Gaping Mouth Research Articles

A Review on the Ksheerdhooma – a Unique Modality of Panchakarma

Abstract: ksheerdhooma is a sort of Swedana that falls under the umbrella of Nadi Sweda and Bashpa Swedana. A decoction of herbal medicines and cow's milk is blended and heated in this therapy. Steam vapours arise from the tube and are applied to the afflicted area of the patient's body or the entire body. It is commonly used to treat Jatrurdhwagata Vata Vyadhi. Swedana is also known as dhuma because steam is breathed via a gaping mouth. However, the process is similar to Swedana's. It can be classified as bashpa sweda, in which the face is fomented by vapours of the decoction. Ksheera dhuma with milk decoction vapours causes the body part to sweat, which opens the pores. This aids in the relief of inflammation and stiffness in the afflicted areas. This stimulates nerve endings and opens micro channels beneath the skin. Ksheera Dhooma is a Snigdha variant of Nadi Sweda, and its mode of action is determined by the drug used for therapy as well as procedural effects. Ksheerdhooma is an important swedana procedure, thus in this publication, we strive to establish a standard operative process and determine the efficacy of ksheerdhooma.

Medusa, trauma-informed

Medusa is a cadaverous head that has been disembodied by sword and malice. Her wide-open, fierce eyes glare over a gaping mouth with a wriggling red tongue, her black lips are crowned with sharp fangs and tusks, and she wears a mane of hissing snakes instead of hair. Medusa is a cephalic monster that emanates visceral terror, draining the life force out of any mortal onlooker by instantly turning them into stone. Even evil spirits stand back from her in fear. Her visage decorates artifacts, armoury, and sepulchral art from the Neolithic period onwards, and nowadays she is the face of a luxury fashion label. Legions of artists and literati have drawn inspiration from her. Dante places Medusa within the cycle of anger at the lower part of Hell, alongside the wrathful and the sullen. Cellini immortalised her in marble as the triumphant display of Perseus's kill, her severed head bearing an unnerving likeness to her slayer. The unconventional Caravaggio dared to give a lover's countenance to her legendary portrait. Psychoanalytic scholars have identified Medusa as a vagina dentata that threatens castration and should be killed. Others have examined her lethal gaze as the insignia of the precarity embedded in interpersonal relations. Among some feminist thinkers, Medusa stands for the archetype of the so-called monstrous feminine, an exposé of patriarchal narratives that transform non-subservient women into monsters. Of late, Medusa has appeared in the mental health discourse as a symbol of trauma. She is a powerful muse, irrespective of how she is interpreted. From prehistory to modernity, she keeps shape-shifting her way into immortality, nourishing the creativity and nightmares of generations.

KSHEERA DHOOMA: A TRADITIONAL PRACTICE WITH MULTIFOLD APPLICATION

Ksheera Dhooma is an effective and popular Ayurvedic procedure in which decoction of herbal medicines and cow’s milk are mixed, heated and the emitted vapours are directed through a rubber tube. The steam coming out of the tube is applied to the whole body or the affected part of the patient’s body. It is used in the treatment of facial paralysis, lock jaw and disorders of head and neck, with Vata Dosha imbalance. Though Ksheera Dhooma is considered as a type of Sweda, it is termed as Dhooma because steam is inhaled with gaping mouth. Ksheera Dhooma has multi-fold benefits like facilitating proper blood circulation of the body and relaxation of the mind, lubrication of the joints, relief from pain, spasms and stiffness of the muscles and joints. This study was performed with an aim to review the procedure of Ksheera Dhooma or Palpuka Swedam, understand the standard operating procedure and its efficacy.

The Animal Surfaces: The Gaping Mouth in Francis Bacon’s Work

Among the most popular motifs in Francis Bacon’s painting is the gaping mouth. In some works the expression appears to be a scream, while elsewhere the mouth is open, replete with upper and lower teeth, but beyond that it is unclear whether we are seeing a mouth that is screaming or making some other expression. This article conveys the importance of the mouth as a “lever” for prising apart the human. Through the open mouth Bacon exposes the human-animal and reduces the mouth—as an organ of speech, reason and humanity—to its primal and pre-linguistic function. In demonstrating this it will be argued that rather than focusing exclusively on the scream, more attention needs to be paid to the gaping mouth and its significance in Bacon’s œuvre.

