jueves, 30 de septiembre de 2021
Inoculación Experimental en Niños y Adolescentes, Análisis Científico de riesgos/beneficios
Azevedo Whitehouse, Karina. "Inoculación Experimental en Niños y Adolescentes, Análisis Científico de riesgo/beneficio (APSSIN)." Video lecture. YouTube (siglospasan) 14 Sept. 2021.*
2021 DISCONTINUED 2021 (Censored by YouTube).
Online at Facebook.*
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=561276991683401
2021
Ya han retirado el vídeo los VACUNAZIS DESINFORMADORES de YouTube. De momento aún puede verse en Facebook. Ir al minuto 11:
miércoles, 29 de septiembre de 2021
The New Religion, the New Sacrament
La nueva religión: el Covidismo. Y su sacramento, la Vacuna.
@Tiniveinte @SolSch3 @Solchi1986 @atoscanof4 @elhijodelrayo @CCRadovic2012 @crismartinj @SalvemosChile5 @rubengluengas @pastordc3110 @qqromero @JavierVillamor @SciutoDr @drgbayona @MariolySosaP @mabarnier @Andrea25Chilena @SomosMGL @davidjthunder @jcnanalon @ozcarbarreto https://t.co/a8rjozYQTo pic.twitter.com/LhV3aSvBmZ
— Elmer Bauman (@ebauman70) September 28, 2021
Jonson in Coote
On Ben Jonson. From The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote (1993).
("Shakespeare and the Drama: 1500-1642", 12):
...
Shakespeare's work is never (...) openly autobiographical. Indeed, on the level of personality, England's greatest poet remains her most enigmatic. In studying the works we come no nearer to the man. Rather, Shakespeare is so wholly absorbed in his art—in the imaginative exploration of mankind through the dramatist's resources of language, action, and role-play—that what we do come to appreciate is the inexhaustible richness of human invention itself. In the noble words of Ben Jonson: 'He was not of an age, but for all time'.
12
The tribute paid to Shakespeare by Jonson (1572-1637) was the more generous for the rivalry he felt towards the greater man, but if Jonson awarded Shakespeare the honours of posterity, he gained for himself some of those offered by his age. He was effectively Poet Laureate (pensioned, but not titled) and, though his later years were spent in poverty, the nobility of England attended his funeral in recognition of his genius.
Jonson—convivial, critical, the pundit of his age—remains a fine writer of lyric, a great satirist and a major figure in that classical and humanist tradition of literature which stretches from Sidney, through Milton and Dryden, to the other Johnson and Gray. That this tradition of humane, decorous, yet profoundly experienced poetry was also the standard by which to satirize his times is given dramatic form in Jonson's Poetaster (1601) where the serene values of Virgil and Horace are juxtaposed to seventeenth-century pretenders to art.
Jonson's two surviving tragedies derive from Roman history. The first is by far the greater, though neither was a popular success. Sejanus (1603) presents the emperor Tiberius's bestial reign of terror in a Rome where, amid parasites and fearful hypocrites—people swollen to distortion with their desire for power—liberty, language and human worth are crushed in the self-destructive intricacy of machination. In Catiline (1611), Jonson shows the working of conspiracy with an even darker and self-conscious scholarship, but the play cannot be counted a dramatic success, and it is in his comedies of city life that we find Jonson's most telling portrayal of human folly. These works were profoundly influenced by classical theory. They also relate to a rich and varied native tradition which they effortlessly transcend. To this last we should briefly turn.
The rapid expansion of population and mercantile activity in London was a leading phenomenon of the age, and theatres like the Fortune produced plays designed to please the merchant classes. The immensely prolific Thomas Heywood (?1575-c. 1641), for example, wrote The Four Prentices of London (c. 1592-1600) in which the heroes are noble yet 'of city trades they have no scorn'. In the second part of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1605), praise of the great merchant Sir Thomas Gresham combines with intense patriotism. Domestic virtue and moral edification are again central to Old Fortunatus (1599) by Thomas Dekker (?1572-1632) while in the same year Dekker produced The Shoemaker's Holiday in which imaginative comic prose, romance and touching marital fidelity are allied to the eternally comfortable story of an apprentice's rise to the position of Lord Major.
