Sea Monsters Research Articles

Jessica Riskin. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. xiii + 548 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. $40 (cloth).

Jessica Riskin. <i>The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick</i>. xiii + 548 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. $40 (cloth).

The Background, Explanations and Textual Research of Wang Ao’s The Poem of Prawns

The sea is so vast, The sun and the moon rise and set on the back of a sea-turtle.BR Apodal fetus is as big as the house, Even the smallest prawns are as long as 100 inches.BR Palpi of prawns are like halberds, Striving to jump out from waves. Prawns volunteer to be pioneers for the Dragon, Ascending to win glory.BR The above poemis adapted from The Poem of Prawns written byWang Ao in the ancient Ming Dynasty. The whole poem is composed of 16 lines, 112 Chinese characters altogether. Through the description of the vast sea, fish and prawns, flying dragon and the blue sky, the poem presents us a splendid scenery of fierce waves, horrible sea monsters, violent winds, dancing fish and dragons, and the daring and braveness of prawns, which is grand and moving.BR The Poem of Prawns, a poem written in a painting by Wang Ao, is not his best. However, it clearly describes the bad political environment in his era and shows his strong will to make contributions to the country. The strength in the meaning of the two line “Palpi of the prawns are like halberds, striving to jump out from waves” unfolds us his resistance and unwillingness to the bad political atmosphere then. The prawns drawn by Wang Ao are actually fighters combating fierce storms, rather than small shrimps muddling on in the deep sea. The spirit of braving hardship and danger in the poem inspires others. The poem presents us not only the form of prawns, but also their ideal and aspiration. The prawns embody those who hope the country has a good political system, a wise emperor and loyal officials.BR The ancient Chinese politicians, thinkers and writers often strike a chord in readers’ heart by composing poetry. From The Poem of Prawns, we feel that Wang Ao was immensely complacent to contribute to the country, but had no opportunity to use his talent. At that time, the Ming Dynasty was in a state of decay. Though serving as an official after passing the imperial civil examination, Wang Ao was not assigned to a key post to give full play to his talent because wicked ministers and sycophants held away in the imperial court. Nevertheless, Wang Ao remains staunchly loyal to his faith. So people admires him. From the above, the poem exposes the corrupt officialdom then and Wang Ao’s dedication to the country. Through the background, explanations and textual research of Wang Ao’s The Poem of Prawns, the article gives a further study of the artistic conception of the poem.

Threnody by an Amateur Oceanographer for His Father the Biologist

Threnody by an Amateur Oceanographer for His Father the Biologist Cole Bucciaglia (bio) Simon's father was drowned by a sea monster. It first flashed an open-mouthed grin, folding and unfolding its big, pink tongue harmlessly. But then it closed its jaws around the man's body until little more was visible than one leg, which hung almost comically from its mouth. It pulled away from dry land until they were both submerged, father still caught between its little rows of uniform teeth. As it dove, it left behind a trail of blood, uncurling through the water like red smoke. Simon's mother let him carry the urn holding all that had been recovered of his father's remains when they went to scatter them at sea. The container wasn't meant for display—a simple bullet thermos pressed between his hands like a large, black bishop. The dead biologist's coworkers took them out in a schooner on a calm and sunny day, and no one spoke but the boat as it sighed and trembled against the push of the wind. Simon imagined that he might somehow lose his grip on the urn before it was time, and that the wind would carry it up and away from him, over the side of the boat and into the water. With the lid still tightly on, his father would be forever trapped inside the urn, locked away from the sea and incomplete. He thought the ashes would be fine and smooth like gray sand, but they were instead gravelly, with little rough rocks that Simon would later realize were bits of bone. His mother bent down beside him until she was closer to his height, and she held his waist as he reached to pour the ashes down along the side of the boat and into the water. They didn't fall in a steady, gray stream but puffed out a bit into a whitish cloud, and it was all very simple and final and un-miraculous. Everyone waved farewell. After that, something shifted inside Simon, who had spent all of his life in a house by the sea. When the surface of the ocean glittered, he now imagined that it was because the light was reflecting off his father's particles. It was pretty, looking down on the water's surface from above, but underneath there was a boneyard for dead and lost things, and Simon understood that there were dangerous creatures in the ocean. He used to love the ocean's creatures. When he was very small, [End Page 54] he had a nightlight that projected blue ripples and colorful fish onto his walls, and that lulled him to sleep. He knelt in the wet sand by the ocean and pressed his fingers into the mud, searching for white Emerita and fearlessly letting them scuttle along his arms. His father, the biologist, taught him the names for aquatic things. Years before Simon had any reason to be afraid of killer whales, the biologist held Simon's hand up to the nose of a captive orca. Its skin was harder than it looked like it would be, rubbery like a wet inner tube. The whale pulsed against his palm and snorted in the soft, deep voice of a horse. The year before Simon's father died, he brought the family with him on a trip to Puerto Rico, and Simon swam in the gentle waves of a bioluminescent bay, incandescent flecks of blue plankton all around him, and his parents' dark and hazy ghosts on the shore. ________ The summer after his father's death, Simon avoided walking down to the beach for the very first time in his life. He could hear the hushed breathing of the ocean from any room in his house. He tried not to look at it. With his curtains drawn, he spent most days in his bedroom playing computer games. At night, he dreamt of people he knew drowning and of a great, big jawbone stretched over the earth where the sky should be, teeth like menacing stalactites. In July, the tourists came to town, and the family—father, mother, and two...

