HERESIOLOGY

‘Mad and offensive’ texts shed light on the role played by minstrels in medieval society

‘Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. This is something else’ … the Heege Manuscript. Photograph: National Library of Scotland

The Heege Manuscript which ‘pokes fun at everyone, high and low’ is among the earliest evidence of the life and work of a real minstrel


Sarah Shaffi

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

From mocking kings and priests to encouraging audiences to get drunk, newly discovered texts at the National Library of Scotland have shed light on the role played by minstrels in medieval society.

Containing the earliest recorded use of the term “red herring” in English, the texts are part of a booklet known as the Heege Manuscript. Dr James Wade of the University of Cambridge, who discovered them, said echoes of minstrel humour can be found “in shows such as Mock the Week, situational comedies and slapstick”.

“The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British standup comedy,” he added.

Throughout the middle ages, minstrels travelled between fairs, taverns and baronial halls to entertain people with songs and stories. Although fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature, references to real-life performers are rare, and the Heege Manuscript is among the first evidence of the life and work of a real minstrel.

Dr James Wade: ‘To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.’ Photograph: University of Cambridge

Wade, from Cambridge’s English faculty and Girton College, said that most “medieval poetry, song and storytelling has been lost”.

“Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art,” he continued. “This is something else. It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. Standup comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.”

The texts consist of a tail-rhyme burlesque romance entitled The Hunting of the Hare, a mock sermon in prose and an alliterative nonsense verse The Battle of Brackonwet. They were copied circa 1480 by Richard Heege, a household cleric and tutor to a Derbyshire family called the Sherbrookes, from a now lost memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel performing near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border.

Wade believes the minstrel wrote part of his act down because its many nonsense sequences would have been extremely difficult to recall. “He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” Wade said. “Here we have a self-made entertainer with very little education creating really original, ironic material. To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.”

The Hunting of the Hare is a poem about peasants, “full of jokes and absurd hijinks”. Wade said that one scene is reminiscent of Monty Python’s “Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog” sketch.

The sermon addresses the audience as “cursed creatures” and includes fragments from drinking songs. “This is a minstrel telling his audience, perhaps people of very different social standing, to get drunk and be merry with each other,” Wade said. The sermon also contains the first recorded use of the term “red herring”, when three kings eat so much that 24 oxen burst out of their bellies, sword fighting; the oxen chop each other up until they are reduced to three “red herrings”.

The Battle of Brackonwet features Robin Hood as well as jousting bears, battling bumblebees and partying pigs. The poem names several villages close to the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border and includes a “skilful demonstration of alliterative verse and a clever double entendre”.

Wade said: “We shouldn’t assume that popular entertainers weren’t capable of poetic achievement. This minstrel clearly was.”

Wade’s study is published on Wednesday in The Review of English Studies journal.

https://www.cambridge.org/9781009064347

Cambridge introduction mikhail bakhtin | Literary theory

Based on up-to-date sources and recent scholarly editions of Bakhtin's work; Sets Bahtkin's work in its historical context, helping readers better ...

https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Bakhtin_Mikhail_Rabelais_and_His_World_1984.pdf

Rabelais and His World - Monoskop 

Bakhtin's ideas concerning folk culture, with carnival as its ... Long before he published his book on Rabelais, Bakhtin had ...

SEE 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HERESY 

Carnival against capital: a comparison of Bakhtin,Vaneigem and Bey
GAVIN GRINDON
Department of English and American Studies School of Arts, Histories and Cultures 

University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL

ABSTRACT

Since the mid 1990s, many anarchists and Marxists, drawing on the writings of Hakim Bey, the Situationist International and Mikhail Bakhtin, have increasingly articulated the concept of ‘carnival’ as a valuable form of resistance that merges the political and the aesthetic. This essay looks at these writings and the cases they make, and examines the extent to which they form a coherent body of thought.The central texts under discussion will be Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Rabelais and HisWorld , Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life

and Hakim Bey’s TAZ:The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

Uprising in Storyville:
Conjuring Resistance in African-American

Literature

Tom Tàbori (University of Glasgow)

