Sense Of Play Research Articles

A formação profissional dos professores: um velho problema sob outro ângulo

RESUMO O objetivo do artigo é abordar a formação profissional do professor pelo ângulo da sociologia das profissões. A representação do magistério como “vocação” e as premissas da tendência natural feminina para desempenho de uma atividade “maior” e superior às demais profissões - a de “educador” - trouxeram uma enorme ambiguidade para a formação dos professores. Nossa hipótese é que a disseminação dessa perspectiva contribuiu para a descaracterização profissional do magistério. A profissionalidade é condição necessária para a qualidade do exercício profissional, pois, ancorada no habitus profissional, viabiliza o desenvolvimento das ações razoáveis (“senso do jogo”) que, incorporadas pelas ações experimentadas no campo escolar, fundamentariam uma boa formação profissional.

Adapting War Horse: Cognition, the Spectator, and a Sense of Play by Toby Malone and Christopher J. Jackman

Reviewed by: Adapting War Horse: Cognition, the Spectator, and a Sense of Play by Toby Malone and Christopher J. Jackman Drew Chappell Adapting War Horse: Cognition, the Spectator, and a Sense of Play. By Toby Malone and Christopher J. Jackman. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; pp. 114. In Adapting War Horse authors Toby Malone and Christopher Jackman explore from multiple angles the phenomenon that is War Horse: novel, radio play, stage production, filmed stage production, and feature film. With a particular focus on the puppetry of the National Theatre's stage production, the authors use this narrative as a case study for understanding the relationship among audience, text, and image. The case study highlights some key pieces of performance that many spectators take for granted: the imagination essential to create a living thing and environment out of nonliving materials; the process of adapting a piece of literature (which was itself a free adaption of historical events) twice over; and the emotional dimensions of a story centered on an animal in the midst of human tragedy. As the world approaches the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day commemorating the end of World War I, the War Horse project as a whole strikes a nostalgic chord for me. Pairing a talking animal's narrative journey with serious commentary brings me back to stories of my youth, such as Watership Down and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. In these tales the animals were used as metaphors for humans at the mercy of larger forces. It was easy for children to identify with anthropomorphized animals, perhaps because they were smaller then children and thus nonthreatening or because they resembled stuffed animals with which children often sleep at night. As an adult, horses share that childlike fantastical quality. Horses are a collection of contradictions: strong and vulnerable, tame and wild, independent and bound to service. "Remembering" the Great War (of which most readers/audience members have no direct communal knowledge) seems to me of a piece with these animal stories from so long ago—stories viewed through a lens of nostalgia and safe distance. The book is structured as a series of interrelated chapters, each examining one aspect of the War Horse narrative (which focuses on the thoroughbred Joey) in its various incarnations. First, the authors circumscribe the specific Handspring Puppet Company/National Theatre production, with a focus on the playfulness of the puppet artistry. In this section they define and describe the puppet construction and manipulation strategies, focusing on the process of bringing life to the character of Joey. I appreciated the detail in this section and the way in which the authors wove in various approaches to the understanding of "horse" (down to the micro-level of the puppets' eyes and the effect of lighting design on their sheen). Next, they branch out to the other incarnations of the story—book, film, radio play—exploring the unique ways that each of these forms conceptualizes both the emotional center of the story and the audience's experience. The authors then dig deeper into the theory behind the process of imagination and the end goal of emotional connection, bolstering their arguments with theory from (among others) Peter Brook and Bruce McConachie. In this section they ask compelling questions about how we form emotional attachments with characters—both human and nonhuman—and how play functions within this intellectual/emotional exercise. There is much to appreciate in this section, especially as it explores the role of fantasy and imagination on audience understanding and investment. Finally, the authors explore other fine points of the National's production, including marketing and translation into multiple languages. This section contextualizes the work done within the production and tackles the question of how did a book for young people become a worldwide phenomenon? Where did the multiple adaptations "go right"? What can we learn as scholars and practitioners from the long journeys of War Horse? As a study, War Horse hits several high notes: it articulates the grand experiment that the National and Handspring undertook, with its reliance upon audience buy-in for its central character/characterization; and it situates this production within a frame of contemporary work, as well as...