Образ «美人鱼 / русалка» в русской и китайской традиции: общее и особенное

The results of a comparative analysis of Russian and Chinese myths and legends about the mermaid are presented. Novelty of research consists in the fact that in the current research a comparative analysis of the image of such aquatic creatures in different cultural traditions is presented only to a small extent. Material of the analyses are the texts that contain mention of the mermaids and describe their appearance. The information is given about the origin of the image of a mermaid and a word mermaid . It is reported that in the Chinese records there are a lot of variations of this aquatic image, which can be separated into three main types: “Japanese Cryptobranchidae”, “sea monster” and “the mermaid tribe”. It is noted that third kind of them is closer to the image of a mermaid, which is known today, - the image of a young girl, living in the water (river, lake), who attracts to herself and has the gift to charm. The author points out that many known Chinese stories about the snake and the dragon can to some extent be considered the stories about the mermaid, because in Chinese myths and legends the fish, the snake and the dragon are associated with the water element, and these three images can be transformed into each other. Thus, the comparative analysis showed that there are more differences than similarities in Russian and Chinese mythological texts about the mermaid. They are explained by religious, socio-cultural factors, the difference of mentalities and the overall civilizational features of two cultures - China and Russia.

How Not to Improve the Estate: Lopping &amp; Cropping Jane Austen

This essay reads Quirk Classics’ monstrous mash-ups, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters , as deliberately excessive and unnatural alterations that speak to a preoccupation with improvement that is both thematized within Austen’s own work and symptomatic of Austenmania’s broader project of renovating the literary landscape that is Jane Austen’s estate. While the mash-up enterprise is, no doubt, an exercise in making Austen’s novels worse, the essay frames the Quirk travesties in terms of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” asking whether it is possible that these imprudent “improvements” might actually be good because they are bad. Insofar as the enhanced editions make manifest the Camp sensibility that has long been latent in Austen’s prose, they tease promising critical insight; however, the increasingly derivative mash-ups ultimately fail in their campiness precisely where Austen succeeds: for hers remains a secret of style.