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_122693_smxx.pdf

‘[Ishmael] Reed’s rhetorical strategy assumes the form of the
relationship between the text and the criticism of that text, which
serves as discourse upon the text’ (Gates 1988, p.112). So speaks
Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his seminal text The Signifying Monkey,
harnessing, he believes, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘inner
dialogisation’ (1988, p.112), or polemic hidden in parody. He does
this to argue the case for self-reflexivity as Mumbo Jumbo’s ‘form of
signifyin(g)’(Hurston 1990, cited in Gates 1988, p.113), the way in
which Reed riffs on the codes fielded in his text. However, what
Gates declines to explore are the discourses to which these codes
pertain, discourses that Reed summons like a conjuror, then
performs like a ventriloquist; the very social currents that lace his
America and are re-laced in his text. To avoid the connotation of
illusory, David Blaine-style conjuring, this essay will posit in its place
the term conjure, as it relates to the conjure man, a pervasive
archetype within African-American literature. He is both community
organiser and a reality re-organiser, conjuring uprising from what
already-exists, not out of the blue, and this conjure is present in the
works of Ishmael Reed, Rudolph Fisher, and Randolph Kenan
which this essay will examine.

Even after the sociality of conjure is returned, the radicalism
and reach of this ‘form of signifyin(g)’(Hurston 1990, cited in Gates
1988, p.113) is restricted by critics who file it away as Reed’s
idiosyncrasy, such as James Lindroth’s Images of Subversion and Helen 
Lock’s A Man's Story Is His Gris-gris (Lindroth 1996; Lock 1993). In
response, this essay will show that Reed’s ‘Neo-HooDoo, …the Lost
American Church’(2004b, p.2062), is part of a grander narrative of
conjure within African-American literature. 

To this end, the essay will look at the generations prior and successive 
to Reed, in order to fashion a theory of conjure as a narrative adapted
 to the uprootednessof a people hauled across the Atlantic: ‘we were
 dumped here on our own without the book to tell us who the Loas are, 
what we callspirits… [so] we made it all up on our own’ (Reed 1996, p.130).
African-American literature’s interiority to America levies the
commitment that is this essay’s first theme: giving the individual no
opt-out from the relationships of difference into which he is born,
and giving Reed the belief that ‘a black man is born with his guard
up’ (Reed 1990, epigraph). The second theme is parody itself, an act
of doubling involved in what Bakhtin calls ‘the reaccentuation of
images and languages (forms) in the novel’ (1981, p.59), essentially a
storytelling technique by which the past can be played and replayed,
memories conjured up to furnish the present, rather than one-way
bombardment, or Proustian moments. The third aspect of conjure
and the third theme of this essay is the act of occupying, as used by
the Loop Garew Kid in Reed’s Yellow-Back Radio Broke Down, when,
‘by making figurines of his victims he entraps their spirits and is able
to manipulate them’ (2000, p.60). Each theme makes a point about
decentredness, the relational subjectivity of those separated from their
origins by the Atlantic. Each theme remarks that decentredness does
not disable resistance but, rather, enables the double-voicing that can
negotiate such a compromised position. This is what lets the
conjuror stays focused behind enemy lines, behind the mask, as a
storyteller trapped in his own story, with access to a host of ciphers
for him to talk through, structures for him to ride on, and social 
apparatus on which ‘to swing up on freedom’(Malcolm X 2004,

track 21). 

'Pooper' figures star in nativity scenes in Spain

Rosa SULLEIRO
Thu, 21 December 2023

The 'caganer' -- or 'pooper' figurine -- has long been a staple of Christmas in the northeastern region of Spain

 (Josep LAGO)

Look closely at a nativity scene in Spain's Catalonia region and you will likely spot an unusual figure -- a peasant with his pants down and doing his business in the holy scene.

The "caganer" -- or "pooper" -- figurine has long been a staple of Christmas in the northeastern region, usually placed in a discreet corner not far from Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus.

The defecating statuettes are believed locally to bring prosperity for the coming year. They have become increasingly popular with tourists, especially in Barcelona, the region's capital, where they are easily found in Christmas markets.

The traditional clay figure depicts a peasant or shepherd wearing black trousers, a white shirt and the classic red Catalan cap called the barretina.

But the tradition has expanded to include famous figures such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, former US president Donald Trump, singers such as Michael Jackson and athletes like Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe.

"It is very interesting. We are also very surprised to see they have all these figures, celebrities and also political figures. It's definitely a new experience for us," said Amy Hu, a 30-year-old tourist from the United States, as she browsed a selection of caganers in Barcelona.

One of the biggest caganer makers, family-run Caganer.com, currently sells 650 different models of the figures at its six shops in Barcelona and Madrid as well as online, where the United States accounts for the bulk of orders.

The company expects to sell 140,000 of the figures this year, which retail for five to 21 euros ($5-$23).

