Beautiful Things Research Articles

On His Own Two Feet.

It all began after my 6-year-old son “V’s” first chemotherapy session when he came out of it a bit tired and he asked me to carry him to the car, needless to say, I did. As we were leaving the hospital, even though everything had gone well, it felt like we were going home defeated, hunched over and with our tails between our legs, with my boy on me … sort of like picking up pieces. I thought then, that I might have been doing a disservice to my son in the grand scheme of things by “carrying” him to the car since life was tough enough with or without this disease, our support will ALWAYS be there but I thought he needed to know he was no pushover. When we got home we sat down and talked about the fact that medulloblastoma was not going to take the best of us and every time he would leave the hospital he would leave “on his own two feet” as a symbol of turning the tables on this disease, as a symbol of him having the upper hand on this tough path, as a way of having valor against adversity, as a statement of self-reliance and endurance. “V” has matured so much and so rapidly since his diagnosis in late June 2013 that he amazes me. Diligently, after each chemotherapy session, once the port was de-accessed, he would go towards that door walking, holding my hand…. It was a thing of beauty to watch him go, determined, brave and strong. It was, and will always be, a teaching for the whole family. “On my own two feet” became our mantra. “On my own two feet” brought us together as a family, made us more resilient. Many times we would arrive home after battling both cancer and chemotherapy, in addition to appendicitis, otitis media, febrile neutropenia, all of these while on chemo and he’d go about his business as if nothing was really happening; to watch him brave these episodes represented a strange collage of arduousness, herculean and invigorating feelings. Each one of the those times when we’d finish a session or conquered a new milestone, it felt that we had just won a battle … one more towards winning the war … and it was every time he did it, a breath of fresh air, a thrill. At times it felt like he was, in fact, “carrying ME to the car,” that is how much of a tough cookie “V” is. Despite the fact that we are not “out of the woods” yet (but then again we know in our hearts we are) and that we continue to fight, I have to say that with conviction, love and support, the toughest of tasks in front of you can be overcome … even DEFEATING CANCER!! Today, I am happy to share with you that he has completed his chemotherapy and radiotherapy with the help of a caring and nurturing team of doctors, nurses and administrators, that his port has been removed and that “V” is getting ready to live the rest of his beautiful life, … STANDING …, on his own two feet.

Art, as Device

We get used to horrible things and stop fearing them. We get used to beautiful things and stop enjoying them. We get used to people and stop experiencing them as personalities. Art is a means to make things real again. These ideas, expressed by a very young and polemically minded Viktor Shklovsky almost a hundred years ago, are as relevant today as ever: current studies in cognition confirm his insights about the process of automatization and its opposite. While the Romantics only sought to actualize the beauty of the world, Shklovsky sees art also as a way to make its horrors felt.

“How Did I End Up Here?”: Dynamic Cartography in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

This article considers the principle of relation in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears in order to suggest that the novel brings narrative and mapping practices closer together. I develop this relational reading by connecting Edouard Glissant’s work on the poetics of relation to David Harvey’s conception of relational spacetime and arguing that the novel’s fragmented and elliptical narrative embodies these principles. As a result, it generates what I call “dynamic cartography,” a mode of space-writing characterized by fluidity, mobility, and disjunction. Reading Beautiful Things through the framework of relation shows how the text deploys maps and other cartographic ephemera to negotiate and mediate geographical upheavals such as diaspora and gentrification. More broadly, it reveals how the literature of globalization functions as a form of cartography, a representation of space that conditions our understanding of the world. Ultimately, this reading suggests that as space becomes increasingly dynamic and disjunctive, so too do the forms that represent that space.

Freely Revised and Edited: Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems

Freely Revised and Edited:Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems Dani Spinosa (bio) It might seem strange that in order to write about anarchism and authorship in the poetry of Jackson Mac Low, I write not about his early poems in which he pushes the limits of chance, spontaneity, improvisation, deterministic methods, and computer systems designed to produce diastic poems1 but, rather, about his often critically neglected poetic sequence, The Stein Poems, composed between 1998 and 2003, ending just a year before his death. Among some of the last poems he ever wrote, The Stein Poems serve as a kind of combination of a lifetime of experimentation with indeterminacy and chance. As he himself asserted in a cover letter sent [End Page 91] accompanying a submission of some of these poems for journal publication: “I returned to using a deterministic procedure in April 1998, when I began writing the poems in the Stein series, but now I always, to some extent, modify the results of the procedure, making personal decisions of different kinds. My writingways came together” (Thing of Beauty 376). In The Stein Poems, Mac Low returns to deterministic methods of writing, which he had more or less abandoned, only to adapt these chance-based procedures by making clear (and unapologetic) the moments in which his individual taste intervened in, or added on to, the deterministic process. In this article I argue that The Stein Poems bridge the gap between the anti-egoic poetics popularized throughout Mac Low’s career by the avantgarde (and especially by artists like John Cage, whom I will discuss further). Occupying a unique mediatory position, The Stein Poems showcase Mac Low’s anarchist poetics in that they produce texts that function not as utopian dreams or political tracts but, instead, as what Mac Low himself terms “analogies of free communities.” The poems encourage the reader to perform interventionary tactics in the production of meaning and to play a significant role in the meaning-making of the poems themselves. Ultimately, I use the unique position of The Stein Poems to argue that Mac Low’s anarchist poetics and politics are best understood not necessarily or exclusively in relation to aleatoric or nonintentional writing methods but primarily in relation to the role of the reader (who is thus performer and perceiver) in this quasi-intentional work. To do this I should first look to chance and the role of the ego in his work more generally and how his grappling with these issues led to the composition of The Stein Poems. It would seem from Mac Low’s publication history that his writings about and discussions of the chance-based work of John Cage is what sparked the decision to produce The Stein Poems in this fashion. Cage and Mac Low were friends and often colleagues, but it was not until after Cage’s death in 1992 that Mac Low started to write critically about his work. Published in Richard Kostelanetz’s Writings about John Cage (1993), Mac Low’s article “Something about the Writings of John Cage,” examined, specifically and critically, the role of taste and authorial intent in Cage’s chance-based work. He then revised and expanded the article as “Cage’s Writings up to the Late 1980s” for inclusion in David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch’s Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art. At the same time, he was engaged in the composition of 154 Forties, poems written in a more traditional compositional method, incorporating an emphasis on prosody and caesural spaces. In 1998, between the two Cage articles, Mac Low, as he stated in the quotation above, “returned” to deterministic [End Page 92] methods, but it was under the caveat that he no longer pretended that this was not, ultimately, an egoic process. This decision was clearly triggered, at least in part, by Mac Low’s work on Cage, in which he rails against those who misinterpreted or misunderstood Cage as having refused or eliminated the presence of the ego and its concomitant authorial intent via indeterminacy. For Cage, Mac Low writes, “chance was always constrained, to a greater or lesser extent, by...

Kafka’s failing migrant and spaces for integration in contemporary German and American literature

In this comparative study of Kafka’s The Man who Disappeared, Ozdamar’s Mother Tongue and Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, I examine the complex processes of integration and exclusion of the figure of ‘the migrant’ that are at work in each of these texts. In Kafka’s novelistic fragment the space for integration is gradually undone—a process that is suggested in the title of the novel itself: “The Man who Disappeared.” Ozdamar and Mengestu, on the other hand, construct spaces where the possibility of integration is not ruled out. To be sure, Mengestu’s African immigrant, who runs a small store in a gentrifying American city, resembles Kafka’s protagonist in many respects. However, unlike Kafka’s two-dimensional character, who remains radically marginalised, Mengestu’s immigrant develops a strong sense of belonging, asserting a place of his own in his American-Ethiopian diaspora. The claim for ownership is also prominent in Ozdamar’s stories, albeit differently. The Turkish-German author Ozdamar works through the linguistic complexities of the migrant’s many tongues, forming a linguistic synthesis—or ‘third language’—that opens up other spaces for integration. This contrastive comparison will shed new light on different literary dealings with the figure of ‘the migrant,’ distinguishing the uncompromising failure of Kafka’s migrant from more “successful” integrations through developments of third (linguistic) spaces in contemporary literature.

Unification: Not Just a Thing of Beauty

We often hear that simplicity, explanatory power and unification, though aesthetically pleasing or beautiful qualities, are at best pragmatic considerations in matters of choosing between rival hypotheses. This paper aims to offer a novel conception and an associated measure of unification, both of which are demonstrably more than just pragmatic considerations. The discussion departs from a brief survey of some failed attempts to carve out adequate conceptions of unification. It then proceeds to an analysis of the notions of confirmational connectedness and disconnectedness. Roughly speaking, these notions attempt to capture the way support propagates or fails to propagate between the content parts of a hypothesis or, equivalently, between the contents of two or more hypotheses. The two notions are instrumental in helping to tackle the problem of ad hoc, and in particular monstrous, hypotheses. More importantly for the purposes of this paper, they are essential ingredients in the proposed conception of unification and its associated measure. In simple terms, the more the content of a hypothesis (or, equivalently, the content of a set of hypotheses) is confirmationally connected the more that content is unified. Since the confirmational connectedness of two content parts is determined by purely objective matters of fact, the proposed notion and measure of unification are themselves strictly objective, i.e. not merely pragmatic considerations in matters of hypothesis choice. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the proposed measure handles real and hypothetical examples but also how it stands up to various objections.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Life