The Panacousticon: by way of echo to Freddie Rokem

The impulse for this essay came about as a direct reaction to reading Freddie Rokem’s contribution in Volume 1 of this journal. Whereas Rokem refers to eavesdropping scenes in plays and philosophical discourse, I shall examine this act within the context of an acoustic mechanical theatre invented by philosopher Athanasius Kircher in the 1600s.The Panacousticon was a system of spiral-shaped funnels hidden within walls that were operated as amplifiers, connecting public spaces to the eavesdropper via ‘talking heads’ or stone busts. An audience witnessing the deeds of Polonius or Orgon in classical theatre was replaced by an auditor of unseen ‘performers’ in the act of conversing. The ‘closet’ in Hamlet was replaced by a stone bust with gaping mouth. Furthermore, Rokem’s discussion of the supernatural as an eavesdropping presence in the same play, finds an echo in Kircher’s acoustic theatre, where the talking busts began to speak as people passed by, creating an uncanny mise-en-scèneof omnipresence.Whilst Kircher performed his conceptual creations through theatrical techniques, his actor-audience was subject to the sonic address of an unknown source. With passing references to natural magic, ventriloquism and automata I shall discuss the convergences that occur between these two perspectives of performer / audience.

The Taste of the Eye and the Sight of the Tongue: the Relations between Sight and Taste in Early Modern Europe

This article examines the articulation between the senses of taste and sight through the representations of their organs, the tongue and the eye, in early modern Europe. The relationship between taste and sight first brings to mind gastronomical aesthetics, and the part played by the eye in the relish of beautifully presented dishes. The first part of this article is therefore devoted to exploring the taste of the eye (or the foretaste of sight) and highlights the harmony of taste and sight in early modern cuisine. However, the forms of reciprocity between taste and sight cannot be reduced to the sole figure of culinary aesthetics, which tends to blur the other multiple modalities that this sensorial association could reveal. The second part, the sight of the tongue (or the invisibility of taste), thus examines more complex layers of the relationship between the sense of sight and the taste organ, through a study of the representations of the tongue and of the gaping mouth in early modern visual culture. Drawing on early modern textual and iconographic resources and exploring: cookbooks; physiognomic works; conduct books; and also engravings and paintings related to the culinary arts, the seven deadly sins, and representations of madness and the fool in early modern visual culture, this essay argues that examining the representations of the sense organs is a suggestive way to explore the relationship between the senses.