Sergi Alos, co-owner of the company founded by his mother in 1992, said the figures were a tribute, not a mockery. He said he was happy that tourists could "have something that is typically Catalan".

- 'An icon' -

The roots of the caganer are vague but are generally thought to date from the 18th century.

The figurines aim to "connect the people to the mystery of the nativity", said Josefina Roma, a retired University of Barcelona anthropology professor.

She likened caganers to playful characters that appear in theological narratives to make them more understandable.

Xavier Borrell, the president of the 33-year-old Friends of the Caganer Association, which has around 100 members, said the figures "have gone beyond nativity scenes to become an icon".

The retired engineer owns 1,400 caganers, the bulk of them classic figurines of peasants.

He said he was delighted that the statuettes had become popular tourist souvenirs in Catalonia, a wealthy region of around 7.7 million people that has its own distinct language.

"In Catalonia we sell Mexican sombreros, Sevillian dresses, images of bulls, which are not typical of our culture, and the fact that tourists who come here take a caganer with them pleases me a lot," Borrell said.

- Unusual gift -

At Christmas markets across Catalonia, caganers rub shoulders with "tios", a log with stick legs and a smiling face and red hat that is also a staple in many homes during the Christmas season.

Parents cover the log with a blanket and secretly place little gifts such as candies, nuts and small toys inside.

On Christmas Eve, or in some households on Christmas Day, children hit the blanket-covered log with sticks while encouraging him to "defecate" gifts.

"It is a bit scatological," Borrell said.

The log does not drop large gifts, which are traditionally considered to be brought by the Three Wise Men on January 6, the day of the Epiphany.

rs/ds/gv

CARNIVALE/TRANSGRESSION/THE FOOL

Edisciplinas.usp.br

https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4994029/mod_resource/content/1/Bakhtin%2C%20Mikhail%20_%20DENTITH%2C%20Simon_%20Bakhtinian%20thought%20_%20an%20introductory%20reader.pdf

Bakhtinian Thought : An Introductory Reader 

Mikhail Bakhtin, and the writers associated with him, have come to be recognised as writers of trail-blazing importance. Working in the.

CANADA
The coronavirus pandemic provides an opportunity to address homelessness

Timothy Martin, 

Doctoral Student, 

Faculty of Education, 

York University, Canada 

 

3/18/2021

As emergency shelters and encampments emerge in cities across North America, the public has been confronted with a more visible homeless population as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, this has led to several crusades aimed to — 

once again — hide this population from view.

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes A small homeless camp is shown outside a department store in Montréal, Que., on Jan. 23, 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

I research public responses to homelessness, and I believe that we can do better. Through education and dialogue, we can begin to recognize that we all want the same thing: the end of homelessness, safer neighbourhoods and adequate housing for all.

With several years of experience involved in coalition work alongside Ontario’s street-involved population, my doctoral research examines processes of mourning as ways to mobilize public understanding and togetherness.

Homelessness need not be viewed as an inevitable part of the fabric of North American society. It was not always omnipresent, and need not continue to be. It has only really become pervasive, and increasing since the 1980s in Canada. Research has argued that it is preventable.

Policies produce homelessness

Today’s housing crisis is a result of particular policies that are neither inevitable nor intractable. Yet, perhaps most unfortunately, the collective response has too often included blaming, criminalizing and stigmatizing people experiencing homelessness.

No longer can we covertly warehouse working-class people experiencing any mixture of bad luck, addictions, mental health challenges and trauma produced by historical oppressions that are difficult to define.

The spread of COVID-19 through the shelter system is well-documented, though it took a lawsuit for the City of Toronto to take action. And still, several Canadian cities threaten the evictions of the most vulnerable from encampments.

Read more: Cities must end homeless camp evictions during the coronavirus pandemic

Various communities made up of outreach workers, nurses and artists — such as the Encampment Support Network in Toronto — meet the material needs that city governments refuse to address. Meanwhile, “dehoused” citizens are shipped off to holding cells in hotels, shelters, community centres and empty apartment buildings, where many already struggling with mental illness or drug addictions are isolated and separated from essential harm reduction services. The results have been disastrous.

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward This homeless camp at Strathcona Park in Vancouver, B.C., developed after city officials shut down the homeless encampment at Oppenheimer Park in late 2020 in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

 BECAUSE POOR PEOPLE SHOULD NOT RESIDE FOR FREE IT UPSETS THE NEIGHBOURS WHO HAVE TO PAY RENT

Hope in coalitions

What is now emerging is the way in which certain affluent communities have veered toward age-old practices of NIMBYism, fear-mongering and unequal policing. Of course, this is a complex issue.

