, who overlapped at Harvard with T. S. Eliot but did not exactly share his literary taste, said he got the idea for Chan while sitting in the New York Public Library in 1924 and reading about a real-life Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Mr. Huang suggests that Biggers may have misremembered the details, but there is no doubt that Apana was the model for Chan, and Mr. Huang gives a full account of a life that was in many ways more interesting than the fictional version: born in Hawaii to Chinese parents, Apana moved to China and then back to Hawaii, where despite being virtually illiterate, he rose in the detective ranks of the Honolulu police. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a bullwhip and was said to leap from rooftop to rooftop like a human fly. Continue reading.

Charlie Chan “Confucius”

SHADOWS OVER CHINATOWN TRAILER CHARLIE CHAN 1946