Bosses of Light and Sound

Bosses of Light and Sound Nickalus Rupert (bio) The story begins in 2003, where it ends: Look at Kelli. Look at her in the sunlight. You’re not used to seeing her outside the theater, and you’re struck by the way her eyes grab the light, the middles crackling gold. The story also begins in July of 2001. Kelli sits at the Valley Cinemas projectionist’s desk, on the second floor. She wears black pants and a red shirt that’s turning pink from over-washing. The shirt’s front pocket is embroidered with Valley Cinemas and the company logo—a jagged line that’s supposed to contour a series of mountainous peaks and valleys, though it looks more like the EKG of a cokedup heart. Kelli is bored, and she’s still young enough to believe that her boredom is special. She has one of those faces that makes it seem like she’s always pissed off, but (and here’s what’s so unfortunate about Kelli) she’s practically never pissed off. Not even a week from now, when Brody, her ex-boyfriend, shows up to the theater holding hands with Misty Caldwell, and later that same night, she looks down through one of the projection windows and sees, in the otherwise empty theater, someone who could only be Brody slung way back in his seat, with Misty’s blond head doing a rhythmic bob over his lap. I’m still here in 2001, still stuck on Kelli’s scowl. It’s something in the eyebrows, I think. Too much tense muscle tissue? Maybe the scowl is why Management have put her in Projection. Run afoul of the high school blondes in Concession, and Management will stick you somewhere else. Kelli has nothing but kind things to say about those girls, but she has definitely failed to fit in somehow or she wouldn’t be up here. Maybe the GM, Tina, figures Kelli doesn’t have the right mug for slinging popcorn at eight hundred percent markup. That’s a job for the bubbly ones. Kelli is closing tonight, which means she won’t get to leave the theater parking lot until well after midnight. The sprawling dark of the projection hall is sentineled by eight projectors gunning 5,000 watts of light and movie magic at flat white screens. Each projector’s quartz bulb contains several atmospheres of pressure, and burns hot enough to melt right through celluloid, should the film snag, which Kelli hopes it won’t. She spends long hours sitting at the projectionist’s desk, which is located sort of mid-hallway, in a neutral zone between chattering machines. On the wall over the desk, there’s a dry-erase board that we projectionists use to delegate work and leave each other notices, like number three needs oil, or number six has been cold-starting. Mostly, though, we use the board to sketch places we’d rather be. Tonight, Kelli illustrates the cosmos, with the rings of Saturn well-defined. It’s not so noisy here at the desk, and Kelli has her portable CD player and a pair of desktop speakers. She’s still in her Pink Floyd phase, and can’t stop playing “Welcome to the Machine.” She [End Page 121] doesn’t connect with the hip indie rock that the girls downstairs like, and she really doesn’t connect with the pitch-perfect pop music that her other friends are always talking about. Kelli plays some guitar. Years later she will start listening to Riot Grrrl and form a band of her own: Brainwrap, a moderately successful punk trio. Then she will mellow out, start smoking more pot, go through her Joni Mitchell phase. But for now, Pink Floyd. The back wall of the hallway comes alive with lambent, inverse images of movie heroes, cataphracted sea monsters, homicidal robots on parade. These images are not magical, and Kelli isn’t hallucinating. She’s witnessing one of those unintended visual tricks that happens as the projected images vault off the windowglass and create a backwash of light. A paradox of the projection hall: always crowded, always lonesome. Sit here with Kelli...

Tales from the Long Twelfth Century: The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire by Richard Huscroft