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Life Robert H. Bell (bio) In 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-eight years old, the celebrated author of The Great Gatsby, and married for better and for worse to Zelda. That summer of “1000 parties and no work” on the French Riviera, Scott and Zelda became close friends with Gerald and Sara Murphy, ten years older, whose life together seemed a thing of beauty. The art of living was for the Murphys their special project and particular gift. “For me,” Gerald would say, “only the invented part of life is satisfying, the unrealistic part … the invented part, for me, is what has meaning.” The lives of the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys were intricately entwined for many years, and their history catalyzed Fitzgerald’s autobiographical art, as his notes for his work in progress indicate: “Parallel between actual case and case in novel.” Tender Is the Night demonstrates the imbrication of life and art, the contingency of Fitzgerald’s imagination, and the treachery of both the writer’s prerogative and the reader’s literal-mindedness. Partly because of its intimacy, the novel long gestated; ironically, because of its personal nature, the book was vastly undervalued when it finally appeared in 1934, and it never achieved the critical stature its author expected. Perhaps Fitzgerald was just too close to his work—or his fiction was too close to the bone. To this day the legend of Zelda and Scott is far better known than the heartbreaking narrative of Dick and Nicole Diver. Yet the many historical accounts of the Fitzgeralds help us see both the vexing relationship between autobiography and fiction and also the remarkable imaginative achievement of the novel. Tender Is the Night begins as a portrait of Gerald Murphy and his wife, Sara, depicted as Dick and Nicole Diver. Here is Nicole Diver on the beach: “Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful.” Fitzgerald was one of several prominent artists attracted to the Murphys: Dos Passos, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Archibald [End Page 312] MacLeish—all visited the Murphys’ Villa America to make friends, art, and whoopee. Picasso sketched Sara in the same situation and pose that struck Fitzgerald, who was evidently smitten with both Murphys and conspicuously infatuated with Sara. Scott gazed on Sara gauchely and interrogated Gerald about their sex life. Sara complained, “Scott, you just think if you ask enough questions you’ll know all about people, but you don’t know anything about people. … You ought to know at your age that you can’t have theories about friends.” The Murphys regarded the Fitzgeralds with admiration and affection, bemusement and concern. Gerald considered Scott “fragile Irish”—a kindred spirit, romantic and vulnerable. As it turned out, Fitzgerald’s artistic genius proved more tough-minded, faithful less to friends or authenticity than to the unsparing rigor of imagination. The Murphys provided Fitzgerald a model of grace and romance. Gerald and Sara were the ideal couple and perfect hosts: rich and generous, artistic and sophisticated. Scott’s initial plan for Tender Is the Night envisioned “the leisure class” at “their truly most brilliant and glamorous.” But Fitzgerald’s project gradually became far more ambitious and complex, focusing, he mused, on “a man who is a natural idealist, a spoiled priest, giving in for various causes to the ideas of the haute bourgeoisie, and in his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent, and turning to drink and dissipation.” Dick Diver’s feelings of “emptiness and imposture, his betrayal at the hands of a world he thought he could manipulate, his struggle to come to terms with the renunciation of his idealism and his talent,” all that was autobiographical. For the tragic arc of his fictive hero—the aspirations and illusions, the devastating fall and partial illuminations—Fitzgerald dramatized his own experience. Gradually the Divers become much less like the Murphys and much more like the Fitzgeralds. Like almost everything Fitzgerald wrote, Tender Is the Night was...