In a talk she gave at the West Coast Women’s Festival in 1981, social justice activist Bernice Johnson Reagon declared: “We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is ‘yours only’ — just for the people you want to be there.” Reagon, a lifelong civil rights activist and feminist, wrote and spoke about the desperate need to engage in coalition work, reminding her audience that coalition work “is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets.”

Medical sociologist Arthur Frank suggests a conceptual persona he calls the dialogical stoic that combines the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius with the dialogical responsibilities adhered to by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Stoicism is that ability each of us has to choose the best option amid what is sometimes a panoply of difficult circumstances. Frank explains the steadfast commitment to dialogue as a discovery of the suffering of the other, while existing “on the boundary with others.” Frank emphasizes, importantly, Bakhtin’s claim that people are unfinalizable — thus, there is no “last word.” There is no “these types of people.”

Collisions open up opportunities for coalitions. Will we seek to discover the other — their stories, their pain, their gifts — as, like always, we have the choice to do so? Or will we band together with those only like us? Will we stay home or take to the streets?
‘Feel the strain’

There has been some thoughtful writing about the teachable moments offered by the pandemic. Students returning to schools certainly have much to digest and teachers have a great deal of material to draw from as they resume in-person classes.

But what if we began to consider the teachable moments offered to all of us, even as these opportunities present themselves in public spaces? Cultural critic Henry Giroux describes this as public pedagogy, arguing that classroom learning needs to spill out into “social movements in the streets.”

These are certainly uncomfortable moments. But, as Reagon reminds us: “If you feel the strain, you may be doing some good work.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Read the original article.

Timothy Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

War is no joke, but in Ukraine, humor is resistance | Opinion

Menendez

Ana Menendez
Tue, March 22, 2022

Just before the Russian invasion of his country, Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov posted a sardonic alert on Twitter: “Kyiv/Kiev weather forecast: +5C, windy, chances of Russian attack 30%, feels like 95%.”

A few days later, he posted a photo of heavily armed soldiers by the side of the road and tagged it “Ukrainian mushroom pickers.” A photo of a bombed building on March 2 was labeled: “A school visit from Putin.”

This kind of ironic, often dark humor defines Ukraine’s culture of resistance, says the Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky.

“In Odessa, it helped people to cope during Soviet times,” Kaminsky wrote in a brief interview I conducted with him over email. “It helped to have a language of its own, with its own jokes and intonations, quotations and echoes not always understood by authorities.”

In a recent interview with Slate, Kaminsky pointed out that the most important holiday in Odessa isn’t Christmas, “It is April 1, April Fool’s Day, which we call Humorina. Thousands of people come to the street and celebrate what they call the day of kind humor. All of Ukraine has a sense of humor — think of the man who offered to tow the Russian tank which had run out of gas back to Russia.

“Humor is part of our resilience,” he said.

War is not funny. Suffering, exile and dispossession are nothing to laugh at. And, yet, humor has always formed part of resistance movements. Why? What role does laughter have to play in times of oppression? Is humor just a safety valve, or can it be the catalyst for real change?

Last year, these questions prompted me to propose a new course at Florida International University. I spent a year developing “Humor as Resistance” as a special topics course in our Writing and Rhetoric track, and this semester, 17 intrepid students enrolled. We were exploring the topic together, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine making a hero of the country’s comedian-turned-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“I don’t need a ride,” Zelenskyy reportedly told the Americans who wanted to evacuate him in the early days of the invasion. “I need ammunition.”

As the daughter of Cuban exiles, I well understand how humor makes life bearable. Living with despots, sometimes laughter is the only way to tell the truth. One of the first short stories I wrote, “In Cuba I was a German Shepherd,” revolves around a group of old men who tell jokes around the domino table to process the pain of exile. Later, I bonded with my Slovak husband, over jokes that made light of communist-era deprivations:

Man runs into a store. “I’d like a roll of toilet paper.”

Shopkeeper: “We’re out. We’re getting some next week.”

Man: “I can’t wait that long.”