Najraniji i rani radovi kipara Rudolfa Valdeca

Ivan Rendić rođen je 27. kolovoza 1849. u Imotskom. Odgajan je u vrlo siromašnom okruženju bračkih kamenoloma, a u svojoj najranijoj dobi otkriva dar za kiparstvo i crtanje. Nakon osnovnog školovanja naobrazbu nastavlja u Trstu kod drvorezbara Giovannia Moscota, a potom na Akademiji u Veneciji, gdje je, kao vrlo talentiran student, dobivao mnoge pohvale. Po završetku studija usavršava se u Firenzi, kod tadašnjega glasovitog majstora Giovanni Duprea. Nakon studija živi i radi u Zagrebu, no zbog pomanjkanja narudžaba i katastrofalnoga potresa 9.12.1880. koji razara njegov atelier u Zagrebu, odlučuje se s obitelji preseliti u bogatiji i kiparskim narudžbama skloniji Trst u kojem boravi i radi u dva navrata i to od 1880. do 1899. i 1902. do 1921. Ivan Rendić je bio posljednji umjetnik - putnik koji je poput srednjovjekovnih kipara stvarao svoj opus iz slijeda putovanja, od mjesta do mjesta, nudeći klesarske usluge. Tako je stvorio raznolika, kreativna djela po svim većim gradskim grobljima duž naše obale i unutrašnjosti. Upravo ta razasutost karakterizira njegovu jedinstvenu poetiku koja se iščitava na svakom njegovom spomeniku. Lirski i realno obrađeni motivi, koji kao da su zaleđeni u trenutku svojih priča, uvijek više oblikovani nego klesani u za to im predviđenim arhitektonskim okvirima, obrađenim do najmanjih pojedinosti, čine ga iznimnim umjetnikom. Riječki će uglednici - investitori koristeći rad što riječkih, a što inozemnih graditelja angažiranih na projektiranju i gradnji njihovih investicija, uzimati iste i kao projektante svojih vječnih počivališta. Osim arhitekata za njihovu gradnju, uposlit će i kipare koji su u Rijeci bili u prolazu, poput Ivana Rendića iz Trsta. Blizina i brojni kontakti koji su se iz Trsta odvijali prema Rijeci, potaknut će 1882. suradnju Ivana Rendića s brojnim riječkim poduzetnicima koja je započela s veleposjednikom Josipom Gorupom, a nastavila se sa obitelji Devet 1885., sa obitelji Gelletich-Bartolich-Nicolaides 1886., sa obitelji Ploech 1887., sa obitelji Frana Pilepića 1890, sa obitelji Antonia Stiglicha 1891., sa obitelji Antuna Bakarčića, obitelji Copaitich- Battaglia i Manasteriotti 1892., te Marijom Schalek i udovicom Tonhausera 1896. Godine 1900. podiže nadgrobni spomenik dr.Stanislavu Dell'Asti-Mohović, zatim Giovanniju Fumi 1902., Đuri Ružiću, Andreji Antiću i obitelji Haramija 1905., Ivanu Tomašiću 1907., obitelji Cozulich de Pecine 1914. te posljednji, Ivanu Smokvini 1915.Svi ti nadgrobni spomenici, mauzoleji ili grobne kapele na sebi nose svoje vlastitosti, ukazujući na Rendićevu neiscrpnu energiju i marljivost, trenutak u njegovom stvaralaštvu,njegovu individualnost. Njegove skulpture i forme su pomno prostudirane. Bio je vješt imitator prirode. Imao je izvrstan osjećaj za detalje koje je predočavao usvojenom visokom tehničkom vještinom obrade materijala. No nažalost njegova likovna čistoća i izražajnost ponekad se znala gubiti u preobilnim količinama i bogatstvu ukrasa i detalja, samo u želji da da još više.Njegovi spomenici u stanju u kojem su danas govore o zaboravu i devastaciji. Govore o zaboravljenom umjetniku čija djela i u ovakvom stanju još uvijek plijene pozornost svojom ljepotom. Ukoliko bismo ova njegova kiparska ostvarenja izdvojili u jedan drugačiji prostor od onoga u kojem se nalaze, vjerujem da bismo onda, u tom novom okruženju, znali uživati u profinjenosti njegove obrade motiva, u njihovoj ljepoti, u realnostima scena obrađenih do najmanjih detalja. Ovako, možda iz razloga što se ova njegova djela nalaze na mjestima gdje jesu, ne dobivaju zasluženu pozornost javnosti. Utonuvši u u zaborav, izgubljene monumentalnosti počinjenim oštećenjima, njegovi će spomenici još jednom ukazati na to kako ljudska nebriga zna ponekad prijeći granicu ljudskoga razuma u kojoj onda vrijeme upleće svoje prste pridonoseći mogućnosti da se nečega možemo samo prisjetiti.

The monster in the garden: the grotesque, the gigantic, and the monstrous in Renaissance landscape design

The monstrous is an instance of the marvelous in reverse, but it is, nonetheless, an instance of the marvelous. Georges Canguilhem Mikhail Bakhtin has suggested that the image of the gaping mouth i...

Kamp (review)