Reviewed by: Tales from the Long Twelfth Century: The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire by Richard Huscroft Susan Brooks Richard Huscroft, Tales from the Long Twelfth Century: The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2016) xxiii + 305 pp., ill. Tales from the Long Twelfth Century felicitously opens with a fairytale. According to folklore of Northern France, the Angevin dynasty was descended on its matrilineal side from a magical creature named Melusine. Half siren and half she-devil, the beautiful Melusine married the Comte D'Anjou, who begot upon her sons, as described by the author Richard Huscroft, of "ferocious tempers and tyrannical leanings" (xx). In his Tales, subtitled The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire, historian Huscroft seeks to set out an innovative overview of the family that ruled vast territories in England and France during a tempestuous century. In actuality descended from the seed of William the Conqueror rather than from a supernatural sea monster, the exploits of the [End Page 216] Angevins, named by scholars after their ancestral duchy, encompassed military adventures, murder, and civil wars. Their accomplishments included artistic patronage that enabled the ethos of the Troubadour poets and political reforms that paved a path to the modern world. Henry Plantagenet and his sons Richard and John were warriors all, and prey to the power obsession and priorities of personal advancement emblematic of royalty, but they left such an indelible impression on Western history that they loom large in the popular imagination to this day. Who, after all, has not heard of King Richard the Lionhearted?—a legendary figure, and fit content for a fairytale, indeed. Huscroft, an instructor of history at Westminster School, London, has previously penned texts on related topics, including Ruling England, 1042–1216 (2004) and The Norman Conquest: A New Introduction (2009). He has utilized a brilliant concept to construct his current book, published on the eighth centenary of the death of King John: he has borrowed the structure of The Canterbury Tales as a template, with each chapter a biography of one person pivotal to the Angevin era's events. By telling interconnected stories of the important players around the Angevin kings, Huscroft has opened up a fresh and more fully dimensional perspective of their rule. "The Prince's Tale" provides a tragic prologue to the Plantagenets with the saga of William Atheling, the heir of the usurping youngest son of the Conqueror, Henry I. The Atheling's untimely death in the sinking of the White Ship caused the succession crisis and subsequent war known as the Anarchy. The contested kingship ultimately passed to Henry I's grandson Henry II upon the death of another usurper, Stephen of Blois, and thus began the Angevin epoch, with the younger Henry succeeded in turns by his sons. "The Disciple's Tale" outlines the role of the scholar Herbert of Bosham in the conflict between Henry II and the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket that culminated in the latter's unlawful killing. Herbert was Becket's companion and biographer and as such was a front-row witness to the power struggle between the cleric and the king over the privileges and proper relations of the church and the crown, one of the most consequential clashes of the Middle Ages. "The Princess's Tale" tells the fascinating story of Joan, a daughter of Henry II and the remarkable Eleanor of Aquitaine. Joan was a typical aristocratic chess piece serially and strategically married to scions of other noble families, but she was also notably well-travelled and well-educated for a woman of her time. A strong woman as well, and no mere pawn, she led at least one recorded siege at the head of an army but died similarly to many females of her era, felled by complications of childbirth. Another unusual woman is highlighted in the final of these twelfth-century tales: Nicola de la Haye was an ally of King John who also like Joan played a military role, holding Lincoln Castle in the last civil war of the Angevin age. With the death of John by disease during that conflict, the...

Sharks in the jungle: real and imagined sea monsters of the Maya

Abstract

Ancient sea monster battle revealed in unusual fossil

Ancient sea monster battle revealed in unusual fossil

Troubled Waters: Marcantonio Raimondi and Dürers Nightmares on the Shore

Marcantonio Raimondis Il Sogno and Albrecht Dürers Sea Monster share a number of compositional similarities as well as a fascination with the bizarre. The association of monstrous forms as an omen of grave misfortune, including pestilence and war, was particularly common at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In Marcantonios engraving the chimeric monsters, billowing inferno and shooting star can be perceived as a graphic warning that by 1509 Venices world was in deep peril.

Piękne i szkaradne. Motyw maski na drodze rozwoju i transmisji nowożytnej groteski