Dekker's seemingly unlikely collaboration with the tragedian Webster in Westward Ho! (1604) and Northward Ho! (1605) led him beyond the praise of 'a fine life, a velvet life, a careful life'. Others were actively to criticize citizen tastes in drama however, and the most lasting exposure of the works produced for this market is The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) by Francis Beaumont (1584-1616). This piece is both a kind-hearted burlesque and a clever exercise on the idea of the play within the play. Contrasts between chivalry, modern aristocratic values and merchant ideals here centre around the sympathetic figure of Rafe, the apprentice and comic knight errant.
A more bitterly satirical humour is to be found in the comedies of George Chapman (c. 1560-1634) and John Marston (1576-1634). Cynicism is a marked tone in Chapman's work in the form, while Marston's comedies are the work of a verse satirist and reveal the aggressive and twisted syntax characteristic of that genre. Jonson himself came into collision with Marston and Dekker in the so-called 'war of the theatres'. He had already completed Nashe's The Isle of Dogs (1597) and been imprisoned for sedition as a result. Shortly after finishing the first version of Every Man in His Humour (1598, revised by 1616) he duelled with a fellow actor, killed him, and only escaped the gallows through a legal technicality. In Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)—a drama of plays within plays which discusses the problems of play writing and then satirizes the nature of satire—Jonson lightly critized Marlowe in the figure of Clove. Marston himself had recently essayed an unfortunate eulogy of Jonson in his revision of the anti-theatrical diatribe Histriomastix (c. 1599), a portrait which is in fact nearer to parody.
Marston retaliated to the figure of Clove with an open caricature of Jonson in Jack Drum's Entertainment (c. 1600). He received his rebuff in Cynthia's Revels (1600), a boys' company play satirizing the follies of the court. The work is reminiscent of Lyly, and contains the exquisite lyric 'Queen and huntress, chaste and fair.' Jonson's Poetaster, written for Paul's Boys, presents caricatures of Marston and Dekker among the pretenders to art in Augustan Rome and triumphed completely over Marston's What You Will (c. 1601). Dekker was now recruited on Marston's side with his Satiromastix (1601), but Jonson himself tried to rise above the fray with Sejanus. Then—such is the abiding nature of the literary world—he collaborated with Marston and Chapman in Eastward Ho (1605), voluntarily joining his co-authors in prison when the play was considered seditious. However, in the following year, the King's Men gave a triumphantly successful performance of Jonson's Volpone, one of the great comic masterpieces of the English stage.
All Jonson's immense energies are focused in Volpone where he deals with one of his most characteristic themes: the corruption wrought by greed on those obsessive and fantastic creatures who dupe each onther on the lunatic finges of an enterprise culture. 'This', Jonson wrote, 'is the money-get mechanic age', and Volpone's cunning scheme for getting money makes gold itself the object of a parody religion.
As a rich man without heirs, Volpone adds to his wealth through the brives offered the apparently dying man by those hoping for an advantageous mention in his will. To secure this, people will disinherit their children, pervert the law and prostitute their wives. Volpone's bedroom becomes the centre of inverted human values where money is gained without real work, innocence is all but corrupted by glittering lust, and men are reduced to the foxes, flies, vultures, ravens and crows which give them their names.
To draw his heroic caricature of materialism, Jonson turned to a wide range of sources, his classical training especially. There was nothing frigid or pedantic about this. He confined his play largely within the unities of time (twenty-four hours), place (Venice) and action (the refusal to admit material distracting from the main narrative), not because Renaissance scholars loved Aristotle had promulgated such rules as laws. He did it because these devices help concentrate the dramatic excitement. Again, Jonson did not reduce his characters to types because Terence and Plautus had done so, but because an overmastering obsession or 'humour' caricatures itself, as the anonymous writers of medieval Morality plays had been aware. If older forms helped give a framework, the foundation of Volpone is passionate observation.
As a result, Volpone himself throbs with something of his creator's vitality. He relishes his own play-acting, his frequent disguises and performances which eventually lead to his undoing and that of his parasite Mosca. As a result, the effect of the play is far from simple. The energy of corruption is infectious, and if we are pleased that the villain is exposed by means of his own designs, then the worthlessness of the Venetian authorities who clap him in irons gives justice itself as ironic final twist.
Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609) is again concerned with man as a social (or antisocial) animal. Morose tries to shelter himself from the world's din, declaring 'All discourses, but mine own, afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent and irksome.' The world appears to justify his misanthropy. Morose tries to disinherit his nephew by marrying an apparently silent bride. She turns out, however, to be first a scold and then a boy in disguise. The comedy ends in separation rather than marriage, while its sexual ambiguities may be a taunt at the Puritans' objection to the portrayal of female roles in the theatre by boys.
