Handsome Man Research Articles

Wings

Wings Park Hyoung-Su (bio) Translated by Sora Kim-Russell (bio) When my friend K of the beautiful bald head died, this evil-looking hag showed up at the funeral with her kid in tow and put up a big front, wailing about how she was O’s mistress and therefore deserved to be treated with respect by his surviving family, so I approached her carefully and took her by the arm and told her this was not the funeral for the great O, where even mistresses were welcome, but the funeral of my friend K of the beautiful bald head, and though he was bald, he was barely thirty and a bachelor, whereupon the old hag glared at me as if to say “We’ll see about that,” then polished off a bowl of yukkaejang and slipped out. Anyway, this has nothing to do with any of that, but I can see into the future. The future that I will talk about from here on out takes place 170 years from now, that is, when all the rational people got the heck out of the solar system and the earth became a hotbed of radioactivity, cockroaches, and Freemasons: the year 2175. Humankind failed to protect the earth and, having learned from that failure, was mucking up the universe at a ferocious pace. How that was possible, I have no idea. I can observe their behavior, but I do not understand their science. The majority of their generation was in the same situation. Science has always been an art reserved for the few. I watch them from Planet Earth, October 2005 a.d., 170 years before their lives. As it is fall, the sky is blue and the occasional [End Page 121] passing breeze carries the scent of dried filefish being roasted. Right now, it is not quite four in the afternoon. I always grow bored around this time. Not lonely, not lonesome, not alone. Just bored. Bored, so I sit at my desk. I close my eyes and ponder as much time as I want. The hag from K’s funeral keeps trying to leap out at me, but she’s come to the wrong place. Or maybe she was just really jonesing for some yukkaejang. I manage to shove her away and get back to pondering time. That is how I see 170 years into the future. What? Am I weird for saying I can see the future? It’s not that extraordinary. Anyone can travel to any place and any time if they want to. I mean, if they really, desperately want to. You close your eyes and spread your arms, desperately. What I see is an eighty-four-year-old woman who works in a basic education facility on a colonized planet in the outer reaches of the universe. It’s not my fault she’s so old. Let’s turn our eyes for a moment from the distant future to the more recent past. The eighty-four-year-old woman, obviously, was born eighty-four years earlier. Her father was a handsome man committed to a life of bachelorhood, and he worked as a programmer for the governing council on an artificial sun. One day, he returned home and decided to end his life. He leisurely swallowed some pills and lay down. Just then, a horny yogurt delivery woman came by and raped him as he lay dying, a spaced-out look on his face. At the moment of his death, an extraordinary number of tadpoles burst forth from the tip of his penis. One of those tadpoles became this future woman. The dazzling development of organs grown for transplant was not good for lactobacillus. Yogurt was rendered a superfluous part of the human diet, and the woman’s mother, who had staked her life on yogurt sales, likewise was reduced to rags. When the girl turned six, her mother sent her away to a poorhouse on the distant rice planet. High-density water covered twenty percent of the surface of that tiny planet, and the air was thick with the scent of moss. The three moons that hung in the sky were, because of...

Chutes & Ladders: Middle Class in Motion

Chutes & Ladders: Middle Class in Motion

He is risen! A play based on Acts 1:1-12

This play was written in response to a request to conduct a worship service on Ascension Day, 21 May 2009, a Thursday, for primary school children, ages six to thirteen, from the Potchefstroom Christian School, an English-speaking school in Potchefstroom. The worship service was part of an outreach of Potchefstroom North congregation, a member of the GKSA (Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika), to two local schools.An hour earlier on the same day, children from an Afrikaans-speaking school heard a sermon by Prof. Ben de Klerk. This article is dedicated to Professor De Klerk with thanks for his service to the Lord. Truly, his life exemplifies joy and honour. The author of the play spent two and a half years (July 2002- December 2004) with the Faculty of Theology at the North-West University in Potchefstroom – first on a Fulbright Fellowship and then as an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Theology for a finite term of 18 months. She was back for a visit doing research with her former colleagues when the invitation came to conduct the service for Potchefstroom Christian School on 21 May.During announcements at a chapel service for theology students and faculty earlier in May, she asked for “six strong, broad, energetic, excited, and very handsome men” to be disciples in her new play for children. Young men responded and rehearsals commenced. The play was well received by the children. It kept their attention because it was fast-moving and fun. They learned a bit about the book of Acts and its opening story, the ascension, in a manner faithful to the Biblical text and yet one that creatively9 incorporated contemporary elements.

I only have eyes for you: Ovulation redirects attention (but not memory) to attractive men

A number of studies have found a disjunction between women’s attention to, and memory for, handsome men. Although women pay initial attention to handsome men, they do not remember those men later. The present study examines how ovulation might differentially affect these attentional and memory processes. We found that women near ovulation increased their visual attention to attractive men. However, this increased visual attention did not translate into better memory. Discussion focuses on possible explanations, in the context of an emerging body of findings on disjunctions between attention to, and memory for, other people.