Reviewed by: Kamp James M. Cherry Kamp. Hotel Modern. 9th International Toy Theater Festival, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY. 3 June 2010. In Kamp, a production by Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern, a gigantic scale model of Auschwitz covered the floor of St. Ann's Warehouse, an avantgarde performance space in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. Measuring 36 × 33 feet, the set was meticulously rendered, complete with rows of barracks, crematoria, and a sign that declares "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free). Fenced in by barbed wire and guard towers, 3,000 three-inch-tall figures of prisoners and guards "performed" a series of vignettes that depicted the debasement and viciousness of the Holocaust in a harrowing and visually arresting manner. The three members of [End Page 109] Hotel Modern, Pauline Kalker, Arlene Hoornweg, and Herman Helle, dressed in muted earth-tones, manipulated the figures around the set, depicting a day in the life of Auschwitz. Guided by hands, by control sticks, and by wire, prisoners filled bags with stone, ate soup from makeshift bowls, and were sent to die in gas chambers. Often acting as documentary filmmakers, the three performers captured the action as it unfolded using small handheld digital cameras. These images were then projected in real time on the rear wall of the theatre. No one spoke in the piece, and no words were needed. Through innovative use of digital technology and puppetry, Kamp evoked the gross absurdities and terrors of the Holocaust. It was an hour-long tour of hell in miniature. Click for larger view View full resolution A scene from Hotel Modern's Kamp. (Photo: BZA Photo.) Structurally, Kamp alternated sequences in which the puppeteers moved within the set, preparing the figures for the next scene, with the scenes themselves. Importantly, there were no individual characters in Kamp. There was no real story-arc outside of the progression of day to night, no "girl in a red coat" with whom to empathize, as in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List. Without any characters with whom to connect, the audience was forced to consider the vast scope of the horror. Created by troupe member Helle, the crudely fashioned figures who occupied the space of the camp were made of moldable plasticine and paint. With holes for eyes, a nub for a nose, and a gaping mouth, their doughy faces recalled Edvard Munch's iconic The Scream. Ultimately ambiguous in affect, these faces suggested bewilderment, anger, alarm, exertion, desperation, or pain depending on the context. That the very same faces were to be found on the SS officers suggested, paradoxically, both a common humanity despite the circumstances, and also how the mechanization of death rendered everyone inhuman. The performers' manipulations of the figures worked in precise choreography with the cameras, giving a sense of what Kalker, one of the founders of Hotel Modern, has termed a "live animation film onstage." The audience, seated at a distance from the tiny figures, viewed the action in tight close-ups. Such apparent proximity to the action—in a space where death is omnipresent—created a sense of perpetual dread. Death seemed always to be lurking just off-screen. Interactions between puppeteer and figure often created meaningful symbolism. In a vignette at the beginning of the piece, four prisoners were hanged at a tiny gallows in the middle of the camp. Slowly, almost tenderly, a puppeteer placed small boxes under the gallows. Then the puppeteer placed the heads of figures in the nooses. Finally, the hand of a puppeteer reached over, in view of the camera and the audience, and pulled each block away one at a time. The hand appeared so large onscreen that it seemed almost God-like in scope, a parody of Michelangelo's The Creation of Man. The camera shot framed the dangling figure, an object seeming to struggle and jerk, but eventually becoming still. This was repeated over and over until finally the camera panned away to reveal a group of thirty more prisoner figures that looked as if they were watching the event. Their gaping mouths seemed to be reacting to the execution. The scene ended with the camera operator...

Confessions of a Pseudo-Nature Writer

Confessions of a Pseudo-Nature Writer Amber Flora Thomas (bio) I am standing at the corner of 30th and Madison Avenue in New York City in October 2006. I hold a cup of hot coffee to my nose and inhale deeply, a yawn escaping before I can press a polite hand over my gaping mouth. I left my wintery home in Fairbanks, Alaska, only yesterday, a seventeen hour journey from which I have not recovered, though I am pleased to be a guest reader at the 10th Anniversary Celebration for the Cave Canem Foundation. I have been thinking about the poems I will read tonight, when my attention is drawn toward a drainage grill at the curb, a graceful piece of orange and black trash floating up and forward easily. Someone next to me says, “Oh, a butterfly,” and then I see the detailed lining of black which masks each wing in an eye: a monarch. It is hard for me to believe in the middle of rushing traffic this butterfly finds something of interest worth lingering for, the fraud of some woman’s flowery perfume, perhaps? I start across 30th and the monarch, too, is headed for the west side of the street; he rises and falls between legs, purses, and shopping bags; other people gaze with admiration at the novelty of this creature in an otherwise human-congested intersection. Coffee sloshes out of the plastic lid and I suck at the foam and milky brown richness. Luck permeates my being; the butterfly must be a sign of good things to come. He makes his way to the window of a Starbuck’s café and hovers for a moment, before turning away. In the updraft of a man tucking earphones into a pocket, he is almost struck by a skateboard under a teenager’s arm. I follow him for half a block and decide I don’t want to see him done in by a shoe or flung haphazardly against a taxi’s windshield. Hoping he will find his way to Central Park or some haven of trees and less human chaos, I head back towards my room at the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th to call home and check on my house and pets. I have made my mind up to read all new poems at the celebration tonight. I hope my friends and colleagues will not be disappointed with another series of poems primarily focused in nature, specifically a series of poems about watching my father butcher rabbits as a child. I hope no one will be disappointed that yet again my poems do not deal explicitly with race and ethnicity. I suddenly feel like a cheat among so many poets making important new advances in the African American literature. These are the poets and writers defining black experience for a new generation of readers and critics. I am still conflicted and angry about my mixed heritage; the constant questions I ask myself about which part of me belongs to which history and race. I will at least read a poem about watching a swarm of bees attack two white men in the woods when I was sixteen. This is an important poem I finished over the summer at the Cave Canem retreat while sitting under a gazebo and watching two cardinals tussle in a tree. I have wanted to write about growing up in rural northern California as a black [End Page 778] person of mixed heritage. Maybe this poem says enough about how I feel about my race: my father African American Ojibwa and Jewish, and my mother Irish German. I was lonely in the confusion of my skin color. I felt the world was dangerous, and the woods were no place for a girl like me, though I went into the woods each chance I got and found some magic worth the risk. Yes, I will read this poem to show that I do know how to talk about my experience from the context of racial identity. I am not really a nature writer, merely a child of rural landscapes, farm animals, and an endless parade of pets. The human infiltrates my poems of...