Impeccable Regret by Judith Fitzgerald

Reviewed by: Impeccable Regret by Judith Fitzgerald Bruce Whiteman (bio) Judith Fitzgerald. Impeccable Regret. Talon-books, 2015. The Canadian poet Judith Fitzgerald died in the fall of 2015 at the age of sixty-three, not long before what would be her last book was published. What irony and sadness are there in its title, with its winking but surely unplanned acknowledgement of the end of life. It was never an easy life, a fact she did not hide. Abused by her mother as a young child, abandoned by her father, and raised by a series of stand-in parents (she has called her biological grandmother her “biological monster”), Judith Fitzgerald eventually found unconditional love in the parents of a high school friend, and was able to pull her life together, attend university, and start a career as a poet and writer. (Her first collection of poems was published when she was just eighteen years old.) She built a kind of bulwark with words. She found maîtres in Marshall McLuhan, whose biography she wrote, and in the English professor and writer Thomas Dilworth, who supplies a brief introduction to her last book in which he concludes by placing her in the company—the odd company at first blush—of David Jones and David Foster Wallace. Those two writers did share an uncompromising love of language and were masters in their individual ways of sprezzatura. In that sense at least, Judith Fitzgerald does belong among the Davids, for she is nothing if not a playful alchemist with words. Dilworth locates Fitzgerald’s company of elders in the Joyce of Finnegans Wake and in Hopkins, and those literary alliances seem undeniable. He might have added cummings, although Fitzgerald’s sense of play in poetry centers not so much on typography as on invention and variation. Here is a particularly audacious example, the opening lines of a poem entitled “Existentuality Two : Wave of Radiant Silence”: How I wanted you, hearthening, soulstitious, wholly opensighed, seaswirl ingathering, leaving your damned wreck, my tearstream, interramingling, celebreathing, neither burning nor brimmungling; The relentless emphasis on portmanteau words bespeaks an unappeasable psychic pressure that comes close to being inarticulate, and it is no surprise when this stanza concludes with the imperative “Live outrageously.” Certainly the poems in Impeccable Regret live outrageously. At times the verbal legerdemain can be tiring for the reader, but fortunately Fitzgerald lets up on the throttle often enough to provide solace and relief, or at the least a change of pace. Here, for example, in its entirety, is a poem [End Page 64] called “Contemptus Mundi”: He unfolds and smooths [sic] your annotated life starry; no matter, no mindfulness, even less indifference past imaginable. Talk invincible defeat. Go ahead. See if I cry. Life worthy of affirmation, glimpses of discovery, delight, a thrilling quietude prevails. Of course there is some word play here—“life starry” working a variation on “life story,” and “See if I cry” a suggestive alternative to the usual “See if I care”—but the play is ornamental rather than essential, appoggiaturas and mordents on an otherwise straightforward melody, subtle and suggestive rather than outrageous. The theme of contempt for the physical world is not limited to the poem of that title, and it forms part of a broader spiritual, even Christian, thematic in the book. Titles such as “Trinity,” “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” “Triangular Benedictions,” “Reticulated Salvation,” and even “We Hit Our BVM Knees/Sashay Sway” (and that is a V, not a U) contribute to a liturgical order in the poems that is otherwise not especially overt in the language. Christ is invoked more than once, but in what Fitzgerald calls a “secularly sacred” context; often one has the sense that the wild language is intended to evoke a parallel world, somewhere beyond the pain and complexity of this one, “divorced from furniture” and “divinely fine.” Fitzgerald can say something as simple and beautiful as “The truly innocent yet lucent urgency of love / Stays with me, always an alluring green light,” but usually she senses something bloodied or anguished around the corner or down the street. The opening poem, an address to “Dear Reader,” bids us be welcomed: To...

Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen

Reviewed by: Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen Monica Fay Anderson Sense & Sensibility. By Jane Austen. Adapted by Kate Hamill. Directed by Eric Tucker. Bedlam, The Gym at Judson, New York City. October 29, 2016. Directed by Bedlam’s founding artistic director Eric Tucker, the production of Sense & Sensibility presented at The Gym at Judson was a delight for both the Austen-initiated and uninitiated. Cast members prepared for the show at lighted makeup tables positioned at one end of the alley-configured playing space in view of the audience. Once prepped and sporting contemporary outerwear over nineteenth-century-inspired garb, they roamed about the space, engaging audience members with a few words or inviting looks. With Pharrell Williams’s “Come Get It Bae” playing, they then proceeded to perform a contemporary dance that, after the actors removed the outer layer of their costumes, switched instantaneously to period movement, thus emphasizing the production’s interest in reinvigorating Austen’s text for contemporary audiences. Click for larger view View full resolution The company of Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility. (Photo: Gregory Costanzo.) The tradition of adapting literature for the stage has a long and rich history. George Aiken’s rendering of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrated early on that popular novels could yield popular plays. The challenges of adapting a novel to the stage are many, as adapters must identify the essential conflicts and characters in a literary work and often distill hundreds of pages into two hours or so of performance. An added challenge for Kate Hamill, the adapter of Sense & Sensibility, was the imperative to communicate the novel’s contemporary relevance for an audience two hundred-plus years older than Austen’s own. Hamill’s adaptation and Tucker’s direction met these challenges by adopting a lively point of view conveyed through inventive and fast-paced staging, and by keying in on the chaos created in a society that turns on “fake news.” One prominent force driving this production was a shake-up of Austen’s narrative perspective. In her telling of the Dashwood sisters’ story, Elinor, the paragon of good sense, is the primary eye through which we see the makings of good matches, and it is Elinor’s reserve that is reflected throughout Austen’s narration. By contrast, Elinor’s younger sister, Marianne, is the picture of romantic sensibility and wears [End Page 578] her passions for all to see. Austen’s third-person narrator describes Marianne as “eager in everything,” and it was the spirit of Marianne that imbued Bedlam’s production. The performance was marked by expeditious transitions, accomplished with rolling furniture and actors easily passing from one character to the next. Sometimes a single character was shared by more than one actor. A tiara and some gnawing at a pantomimed chicken leg told us that Lady Middleton was with us, regardless of which actor was playing her in any given moment. This fluid passing of one character from actor to actor is a convention that Tucker successfully employed in two of Bedlam’s earliest productions: Shaw’s St. Joan and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, both played by Bedlam’s founding cast of four. The use of the convention had a similar impact in Sense & Sensibility, as it allowed a cast of ten to bring before us a panorama of characters (including horses); it also supplied the production with a sense of playfulness that show-cased the actors‘ agility and creativity. Click for larger view View full resolution The company of Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility. (Photo: Gregory Costanzo.) For all of the fun that we had with Marianne and some of the novel’s equally boisterous characters, one of the greatest treats of this production was the moment when all of the frantic giddiness stopped. When the production reached what is the climax of Austen’s novel—the long-awaited union of Elinor and Edward—it gifted us with something that the novel does not. What Austen discreetly summarizes, Hamill put before our eyes: Elinor and Edward’s heartfelt profession of their long-concealed love. The role of Elinor, originally played by Bedlam cofounder Andrus Nichols, was now embodied by Kelley Curran, and the...

Фрески церкви Христа Спасителя в Верии (1314/1315 год) и вопросы творчества Георгия Каллиергиса

The small single-nave Church of Christ in Veroia, which used to be the katholicon of the Resurrection monastery, retains a complete and accurately dated frescoes ensemble of the Early Palaeologan period. A dedicatory inscription above the western entrance reports that the church was painted by the artist named Kalliergis, “the best painter in all of Thessaly”, and consecrated by the Constantinopolitan patriarch during the reign of the Emperor Andronikos II Palaeologos in 1314–1315.In 1955, in reliance with this inscription, the stylistic and iconographic features of the frescoes, A. Xyngopoulos suggested that the painter who carried them out was connected with Thessaloniki, whose cultural influence extended to Veroia. This hypothesis was later confirmed by a certain document of Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, dated to 1322. Wide range of issues associated with the frescoes of the Church of Christ in Veroia is of particular importance since their creation time and author are precisely known, and therefore the examination of this monument can improve our concept of the evolution of Byzantine painting during the Early Palaeologan period.The article deals with three key aspects connected with the frescoes of the Church of Christ. Firstly, the murals of the church demonstrate a number of specific iconographic features that are based, in our opinion, on the artistic vision of Kalliergis. So, the preference which is given to succinct iconographic variants can be explained by the painter’s desire to enrich the meaning of the image, without overloading it with excessive details, and to preserve the possibility of clear perception of the entire composition. Secondly, the creative manner of Kalliergis had its individual features that distinguish him from other contemporary painters. Thus, Kalliergis is a master of a compact, restrained and balanced composition; he avoids narrative even in the most dramatic scenes. This manner contradicts with the great part of monuments in Macedonia and Serbia created at the end of the 13th — beginning of the 14th century which, in G. Millet’s apt words, “have a sense of drama” and demonstrate dynamism and redundancy in narrative scenes. Kalliergis isa true muralist, who consistently embodies the principle of clear and proportional division of the architectural space. His paintings, along with frescoes in the nave of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki(ca. 1314), belong to the most aristocratic trend in the Byzantine art of the first quarter of the 14th century.Finally, the issue of attribution of the monuments that can be more or less likely attributed to Kalliergis still remains. The article summarizes opinions of different researchers on this uneasy question, which are often based on vague stylistic (or even purely iconographic) criteria and need further examination.