The Alchemist (1610) again concerns itself with distorting dreams of gold. It is constructed in brilliant conformity to the unities and, in its earthy and imaginative richness of contemporary dialogue and folly, embodies Jonson's ideal of a comedy which employs
deeds, and language, such as men do use,
And persons, such as Comedy would choose
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.
The particular follyhere is the lure of easy money: Sir Epicure Mammon's dream that through the philosopher's stone he can 'turn the age to gold'. Interestingly, it is not alchemy itself that is satirized but the attitude which sees science (which alchemy was still widely held to be) as a fulfilment of fantasy. Face, Subtle and his consort Doll Common—rogues who have employed Lovewit's house for their purpose—are adepts in manipulating vain desires in a variety of characters: Epicure Mammon himself, Abel Drugger the tobacconist, Kastril the roistering boy and the comic puritans Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome. The real transformations in The Alchemist are thus not of base metal into gold but of human folly into absurdity. When the off-stage laboratory finally blows up, fantasy explodes with it. The return of Lovewit brilliantly resolves the action but hardly restores official law and order.
A Puritan is again humiliated in Jonson' prose comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a hypocritical creature of appetite, ends up in the stocks. The dramatic re-creation of a real fair allowed Jonson to celebrate de all-licensed, topsy-turvy world of mardi gras with great diversity of action and a matching richness of dialogue. The simple-minded Cokes is robbed, while Justice Adam Overdo, out to spy on 'enormities', also winds up in the stocks. Nonetheless, when he ends the play by inviting all to dine with him, the foolish Cokes insists they be accompanied by the puppet show which has already offered one of the best episodes in the play. The fari itself—its vitality memorably embodied in Ursula, the Pig-woman—is Jonson's image of raucuous humanity, variously hypocritical, simple, vengeful and forgiving.
The plays for the commercial theatre Jonson wrote in the later stages of his career — The Devil Is an Ass (1616), The Staple of News (1626), The New Inn (1629) and The Magnetic Lady (1632) — were harshly if not wholly inaccurately described by Dryden as his 'dotages.' A fascinating and very different aspect of Jonson's dramatic art however is revealed in the series of masques he wrote as Twelfth Night entertainments for the court of James I (1605-25). Here we see an élite drama dealing explicitly with contemporary theories of political power.
Jonson had already designed the lavish and arcane symbolism of the Scottish king's triumphal entry to his new capital, and the masques extend his exploration of James's notion of the divine right of kings: the belief that James was accountable to God alone, that his position partook of divinity and that he was endowed with supernatural wisdom. In The Golden Age Restor'd (1615), we see how classical larning, music, poetry, dance and the lavish sets of Inigo Jones (1573-1652) present James as Jove, the benevolent guide of the nation's fate. Whn the Iron Age is routed in a conventional anti-masque, Astraea or Justice heralds the return of the Golden Age. Through the Neoplatonic philosophy that underpins the Jonsonian masque, the dancing courtiers come to symbolize the completeness, harmony and peace attained by the dramatic enactment of the divine king's decrees.
The Jonsonian masque was an élite celebration of a political and cultural ideal. For many, however, these sumptuous illusions disguised a more troubled reality. Though the court encouraged the highest cultural sophistication, its moral tone was low and corruption and factionalism were rife. James's assertion of divine right gave a dangerous edge to the royal prerogative, while his reckless expenditure led to increading debt in a period of economic uncertainty and bad harvests. Further, while the king (an enthusiastic amateur theologian) failed to satisfy moderate Puritan demands for church reform, his rash creation of new titles (partly as an attempt to raise money) exacerbated a deep sense of status insecurity in a society where ancient notions of hierarchy were being eroded by the power of money and capital. This uncertainty is reflected in the work of a number of Jacobean comic writers.