Drinking from the Water-Clock: Time and Speech in Imperial Rome

This article traces a representational history of the judicial clepsydra (water-clock) in early imperial Rome. While the topic of time has recently flourished in Roman studies, there has been relatively little focus on short-term and diurnal temporality as opposed to the time schemes of the annual calendar and broader history. The article offers a Roman complement to the study of democratic Athens in the 1996 essay "A Schedule of Boundaries" by Danielle Allen, and builds on the essay, "For Whom the Clock Drips," by Andrew Riggsby, with which it is co-published in this volume. Riggsby argues that the clepsydra offered an impersonal manifestation of imperial time specific to the period of the early principate, and shows how this aspect of the clepsydra is reflected in the letters of Pliny the Younger. This article contextualizes Pliny within the history of changing time limits in the early imperial courts, and compares the attitudes of Pliny with allusions to the clepsydra in Martial's epigrams. There are occasional mentions of time limits enforced by clepsydrae in Ciceronian oratory, but a self-conscious discourse on such limits, and on the role of the clepsydra in enforcing them, is not evident until the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Tacitus. There the opposing speakers Aper and Maternus are in agreement about the encroachment of time limits, and of limits on the number of clepsydrae (approximately 15-minute units) allowed to speakers, especially in the context of the centumviral courts. But while Aper celebrates this as in keeping with a new aesthetics of oratorical brevity, Maternus sees it as a symptom of the loss of republican "times"-in the sense both of historical time and of less restrictive time keeping conventions. These points of view are each echoed in the various mentions of clepsydrae in Pliny and Martial. Pliny, in accounts of his activities as both orator and judge ( Ep. 1.20, 1.23, 2.11, 6.2), variously celebrates his ability to shield himself from the impositions of the clepsydra, and advertises the liberality with which he has given time to speakers or has received capacious clepsydrae from the emperor Trajan. Martial, however, in two epigrams mocking speakers who exhibit excessive greed for clepsydrae and thus try the patience of audiences in the courtroom (6.35, 8.7), aligns the time restricting power of the clepsydra with the brevitas aesthetic of his epigrams-his poems in effect becoming clepsydrae through which he can appropriate time from his opponents. (Martial's clepsydra poems can also be interestingly juxtaposed with an epigram by the emperor Trajan [ Anth. Graec. 11.418 Beckby] that mocks someone by comparing his nose and gaping mouth to the gnomon and face of a sundial.) These diametrically opposed attitudes toward the clepsydra are in keeping with the time economies of Pliny's letters and Martial's epigrams more generally, the one celebrating an overflow and free exchange of time and seeing in this the possibility of retrieving republican times, the other searching for ways to steal or preserve time from the incursions of others, especially through performances of epigrammatic brevity.

Daughter’s Bedside Vigil

Daughter’s Bedside Vigil

Drips, Scratches, and Strokes: The New Language of Expressionism from Edvard Munch to Willem de Kooning

Whether on oddly-shaped pillows, shrieking dolls, or basic coffee mugs, the emaciated protagonist with a gaping mouth and the swirling landscape of Edvard Munch's <em>The Scream </em>is one of today's most widespread images. Though Munch died just as abstract expressionism was being born, his emphasis on the highly personal and the unconscious through abstraction, brushwork, and intensely evocative colors link him closely to this important American art movement. Through the specific comparison of the oeuvre of Munch and the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, this essay will examine how and why the Norwegian painter became known as the "father of expressionism" in the history of art. <em>The Scream</em> is not central to this discussion, but instead will be looked at in conjunction with other early paintings and prints, such as <em>The Sick Child</em> and <em>The Kiss. </em>These works and others reveal Munch's artistics philosophy and technique and allow us to draw broader connections to future movements, neo-dadaism and expressionism among them.