The making of Mr. Gray’s anatomy

The making of Mr. Gray’s anatomy chronicles the fascinating story of one of the most widely known medical textbooks in the world as told through the work of two young men: Henry Gray, anatomist, surgeon, and author, and Henry Vandyke Carter, apothecary-surgeon, physician, and illustrator. Historian Ruth Richardson, of the Department of History at the University of Hertfordshire and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, weaves a wonderful tale of dissection, medicine, publishing, printing, illustration, marketing, and sales that culminates in the book often referred to as the “doctor’s bible.” Written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Gray’s anatomy, Richardson immerses the reader into the Dickensian back streets of mid-Victorian London to reveal the chance encounter of two very different men of medicine whose unlikely collaboration launched a masterpiece. In 1842, Henry Gray, a young man of modest educational background, entered St. George’s Hospital at the age of 15 to begin his medical studies as a surgeon and emerged 10 years later known for several important scholarly works and for his election into membership as a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 25. Henry Gray was a handsome man of medium height, a bit of a “dandy,” and known as hardworking, focused, clever, status hungry, and professionally ambitious. Unfortunately, Gray still emerges as a mostly enigmatic person whose life we know about only through the scant writings of those who knew him, none of whom ever wrote a contemporary biography or personal memoir. Gray’s Anatomy, descriptive and surgical was conceived, written, illustrated, and published in three years’ time, appearing in 1858, when Gray was 31. Three years later Gray, although vaccinated in childhood, died a swift and tragic death of confluent smallpox while attending his ill nephew. Equally fascinating is the parallel story of the shy and reflective Henry Vandyke Carter, about which much is known through the diary he kept from the age of 14. Unable to afford the cost of an education that would formally prepare him to become a physician, Carter chose instead to train as an apothecary and then qualify as a surgeon; the apothecary-surgeons of that time were the equivalent of general practitioners in England. In 1848, at the age of 17, serving as an apprentice to a London apothecary-surgeon, Carter entered medical school at St. George’s Hospital, where he probably met Henry Gray for the first time. Their meeting most likely occurred in the dissection laboratory where Gray, age 21, was teaching anatomy and working on his first major work in embryology and comparative anatomy. It was in 1850, while both men were attending ward rounds and postmortems, that Henry Gray discovered that Carter was an accomplished artist, thus marking the beginning of a short but very fruitful, and sometimes contentious, collaboration that culminated in Gray’s first book, The structure and use of the spleen, and in the publication of his opus, Gray’s anatomy. Gray’s anatomy was a groundbreaking text known for its clear and concise descriptions complemented by Carter’s beautiful woodcut images brilliantly rendered in light and shadow. The book provided medical students with an affordable, richly illustrated, and easily navigable textbook of anatomy that was the perfect companion for laboratory dissection and classroom study. Both men knew what students needed and wanted, and both brought their dissection skills, keen sense of the visual, and medical knowledge to the fore in creating this landmark volume. Richardson does a masterful job of writing a book within a book. Her focus is on the creation and publication of Gray’s anatomy, but she also skillfully weaves a tapestry of life, first as a medical student and academic, then as one who procures and dissects cadavers, and finally as one absorbed in the details of writing, illustrating, printing, publishing, and marketing a textbook of the size and complexity of Gray’s anatomy. Richardson’s book is thoroughly researched, meticulously referenced, appropriately annotated, richly illustrated, and vividly written in an absorbing style that is both scholarly and passionate. The only annoyance for some readers may be Richardson’s digression into the process of publishing and marketing a book of this magnitude during the mid-nineteenth century. However, I feel this adds contextual historical richness to the story and provides insight into the immense nature of Gray’s, Carter’s, and their publisher’s accomplishments over the three years that brought the book to fruition and guaranteed its relevance even to our present day British and American editions. Finally, Richardson is not afraid to critique her subjects’ personalities or scholarly accomplishments and leaves no stone unturned in this compelling historical narrative. The reader doesn’t have to be an anatomist, physician, or historian to appreciate this all-too-human story of a bygone era and the author and artist whose legacy survives to this very day.

The Last Picture Show

70 martine bellen The Last Picture Show I can’t be sure if both sides of our conversation Occurred in my mind—An underground transmission Or film’s ability to realign metabolism. I/S(H)e/We walk through the field of light: Delicate traceries of windows, The “takes” of a film (it takes my belief, my body) (it takes my breath away) Shots deepening, narrowing now With synapse activated, the movie slips into breeze—the crisp taste on the tongue of spring; an airstream encircling the actress, her illuminated room absorbs the temporal light that remains on the brink of morning, revealing a sequence of reality—pool whitewashed with eddies, glistening starlight on still water. Continuity of wind replaces subject matter. A film of a symphony must respect time An autobiography respects dates Both absolute and relative In transcendental balance. She checks the show time so she won’t be late, purchases tickets online , approaching the ineffable/ The field of light on the wall she circumnavigates, the field She wanders, it transforms Into a flora sculpture— CRSP09 poetry.indd 70 1/30/2009 12:51:00 PM 71 yellow cress, honesty, periwinkle, blue bugle and windflower. How can light not be made into wildflower? Each cut offers clarity that reawakens the daytime mind, sometimes called meaning. She understood The darkest night, the white night, gaps in memory & continual renewal. Is she watching herself or another who shares her name? Living a film-life or asleep? Released from the material, she wanders a world of symbol. Cosmic architecture Of the human spire. The camera caresses its subject, and she is transferred To celluloid, To video, Next, afterimage—angle after angle the perspective widens, Ripens, and we believe We know her thoroughly as she shifts space. On film No moment appears more important than any other: She passes a stand of handsome men, a group of yew, Who watch her—we are them, staring at the actress; We are the actress watching the river, the viewer, displaced and yearning; The wind in young men’s eyes, their breath flowing through Tree branches that quiver; the eyes in the knots of the boughs. We are the camera’s eye that selects shots, When to look away. Like the cat’s dream, nothing is solid. I tell him I know he is dying, but I don’t know What that means. I remember a breeze replacing my feelings And that he began to rain, hail, conical clouds gather above the mountain’s peak, Tornadic waterspout touches down on my heart, A beating pond, thunder bellows. CRSP09 poetry.indd 71 1/30/2009 12:51:00 PM 72 That’s how our film ended—a crescendo of fiery breath— The transition From one weather system to another. Time passing. How he appears, then vanishes, animates my mind—the borders of his body isolate him from matter and from me. A full-frame shot of the sky. Still. Spiraling swifts in the distance. Unguarded honesty. Tenderness. Darkness. CRSP09 poetry.indd 72 1/30/2009 12:51:00 PM ...