Satire has a long history in the West, of course, going back to at least Aristophanes. But as a form of resistance, it has a particularly strong tradition in Eastern and Central Europe, pre-dating Soviet times. The Odessa-born Isaac Babel was the master of this style during the earlier Russian empire. And, for the Czechs, the great master of ironic resistance was “The Good Soldier Švejk,” the creation of anarchist Jaroslav Hašek, an inveterate hoaxer whose hero, under a cloak of naivete, pierces every cultural pomposity, particular those emanating from the military.

Many of these forms of humor hark back to the literary carnivalesque (embodied by Rabelais and elucidated by the critic Mikhail Bakhtin). The tradition remains alive in Europe, where the spirit infused a range of humorous resistance stunts from the Poles who resisted state propaganda by taking their TV sets out for a walk during the daily newscast to the Otpor movement in Serbia that organized a “birthday celebration” for Milošević complete with cake, card and gifts that included handcuffs and a one-way ticket to the Hague.

With notable exceptions (including Majken Jul Sorensen, whose work has guided my class) most traditional scholarly approaches to humor take a dim view of the power of laughter. Much of the earlier scholarly literature on humorous resistance is preoccupied with the question: “Is it just a way to blow off steam or can humor really change the rules of oppression?”

The question represents a false choice. Resilience is resistance. Beyond instrumentalist aims of humor, laughter is a philosophy, a lightness of life that was most famously captured, in our times, by the writer Milan Kundera who told Philip Roth in an interview: “I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor.”

I feel for my students. This generation has lived through a civil war in Syria (which has produced more than 5 million refugees) and two years of global pandemic only to now emerge at the cusp of a war that may yet engulf the world. In a broken world, how do we survive?

Violence is its own total vernacular. And we know that a joke has never stopped a bomb. But against the nihilistic darkness of Putin who has suggested “why do we need a world if Russia is not in it?” we can offer the life-affirming light of laughter. We can reject the dour humorlessness of history’s butchers. And we can go on resisting by embracing all the things that make life worth living: friendship, love, and humor, even in the face of extinction.

“Putin died on the 24th of February, 2022 at 5 am Kyiv time,” Kurkov wrote on March 6. “He doesn’t know this yet.”

Ana Menéndez is a writer who teaches at Florida International University. Her most recent novel, “The Apartment,” will be published by Counterpoint Press in April 2023.

Humor As Subversion

The Great Dictator by Charles Chaplin

POSTED BY: DONATO NDONGO 17TH DECEMBER 2018

Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo | 

George Orwell used to say that “jokes are small revolutions”. What self-respecting autocrat does not have his collection of jokes? Franco, Stalin, Hitler… Simple scape valve of fears and hopes, this modest revenge helps to cope with the absurdity that life can become.

Although jokes never overthrew any tyranny, they act as a cathartic tool, perhaps the only impious transgression that citizens can afford as a form of resistance. Although sometimes they entail risks for those who tell and listen to them.

Ana María Vigara Tauste, linguist at the Complutense University in Madrid who died in 2012, wrote in her study ‘Sex, politics and subversion. The popular joke in the Franco era ‘, that the jokes about Franco and his regime were a “form of humorous rejection of the effective pressure of the dictatorship”.

Sociologist Christie Davies, professor at the University of Reading, who passed away in 2017, compiled in ‘Jokes and Targets’ some of the most celebrated amusing stories in communist Europe. Although it minimized their practical effects – “they did not cause the fall of the Soviet Union,” he said – he considered them fundamental to erode the system, because of their sharp criticism of the political establishment; for him, they predicted the future of socialism better than analysts’ reports, because “they explored all the weaknesses of the system”. According to Davies, a joke is a thermometer and not a thermostat: it indicates what happens, without changing it; at best, it helps maintain morale. Censoring humor, more than a symptom of fear of the powerful, “is a way of saying: here I am, I control the situation!”

Philosopher and political scientist Tomás Várnagy, of the University of Buenos Aires, feels more optimistic about the role of humor against dictators. The examples collected in ‘Proletarians of all countries … Forgive us!’ undermined, in his opinion, the legitimacy of the political, economic and social system they embodied, highlighting the enormous gap between words and reality. He also remembers that, in a democracy, political humor, in its oral or graphic expression, has a very different tone: it serves to laugh at politicians who are not very clever, vain or self-centered, but rarely question the system.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donato Ndongo

Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo was born in Niefang, Equatorial Guinea, in 1950. Writer, journalist and political exile. He was correspondent and delegate of Spanish EFE agency in central Africa (1987-1995). Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Murcia (2000-2004). Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia (United States, 2005-2008). Regular lecturer on American, African and European universities. He is the author of the essays "History and tragedy of Equatorial Guinea" (1977), "Anthology of Guinean literature" (1984) and co-author of "Spain in Guinea" (1998) as well as of three novels translated into several languages. Mr Ndongo is a regular contributor for Spanish media such as El País, ABC, Mundo Negro and The Corner’s print magazine Consejeros, among others.