Off Set

Off Set Ron Capshaw (bio) High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and The Making of an American Classic Glenn Frankel Bloomsbury Press www.bloomsbury.com/us/high-noon-9781620409480/ 400Pages; Print, $28.00 In the film, The Contender (2000), a liberal female politician who is undergoing a bruising confirmation hearing for a position in the president’s cabinet, uses the blacklist as an example as to why she won’t answer questions from Congress about her sex life. In Atticus Finch fashion, she instructs a young hothead who wants her to answer the questions, that had the first witness before HUAC refused to name names, then other witnesses would have done likewise and the whole nightmare of the blacklist would have been stopped in its tracks. Thus the point of her “history lesson” is that she must refuse, otherwise blacklist part two will occur. This is a prime example about the navel-watching Left Coast Hollywood indulges in that when they need an event to show America betraying its democratic ideals. In these sweepstakes, the more horrific event of the Japanese Internment cannot compete with their almost continuing citation of the blacklist—always the blacklist. For it happened to “them:” tinsel-town liberals, whose, more often than not membership in the American Communist Party did not disqualify them from liberalism; indeed, it intensified their humanist ideals. And those who inflicted the blacklist, “culturally illiterate” right-wingers, suit the Left Coast’s description of their enemies today; Meryl Streep’s “mixed martial artists” and “brown-shirts” that support her hated Donald Trump. When those such as the Streeps and Baldwins conjure up the boogeyman of the blacklist one gets the sense that they want it to happen; that their sense of drama and fantasy demands their chance to defy their own form of “HUAC.” [End Page 25] The roles, in every sense of the word, have been established in the history of the blacklist: liberal humanist celebrities vs. knuckle-dragging conservatives—read fascists. But in 2002, for one brief shining moment, these roles were challenged, and not with the typical conservative example of the Hollywood left blacklisting them. Conservative film-maker Lionel Chetwynd made the documentary Darkness at High Noon, which defended a Hollywood Communist against a liberal betrayer. The “red” in question (who, in point of fact, had left the Party years before) was Chetwynd’s mentor, blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman, and the cowardly liberal was Foreman’s partner in a film production unit, Stanley Kramer, the “brave” liberal producer of such movies as “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” (1967). The role reversal was present even in the reactions to this documentary. Suddenly, anti-anti-communists like Victor Navasky, who never left an opportunity go to waste to bemoan the cowardly behavior of those who named names and/or betrayed their comrades, were defending Kramer and bashing Chetwynd, and in effect, Foreman himself. And this betrayal and blacklist occurred during the making of a cut-rate black and white Western (probably the most reactionary of film genres) with an aging A-list star, High Noon (1952). In this excellent book, Glenn Frankel conveys the ironies involved in this Western that became a metaphor for what was happening off set. Foreman, who adapted the story of a sheriff abandoned by the townsfolk to face the outlaws coming back to town, felt more and more like the main character, played by Gary Cooper. Foreman was called to testify before Congress about his Communist associations mid-way into production. Because he refused to name names (although he did volunteer information, however limited, about his own political history), Congress gave Foreman the “kiss of death” for studio employment by declaring him “an uncooperative witness.” When Cooper went down the town square to face an almost certain doom as townspeople closed their shutters, Foreman felt that represented his “leper” status among his friends. And that was most evident in how Kramer, his friend and colleague for ten years, treated him after the testimony. Kramer always claimed that (a) Foreman lied to him about being a Communist and (b) that Foreman was going to falsely name Kramer...

Have adults lost their sense of play? An observational study of the social dynamics of physical (in)activity in German and Hawaiian leisure settings.

BackgroundPhysical inactivity is one of the biggest health problems nowadays. Recent research shows that socio-cultural barriers to physical activity are mostly related to modern lifestyles. However, there is a lack of research on how social and group dynamics influence engagement in physical activity. Furthermore, there are few cross-cultural studies that have compared the social dynamics of (in)activity in different cultural settings. This paper therefore aims to analyse how social group dynamics influence physical activity and inactivity in informal social environments and whether physical activity is influenced by the socio-cultural settings.MethodsThe paper presents the qualitative data collected within a covert participant observation study. Data was collected by keeping observational notes in order to record typical, regular patterns regarding physical (in)activity related behaviour of groups at an artificial open air swimming pool in Germany and a natural pond in Hawai’i. The data collection period was eight and a half months. Data was interpreted based on constant comparative analysis in order to identify most generative patterns in the field notes.ResultsGroup structures appear to play a significant role regarding the activity of the group members. In this study, we identified four key factors that influence group based physical activity: 1) Physical activity seems to be a group disturbing behaviour particularly in larger groups of adults; 2) Physical activity appears to be more functional and less joyful in adults than in children; 3) Group activity is influenced by (in)activity anchors, including ‘domestication’ of a group’s site, obesity, and controlling parents. 4) Physical activity is to a certain extent socially contagious, particularly with regard to playful activities.ConclusionsSuccessful promotion of physical activity should target the social structures of inactive individuals’ groups. In this regard, one of the main problems is that fun and wellbeing, as very important targets of public health strategies for the adult population, appear not to be compatible with physical activity. Developing strategies to reframe physical activity rather as ‘fun’ and less as functional may be one way to engage inactive individuals in physical activity in leisure settings.