Butterfly Soup

Butterfly Soup James Davis May (bio) Keywords James Davis May, butterflies There’s really no grace to their names: red peacock,green triangle kite, blue and brown clipper.A nomenclature of awkward plainness,because trying to describe the metallic,nearly turquoise wings of the blue morphoin two to three words could only end in failure.Our guide points to one, says it isn’t actually blue,but that tiny scales on its wings scatter the light,similar to the way dust molecules refract the sun’s rays.When he finishes speaking, the boys in our groupgive chase to whatever flutters by them,while Jane, the only girl, keeps to the trailthat leads down to where the artificial streamturns to go back through the filterand we find the shredded fragments of so many wingslike confetti simmering in puddles after a parade.Or are they more like the fronds and stems of the fruitChelsea was cutting for the salad last night?Her knife slid through the strawberries.The tiny green leaves, much lighterthan the small amounts of red flesh they clung to,bobbed in the sink above the apple peels,melon and orange rinds. I kissed her neck,said I was sorry for something—it hardly matters what—and without looking she put a strawberry in my mouth.We dip our hands in the stream. Jane tells mebutterfly soup probably wouldn’t taste very good.To keep us from eating them, she tells me, the bright,beautiful things always have a bitter taste. [End Page 100] James Davis May JAMES DAVIS MAY’s first book, Unquiet Things, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2016.* First appearance in Ecotone. Copyright © 2015 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction

How can we read contemporary fiction in the age of its real subsumption under capital? How can we avoid explaining it as just one more commodity? This presentation explores these questions by returning to the proximity between neoliberalism and biopolitics in Foucault’s 1978–1979 lectures, and by describing the tension between contemporary literature and neoliberal biopolitics as a relation of reciprocal saturation: while the market has colonised all but the most marginal fields of culture, the market has in its turn adopted markedly literary strategies, of which the mobilisation of affect and the manipulation of potentiality are the two most important. Neither a form of surface reading nor of interpretation, the reading alongside the market that I propose reads for contemporary fiction’s engagement with affect and potentiality, in order to trace the minimal difference between its textual performance and its biopolitical solicitation. I illustrate this approach through a brief reading of Teju Cole’s Open City and a more extensive discussion of Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears.

Re-Creating Bach’s Music and Life

Re-Creating Bach’s Music and Life Robert Miles (bio) Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner (Knopf, 2013. xxxiv + 558 pages. Illustrated. $35) The author of this biography, John Eliot Gardiner, is an orchestral and choral conductor who has had many years experience conducting the works of Bach. In the preface to this volume he states, “It is this rich, sonorous world and the delight I take [End Page vi] in it, both as a conductor and as a lifelong student of Bach, that I most want to convey.” Convey it he does, in expressive sonorous prose. The unfolding of the prose has the quality of music throughout. The different periods of Bach’s life—early, middle, and late—are all centered around and expressed in relation to the music he was performing as a keyboard virtuoso, conducting as a cantor or choir director, and composing at the time. All of these activities were usually intertwined in Bach’s everyday life. This book is a masterpiece and a thing of physical beauty—visually expressive of its subject. One of its many beautiful photographs is of the interior of the cathedral at Eisenach. First Martin Luther and later Bach had active affiliation with this house of worship. There are two impressive portraits of Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, and the reproductions of Bach’s handwritten music manuscript on the inside covers and throughout the volume are beautiful and compelling. The footnotes are extensive and informative, and the work is further enriched by Gardiner’s wide-ranging familiarity with present-day musical scholarship from which he has abstracted many apt quotations, some of which pertain to such interesting observations as the influence Bach’s music had on later composers—Haydn, Mozart, and Verdi. There are also intriguing and apt comparisons of Bach to writers such as Shakespeare and Dryden, and to painters including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Rubens. Bach, as might not be surprising, was born into a musical family and became a child prodigy at the keyboard. What he learned from his father and older brother was reinforced and extended in the classroom; the ability to play and sing contrapuntally was instilled from an early age. In what was still the Lutheran school system, singing was valued as a proven way of helping pupils commit things to memory. Although the focus throughout this study is on the kinds of music Bach was writing at different periods of his life and the effect his performance ability and his insistence on performance standards in vocal ensemble had on his compositions, Gardiner does pay due attention to other transformative events in Bach’s life. Many of these are quite sad. Both Bach’s father and older brother died at early ages. Bach himself had seven children by his first wife, and thirteen by his second. A depressing number of them died at early ages such as four and six. The remaining children, however, were musical, and they could quite properly be called a musical family. His two sons, in fact, helped Bach prepare for musical programs by copying the parts for instrumentalists and soloists to use. It is a privilege to read the biography of a great composer written from the inside out musically rather than from the outside looking in trying to make sense of truly monumental musical compositions. Even though it may be true that the more one knows about music the more this account will resonate, it is even truer that after reading this study the reader will hear more when listening to Bach than he or she ever has before. [End Page vii] For many years during his life Bach was known only as a keyboard virtuoso. But, as Gardiner makes clear, for Bach to perform was for him to improvise on a melodic idea, and it was from these on-the-spot combinations of notes that the incomparable two- and three-part inventions, canons, and fugues arose. It is one of the central revelations of this biography that, for Bach, to perform was to compose. We are all fortunate that he recognized this and took the time and trouble after a performance—no later than...