The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe

Series Editor's Preface, Elinor Shaffer Acknowledgements List of Contributors Preface: Virginia Woolf's Crossings, Mary Ann Caws Timeline: European Reception of Virginia Woolf, Paul Barnaby Abbreviations Introduction, Nicola Luckhurst French 1. Virginia Woolf Among Writers and Critics: The French Intellectual Scene, Pierre-Eric Villeneuve 2. The French Reception of Virginia Woolf: An 'Etat Present' of 'Etudes Woolfiennes', Carole Rodier 3. Translating Virginia Woolf into French, Francoise Pellan 4. A Virginia Woolf, with a French Twist, Mary Ann Caws German 5. The German Reception and Criticism of Virginia Woolf: A Survey of Phases and Trends in the Twentieth Century, Ansgar and Vera Nunning 6. Installing Modernism: The Reception of Virginia Woolf in the German Democratic Republic, Wolfgang Wicht Polish 7. From Silence to a Polyphony of Voices: Virginia Woolf's Reception in Poland, Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga Swedish 8. 'Literature is no one's private ground': The Critical and Political Reception of Virginia Woolf in Sweden, Catherine Sandbach-Dahlstrom Danish 9. Waves of Influence: The Danish Reception of Virginia Woolf, Ida Klitgard Greek 10. 'The Country of the Moon' and the Woman of 'Interior Monologue': Virginia Woolf in Greece, Katerina K. Kitsi-Mitakou Italian 11. The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Italy, Sergio Perosa Spanish 12. 'A gaping mouth, but no words': Virginia Woolf Enters the Land of Butterflies, Laura Lojo Rodriguez 13. The Emerging Voice: A Review of Spanish Scholarship on Virginia Woolf, Alberto Lazaro 14. Virginia Woolf and the Search for Symbolic Mothers in Modern Spanish Fiction: The Case of Tres Mujeres, Maria Jose Gamez Fuentes Galician 15. 'A fastness of their own': The Galician Reception of Virginia Woolf, Manuela Palacios Catalan 16. Modernism, Nationalism and Feminism: Representations of Virginia Woolf in Catalonia, Jacqueline A. Hurtley Portuguese. 17. The Portuguese Reception of Virginia Woolf, Graca Abranches History of Publishing 18. The European Dimensions of the Hogarth Press, Laura Marcus Bibliography Index.

Allergic rhinitis in children : diagnosis and management strategies.

The incidence of allergic rhinitis has been increasing for the last few decades, in keeping with the rising incidence of atopy worldwide. Allergic rhinitis has a prevalence of up to 40% in children, although it frequently goes unrecognized and untreated. This can have enormous negative consequences, particularly in children, since it is associated with numerous complications and comorbidities that have a significant health impact on quality of life. In fact, allergic rhinitis is considered to be a risk factor for asthma. There are numerous signs of allergic rhinitis, particularly in children, that can alert an observant clinician to its presence. Children with severe allergic rhinitis often have facial manifestations of itching and obstructed breathing, including a gaping mouth, chapped lips, evidence of sleep deprivation, a long face, dental malloclusions, and the allergic shiner, allergic salute, or allergic crease. The medical history is extremely important as it can reveal information regarding a family history of atopy and the progression of atopy in the child. It is also important to identify the specific triggers of allergic rhinitis, because one of the keys to successful management is the avoidance of triggers. A tripartite treatment strategy that embraces environmental control, immunotherapy, and pharmacologic treatment is the most comprehensive approach. Immunotherapy has come to be viewed as potentially prophylactic, capable of altering the course of allergic rhinitis. The most recent guidelines for the management of allergic rhinitis issued by the WHO recommend a tiered approach that integrates diagnosis and treatment, in which allergic rhinitis is subclassified both by frequency, as either intermittent or persistent, and by severity, as either mild or moderate to severe. Oral or topical antihistamines and intranasal corticosteroids are the mainstay of pharmacologic therapy for allergic rhinitis, depending upon its severity, and several agents have been approved for use in children aged 5 years old and younger.