Mister Doctor: Janusz Korczak and the Orphans of the Warsaw Ghetto by I. Cohen-Janka

Cohen-Janka, Irène. Mister Doctor: Janusz Korczak and the Orphans of the Warsaw Ghetto. Illus. Maurizio A.C. Quarello. Trans. Paula Ayer. Toronto: Annic Press, 2015.When the human order descends into madness, the heroes are those who remain humane. One such hero was a Polish national, the “Mister Doctor” of this story. Born into a Jewish family as Henryk Goldzsmit, he became better known by his nom de plume, Janusz Korczak, under which he wrote popular books for children. A trained physician, he served his country as a military doctor in World War I. When peace came, he turned his attention to pediatrics. He shared, through radio broadcasts, his enlightened ideas for child rearing. These ideas he put into practice in Warsaw as the head of an orphanage for Jewish children. Mister Doctor provides an account of his last years as he struggled to bring hope and comfort to the orphans following the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II.The narrative voice of Mister Doctor is haunting, for it is a voice from the grave. Simon, the child narrator, relates events as the Nazis repeatedly relocate Korczak and his young charges, first, from the security of their orphanage into the nightmare of the Warsaw Ghetto and, from there, into the death bound trains that would transport them to the extermination camp at Treblinka. We see through Simon’s eyes how Korczak, defying the climate of deprivation, attempts to retain at least some of those things that are vital to childhood: a sense of play, the assurance of love, the comforting presence of an attentive adult.Cohen-Janka has created in Simon a youthful and unadorned voice that will speak to children in upper elementary and junior high school. Maurizio Quarello’s somber, realistic, charcoal drawings, are masterful works that would speak to any age. Excellent end notes give further details of Janusz Korczak’s life.Korczak, like other men of conscience, Oskar Schindler, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Canadians of our own era—Ambassador Kenneth Taylor, Roméo Dallaire, retained, under extreme duress, the courage of his convictions. In today’s world, beset as it is with sectarian violence, terrorism, and the murder and displacement of innocent people, children need to know that it is possible to be steadfastly life affirming. Parents, teachers and librarians might well share and discuss with them this story of Mister Doctor.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special and academic libraries. She was formerly Curriculum Librarian for the University of Alberta.

Marjan Manček: Illustrator – Slovenia

Marjan MančekIllustrator – Slovenia Milena Milutinovic Click for larger view View full resolution When you’re drawing, the word comes, the line comes, the figures come, you add to them, repair them and then something emerges from this, a story develops. M. Manček marjan mançek is one of Slovenia’s most recognizable illustrators due to his unique style. He has illustrated more than 200 books, written and illustrated comics and children’s picture books, and made several short animated films. He has received a number of awards in Slovenia and abroad for his work. Manček was born in 1948 in Novo Mesto in Slovenia. During his years as a student of English and History at the University of Ljubljana, he earned money publishing cartoons, particularly caricatures. After having worked briefly as a teacher, and later as an editor in a publishing house, he started working full time as a freelance artist. Manček’s artistic style is informed by his experience as a caricaturist. His drawings seem to be designed to express the content as clearly as possible, while using the smallest possible number of lines. Yet, this does not mean that Manček does not pay attention to detail. Movement, for example, is an important feature of his illustrations, and he makes use of his experience from working with animated film when depicting, for example, laughter or crying. Manček’s early work on caricatures and cartoons has also influenced his style in terms of the comedic elements and humor present in his illustrations. There is a sense of playfulness in his drawings and he expresses humor in a number of ways. Sometimes it is by exaggerating and contrasting certain parts, sometimes it is by facial expressions, and other times it is by the sheer oddity of his drawings. Though Manček puts a lot of effort in the detail of each individual illustration, the overall design of each book is equally important. For instance, he is guided by both aesthetic deliberation and educational aims when illustrating a book. Accordingly, he may for example decide to link the text with his drawings, hoping that the connection between text and illustration will lead the child towards reading through play. In fact, the most important factor for Manček when making his creative decisions is the readers. “In creating for children and young people, I am aware for whom the work is intended, and when it comes onto paper, in some way, I feel whether it is right,” he says. In other words, Manček always takes his readers into account when illustrating, considering them a starting point for his drawings. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Peter Klepec [Peter Chatterbox]. By France Bevk. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1978. Print. Google Scholar Pedenjped [Pedenjped]. By Niko Grafenauer. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1979. Print. Google Scholar Kozlovska sodba v Višnji gori [The Famous Goat Trial]. By Josip Jurčič. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1977. Print. Google Scholar Hribci. Zgodbe iz pradavnine [The Hillies: Stories from the Distant Past]. By Marjan Manček. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, 1993. Print. Google Scholar Koroška pripovedka [Carinthian Tale]. Mojca Pokrajculja, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1976. Print. [End Page 52] Google Scholar Copyright © 2016 Bookbird, Inc.