How workplaces are phasing out the tattoo stigma

WORKPLACE


More people are getting tattoos – so workplaces must be keeping up, right? 

Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
By Elizabeth Hotson 13th January 2020

“In the last few years, tattooing’s gone absolutely berserk.” That’s George Bone’s take on what he sees as the mainstream take-over of tattoos. Even at the London Tattoo Convention, which claims to be the biggest of its kind in Europe, Bone stands out. Once the UK’s most tattooed man, he is still in charge of his eponymous studio in London at 74 years of age. And he isn’t impressed with the direction things seem to be going.

“Tattooing’s turned into a fashion accessory, which I’m all against, because tattooing is not a fashion accessory, it’s a way of life,” he says. “I used to be different, outrageous, but now I’m normal. I’ll have to think of something else!”

And while Bone might be underestimating his power to shock – it’s not every day you see a senior citizen with extensive body art – tattooing is becoming widespread in some countries. When Berlin-based market research company Dalia Research surveyed 9,000 people in 18 countries in 2018, they found that 46% of US respondents had a tattoo, rising to 47% in Sweden and 48% in Italy. Research in 2010 by the Pew Research Centre found that 38% of US millennials had a tattoo (though 70% said their tattoos were not usually visible).

In many places, tattoos are no longer the preserve of rebels on society’s fringes. Take Anthony Fawkes, for example. An IT consultant for various investment banks, Fawkes is at the convention to be inked by Nikole Lowe, 47, who owns Good Times Tattoo in Shoreditch, East London. She’s working on an intricate dragon around Fawkes’ left arm which will eventually be a five-part design.


As the 2020 Tokyo Olympics near, Japan is forced to rethink 

its anti-tattoo tradition (Credit: Getty Images)

“I’m having the Shaolin fighting animals; a snake, tiger, dragon, leopard and crane,” says Fawkes, whose right arm is already inked with the tiger and snake. “Initially I thought I’d have to cover them up at work, but I think it’s so accepted now, the only reactions I get are complimentary.”

Fawkes estimates that the full design will cost around £12,000 ($15,000) altogether, depending on how long it takes. It’s a big chunk of money but then again, it’s not unusual for high earners in established professions to get inked. Senior figures in both business and politics have shelled out on tattoos, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Lachlan Murdoch, executive co-chairman of News Corp. So it naturally follows that if national leaders and captains of industry do it, getting inked is officially acceptable, right? Well, not quite.

Social stigma?

While some may feel comfortable showing off their body art, in the UK, US and many other countries it’s still legal for companies to have a ‘no tattoo’ policy. Some institutions like the US Army have detailed guidelines on what is and isn’t acceptable, while others grant exemptions for cultural reasons; in 2019 Air New Zealand dropped its ‘no visible tattoos’ policy partly because it had meant that traditional Maori markings had to be covered up, creating a backlash.

Study participants rated individuals without tattoos more favourably than those with tattoos

Specific cultural exceptions aside however, conservative corporate attitudes aren’t necessarily out of step with social attitudes. You might think that in countries where a high percentage of residents had tattoos, there would be a more relaxed view of body art, but that’s not always the case. Research conducted for the University of Northern Iowa by Kristin Broussard and Helen Harton reveals that even in the US, wearing your art as a sleeve can result in social stigma.

In their 2017 study, Broussard and Harton recruited two groups; one of students with an average age of 19 and another from the general US population with an average age of 42. Both groups were shown images of men and women with arm tattoos, then shown the same images but with the tattoos digitally erased. The groups were asked to rate the pictured individuals for 13 character and personality traits including honesty, success, trustworthiness and intelligence.

Apart from the students viewing women with tattoos as being ‘stronger and more independent’, participants in both age groups generally rated individuals with an arm tattoo less favourably than the image of the same individual without the tattoo. Broussard said she was surprised “on the surface” that the two groups held similar views. “A lot of 19-year-olds have tattoos, so you would think that they would be more OK with them,” she says.