Reconfiguring the African Diaspora in Dinaw Mengestu's <em>The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears</em>

Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) has been greeted as a subtle and moving exploration of the migrant condition, written in elegant and lyrical prose; one of its main specificities, however, is its calling into question of monolithic approaches to the African diaspora. Depicting the loneliness that characterizes the life of displaced people the world over, this novel offers a glimpse into the specific experience of Sepha Stephanos, a member of the Ethiopian community in the United States. This article examines how Mengestu problematizes the relationships of this individual with white America, but also with other African immigrants and with African Americans. Sepha and the last two groups are bound by their complexion and a similar experience of racial discrimination and have therefore access to a form of black diasporic solidarity; yet, this sense of fellowship is shown to be fragile and ultimately fraught, if only because diasporic identity tends to erase individuals’ essential distinctiveness and for this reason cannot accommodate the need of each person to come up with their own singular narrative.

The Brownies' Book: Preserving African American Memories through Textual Lineage

22 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 78, NO. 2 78 No.2 THE BROWNIES’ BOOK: PRESERVING AFRICAN AMERICAN MEMORIES THROUGH TEXTUAL LINEAGE By LaVerne Gyant As editor of the Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a monthly column, “The Children’s Number,” which ZDV¿UVWSXEOLVKHGLQ2FWREHU³7KH&KLOGUHQ¶V1XPEHU´GLVFXVVHGFXUUHQWLVVXHVWKDWDIIHFWHG\RXQJSHRSOHDQG their achievements.1 According to Du Bois, it was “easily the most popular number of the year.”2 In the 1919 edition of the Crisis, Du Bois announced the publication of The Brownies’Book, a new periodical for Black children—which became the¿UVWSXEOLFDWLRQWRWDUJHW$IULFDQ$PHULFDQFKLOGUHQ3 Historically, The Brownies’ Book will be remembered as a hallowed publication that sought to preserve young people’s memories and spark their curiosities through textual lineage. In Du Bois’s announcement of the publication, he characterized The Brownies’Book as a thing of Joy and Beauty, dealing in Happiness, Laughter, Emulation, and designed for Kiddies from Six to Sixteen. It will seek to teach Universal Love and Brotherhood for all little folk—black and brown and yellow and white. Of course, pictures, puzzles, stories, letters from little ones, clubs, games and oh everything.4 The Brownies’Book grew out of Du Bois’s concern for what Black children were learning and their daily experiences in schools. It also grew from a letter a young girl wrote about her desire to learn about Black history and her hatred for Whites.5 The stated goals of The Brownies’Book were: 1. To make colored children realize that being “colored” is a normal beautiful thing. 2. To make them familiar with the history and achievement of the Negro race. 3. To make them know that other colored children have grown into beautiful, useful and famous people. 4. To teach them a delicate code of honor and action in their relations with white children. 5. To turn their little hurts and resentments into emulation, ambition and love of their homes and companions. 6. To point out the best amusement and joys and worth-while things of life. 7. 7RLQVSLUHWKHPWRSUHSDUHIRUGH¿QLWHRFFXSDWLRQVDQGGXWLHVZLWKDEURDGVSLULWRIVDFUL¿FH6 According to Harris, these goals sought to teach children “knowledge of and respect for African culture.”7 'X%RLV$XJXVWXV*UDQYLOOH'LOODQG-HVVLH5HGPRQ)DXVHWRIIHUHGWKH¿UVWLVVXHRIThe Brownies’ Book in January 1920. It was published by Du Bois and Dill publishers, sold for 15 cents a month or $1.50 for a year’s subscription, DQGKDGDFLUFXODWLRQRI$VRQHRIWKH¿UVWSHULRGLFDOVIRUFKLOGUHQThe Brownies’ Book was published from 1920 WKURXJK,QWKH¿QDOLVVXHRIThe Brownies’Book, Du Bois noted that they needed a minimum of 12,000 subscriptions and that the economic times were the reasons they had to stop publishing it. The fault has not been with our readers. We have an unusually enthusiastic set of subscribers. But the magazine was begun just at the time of industrial depression following the war, and the fault of our suspension therefore is rather in the times, which are so out of joint, then in our constituency.8 In The Brownies’ Book, there were stories and poems by Jessie Redmond Fauset, Augusta E. Bird, Nella Larson, $XJXVWXV*'LOO/DQJVWRQ+XJKHV(I¿H/HHDQG$OSKRQVR6WDIIRUG6WRULHVJDPHVSRHPVDQGSX]]OHVZHUHDOVRZULWWHQ by children from around the world. Sections in the periodical included “The Judge,” written by Jessie Redmond Fauset, who had conversations with children—Billikins, Billie, William, and Wilhelmina—about their parents, their behavior, their friends, their schoolwork, and Black history. “The Jury” focused on letters from children. Then there was “As the Crow Flies,” which focused on multicultural awareness, responsibility, and international news, written by Du Bois. The other sections included “Playtime,” which offered puzzles and games from around the world; “Our Little Friends,” which praised BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 78, NO. 2 | 23 78 No.2 and highlighted photographs of children; “Little People of the Month,” which featured African American children excelling in academics, music, writing, and art...