The 'city' comedies of Thomas Middleton (?1580-1627), for example, combine the idiom of London life and its pace with deft plotting and realistic satire. Middleton is consistently ironic about the rabidly acquisitive London of his time. Merchants, usurers, idle aristocrats and an extravagant gentry are all exposed in a world where it is increasingly the cleverest rather than the most virtuous who succeed. In A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), surface cleverness works alongside deeper moral concerns with something of the force of the exempla in contemporary Puritan sermons. A Mad World, my Masters (1605) represents the marriage of a whore to a dupe, while in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) sex is traded for money as the appetites and restless folly of city life controls the gulls and cheats who populate it. Philip Massinger (1583-1640) borrowed the plot of A Trick to Catch the Old One in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1621), turning it to different and Jonsonian purposes in the humiliation of the great comic figure of Sir Giles Overreach, the loan shark. Overreach is the focus of Massinger's violent and deeply conservative satire of a corrupt Jacobean world, a world where titles are sold to the nouveaux riches and, as traditional social ties collapse, so madness looms.
....
("From Donne to Dryden", 2):
The courtiers addressed by Donne in many of his sermons were also the recipients of verses by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), and it is a measure of Jonson's stature that, in addition to being one of the leading playwrights of the age, he was also its most influential court poet.
Drawing extensively on the classics and Renaissance theorists, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry elaborates the ideals and criticizes the shortcomings of those involved in his vision of a cultured, socially responsible life of 'manners, arms and arts'. In these works, Jonson thus aspired to a seventeenth-century version of the urbane and moral gentleman of Latin literature: sociable yet self-contained, grave but unpedantic, a man in whom the virtues of the golden mean have been refeined in the fires of art and personal integrity. Jonson thereby presents himself as an arbiter of civil virtue, an English Horace.
In the prose of his Timber, or Discoveries (1640-41), and often through extensive and unacknowledged paraphrase of Vives and other scholars, Jonson showed how the classical basis of his poetry was rooted in nature, exercise, imitation, study and art. The classical rhetoricians were the masters of his particular practice. Their works were to be used only as guides however, not as commanders. What Jonson was seeking was to relate an awareness of his own time to the timeless values of the past, and to do so in a distinctive idiom. To achieve this, he perfected the rhetoric of the middle voice in which he declared: 'the language is plain, and pleasing; even without stopping, round without swelling; all well tuned, composed, elegant, and accurate'.
These qualities can be seen in Jonson's Epigrams, 'the ripest of my studies'. In pieces such as 'Inviting a Friend to Supper', the courteous social tone, tinged with fantasy, is modulated through reminiscences of Martial to create the ideal of a shared and civilized enjoyment of good food, good talk and good books. A sense of self-knowledge and self-respect, of constancy tempered by experience, is the subject of 'An Epistle Answering to One that Asked to Be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben', an informal group that numbered some of the finest intellects of the age.
A shared sense of high values is also clear in Jonson's praise of other literary and artistic men, though this was something that did not always come naturally to him. The torrential release of pent-up irritation in 'An Expostulation with Inigo Jones' vividly suggests Jonson's envy of a rival's success at court and his refusal to believe that this great architect and scene designer's skills ranked with his own poetic arts. Jonson's tribute to William Camden, his master at Westminster, achieves a moving reverence. When Jonson writes of Shakespeare however, in a poem printed in the First Folio, his lines are among the most generous of the age.
Jonson's epitaphs to his children temper contradictory feelings of grief and Christian acceptance through an art that seems to belie the emotions that sustain it. In Jonson's two odes to himself, his deep feeling for the integrity of that art is asserted against the allegedly gimcrack tastes of his age. In his few religious pieces, such art also expresses a sinner's measured awareness of his own iniquity.
A contemporary is supposed to have declared that Jonson 'never writes of love, or, if he does, does it not naturally'. This is hard but not wholly unfair. 'My Picture Left in Scotland' has a delicate, honest pathos, and Jonson was capable of both the shrewd cynicism of 'That Women Are but Men's Shadows' as well as the artifice and high compliment 'Drink to me only with thine eyes'. In 'See the chariot at hand here of Love', such artifice creates its own exotic sense of wonder:
Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hand hath touch'd it?
Ha' you mark'd but the fall o'the snow
Before the soil hath smutch'd it?
Ha' you felt the wool o'the beaver?
Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o'the bud of the brier?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
(nard: ambergris)
It is as the poet of the civilized aristocratic community however that Jonson is at his best, the mutual and by no means automatic respect of patron and poet serving to create a Roman ideal of behaviour, an aristocracy of mind as much as birth. Consequently, Jonson was a fine writer of eulogies. These, as in the excellent 'To Sir Robert Wroth', are often tempered by a moral concern for the corruptions of the city and court, a feeling for the virtues of country existence and a piety in which the classical ideal of the good life blends easily with a restrained Christian faith. Bravery, patriotism and friendship—the aristocratic life of action—are celebrated in the Pindaric ode to Cary and Morrison, but it is a tribute to the breadth of Jonson's classicism that he could also celebrate the scatological and mock-heroic exuberance of 'On the Famous Voyage'.