In 1555, the serie of masks by Cornelius Floris was edited in Antwerp. This well known and a comprehensive artist, designed Maski fantastyczne (The Fantastic Masks) and then he separated a motive which was the element of ancient and modern grotesque. His style and projects exerted the significant influence on art, especially in the north of Europe. The origin of grotesque ornament can be found in the ancient paintings. In the second half of XVth century, inside Nero’s House in Rome, were discovered some interior decorations – mostly strange and fantastic creatures like the sea monsters, hybrids, girlands of flowers and masks, covering the walls of ancient interior which delighted some the late Reneissance artists. The mask was connected with the theatre, coming from the rituals in honour of Dionisos and it was not only the symbol of vegetation or rebirth but also the oncoming end of life. In medieval times the apotropaic properties were attributed to it. The grotesque ornaments thanks to printing – houses and graphic artists and also – thanks to many XVI th artists’ journeys, expanded quickly and they used by architects, sculptors, carvers, goldsmiths and especially –by graphic artists. The activity of the artists from Raphael’s School in Rome had the main influence on a grotesque ornament expansion in the whole Europe. They transferred the themes from Nero’s House and their work was willingly engraved by well – known Italian, German and Netherlander graphic artists. The important moment for the spread of grotesque ornament was the invitation from Francis the First to Italian artists to the work of Fontainebleau Castle decorations. The monumental wall decorations, joined a picture and relief, figural and abstract composition with the elements of grotesque, two – way exchange of patterns, Italian mannerism connected with ancient , with the French gothic tradition. It involved to a grotesque reduction from strange forms to dominant cartouche, made mainly by Netherlanders. Within the north grotesque the mask achieved an unusual, fantastic shape of mascaron, mostly in Floris’s and Bos’s art. But, most of all, The Floris’s patterns, by graphic artists and his students, got to the north Europe, also to Gdansk and Torun – the main protestant centres in the territory of Royal Prussia.

INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE DEATH OF A PILOT: THE KUBERNETES ARISTOS IN LUCIAN’S VERAE HISTORIAE.

In Lucian’s Verae Historiae , Lucian ensures the success of his voyage by providing the very best supplies and equipment for his men. As part of his preparation he hires on the best pilot that money could buy, this pilot is only heard from at one other point in the narrative, at his death in the belly of the sea monster. This paper examines the intertextual context of the pilot’s death and how Lucian uses it to further the juxtaposition of himself with that greatest of liars, Odysseus.

Beast in the Barrier Zone: Transformations of Irish Politics, History and Myth in Neil Jordan's Sunrise With Sea Monster

Sammanfattning saknas

Boring Through History: An Environmental History of the Extent, Impact and Management of Marine Woodborers in a Global and Local Context, 500 BCE to 1930s CE

Abstract While depictions of mariners fighting fearsome sea monsters or battling terrifying storms entertain us to this day, it is perhaps ironic that one of the main threats to commerce over the last millennium or more has come from a series of very small organisms whose history has been submerged in historical accounts. Despite their marked long-term and large-scale impacts on global marine infrastructure, shipping and economies, shipworms, pillbugs and gribbles - collectively referred to as marine woodborers - have received no substantial scholarly attention from environmental historians. This article first overviews their historical spread around the world, demonstrating, too, their disruption of global travel and trade, then traces past problems and management attempts in New Zealand from the arrival of the first humans, c.1300, to the 1930s. New Zealand presents a particularly rich study demonstrating the spread, impacts and management responses to marine woodborers. Until the more widespread and successful use from the 1900s of both ferro-concrete pilings and chromated copper arsenate (CCA) as a wood preservative, colonists in different parts of New Zealand unknowingly experimented with techniques which had failed elsewhere in the country. A longstanding inability to learn from past failures in nineteenth-century New Zealand demonstrates the lack of co-ordinated application of management techniques in the colony, and suggests both the fragmentation of colonial knowledge and the limitations of colonial science, as new ideas were introduced at a local level rather than nationally. Due to the overwhelming attention given to globalisation's role in spreading terrestrial plants and animals - and to a lesser extent aquatic freshwater fishes - an examination of the extent and response to marine woodborers provides significant new perspectives on the neglected subject of non-indigenous marine organisms.

Professor Emily Casaubon Studies the Emotions

The trouble started with an ultimatum. emily casaubon, an english professor, was in line for a new office. but first, the kindly departmental administrator told her, she needed to purge some books. The administrator was right: Professor Casaubon's books were cresting and flooding like the spawn of the Philistine god Dagon—“sea monster, upward man and downward fish,” as John Milton pithily put it—in full run. She got right to work.