Giving a Little Happiness: Performance in Brisbane during World War II

World War II marked a turbulent period in Brisbane’s social life. Theatre served an important social function within the community, giving performers the opportunity to identify themselves as ‘patriotic’ and providing the chance for performers and audiences to indicate their solidarity and commitment to the cause. With the arrival of the US servicemen artificially increasing Brisbane’s population, certain types of theatrical performances flourished. Most importantly, the increased popularity of Vaudeville is an indication that the theatre was needed to offer a diversion from the realities of war-time life as performance became a means of forgetting the atrocities surrounding the people. This idea is best summed up in the words of one war-time performer who when asked about the war in Europe responded with “let us talk about more pleasant subjects—music and art and the beautiful things of life…Our important function is to provide diversion.” This paper demonstrates how the theatre in Brisbane reacted to the pressures of war. It will be shown that the war provided an opportunity for members of Brisbane’s community to contribute to the society and to the war effort by embracing theatrical activities.

Evaluating aesthetic experience through personal-appearance styles: a behavioral and electrophysiological study.

Consumers' aesthetic experience has often been linked with the concept of beauty, which is regarded as subjective and may vary between individuals, cultures and places, and across time. With the advent of brain-imaging techniques, there is more and more evidence to suggest that aesthetic experience lies not only in the eye of the beholder, but also in the brain of the beholder. However, there are gaps in the previous research in this area, as several significant issues have not yet been addressed. Specifically, it is unclear whether the human brain really pays more attention and generates more positive emotional responses to beautiful things. To explore the brain activity relating to consumers' aesthetic experiences, 15 participants were recruited voluntarily to view a series of personal-appearance styles. They were invited to make aesthetic judgments while their brain activity was recorded by electroencephalography. Two electroencephalographic (EEG) indicators, theta coherence and frontal alpha symmetry, were utilized. Theta coherence is a measure of linear synchronization between signals at two electrode sites. It reflects the degree of functional cooperation between the underlying neuronal substrates and was used to explore the attentional processing involved in aesthetic judgments. Frontal alpha asymmetry is derived by subtracting the log-transformed absolute alpha power of the left hemisphere from the analogous log-transformed alpha power of the right hemisphere. It was used as an indicator of emotional response. During aesthetic judgments, long-range theta coherence increased in both hemispheres and more positive frontal alpha asymmetry was found when the styles were judged to be beautiful. Therefore, participants demonstrated brain activity suggestive of central executive processing and more positive emotional responses when they considered styles to be beautiful. The study provides some insight into the brain activity associated with consumers' aesthetic experiences, and suggests new directions for exploring consumer behavior from the perspective of neuroscience.