A Novel is a Lengthy Question: An Interview with Frank Ronan

Frank Ronan has published a collection of short stories, Handsome Men Are Slightly Sunburnt (1996), and six novels, The Men Who Loved Evelyn Cotton(1989), A Picnic in Eden (1991), The Better Angel (1992), Dixie Chicken (1994), Lovely (1996) and Home (2002), many of which have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Greek and Dutch. It is extremely difficult to pigeonhole Ronan’s writing and, according to him, it is also pointless since “it’s always the people who don’t read books who want to categorise them”. The following interview throws some new light on this brilliant contemporary Irish writer and his multifarious areas of interest.

The Wider World of the Handsome Man: Southern Plains Indians Invade Mexico, 1830–1848

Fanny Calderon de la Barca loved a good story, and in 1841 people in Mexico City were telling stories about Comanches. Early in the year, the wife of the Spanish minister would have heard astonishing reports about army of the Indians attacking Coahuila's state capital, Saltillo, and its surrounding towns, stealing sixteen hundred horses, taking two dozen captives, and killing one hundred and two Mexicans, including a former governor. Mexico City's press ran hundreds of stories on the north's indios barbares in 1841, and anyone claiming to have knowledge of them found eager Calderon met a colonel who thrilled her and her companions with an account of warfare against the Comanches, in which service he has been terribly wounded. The colonel considered them an exceedingly handsome, fine-looking race, with remarkable resources in both trade and war. Calderon learned more from old soldier covered in wounds from Santa Anna's ill-fated Texas campaign. The veteran evinced a devout horror of Comanches, and stated his firm conviction that we should see [them] on the streets of Mexico [City] one of these days.1Thanks to a surge in scholarship during the past fifteen years, we now have a sophisticated picture of the people who so transfixed the scarred soldier's gaping audience. This recent work has enriched our understanding of Comanche ethnogenesis, economic activity, diplomacy, kinship, spirituality and ritual, gender relations and labor, honor, territorial expansion, captive-taking, hunting and pastoralism, and politics. But Comanche specialists have been curiously disinterested in what their subjects did below the Rio Grande. Though the recent work often acknowledges that Comanches and their allies increasingly seized horses and captives from Mexican settlements in the 1830s and 1840s, plains scholars have not examined these activities through the source material in present-day Mexico. Partly this reflects a more general tendency to read the modern border backward into history. It is also the case that the extraordinarily violent raiding campaigns of these decades fit poorly with the dominant themes in prereservation American Indian historiography-resistance to colonialism and, more recently, hybridity, interdependence, and mutual accommodation.2By recovering links between the southern plains and northern Mexico we can deepen our understanding of both regions. Consolidating and extending a small but important body of scholarship about Indian raiding in northern Mexico with research in Mexican archival and periodical sources, I have built a database tracking Comanche-Mexican conflict. In many ways the data from the late 1820s through the 1840s reinforce what we have come to expect from this relationship-hostilities erupting in one place while commerce and cooperation continue elsewhere. At the same time it is clear that Comanche raiding expanded and contracted in sharply defined stages. Intriguingly, these peaks and valleys coincide with wellknown geopolitical events on and around the southern plains. Read alongside the often thin evidence that exists for scholars to interpret Comanche activities north of the river from the mid-1830s through the early 1840s, Mexican sources reveal striking interconnections between raiding in Mexico and events unfolding on the other frontiers of the Comanches' wider world. By making peace with dangerous Indian and Texan neighbors over the course of a decade, Comanches and their allies obtained the security necessary to launch long-distance raiding campaigns into northern Mexico. Just as important, peace agreements produced new market connections that made campaigns increasingly lucrative. This realignment of frontier relationships reached maturation in the early 1840s, by which time southern plains men were traversing several Mexican states and fueling anxious conversation in Calderon's Mexico City.3Like borderlands scholarship, the broader historiographies of the U. …