Ultima Festival 2015, Oslo

The sheer diversity of Ultima events goes a great way towards explaining Oslo's creative impetus and influence within Northern Europe: the sense of play is tangible in deft, brave and astute programming. With the extension of Lars Petter Hagen's Ultima Festival directorship, taking a risk is still promoted, and very necessary in cultivating the talent and ideas we now expect from and associate with the music scene of Oslo. Ultima 2015, which I attended from 12 to 16 September, did not fail to deliver, provoking and poking at every twist and turn.

Mozart at play: the limitations of attributing the etiology of genius to tourette syndrome and mental illness.

There has been a persistent attempt to explain Mozart's talent as connected to physical and mental illness. While Mozart's musical compositions and performances were often acclaimed for their "taste," the composer's personal behavior sometimes astonished those who witnessed "blödeln" or wild horseplay, practical joking, and scatological humor. Most recently, Mozart's eccentric behavior has been attributed to Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. This chapter investigates the evidence for these retrospective diagnoses and reassesses this evidence by paying particular attention to the milieu in which Mozart lived. We argue that Mozart's putative pathological behavior was a manifestation of his resilience in face of multiple adversities and was deeply rooted in his sense of play. Our hypothesis is that play, rather than neuropsychiatric disease, was essential to the operation of his genius.

Graffiti Silence

These tricontinental ekphrastic poems feature graffiti art(ists) that have caught my heart off guard. The first poem titled “Graffiti of Silence” is a response to the anonymous “listen bird”, ubiquitous in Edmonton's urban geography from 2003 to about 2008. Stenciled, spray painted or stickered, it always featured a speech bubble with one word: listen. It quickly became part of Edmonton’s local iconography, but the city’s Graffiti Management Program managed to eliminate the bird from its streets, but not from public memory. The second ekphrasis titled “The Fisherman” features the work of El niño de las pinturas (Raúl Ruiz), an internationally-renowned graffiti artist based in Granada, Spain. Known for his large-scale wall murals which are almost always accompanied by his own poetic text, he dresses the skin of this city in sienna strokes, covers its bruises with layers of light, becoming a source of symbolic pride for Granada. The third poem, “Monsters in Montevideo,” is inspired by Alfalfa (Nicolás Sánchez), an iconic street artist based in Montevideo, Uruguay. His unique style uses organic lines and bright colours to create fantastical creatures that add a sense of play and surprise to many of the city’s streets. These three ekphrastic poems are an attempt to translate the poetic experience of viewing street art. Through poetry, the impermanent art of graffiti is rendered immortal as a self-portrait of each city and each spectator.

La Contagion de l’écho: “L’Obsession” de Charles Cros

Charles Cros’s comic monologues are less famous than his collections of poems Le Coff ret de Santal and Le Collier de griffes , though they were theorized by contemporary actors such as Coquelin cadet, and more recently analyzed by scholars from Daniel Grojnowski to Françoise Dubor. In this study of “L’Obsession” (written and performed in 1878), I argue that the technique of voice and diction tends to liken language and the flow of words to a mental disease. In connection with the clinical experiments that Charcot carried out in the Salpêtrière or with French psychiatric concepts and studies that influenced his sense of drama and onstage recitation, the way in which Cros focuses on his monologue’s verbal and physical tics brings to light a new theory of echo and poetic phrasing not only based on repetitions but also deeply rooted in the speaker’s body. (In French)

Review: A Short History of the Highrise, by Katerina Cizek, director

Katerina Cizek, director A Short History of the Highrise Short film and “Op-Doc” for the New York Times launched in October 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/high-rise Henry David Thoreau once noted that “every apartment in which man dwells [should] be lofty enough to create some obscurity where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters.”1 Despite the fact that Thoreau abhorred urban life, the existential human quest for magic from the unlikeliest of places—confined living quarters—is similar to that of A Short History of the Highrise , an interactive documentary conceived and directed by Katerina Cizek and published online by the New York Times in the fall of 2013. The short interactive online documentary, which prides itself on placing the human aspects of high-rise life to the fore, is a hearty yet wistful work whose most striking aspect is its visual interpretation of source material. Cizek’s approach to her sources and narrative style itself flickers with a keen sense of play—as well as a certain amount of obscurity. Highrise is an “op-doc” subdivided into four sections, three of which—“Mud,” “Concrete,” and “Glass”—trace a roughly chronological story of multifamily living from Roman times to the present, while a fourth—a slideshow of apartment life contributed by readers—offers an impressionistic picture of contemporary apartment life from an anthropological perspective. The historical sections are narrated by the singer Feist through rhyming verse, which can feel both entertaining …