Feeling the Force of Certainty: The Divine Science, Newtonianism, and Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

F OR over two centuries, Jonathan Edwards's image of a loathsome spider dangling pitilessly over the gaping mouth of hell has defined Puritan terror preaching in the American cultural imagination. The precariousness associated with that image-and with countless others of falling, sliding, hanging-has led critic after critic to identify the terror of in the Hands of an Angry as the emotional product of uncertainty. But to understand the images in this way is to miss the full force of their power, for Edwards's intellectual achievement in Sinners rests not simply in his searing images of hellfire and the insecurity they elicit but also in his ability to draw upon the new science to infuse the old religion with an equally terrifying account of the logic of certainty. In other words, Edwards, master rhetorician that he was, coupled the certainty and universality of gravity's action upon objects in the physical world with the certainty and universality of unregenerate man's utter depravity and dependence on God in the metaphysical world. Sinners betrays an intricate and heretofore understudied cooperation among scriptural revelation, sermonic form (the designated structure of biblical citation, doctrine, and application), and Newtonian mechanics, particularly the notion of uni-

Deception by helpers in cooperatively breeding white-winged choughs and its experimental manipulation

White-winged choughs (Corcorax melanorhamphos) are obligate cooperative breeders, living in groups which may contain up to 20 birds. Although breeding is dominated by a single pair, all birds contribute to rearing young, including the provisioning of nestlings. However, some birds which have carried food to the nest, even to the point of placing the food in the gaping mouth of a nestling, consume the food themselves rather than provision the nestlings. Birds which fail to feed nestlings are typically young, and are only likely to fail to deliver food when they cannot be observed by other group members. Birds which have just failed to deliver food are more likely to engage in alternative helping behaviours such as allopreening the nestlings than are helpers which have just delivered food in the conventional manner. Failure to deliver food is almost eliminated when foraging constraints are experimentally reduced by supplemental feeding of the group. Collectively these observations suggest that young white-winged choughs act deceptively by simulating helping behaviours without sacrificing food supplies.

Serendipity: A Little Note on Du Fu Texts in the Jin

T'ang Studies 14 (1996) Serendipity: A Little Note on Du Fu Texts in the Jin STEPHEN H. WEST UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY An explanatory note: Qiao Ji ~tf, the noted Yuan lyricist, is credited with the following phrase: There is a lIprescribed method" for writing musical lyrics, 1 too. It is summarized in the six words, Ilphoenix head, pig stomach, leopard tail." Generally, the beginning needs to be stunningly beautiful , the middle wants to be vast and mighty, and the ending needs to ring resoundingly. While Iwould have preferred a more linear argument of the order this quote stipulates, Iam afraid that the material itself has pushed this piece in the direction of the traditional biji ~IUc, or scholar's notes, a form of localized discursive comment, for which Ibeg the reader's indulgence. I. Through the centuries, the tangled history of Du Fu's poetic collection has created a Gordian corpus of textual commentary. One has only to consider William Hung's and Zhou Caiquan's work on the texts of this great writer to realize how forgery, malattribution, and willful attempts to appropriate the authority of this poetic sage's voice has consternated the most philologically and bibliographically astute textual critics.2 Fortunately, like Alexander's sword, serendipity can sometimes slice through the snarl of commentary and present a clearer picture of something obscured by complexity from . common VIew. 1 Qiao Ji means the qu lyric when he uses the term yuefu ~Jf.f. 2 William Hung, ed., Dushi yinde tf:~ij 11*,Harvard- Yenching Index Series, Supplement no. 17 (rpt. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1984; hereafter abbreviated DSYD); Zhou Caiquan }j!\H~~, Duji ,shulu (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986, hereafter abbreviated DJSL). 49 West: Du Fu Texts in the lin Such is the case with the first passage from Wang Ruoxu's (11741243 ) Hunan shihua (The Poetry Talks of the Dynastic Survivor from South of the Huto River), in which Wang set out not only to discuss Du Fu, but to describe the critical acumen of Wang's mentor and uncle, Zhou Ang (ca. 1140-1213).3The passage in question reads: The text, The Poetry of Du Fu, Annotated by a Thousand Scholars (Qianjia zhu Du shi =f~ritl:t±~), passed down through the generations , has among its poems some forty or more pieces called lInewly added." My uncle, Zhou [Ang] Deqing ~qJl(J, once made judicious comments about these pieces, saying, Only the poems "Recalling Antiquity on Qutang" (Qutang huai gu m#Mtft1!:r),4 liTheBallad of the Hawk with the Gaping Mouth" (Yahu xing ~efT),s "A Ballad of Parting 's Regret: Sending Off Liu Puye" (Song Liu Puye xibie xing i!jVJ~!}t11UjUrr)6 are without a doubt those of Du Fu. None of the rest are true texts? They are probably crea3 See Yuan Haowen 7CtlTrJJ, Zhongzhou ji (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), 166, and Liu Qi ~H~, Guiqian zhi (Beijing:Zhonghua shuju, 1983),13for biographical information on Zhou Ang. Dates for his life are based on information that he passed his examination at 21 sui during the beginning of the Zhending reignperiod and that he died with King Weishao's southern campaign from Yanjing in 1212-13. 4 All citations to Du Fu's poetry are to Dushi xiangzhu t±~~~, collated by Qiu Zhaoao ffL:JI:.B, 5 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979); hereafter abbreviated DSXZ),here V.21.1931(i.e.,volume 5,juan 21, p. 1931).All poems have also been checked against the more standard Harvard-Yenching Index edition of Jiujia zhu Du shi 1L*tl:t±~,found in DSYD,here 489.12. 5 DSXZIV.18.1558;this poem is not found in DSYD. 6 This poem is not included in DSYD,but can be found under the title "Sending Off Liu Puye: The Ballad of Parting's Regret" in DSXZV.22.2004-5.The editors of the modem edition of the Hunan shihua have misunderstood this line to refer to two poems and therefore read the line as: "Sending Off Liu Puye" and "The Ballad of Parting's Regret" m~Ufi'. 7 One text, instead of ;R*, reads *Ji, "basically true," i.e., true to the basic style...