Harmon Jackson

Harmon Jackson Brittany Hampton The crickets weren't chirping too awful loud the night I mourned for Harmon Jackson. I had never laid eyes on him, but I had heard his story about how he saved that little girl from drowning in the river and the two of them nothing but mud from top to bottom paraded through the holler like they were somebody important, because I reckon that day they had been. And there was also the time Harmon Jackson stood up in the little church across the way where they stand and shake all over and said, "Preacher, I got something to say." And he told the whole congregation that God had put something on his heart, and there'd be no rest for him until he said his peace, so he just said it right then that he thought church ought to be on Saturday, like it was back in the Bible times, and you can imagine the whipping he got when he got back to the house that day. They say he picked out his own switch for that beating, a right big branch and told his Daddy that if he was going to take a beating on account of his religion, he wanted it to be a darn good one. But my favorite story of Harmon Jackson was the one about the banjo. He had his own banjo that his Daddy got from some feller from Virginia, and they say he would play one song and no others, and he played it for hours on end, and nobody ever knew what it was. He'd sit out on a rock near the creek, and people would crowd around him and shout out guesses of the tune's name, but only Harmon Jackson knew what he was playing. And they say he smiled and nodded his head as he sang it, paying no mind to anything but the song. And it was on account of all this that I took up a notion to love Harmon Jackson. I would sit in front of the fire on Sunday evenings and think on the life I might have with that boy someday. He would take me up to Cumberland Falls to get married right there in the water. We'd stand in the shallow water and balance ourselves on the slippery rocks, holding on close to each other so we wouldn'tbe carried over the falls. And I reckon a boy like Harmon Jackson with such a wild spirit would need him a house full of little boys to run around the woods and build forts and carry on with. And when the snow would fall in big, puffy flakes and ice would form little pictures on our windows, Harmon Jackson would gather our children around the fire, inside our 55 warm little kitchen. He'd close his eyes and let his dark hair fall over them. He'd reach that strong arm of his behind the chair and pick up his banjo. The thing would be all shiny, seeing that I would polish it up for him every morning, and he would plop it onto his lap. He wouldn't play anything for a few seconds; he'd like to sit there and feel the weight of the banjo on his lap, thinking to himself that it belonged there. He might even feel a little guilty that he left it sitting behind the chair all day, without so much as plucking a string as he passed. And right when I would look away from that handsome man sitting in the chair, he'd start to playing, but he wouldn't sing. He'd just sit there picking while I would wash our supper dishes in a big pot of steaming water and him teaching our children the song without a name. So when my Mama came home from town, saying she had a sad thing to tell me about that boy Harmon Jackson and how he had died, I just shook my head and said, "No, Mother." I wouldn't hear such a thing, because it meant that our waterfall wedding and our children would be no...

The Heterosexual Appeal of Socially Marginal Men

Surveyed women consistently specify preferences for egalitarian dates and/or mates. A common perception is that many of these same women often select consorts who are inscrutable, assertive, and controlling, ultimately bemoaning their choices. Dominance has been experimentally shown to provide initial attraction advantages. The Byronic Hero, a venerable literary model, embraces protagonists who possess extraordinary masculine traits that include dominance but also multiple personal flaws. Byronic Heroes, easily identified and plentiful in popular fiction, appear strongly to resonate with youthful audiences and provide alluring portrayals of heterosexual relations. In a classroom survey employing slide images of paired apparel models and a blind date scenario, collegiate women slightly but significantly preferred models independently judged to project Byronic traits over equally handsome men who appeared affable and conventional. Subject comments on Byronic models uniquely included allusions to sexual and mysterious/rebellious attributes. It was concluded that projections of Byronic masculinity provide initial advantages in the securing of heterosexual liaisons.

Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (review)

Steinberg, Shirley R. and Joe L. Kincheloe, eds. 2004. Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. $30.00 sc. 322 pp.Hopscotch, jacks, hide-and-seek, tag: once upon a time, simple, communal games such as these were markers of childhood. However, in postmodern world, traditional pastimes no longer define a child's world. Conventional education and even parents have forfeited centrality in life of postmodern child. Instead, into void it both created and seeks to fill steps corporation, new constant in life of child. So argue editors Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe; they assert: Using pleasure as its ultimate weapon, corporate children's consumer culture, which we label 'kinderculture,' commodifies cultural objects and turns them into things to purchase rather than objects to contemplate (11).The book incorporates essays from ten authors who critically examine various facets of purchase options corporations offer postmodern child.While book certainly encompasses critical discussions of aspects of (largely pop) culture, is that sufficient to situate it in ever-evolving, somewhat amorphous canon of cultural studies? Editors Steinberg and Kincheloe attempt to answer that question explicitly, contending that, the book resides at intersection of educational/childhood and cultural studies (18). Throughout selected essays, readers will uncover much that connects book directly to cultural studies.In their introduction, Steinberg and Kincheloe explain that corporations, recognizing children's potential as both current and future consumers, target young customers' interests in technology, toys, food, and fantasy (11). Corporations exploit differences between children's tastes and their parents', creating and enforcing a generation gap. Meanwhile, because children play with many tools of adult livelihoods, such as computers, inscrutability of adult world disappears, and children lose a sense of adult culture as mysterious and powerful (30). With adults-whether as parents or teachers-no longer able to command authority by maintenance of a closely guarded culture to which children are admitted in discreet steps (6), a breakdown in family and traditional pedagogy occurs.This void furthers power interests of corporation, which steps in with its own agenda.Several of essays dissect corporations which, in their quest for profit and political objectives, view children as a primary target audience. Most notably, Kincheloe's study of McDonald's and Henry A. Giroux's examination of Disney fit this mold. In former, Kincheloe argues that McDonald's attempts, with distressing success, to present simply as an American institution but as America itself (123), using flags and eagles. Patriotic images notwithstanding, Kincheloe asserts, McDonald's plays a role in separating children and parents both by its commercials and by offering youngsters toys and prizes considered inappropriate by their elders (127). Some of toys Kincheloe cites include Ugly Stickers, Wacky Packs, Toxic High stickers, Garbage Pail Kids, [and] Mass Murderer cards (127). McDonald's is not alone in desiring to portray as U.S. writ small. In terms of instant recognition, mouse ears are every bit as powerful as golden arches.Giroux asks: Are Disney Movies Good for Your Kids? (164). His answer suggests that movies are more about preserving patriarchal stereotypes than promoting positive, pluralistic values. For example, many Disney movies end with a happily-ever-after involving physically attractive females catching and loving handsome men (171). Marrying female ambition to an antiquated definition of success is not Disney's only troubling aspect, however. Giroux refers to Disney's prototype community, Celebration, as less a lesson in new urbanism than a community for largely privileged whites (166). …