Although 38% of US millennials have a tattoo, only 30%

 say they keep it visible (Credit: Mykola Romanovksy)

But Broussard says that even when people have tattoos themselves, they can hold negative views on the subject. “People tend to internalise stigma. It doesn’t really matter if you have that identity or you have that characteristic like owning a tattoo. If there’s a very strong societal stigma against it, you will internalise it and still believe it. It’s this attitude that it’s OK for me, but not for them,” she explains.

‘Scale of acceptability’

So even if you’re a CEO with a tattoo you might not hire someone who has one. Johnny C Taylor Jr, president and CEO at the US-based Society for Human Resource Management, which represents around 300,000 HR professionals globally, says there’s a sliding scale of acceptability when it comes to tattoos.

“In terms of most acceptable to least acceptable, if you can hide it, it’s OK. Then there’s the employers who say you can have a tattoo, but it shouldn’t be a distraction; it covers half your face or is something that might offend other people, like a scantily-clad woman on the biceps of a man. Lastly, there’s the category of just not acceptable, and that typically means when tattoos show up on your face and it’s something that no one can avoid looking at, [or] when the nature is truly controversial, a swastika for example.

“More conservative industries, for example financial services, banking and healthcare, are going to be more conservative when it comes to tattoos,” Taylor adds. “We find a lot more liberal policies in entertainment, even in corporate entertainment where people at the most senior levels might have a visible tattoo. Those individuals would never do that if they were senior executives at a bank.”

George Bone, once the UK’s most tattooed man, decries

 the current tattoo-as-fashion era (Credit: Getty Images)

And in some countries, the very idea of a tattooed CEO is beyond the pale: Japan in particular has a fraught relationship with the art form. Tattoos have long been associated with yakuza, the Japanese gang members who were known for having intricate designs as a show of wealth, masculinity and the ability to endure pain. Tattoos were against the law until 1948 and, 70 years later, they’re still not generally seen as socially acceptable. The 2019 Rugby World Cup and the upcoming Olympics in Tokyo this year have highlighted the issue; in a country where displaying tattoos in public is taboo, should athletes and spectators cover up their body art?

This conservatism frustrates Yutaro, who co-owns Red Point studio in London but is originally from Chiba, near Tokyo. Taking a break from inking a customer with Hakutaku, a monstrous creature from Japanese and Chinese mythology, Yutaro – who goes by one name – vents his irritation. “Tattooing is a cultural phenomenon; people decorate their body to feel a certain way, but people in Japan are having a hard time breaking out of their mindset,” he says.

Attitudes about tattoos are often as complex as the designs themselves, but for fans of permanent body art, it’s a trend that’s here to stay.

[PDF]

The Illustrated Man Ray Bradbury - Community Literacy Center

https://csuclc.files.wordpress.com › 2013/03 › illustrated-man-by-ray-brad...

Feb 15, 2001 - The Illustrated Man. Ray Bradbury. Contents. • Prologue: The Illustrated Man. • The Veldt. • Kaleidoscope. • The Other Foot. • The Highway.

The Illustrated Man

https://www.cbsd.org › Centricity › Domain › Illustrated Man Study Guides

PDF Full Text: http://greenhumanities.edublogs.org/files/2012/09/Bradbury-Illustrated-Man-1wytglb.pdf. DIRECTIONS ... The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

Leonard Nimoy reads Ray Bradbury's "Marionettes Inc."

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury - read by Leonard Nimoy

1. 1. 16:4

Jerry Goldsmith - The Illustrated Man: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1969) Limited Edition 2001

Posted By: Efgrapha

 

Date: 27 Feb 2019 17:53:55

Jerry Goldsmith - The Illustrated Man: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1969)
EAC | FLAC (Image) + cue.+log ~ 222 Mb | Mp3, CBR320 kbps ~ 132 Mb | Scans included
Soundtrack, Score | Label: Film Score Monthly | # FSM Vol. 4 No. 14 | 00:42:01

FSM returns to the treasures of the Warner Bros. archives (The Omega Man, The Towering Inferno) with a masterpiece by Jerry Goldsmith: The Illustrated Man. The film stars Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom in an adaptation of several short stories by Ray Bradbury, affording Goldsmith the crowning achievement of his work in the anthology format (CBS Radio Workshop, The Twilight Zone), as well as one of his most memorable and original works in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres.