The Great Baptism

THERE IS A TIME in my memory when my age is not measured in years. Before the or the suffices. Days convert to water marks, distances calculated from the lapping surface of the lake to the roofs of houses. The flood must have come when I was nine. I've determined this by the watery memory of my possessions washing out my upstairs window?my birthday tea set bobbed by and Tiny Tears reached for me as I was dragged by my father toward the chimney. And then, of course, there are the people that I knew before the flood who I would never see again. For months Mother called the flood the Great Baptism because, at first, it put us on the path to a better life. My own baptism happened in the church before the flood, but I was never better for it. Eternal Life Baptist Church was saved from total destruction by the slope of the earth, but after the flood, when most of the survivors moved away and businesses shut down, the church followed. Last summer I made the trip back to see what was left. Eternal Life Baptist still stood. When I pried open its rotted walnut doors I could still hear the echoing microphone, the gallant choir, and the gentle sloshing of water. Not water from the flood, but baptismal water. Yet when I think of how baptism feels, it's something like a flood. Or like falling off a dock with a dress on, the skirt billowing up around you as you sink. There comes an instant when you must choose whether you will punch against the preacher or simply lean back and trust the weight of his hand, strapped across your gaping mouth, blocking the water. When my mother was twelve, she was baptized in a river. On the bank she stood in starched white lace, orange mud oozing around her ankles, until she was led into the water by the preacher in his soggy suit. She promised herself an indoor ceremony for me. Perhaps she chose Eternal Life simply because of its baptistry that loomed like a large fish tank implanted in the wall high above where the choir stood. Facing the choir, we sat in stiff pine pews, our necks hinged back, lulled by our aquarium view. In a blue sea of organ chords we drifted with the waves on the other side of the glass and watched the preacher push the heads under, watched the elegant legs float up. Behind ripples and splashes swayed swirling aqua tile. Above the water line, the tile burst into a bright

Faces as releasers of contagious yawning: An approach to face detection using normal human subjects

The yawn-evoking potency of variations in a 5-min series of 30 videotaped repetitions of a yawning face were compared with each other and with a series of 30 videotaped smiles to determine the ethological releasing stimulus for the fixed-action pattern of yawning and to understand the more general process of face detection. Animate video images of yawning faces in several axial orientations evoked yawns in more subjects than did featureless or smiling faces, and no single feature, such as a gaping mouth, was necessary to evoke yawns. The yawn recognition mechanism is neither axially specific nor triggered by an isolated facial feature.