Revising Theatrical Conventions inA Simple Story: Elizabeth Inchbald's Ambiguous Performance

Sometime in the early 1780s, a beautiful young woman stopped by the home of Thomas Harris, theater manager at Covent Garden. She was an actress in his company, and she had recently given him some plays that she hoped he would produce. Harris, it seems, had hopes of his own:When the consultation was ended, Mr. Harris, who was a handsome man, and had found so little difficulty among the theatrical sisterhood under his government, thought that he might be equally successful in an attack on Mrs. Inchbald; but, instead of regular approaches, he attempted to take the fort by storm, and Mrs. Inchbald found no recourse but in seizing him by the hair, which she pulled with such violence that she forced him to desist. She then rushed out of the house, and proceeded in haste, and under great agitation, to the green-room of the theater, where the company were then rehearsing. She entered the room with so wild an air, and with such that all present were alarmed. She hastily related what had happened as far as her impediment [a recurrent stutter] would permit her, and concluded with the following exclamation: Oh! If he had wo-wo-worn a wig, I had been ru-ruined!1John Taylor, a close friend of Elizabeth Inchbald, includes this story in his memoirs. Though scholars have questioned its veracity, the anecdote was widely circulated, and, legend or truth, it illustrates the singular challenges that faced actresses and hopeful female playwrights. As Taylor suggests, liaisons between theater managers and their supporting casts were common, expected, and accepted. The anecdote also indicates the characteristics that enabled Inchbald to overcome these obstacles and become one of the most successful playwrights, novelists, and drama critics of the late-eighteenth-century: her trademark toughness and persistence, her refusal to be controlled by a male superior, and her determination not to be silenced-despite her rather unique struggles for expression.Inchbald occupies multiple roles in this encounter with Harris. She is at once playwright, victim, and-as indicated by her ability to deliver a comic punch line with theatrical presence-the consummate actress. Inchbald makes us want to laugh at what is obviously a frightening, distinctly un-funny experience; she performs her distress as a joke, and her stutter, which highlights her disturbance, also adds to the humor. Her speech impediment, an involuntary effect caused by and representative of evident emotion, at once complicates the clear, discrete articulation of what her feelings may be and seems positioned voluntarily to highlight and heighten feelings of merriment surrounding this event. So what was Inchbald feeling? Fright? Rage? Relief? Amusement? Confidence? Her account makes it impossible for us to latch on to any one emotion; what it does convey is a sense that multiple feelings are being expressed simultaneously.This feature of Taylor's anecdote is characteristic of Inchbald's treatment of emotions in her fiction: she suggests that multiple emotions may be experienced and expressed all at once. Though this formulation may not sound so innovative to us today, it represents a very different understanding of emotions and expression from the one advocated by the eighteenth-century stage. Eighteenth-century actors and actresses relied on a semantics of gesture in which a specific pose signifies a specific so that emotions could be expressed and interpreted discretely, straightforwardly; Inchbald, as a prominent actress and playwright of the eighteenth century, is commonly assumed to have accepted and implemented these same conventions in her non-dramatic prose. For example, Nora Nachumi asserts that [Inchbald's] knowledge of a widely recognized system of theatrical gesture manifests itself in her criticism and fiction and concludes that Inchbald repeatedly demonstrates that bodies express emotions more authentically and more persuasively than words alone (318). …

The Medical Kipling

The Medical Kipling

Mount Mitchell and The Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (review)