John Paul II’s Letter to Artists and the Force of Beauty

ONE OF THE MANY remarkable documents of Pope St. John Paul II's pontificate was his 1999 Letter to Artists. It exemplified Pope's practice of engaging world and of encouraging pursuit of various avenues to Divine as part of New Evangelization. Further, it recalled ancient understanding of beauty as integral to spiritual life of man and as a name of God while confirming distinctly modern self-image of Church as unique preserve of West's intellectual and cultural achievements. process of answering many questions about how Church might engage artists and how artists might serve Church, it raised deeper ones that are touched on but not systematically treated. One of those questions is decisive for meaning of Letter and of serious consequence for us today. Namely, if artist has a special spiritual vocation in Church, John Paul says it is to make beautiful things, and beauty of those things must be capable of enthusing its audience and raising it up in service of common good. (1) But, it is far from clear that contemporary artists understand their work to have such an aim as beauty, much less a beauty in service of a shared good, as is it questionable whether most persons in our age can envision artworks as standing outside the search for empty glory or craving for cheap popularity in service of some transcendent end. (2) Has not philosophy of beauty since Kant been only too successful in convincing us that beauty refers only to a certain kind of superficial pleasure, and that art, to extent that it is serious, no longer concerns itself with beauty at all? (3) Rightly or wrongly, common sense of our day may actually anesthetize most persons against experience of art that John Paul views as so important. answer to such a possibility, I would like to examine implications of John Paul's account of artist and to set forth principles that would have to be true if art and beautiful were to play a meaningful role in New Evangelization. I shall then attempt to vindicate truth of those principles with specific reference to ontology of beauty that various writers have extrapolated from theology of Aquinas. John Paul appeals to a venerable but challenging analogy in opening paragraphs of his letter, citing absolute creativity of God as a sign of distinctiveness of artistic work. He writes, Through his 'artistic creativity' man appears more than ever 'in image of God' ... in shaping wondrous 'material' of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over universe which surrounds him. (4) The fundamental conception of man as image of God specifically in his identity as an intellectual being endowed with free will is not simply assumed here but is also further specified, taking on a new dimension: we see that man, like God, can cause acts of his intellect and will to bring forth new things that exist apart from themselves. (5) The act of making an artifact puts an objective seal on our otherwise private intellectual natures as image of Divine Mind. To make something also brings about a kind of self-disclosure, a revealing of one being to another that comes through matter but is fundamentally intellectual or spiritual rather than material in nature. (6) This dimension of man's creativity Pope had already explored in regard to work in his early poetry and in social encyclical Laborum Exercens (1981). But, in Letter, Pope emphasizes special attributes of fine artist, writing, In shaping a masterpiece, artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. ... [Thus, through] his works, artist speaks to others and communicates with them. (1) Such language purposefully gives us an immanent conception of what an artist may do. The hypothetical masterpiece would seem to gain its significance, first, through being distinctly itself, and, second, in revealing its maker, and thereby drawing its audience into a closed circuit of communication with artwork and artist. …

플라톤의 에로스 신화에 나타난 사랑의 상승구조와 기억 그리고 셰익스피어의 소네트 읽기

This essay examines the concept of love and reads Shakespeare’s sonnets from the perspective of the ascent of love as presented in Plato’s myths of Eros. Though Plato’s influence persisted throughout the Western civilization, especially through the permeation into Christianity from the age of the Church Fathers, it was in the era of the Renaissance during which a complete collection of works by Plato was newly introduced to European countries. Once translated into Latin, a task which was first performed by the Italian Ficino, the collection had a great effect on the intellectual and aesthetical climate of the Renaissance. Among these different works, it was especially the concept of love and beauty as expressed in Symposium and Phaedrus that stimulated the aesthetic sensibility of poets and artists such as Shakespeare, who is considered to have been familiar with it as it is reflected in his works. The myths of Eros that are scattered throughout the Plato’s collection provide the relationship between love and beauty; e.g., love as the pursuit of beauty and eternity, the particular love for a beautiful young man that ascends to ideal love, and heavenly and earthly love. Of these, this essay attempts to focus on the ascent of love as reflected in Shakespeare’s sonnets, in which, similar to Plato’s perspective, the initiation of the narrator’s love by the young man’s beauty tends to develop into ideal love that extends beyond physical beauty and age. In the ascent of the narrator’s love memory plays an important role. First, the narrator retains his impressions of the young man’s beautiful appearances in his memory. However, in his memory, he not only retains the initial impressions of physical beauty but also those of abstract beauty that are distilled from all aspects of the young man and furthered into the generalization of beauty. The young man is eventually represented as the model or the substance of beauty from which individual beautiful things are derived, enabling the narrator to perceive the beauty that is reflected in the phenomenal world.

Related Research of Femininity, Aesthetic Values and Clothing Education Psychology: A Case Study of Chongqing Females