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

Online Persona as Hybrid-Object: Tracing the Problems and Possibilities of Persona in the Short Film Noah

Online Persona as Hybrid-Object: Tracing the Problems and Possibilities of Persona in the Short Film Noah

Albertine: Switzerland ⋆ Illustrator

AlbertineSwitzerland ⋆ Illustrator Roxanne Harde Born near Geneva in 1967, Albertine studied at the École supérieure d'art visual of Geneva. After graduating in 1990, Albertine opened a screen-printing workshop and became a press illustrator for Le Nouveau Quotidein, L'Hebdo, Bilan, Femina, and Les Carnets de Versailles. Her marriage to writer Germano Zullo in 1996 has led to an ongoing and productive collaboration. Their children's books have won many awards, including the Golden Apple of Bratislava in 1999, Prix Suisse Jeunesse et Médias in 2009, the Prix Sorciéres in 2011, and the New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book in 2012. Albertine also collaborates with director Claude Barras, and they have made animated and short films, and a puppet show production. She continues to develop her artistic career and has ex hibited drawings, screen prints, lithographs, and wood engravings in Geneva, Paris, Rome, Valencia, and Tokyo. Albertine also teaches screenprinting and illustration courses in Geneva. In interviews, Albertine often references the importance of games and play to her work. Her commitment to the story comes through the stroke of her Rotring, but her use of color and space, and of the variety of media she employs—including gouache, collage, line drawings, and digital pallets—speak to her sense of play. Overall, her art is aptly described as joyous and unrestrained, and her refusal to subscribe to the traditional constraints of illustrated books means that her work will stay fresh and relevant to children in the decades to come. Selected Publications • Le Chat botté [Puss in Boots]. Text Charles Perrault. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2009. Print. Google Scholar • Les Gratte-Ciel [Sky High]. Text Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2011. Print. Google Scholar • Marta et la bicyclette [Marta and the Bicycle]. Text Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 1999. Print. Google Scholar • Les Oiseaux [Little Bird]. Text Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2010. Print. Google Scholar • La Rumeur de Venise [The Venice Rumor]. Story Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2008. Print. [End Page 50] Google Scholar Copyright © 2014 Bookbird, Inc.

Good Fun: The Hotel Chelsea Drawings of Martin Kippenberger

Good FunThe Hotel Chelsea Drawings of Martin Kippenberger Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Martin Medusa, 1997 © Elfie Semotan 2014 [End Page 95] “I work hard so people can say, ‘Kippenberger was a good time.’” German artist Martin Kippenberger died on March 7, 1997, of liver cancer, six weeks after diagnosis. He was forty-four. His early death turned him into a legend as his reputation and work moved beyond the insular world of art into the realm of cult status. Some have called him “the James Dean of art,” while others more generally labeled him the enfant terrible of the German avant-garde of the ’80s. My first introduction to Martin Kippenberger was at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin. I walked into the building’s east wing on a Saturday morning in June and found myself surrounded by a series of wooden sculptures of crucified frogs, their tongues drooping as each held tightly to a beer mug in one hand and an egg in another, lantern-topped streetlights twisted and tangled, simulating a state of drunkenness, and deprecating self-portraits of the artist with his white cotton underwear pulled up over a protruding belly that belied the charm often sought in self-portraiture. He seemed to have no fear of failure or sense of embarrassment. The whole exhibition showed a levity and playfulness that made me smile. Kippenberger seemed to be saying that art is good fun, and, by extension, that life is too. “Childhood never really ends,” he said, and his sense of play on display at the Bahnhof Museum was infectious. The off-kilter perspectives of his work lifted my mood and made me want to know more about the man and the time and places where he created his art. Martin Kippenberger was born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1953. He grew up in a rambling house at the end of a cul-de-sac, not far from the coal mine where his father worked as a supervisor. There was plenty of art in the home. His parents collected the work of emerging artists, mostly German Expressionists, filling their rooms with paintings. Despite the demands of work and five children, his parents found time to attend movies, theater and art exhibitions. His father and grandfather had in fact wanted to be artists, so it was a valued profession in the Kippenberger household. Rather than playing with cars, toy guns and the usual boy stuff, Martin worked his way through the art history books that lined the shelves, tackling different styles and techniques. “Martin, Our Artist” was proudly written in big letters on the kitchen wall above the breakfast table where he carried on his self-apprenticeship. [End Page 96] Click for larger view View full resolution Martin Kippenberger, Heavy Mädel, 1990 © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Martin Kippenberger, Heavy Mädel, 1990 © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne [End Page 98] Click for larger view View full resolution Martin Kippenberger, Heavy Mädel, 1990 © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne [End Page 99] Click for larger view View full resolution Martin Kippenberger, Heavy Mädel, 1990 © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne In school Martin was good at “drawing and handicrafts” but not much else. Today he would be diagnosed as dyslexic, but then it was simply thought that he had trouble reading and writing. To communicate the thoughts of a mind that was bursting with ideas, he sketched. One of his teachers said of the artwork he was producing that it was “too mature for a small boy.” After failing to pass sixth grade for the second time, he left without graduating. If Martin was to set out on his own to be an artist, he believed that the first step was to dress like one. Clothes were a costume, and, like an actor, an artist needed an appropriate wardrobe. Wanting to be noticed, Martin acquired Hawaiian shirts, sunglasses, polo shirts and a pipe. Later he hennaed his hair and kicked around town in orange overalls. Finally he settled on dressing like a stylish banker...