roots. In his picture (yes, she gives us pictures of Zeb and "Sam") Vance is a ruggedly handsome man with deep-set eyes and a clean strongjaw. It is easily seen why he inspired such loyalty from men and women alike. I'd vote for him in a minute! Malinda (Sam) is one of the women who "Tied back their hair, men's clothing put on" and rode with their husbands while the cruel war was raging. InMalinda, McCrumb has found a fitting example ofthese women who generally aren't acknowledged inhistory. Malinda stares directly into the reader's eyes from her picture, holding the reader with her iron core of resolve. We see Malinda and herhusband Keith change during the course of the war; he changes more than she does. He is loving, albeit hottempered , but the war hardens him into a vengeful, cruel man with little concern for others. Still, their love for one another persists through the hardships, the battles, and the privations of the war in the mountains. McCrumb is a true Appalachian; she gives the mountain dialect in words rather than odd spellings. The mountain voices sound clearly while the music weaves hauntingly in and out of her story in small pieces and mountain vistas spread out in a patchwork. Folklore and little known Appalachian history is peppered throughout—from the details of battle to the conflict between neighbors, something often more pronounced in the mountains than in the valleys. The reader has to smile at the references to "Earth Shoe People," snowbirds, and those who come for our land, but look down upon the people and customs. The story is so well intertwined that sometimes the reader forgets whether she's reading history or fiction. This is an eerie, stirring novel, entertaining and educational. In the end McCrumb gives us further historical facts about the characters' lives. When finished, I closed the book with a satisfied smile and a thump. It was indeed a warm quilt of words. But a last question remains—how long do we have to wait for another one? —JoAnn Aust Asbury Timothy H. Silver. Mount Mitchell and The Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 322 pages. Hardcover. $39.95. Tim Silver has been awarded the 2003 North Carolina Literary and Historical Association's Old North State Award for Nonfiction for his .77 intensely personal and readable history of Mt. Mitchell, the mountain range called Blacks, and the Toe River Valley. Mount Mitchell and The Black Mountains also includes personal journal entries, in which the author describes his own recent hiking and fishing visits into the region. In this way, Silver creatively and effectively makes his point: the people and environmental events of any period irrevocably impact the people and environment of the present. Fascinating human characters appear, and their stories are told, but the natural world is at the center of the book, and the history of the land itself is chronicled. Although he writes of the human impact on the Black Mountains, the author emphasizes that nature has been the most powerful force and that any human influence is secondary. He observes that there is a common misconception that the world was some sort of Eden before the advent of man and that native peoples lived in perfect harmony with the earth before the white man arrived. That has never been true. Silver contends instead that the story of nature is one of steady and relentless decline; nature has never been stable or perfect, and the earth was highly changeable before humans set foot on it. His inclusion of present-day journal entries about his personal experiences in the region is a distinctive approach. This technique evokes an emotional response, conveying the impression that the historical events that took place around Mt. Mitchell in another time are immediate and relevant to the present. The fact that his family originated in the Toe River Valley also contributes to the feeling that he has a personal stake in the history of the area. As he relates the story of the humans who impacted the region, he...

Ghost Riders (review)

shunned by a society terrified of scars and imperfection, this collection offers not simply science in your back yard, but treasure. —Steve Rhodes VCI, m ^*Mz~ Sharyn McCrumb. Ghost Riders. New York: E P Dutton, 2003. 336 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. Rank Stranger as sungby Ollie Gilbert, Mountain View, Arkansas, on February 9, 1970. Cat. #941 (MFH #559). 07 Jan. 04. www.smsu.edu/folksong/ maxhunter/0941. J wandered again to my home in th' mountain Where youths early dawn, I was happy an'free I lookedfor myfriends but never couldfind them Ifound they were all rank strangers to me Everybody I met, seemed to be a rank stranger No Mother or Dad, not afriend could I see They knew not my name, I knew not theirfaces Ifound they were all rank strangers to me 75 Sharyn McCrumb's latest ballad novel, Ghost Riders, is a rousing ghost story. It has all the elements readers have come to expect from McCrumb's novels—involved and intertwined plots that keep the reader's attention on several levels, memorable characters, and humor in unexpected spots. Ghost Riders was originally titled Rank Stranger, but New York editors didn't know or understand that ballad, so they changed it. However, after hearing McCrumb and Jack Hinshelwood singing and talking about the song, I can't think of it as anything else. It's an exact match to the story—the two young lovers fighting side by side, alienated by the side they had chosen in the Civil War. So, we have Ghost Riders, which I suppose is familiar to a wider audience, but definitely changes the way the novel is perceived. Even without the ballad, the opening quotation by Galway Kinnell sets the tone of the entire book: "Is there a mechanism of death that so mutilates existence no one gets over it not even the dead?" The reader knows the supernatural is at work. But there is more here than just a ghost story— this is an historical drama based on the lives of real people in the Civil War. The fictional characters are pieced together, as McCrumb says, in a "quilt of words" with the real characters. Stitched together are Civil War re-enactors; those ofus who know re-enactors will instantly recognize the knowledgeable "sunshine soldiers/sunshine patriots," some of whom change sides with the change of a uniform. Portraying themwithhumor but without condescension, McCrumb seems to know them quite well. The past parallels the present in McCrumb's familiar style: two or more story lines running concurrently. In the present we find Rattler, a part-Cherokee recluse who knows nature and has the Sight. While passing time with a group of re-enactors, a visitor to the camp stirs interest and conversation. When asked why he didn't speak to the stranger, Rattler replies, " 'Cause I don't hold with talking to dead people." We learn a bit more about Nora Bonesteel, an old favorite from previous novels, and why she never attends funerals or burials and only tends one grave. She and Rattler are both necessary to put the past to rest, and they do so with grace and style. Spencer Arrowood shows up too, so previous readers are right at home, but the novel may be read independently also. In the past, the major historical characters are Zebulon Baird Vance, Malinda "Sam" Blalock, and her husband, L. McKesson "Keith" Blalock. Vance is a born politician—part rounder and rascal, but always concerned with his people first. He served as the governor of North Carolina for the Confederacy, yet never forgot his mountain 76 roots. In his picture (yes, she gives us pictures of Zeb and "Sam") Vance is a ruggedly handsome man with deep-set eyes and a clean strongjaw. It is easily seen why he inspired such loyalty from men and women alike. I'd vote for him in a minute! Malinda (Sam) is one of the women who "Tied back their hair, men's clothing put on" and rode with their husbands while the cruel war was raging. InMalinda, McCrumb has found a fitting example ofthese women who generally aren't acknowledged inhistory. Malinda stares directly...