Female’s clothing psychology is the explicit display and representation of femininity and aesthetic values, which affects female’s clothing choices and dressing behavior. This paper adopts questionnaire sampling with 791 females in Chongqing city as the representative and continues to the research of the mutual relationship between trait, aesthetic values and clothing psychology through 788 valid questionnaires except invalid ones. The conclusions are as follows: (a) vigorous, beautiful and upright are the most typical group traits among Chongqing females, and diligent, intelligent and capable are the most representative traits of themselves; (b) a majority of Chongqing females have a demand for beauty in the work or shopping, and kindness, sincerity, wisdom are the top three aesthetic ideals; (c) Chongqing female’s clothing needs more emphasis on comfort, practicality and style, so fashion, elegant and sexy rank the top 3 of dressing style. (d) The person who “doesn’t consider” the beauty in the work and shopping at the lowest ideal standard or the scale of the realm to judge things of beauty or ugliness. And they all base on their interests and hobbies. In contrast, the person who “always consider” beautiful is most based on an ideal standard or the scale of the realm as aesthetic judgment standard in the work and shopping. The person who “sometimes considers” in the work and shopping is most affected by public opinion and popular fashion and is least influenced by an ideal standard or the scale of the realm. (e) “vigorous” ranking the first in Chongqing female’s group traits has an extremely significant positive correlation (P<.001) with “fashion” ranking the first in dressing style, and has a significant positive correlation (P<.005) with “sexy” which ranks the third in dressing style; “elegant” ranking the second in dressing style has an extremely significant positive correlation (P<.001) with “upright” and “diligent”.

High Holy Days in the Hospital

High Holy Days in the Hospital

The future of bilingualism research: Insufferably optimistic and replete with new questions

The scientific process applied to any domain is a thing of power and beauty. It enables its practitioners to systematically and rigorously pursue questions of importance, in a manner that is, by necessity, adaptive and tenacious. As was his way with most matters of relevance to psychology, the words of William James (The Principles of Psychology, 1890) are illustrative here: Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely. (p. 7)

"You Must Remember This": The Lives of Others and the Cinematic Imagination

The lives of others won most of top European and international film prizes between 2006 and 2007, including seven Lolas and an Oscar, but it has also been heavily attacked by some critics both for its sympathetic portrait of a Stasi officer and for its misogynistic portrait of a faithless, drug-addicted actress (e.g., Porton; Foundas). The monstrous Gerd Wiesler, critics have argued, is magically transformed into the Good of Georg Dreyman's novel after his sudden exposure to theater, poetry, and music, and vulnerable Christa-Maria Sieland (Mar- tina Gedeck) must be sacrificed to film's central love story, that between Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) and Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). In my view, much of this negative criticism implicitly acknowledges that Lives is tremendously suc- cessful at authentically recreating East Ber- lin of 1980s. The film captures bleak- ness of architecture, cuisine, and fashion in such unnerving detail that reviews insistently demand that film deliver docu- mentary accuracy. too responded to film's authenticity and found its recreation of East Berlin had visited in 1983 uncanny and unset- tling. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took pains to film on location in rare streets that had not been transformed after fall of Berlin Wall. He refined palette of film to capture sense of color in German Demo- cratic Republic (GDR), so that greens stand in for blues and orange-browns replace reds (von Donnersmarck, Interview on DVD). Visually, film strives for quality of documentary.But The Lives of Others is not a documentary. Although he researched his subject thoroughly for four years, von Donnersmarck's understand- ing of character, his interest in relationships, and his belief in transformative power of art do not come from history, but from an educa- tion in classic Western cinema. We do not fault Casablanca (1942) or Rome, Open City (1945) for being sentimental. We do not blame The Red Shoes (1948) or The Third Man (1949) for being overblown. Instead, we celebrate these films for courage of their sentimentality and hyperbole. And von Donnersmarck's first film is an homage to his cinematic heritage. The per- formance of Martina Gedeck cannot be divorced from iconic performances of Ingrid Berg- man, Alida Valli, Anna Magnani, Moira Shearer, and Julie Christie on which hers is based. And an awareness of Wiesler's cinematic anteced- ents complicates any simple reading of him as a good man.These antecedents have been largely over- shadowed by ideological critiques of Lives. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, an ex- traordinary book about life in GDR, fears that Lives is fostering a new form of Ostalgie.Groups of ex-Stasi are becoming increasingly belligerent. They write articles and books, and conduct lawsuits against people who speak out against them, including against German publisher of Stasiland. . . . The system demanded such loyalty . . . that most ex-Stasi are still true believers. A story such as Wiesler's plays into their hands as they fight for their reputation. (Funder, Tyranny of Terror)Funder admires Lives: I think film deserves its public and critical acclaim. It is a superb film, a thing of beauty. But it could not have taken place (and never did) under GDR dic- tatorship. . . . No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible. We'd know if one had, because files are so com- prehensive (Tyranny).Whereas Funder argues that von Donners- marck is taking brutal fact and turning it into narrative, argue exactly oppo- site. Von Donnersmarck's particular achieve- ment is using his cinematic influences-almost all of which are fantasy narratives-and trans- forming these into a film that many critics have misread as an attempt at documentary real- ity. Yet an intertextual reading that accounts for these fantasy narratives can do much to shatter this misperception. …