On Keeping Company with Wolves: Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”

On Keeping Company with Wolves:Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” Jim Shepard (bio) I encountered that group of writers that came to be known as the fabulists at just about the perfect time for me, although I didn’t know it then. I was at the end of my undergraduate education, and I’d already known from an early age that I wanted to write fiction. But given that I had gone to such a craphole of a high school, and had started to figure out just how much I really didn’t know, I decided that my only hope was to hunker down and go small when it came to ambition: to write obsessively about only what I knew, or thought I knew. The results were what you might expect: stories about sensitive and troubled but covertly appealing lower-middle-class kids negotiating your run-of-the-mill family dysfunctions. I don’t remember how I first encountered Angela Carter’s fiction—I don’t think it was in class, though a class reference probably led to it—but boy, did she blow the doors off that particular project. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, but no writer in the twentieth century did a better job of reminding us both of the importance of staying in touch with one’s own sense of play, and of granting those imagined states their own grave authority. Most, if not all, of the fabulists exposed how much [End Page 69] there was to be gained from pillaging high and low culture, and all of them had their particular pleasures, but while Donald Barthelme was mordant and deadpan, and Robert Coover all antic demolition, Angela Carter was the one who most reliably kept the reader in touch with the exhilaration and exuberance of encountering imagined worlds we thought we already knew. She reconceived all sorts of canonical fairy tales and fables with not only a sly and witty subversiveness but also a startling fierceness. Her work signaled a recommitment to the power of those primal feelings that fairy tales and fables were designed to mobilize: terror, or desire, feelings that attended upon revelations about the fundamental and unapologetic intimacy of innocence and guilt, say, or of eros and thanatos. So that we get, in “The Company of Wolves,” the expected wryness of both psychoanalytic and feminist lenses being trained on the narrative of Little Red Riding Hood—in all sorts of ways, our story proceeds with a noticeably Freudian logic, and our heroine makes abundantly clear that she’s no one’s doormat—and at times the result can be deftly funny. When the virginal but blooming and strong-minded child makes her way through the woods to her grandmother’s house, she finds herself powerfully attracted to a handsome hunter, with his flash of white teeth and carcasses of game birds, and we’re informed, “This young man had a remarkable object in his pocket. It was a compass.” And in terms of the ways in which that Freudianism and feminism come together, we also get a disconcerting sense of what else she’s attracted to: “He laughed at her again; gleaming trails of spittle clung to his teeth.” Granny, it turns out, with her Bible for company and her china spaniels on either side of the fireplace, has been trying to “keep the wolves outside by living well,” but that’s not going to fly, and she’s promptly devoured. But before she becomes just a pile of bones and some inedible hair, even she is erotically mesmerized by what happens when “the forest has come into the kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair.” When the wolf—or werewolf, in this case—strips off his shirt, “his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit,” and it’s hard, in twentieth-century literature, to come up with a moment as comic and disturbing as her reaction when he strips off his trousers: “His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.” Naturally, then, Little Red Riding Hood herself is even more compelled. She spies a tuft of her grandmother’s hair, registers how fully she’s in danger...

Avatar, Identitas dalam Cyberspace

Human dependence on technology will have implications for a new culture of communication. Culture is related to the person behind the presence of elements of verbal or visual communication through internet media. Communication established via the Internet, known as cyberspace, allows the presence of a person in a variety of virtual identities. These identities emerge through verbal and visual appearances. They have names and shapes but can be present in any kind of form, commonly called avatars. The identity of a person can be represented by a number of different avatars capable of having more than one party at the same time. Communication that exists in cyberspace exceed time and space. The presence of these identities clearly indicates a relationship model that has a specific purpose. It could be a model of social relations that promote friendship, excitement, a sense of play, a critical mind or with other purposes. But the presence of such virtual identity cannot simply be equated with human beings as their personal identity in the real world, because in cyberspace, identity is plural and fluid. It can even be made with a hidden agenda.