Julien Gracq and the Tria Fata

Julien Gracq se tient si loin de la production moyenne du jour, que l'on ne peut ouvrir un de ses livres, ni meme lire le moindre de ses articles, sans eprouver aussitot le sentiment d'entrer dans un monde etrange, de reminiscences et de decouvertes, tres austere et tres voluptueux, fleuri et depouille, lapidaire et profus, off l'on deviendrait aussitot somnambule, ou hypnotise. Et le plus souvent enchante de l'etre, Eric Deschodt, Le Monde, February 1989. ********** In Les Jeux de l'allusion litteraire dans Un Beau Tenebreux de Julien Gracq, Ruth Amossy claims that in order to seize the specificity of the Gracquian text, a reader must both follow the author's system of literary allusions, and situate the movement in which Gracq can be placed in History. (2) In Un Beau Tenebreux, Gracq makes reference to the Tria Fata, female figures of destiny that have permeated literary texts since ancient Greece. By examining this allusion to the Tria Fata that so far has not received critical attention, I adhere to Amossy's orientation and ask what the significance of this mythological reference is in Gracq's approach to his aesthetics, and where, in the literary evolution of the motif, his allusion can be placed. This interrogation should shed light on a stratum of Gracq's multi-layered use of anachronism. Finally, taking this particular allusion as a backdrop, I draw a few general conclusions regarding the Gracquian excipit. In the Threads of Destiny's Judges Un Beau Tenebreux's plot consists of a group's fascination with Allan, a broodingly handsome man who toys with the idea of suicide, and who later signs a suicide pact with Dolores, the novel's femme fatale. The action takes place in a summer-side resort, l'Hotel des vagues, located in Brittany. Structurally, Un Beau Tenebreux is divided into three non-linear parts that vary in length: a prologue (written oil the morning of 8 October), the journal kept by Gerard (including entries from 29 June to 24 August), and a switch in narrator to an unrevealed individual who continues the narration of events from September 1st to the night of 8 to 9 October. The characters can be classified in relation to Allan by virtue of indifference (Jacques, Irene, Henri) or attraction towards him (Christel, Dolores, Gregory, Gerard), a classification that highlights Allah's polarizing personality. The group's visit to the ruins of the castle of Roscaer on 22 July sets the stage for the novel's action. When towards the end of his journal, Gerard notes with premonition that [q]uelque chose, ici, allait se defaire, (3) referring to Allan and Dolores's suicide, it seems clear that the picnic scene is where the weaving is initiated before that anticipated moment of unraveling. The characters make plans to visit the hilltop ruins at midnight, when the moonlight will offer the most splendid setting. This hour of predilection has for intertext the Romantic appreciation for midnight vagary in ruins, particularly those of Chateaubriand's Memoires d'outre-tombe. As the group climbs the mountain leading to the ruins, Gerard has a spontaneous vision: [ ... ] tout a coup s'improvisait sous nos yeux une bizarre gravure romantique, un de ces couples hagards qui, dans Gustave Dore, a la lumiere de la lune, cheminent inexplicablement comme des somnambules vers un burg aussi vertigineux, aussi inaccessible qu'une montagne (4) magique. (5) The countryside evokes the artistic engravings of Dore The group invades the ruin, a site of decomposition taken over by nature, now in the hands of the Tria Fata who ravel the intrigue. The characters seem to enter into a Dore engraving, most possibly his 1877 Ruines de Kenilworth. The group mimics the ruin's break-down process, expressed in the verb se decomposer: ce vague emmelement humain se decompose comme un bain electrise. (6) Gracq's surrealistic representation of decomposition as an electrified bath highlights that, in this novel, decomposition can be sparked by a violent one-time action such as suicide. …

LEOPOLD'S NOVEL:THE LAND ETHIC IN BARBARA KINGSOLVER'SPRODIGAL SUMMER

Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for land ethic [that] changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. People should respect . . . fellow-members and also . . . the community as such.2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction. Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock.

Results of an explorative empirical study on human mating in Germany: Handsome men, not high-status men, succeed in courtship

Recent research on human mating depicts men as searching for physical attractiveness (PA) and women as searching for status. To identify the mechanisms which lead to universal, biologically interpretable structures in social processes, we focused on the proximate causes for inter- and intrasexual differences in human mating preferences, attraction, and tactics. We collected data on 180 young singles (mean age 26.9 years) without a steady relationship. A questionnaire and a video sequence (20-30 seconds) of each subject was taken. Next, each video sequence was rated by approximately 20 individuals of the opposite sex, who also participated in this study. Surprisingly, the answers given by male and female subjects regarding sociosexual behaviour and mating preferences are predominantly congruent. Sex differences among preferences for good looking and high-status partners were small or even insignificant. Lower educated subjects had considerably higher status preferences than higher educated individuals. In both sexes, PA was much more preferred in a potential partner than status. For both sexes, physical appearance was decisive for the subject's dating attractiveness. Male, but not female dating attractiveness also correlates with a kind and charismatic appearance. Furthermore, there was a positive linear relationship between men's PA and their number of sexual partners within the last year. Men with more than four sexual partners were all above-average in PA, while the most attractive women had a medium number of sexual partners. However, in this respect, status had no influence. The results show that sex differences in mating are more complex than hitherto assumed.