The Illustrated Man uses Bradbury's tale of a man (Steiger) covered in elaborate skin illustrations by a timeless witch (Bloom) as the thread amongst three other adaptations of his short stories: "The Veldt," in which rebellious children use a futuristic holodeck-device against their parents in a cold, sterile future; "The Long Rain," featuring astronauts trying to survive on a planet of perpetual rain; and "The Last Night of the World," in which concerned parents struggle whether or not to spare their children the agony of the world's destruction. Goldsmith's score links the stories with a single, immediately accessible folk-like theme acting as a springboard for some of the wildest avant garde writing of his career, filled with imaginative woodwind and string counterpoint. Goldsmith called his approach "lyrical serialism" and nowhere else in his career has he been able to display his melodic side hand-in-hand with his atonal, 20th century side.

Most of Goldsmith's score is found in the film's wrap-around sequences, but he creates unique variations of his main theme for the interior stories. "The Veldt" features the first all-electronic cues of his career: cold, atonal tunes that foreshadow the city music from Logan's Run. There is little music in "The Long Rain" but Goldsmith creates fascinating tape-delay effects for the sequence's finale. And in "The Last Night of the World," Goldsmith expands his main theme into a beautiful, Renaissance-flavored development for alto recorder. Everything in the score culminates in the lengthy action climax, featuring devilish clarinet solos as if played by Mephistopheles himself.

The orchestral portions of The Illustrated Man were previously pirated in mono on a German CD—a horrendous production even by bootleg standards. FSM's premiere release features the complete score in stereo and in correct sequence, including the electronic cues and, most importantly, the female vocalise for the main and end titles. The comprehensive liner notes by Jeff Bond and Lukas Kendall cover the film's history, Goldsmith's involvement and the intricate musical details. The Illustrated Man is an absolute gem.

In his evocative score to a largely forgotten 1969 anthology film (based on a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury), Jerry Goldsmith weaves a simple, haunting melody through four permutations. Initially appearing in the "Main Title" as vocalese over orchestra, the melody wafts in as a sort of folk tune, utilized in a fairly traditional style for the film's framing segments. The three individual sections of the anthology then take the tune into more interesting variations, from the harsh electronics of the future in "The Veldt" (tracks seven through ten) to the quiet, woodwind-dominant feel of "The Last Night of the World" (tracks 14 and 15). The climactic "Frightened Willie" provides a terrific glimpse at Goldsmith's clever use of percussion and atonality to create a nightmarish soundscape. Throughout his career, Goldsmith was able to create scores that overshadowed the often workmanlike films they were composed to accompany. In the case of The Illustrated Man, even Ray Bradbury (according to the liner notes) felt that the music was better than the movie itself. The sound on this recording is superb, with the music (from 30-year-old masters) still feeling fresh and vital. This dynamic mix of Goldsmith's lyrical and serial compositional techniques is a solid addition to the composer's recorded legacy.

Neil Shurley, All Music Guide

~ Jerry Goldsmith at Allmusic
~ Jerry Goldsmith at Wiki

~ Film at IMDB
~ Film at Wiki

Tracklist:

01. Main Title (03:27)
02. The House (02:53)
03. The Illustrations (02:24)
04. Felicia (01:42)
05. The Rose (01:57)
06. The Lion (00:51)

"The Veldt"

07. 21st Century House (01:57)
08. Angry Child (01:50)
09. Quiet Evening (02:50)
10. Skin Illustrations (01:22)
11. The Rocket (01:19)

"The Long Rain"

12. The Rain (01:35)
13. The Sun Dome (01:25)

"The Last Night of the World"

14. Almost A Wife (06:06)
15. The Morning After (02:02)
16. The House Is Gone (03:45)
17. Frightened Willie (04:28)

CALL ME ISHMAEL
 

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale 

ORIGINAL 1851 EDITION

www.gasl.org › refbib › Melville__Moby_Dick

The Carnival of Herman Melville's Moby Dick

Pouyan Rezapour

This study aims to scrutinize the extent to which Bakhtin's theory of Carnivalesque is pertinent to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Published in 1851, the novel was taken by many critics as another simple adventure narrative in the same manner as Typee or Redburn, a romance of adventure illustrated by the author's two-year experience as a harpooner. But it turned out to be something quite new when it was reviewed. Melville bravely and cleverly touches upon the taboos of mid-nineteenth century American life, and the utopian freedom, community, and equality in the social domain of Bakhtin's carnival can be found in this novel. The overturning of popular culture, the mingling of the sacred with the profane and the sublime with the ridiculous, allow the voices to dethrone the authority of official culture. Certain actions and events in Moby Dick are nothing short of the renowned theory by the celebrated Russian linguist.