Creatures of the deep: in search of the sea's monsters and the world they live in

In this revised and updated edition of Creatures of the Deep, award-winning nature and science writer Erich Hoyt gives readers a glimpse of the amazing variety of creatures found in the deepest parts of the ocean. Weaving together details from the latest scientific research about sharks, giant squid, dragonfish, huge tube worms, clams and tiny microbes of the deep-sea vents, Hoyt embarks on a magical journey roaming across the abyssal plains and descending into deep-sea trenches more than 6,000 metres down. Hoyt unravels the complex predator-prey relationships, from 'killer' copepods to battles between giant squid and sperm whales, presenting compelling portraits of animals that are superbly adapted denizens of a dark high-pressure world. There are life forms, independent of sunlight and photosynthesis, which flourish around the hot, sulfurous deep-sea vents in the magnificent rift valley of the mid-ocean ridge, the world's longest mountain range. Surviving in conditions that appear to be close to the very soup of primordial Earth, these microbes have become the basis for the latest research into Earth's origins. Fully illustrated with fantastic underwater imagery.

Le Léviathan de Joseph Roth. La problématique juive et le shtetl

The Jewish motif plays a major role in Joseph Roth&#8217;s works. In The Leviathan, a strange and complex novella written during his Parisian exile and the last years of his life, the author returns to the theme of the Ostjuden: the plot is set in a Jewish-Russian townlet (shtetl). The &#8220;hero&#8221;, Nissen Piczenik, is a coral merchant. A very interesting osmosis occurs between the man and his corals. In his eyes they are living animals which, put around the necks of peasant women, instil life, beauty and love. Through folkloristic or midrashic motives&#160;&#8211;&#160;the coral&#8217;s apotropaic power or the sea monster that watches the oceans until the coming of the Messiah&#160;&#8211;&#160;and through alchemy&#160;&#8211;&#160;water and fire&#160;&#8211;&#160;Joseph Roth leads the reader into a man&#8217;s inner world in which he is stuck. Comes the day when, like the corals fished in cold or warm waters and brought to the mainland, an &#8220;oceanic feeling&#8221; wells up within him and awakes his desire to know their world. A sailor takes him onto his battleship, and from then on, he lives between two worlds, the world of delusion and the world of reality: he lets himself be seduced by the false coral his concurrent offers him and mixes it with the real one. He replaces, thanks to drunkenness, the mainland by the rough sea, until he decides to burn the false coral and to keep only the real one that comes from the water. Then he leaves for Canada and embarks on the &#8220;Phenix&#8221;. The ship casts away and Nissen lets himself sink into the abyss of the ocean, a coral amongst corals.

Julius Caesar Arantius (Giulio Cesare Aranzi, 1530-1589) and the hippocampus of the human brain: history behind the discovery.

Julius Caesar Arantius is one of the pioneer anatomists and surgeons of the 16th century who discovered the different anatomical structures of the human body. One of his prominent discoveries is the hippocampus. At that time, Arantius originated the term hippocampus, from the Greek word for seahorse (hippos ["horse"] and kampos ["sea monster"]). Arantius published his description of the hippocampus in 1587, in the first chapter of his work titled De Humano Foetu Liber. Numerous nomenclatures of this structure, including "white silkworm," "Ammon's horn," and "ram's horn" were proposed by different scholars at that time. However, the term hippocampus has become the most widely used in the literature.

The Tricephalos in the Painted Dado of the Church of Nova Pavlica — Possible Origin of Iconography References

The fantastic tricephalos in the painted dado of the sanctuary area of the church of the Presentation of the Virgin in Nova Pavlica, the endowment of Music brothers, is depicted on the fresco layer dating before 1386. It is utterly unusual and interesting because of its iconography. It does not have any perfect analogy neither in Serbian monumental painting, nor in the Byzantine art in general. In previous literature it was referred to as “a fantastic animal”, “an apocalyptic, undefined, sea monster”, as “an Okeanos which is spitting water”. However, any further iconographical details of this fresco were not examined at all, which would be the aim of this paper. The appearance of the said tricephalos indicates that the origin of the various details of its iconography could be traced back to the ancient Greek and late antique art.

Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps. Chet Van Duzer. London: British Library, 2013. 144 pp. $35.

Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps. Chet Van Duzer. London: British Library, 2013. 144 pp. $35.