The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A Guide to the Man and His Music (review)

Tchaikovsky has frequently inspired long books, a peculiarity that he shares with very few other composers—Richard Wagner, of course; Gustav Mahler; and, more recently, Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, and Igor Stravinsky. One thinks immediately of David Brown's four-volume treatment (Tchaikovsky [New York: Norton, 1978-91]) and maybe of the three-volume remembrance by Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer's youngest brother (Zhizn' Petra Il'icha Chaikovskogo [Moscow: P. Jurgenson, 1900- 1902; reprint, Moscow: Algoritm, 1997]), which ran to almost two thousand pages and whose English translation by Rosa Newmarch (as The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) [New York: John Lane, 1906; reprint, New York: Vienna House, 1973]), albeit "abridged," still reached nearly eight hundred pages. Alexander Poznansky's own Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991) comes in at around seven hundred pages; and now we have this new bibliographic Handbook, at almost sixteen hundred. The phenomenon is only partly accidental, of course: the fact that [End Page 659] Modest Tchaikovsky was able to establish a memorial museum at his recently deceased brother's house at Klin near Moscow in 1895 meant that a large number of Tchaikovsky's manuscripts, including many of his letters, remained in one place, ready and waiting for the scholars from Russia and abroad who, sooner or later, would surely come to study them. The sheer extent of the Soviet-sponsored editions of Tchaikovsky's complete correspondence, in seventeen volumes (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii: Literaturnye Proizvedniia i Perepiska [Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Muzyka, 1953-81]), and music, in sixty-two volumes (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii [Moscow: Gos. muzykalnoe izd-vo, 1940-71, supplementary volume 1990]), established the "monumentality" of Tchaikovsky as a national musical figure. But the other, less ideologically motivated, explanation for the expansive treatments of this most famous Russian is surely that, as with Wagner, the public remains fascinated by the man as well as by his music. As Poznansky wrote in his Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), "Nearly as much as his music, Tchaikovsky's very personality persists in haunting our contemporary imagination" (p. 5). This personality has to an extent, of course, been carefully managed over the years: one tends to visualize Tchaikovsky as he appears in the painting by Nikolai Kuznetsov, i.e., as an elegant and handsome man with a white beard and fine features, and it is probably no coincidence that similar photographs of this same Tchaikovsky stare out from the dust jackets both of this new catalog and of Tchaikovsky's Last Days. This is the friendly, approachable Tchaikovsky of the Nutcracker, not the alleged homosexual whose reported suicide at the instigation of a court of honor caused such a flurry of excitement in the 1980s, following its promotion by Alexandra Orlova. In many of the surviving photographs reproduced in the first volume of this new Handbook we see the composer looking directly at us through the camera, rather than averting his gaze. "Who," one might almost hear him asking, "do you say I am?"

"Mobile Images": Myth and Resistance in Nikky Finney's Rice

Nikky Finney, a native of Carolina and a professor of English at University of Kentucky, is a founding member of Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Appalachian poets of African descent who incorporate into their work themes of regional as well as transnational identities, local as well as global communities. Although she hails from Carolina and not geographical region traditionally associated with Appalachia, Finney, along with other members of group, including writer Gurney Norman and adopted member Nikki Giovanni, focus on intersection of history and culture that is central to vast region called Appalachia. Finney's perspective on being Affrilachian is a global one. In Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, Finney writes of the geographical evolutionary theory, which contends that, at one point in time, all land masses were one. She explains that if one were to pull all countries of world in together one would discover Appalachian mountain range melds perfectly into long green valleys of Africa like one single sacred ground. Finney sees same connection between coastal Palmetto State of her birth and continent of her ancestors. However, she laments in her Introduction to collection Rice (1995) that South Carolina has disregarded much of its African heritage. Through her poetry, Finney seeks to remedy that neglect by examining what melds sandy land of Carolina to continent of Africa--the tradition of planting and harvesting rice. (1) Rice combines poems and photographs. The photographs appear to be family pictures, some taken professionally, some by amateurs. There is an elegant studio portrait of a woman, her high-collared blouse trimmed and tucked in lace, tied neatly at neck, and fastened with an ornate brooch. There is a photo of a man and a woman, a couple in their sixties perhaps, standing in a dirt field. There are miscellaneous family photos: a mother and a son, two pairs of women--in first, an older woman poses before a car alongside a younger woman. The second pair is young girls, sisters perhaps, in a professional photo from last century. There are handsome men: a teen in knickers, a headshot that could be a graduation photo. A beautiful young woman holds a bouquet. A couple kisses before backdrop of a seaside resort in one of those shots solicited by photographers who prowl boardwalks for vacationers. None of pictures has captions. We have no sense of who these people are or where and how they fit into Finney's narrative. They seem to tell a story--are they parents and children, second, third, even fourth generation? Are they Finney's mother, father, grandparents? In Rice, shadows of Africa and of slavery in Finney's poems undercut seeming innocence of family photos. Family photographs, however, are far from innocent. They are instrumental in constructing what Marianne Hirsch defines as gaze--that is, the ideology, mythology, of family as an institution. The power of this myth is evident in Hirsch's description of familial gaze as hegemonic (8). Family photographs create an image of unity, a moment of cohesion, a protection from discord that most families cannot uphold. Here Hirsch echoes Roland Barthes, who also recognizes disturbing, insidious, and astonishing power of photograph. (2) In his discussion of signifying function of photography, Barthes tells us, on one level, photographic image is full of meaning. On another, it is form, emptied of meaning and waiting for context, all in service of myth. Family photographs, such as those that appear in Rice, reproduce dominant mythology of family. Claude Levi-Strauss describes purpose of myth as provid[ing] a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (Levi-Strauss 229). Myths, in other words, make a fragmented world understandable and habitable. …