Such poems to the aristocracy suggest the great importance of patronage to the creative life of the age. When Jonson wrote in praise of his patroness the Countess of Bedford, for example, a new image of woman emerged, one that was aristocratic, liberal and educated, and allowed her to move on an equal and graceful footing with men. In 'A Farewell for a Gentlewoman', this is tempered by a stoic, Christian rejection of worldliness. In one of Jonson's finest achievements, the 'Elegy on Lady Jane Paulet', such faith creates a genuine sense of exultation.
It is in 'To Penshurst' however that such concerns combined to form Jonson's supreme evocation of Christian humanism as well as a work which inaugurated the important tradition of the country-house poem. The ancestral seat of the Sidneys here becomes the focus of all aspects of the good life. Modest yet dignified, blessed by the heritage of a great poet and rich in the bounty of nature, Penshurst is the centre of a humane community where all—peasant and poet—join in Sir Robert's courteous hospitality. Rural England is remade through the classics into an image of harmony, decency and integrity, fit and able to welcome the king and so be part of a patriotic ideal. And at the basis of this public excellence lies private virtue. The lady of the house is 'noble, fruitful, chaste withal', while the children, encouraged in rectitude by the example of their parents, are pious and keen to learn the ways of aristocratic merit. Jonson's vision is thus comprehensive and humane, Christian and classical, private and public. However we may question its political implications, it remains a noble image of a civilizing ideal.
—oOo—
The Good Wife
Me citan en esta tesis doctoral mexicana sobre The Good Wife:
López Gutiérrez, María de Lourdes. "Construcción de un modelo para el análisis semiótico de series televisivas. Caso: The Good Wife." Ph.D. diss. México: U Panamericana, 2019.
https://www.academia.edu/45128072/
2021
—oOo—
Construcción social del abusador
Artículo donde se nos cita a cuenta de Narratology:
Gavin, Helen. (U of the West of England, Bristol). "The Social Construction of the Child Sex Offender Explored by Narrative." The Qualitative Report 10.3 (Sept. 2005): 395-413.
http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR10-3/gavin.pdf
Online at the U of Huddersfield Repository:
http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/9504/
Online at Academia.*
https://www.academia.edu/3498283/
2021martes, 28 de septiembre de 2021
Double Top
No es por irritar al Rectorado, que tanto me está mareando estos días, pero me permito observar que soy esta semana (y todas las semanas desde hace años) el académico más leído de la Universidad de Zaragoza. En esta red al menos, que, si no me engañan los datos, es la más importante del mundo.
For Your Safety
The wild deer, wand’ring here & there,
Keeps the Human Soul from Care.
(William Blake, 'Auguries of Innocence')
But the police decided to 'euthanize it' (sic 😖) as "There was no option to let the deer wander".
—oOo—
lunes, 27 de septiembre de 2021
The Age of Chaucer
From A Short History of English Literature, 2nd ed., by Robert Barnard (Blackwell, 1994).
1. THE AGE OF CHAUCER
England in the mid-fourteenth century, the England in which Chaucer, Langland and the author of Gawain grew up, was to all appearances a country cresting a wave of success. In Edward III it had a glamorous, efficient king, and one who appreciated the value of the outward show of monarchy—pageantry, honours, patronage. His court was a centre of culture and chivalry renowned over Europe. With the French monarchy relatively weak, England was losing its status as a dim little off-shore island and attaining the rank of European power. Its seamen were forging links all over Europe an North Africa; its merchants were prospering, forming the beginnings of a solid middle-class. It was a confident, exuberant age. The king had just founded the greatest order of English chivalry, the Order of the Garter, basing it on a celebrated act of chivalry performed by the king towards the Countess of Salisbury.
The reality was rather different—just as the reality behind the garter incident was rather different (according to one account the Countess was wife of the king's best friend, and he raped her). The Black Death of 1348, and subsequent plagues only slightly less terrible, had undermined the whole basis of feudal society, and the Peasant's revolt of 1381 and the civil wars of the next century were evidence of the decline and ultimate collapse of the traditional medieval class structure. Edward's French wars in pursuit of a dubious claim to the French crown over-stretched English resources and proved a chimera which was to delude English kings and impoverish their country for a century. Edward's England, then, was a glorious structure built on dangerously flimsy foundations—a thriving, exciting, fluid age, which finds brilliant expression in the work of its greatest poet.
Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) is the first English writer whom we today can read with anything like ease and he is one who sepaks with particular directness to the modern reader. He was a servant of the court and on occasion its emissary abroad, yet he was born into the middle class which was then so rapidly consolidating its position. Thus his contacts ranged from the highest to the lowest in this changing, threatened, feudal society, and with his extraordinary appetite for all manifestations of human aspiration and human folly he was abrle to capture the essence of fourteenth-century life in a way no contemporary in Britain or on the Continent, could rival.
The plan of Chaucer's last and greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, was not original: to gather together a heterogenous collection of people and have them tell a series of stories—moral stories, romantic stories, bawdy stories, fables. It is Chaucer's genius for characterization and his feeling for social relationships, for the personal, moral and class tensions between people, that give his work a warmth and depth that other similar medieval collections lack. The people on his pilgrimage are described in the masterly 'General Prologue.' they frequently sepak for themseves in the prologues to the 'Tales,' they reveal—often unconsciously—further aspects of their natures in their choice of tale and manner of telling it, and in the conversations, disputes and fights that occur between the tales we get a further sense of medieval humanity at its most unzipped and outrageous.
The pictures of the pilgrims in the 'General Prologue' are little masterpieces of characterization in which what seems at first sight to be a mere accumulation of detail, often quite haphazard, turns out on closer reading to be full of sly innuendo and subtle juxtapositions. If the Prioress wears a brooch with the inscription Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All), is it love of God or of man that is referred to? What exactly does it mean when we are told that the Shipman, if he took prisoners by sea, 'by water he sent them home to every land'? (It means he threw them into the water to drown). What precisely does Chaucer mean to imply when he says that the Wife of Bath (for whom the pilgrimage was a combination of package tour and husband-hunt) was very good at 'wandering by the way'? Two lines, placed together, will illuminate a character and his profession. The excellence of the Cook's creamed chicken is placed next to a description of the foul ulcer on his shin; the description of the worldly monk as a fine prelate comes next to a description of his gourmet taste in food; in the portrait of the Wife of Bath we get this:
She was a worthy woman all her live:
Husbands at chruche door she hadde five...
Sometimes these characters speak with a naturalness or an intensity that like a trumpet brings down the walls of the centuries between us and them. 'Alas, alas, that ever love was sin!' cries the Wife of Bath—who apart from the five husbands has enjoyed 'other company in youth',' so she clearly hasn't been unduly inhibited. 'Let Austin have his swink to him reserved!' ('Let Saint Augustine do his own bl— work!' expostulates the Monk, when he is reminded that the founder of his religious order included hard work among the daily tasks of the monks.
In the tales these people tell, too, we have a wonderful picture of all sides of medieval life, but there is also that tang of modernity that makes our heart stop as we relize our kinship with them. The Pardoner tells his story of the riotous group of young men who decide to seek out and kill Death—and we recognize the teenage rowdies in our own streets. The Nun's Priest tells an animal fable about a about a chicken run—about Chauntecleer who with his six wives, his parade of learning, and his overwhelming conceit is the perfect male chauvinist cock—and even in these days we recognize pale shadows of his type. The bawdy tales of the Miller and the Reeve are funny today precisely because of the swift, economical, humane delineation of characters we can recognize: the story of someone getting branded on the bare behind may be funny on first reading, but it is only funny on second reading if you are interested in the man behind the behind.
Every sort of story is here, and every technique of story-telling in its most modern form. The Wife of Bath's Prologue (longer and better than her actual Tale) tells in shameless detail how she gained mastery over one after another of her husbands, and one gropes towards Joyce's Molly Bloom for comparisons; the Reeve's Tale tells a story of complicated changings of bed-partners which reminds us of nothing so much as a modern French farce. At one point in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer, who has dreamed he has been seized by a fox, launches into an enormously long disquisition on the theory of dreams, their meaning in history and literature, intended to put down his silly wives who have pooh-poohed the prophetic significance of his dream. so long and rambling is it that we are about to say how medieval and dated this all is when suddenly Chauntecleer end his lecture and is so puffed up with his learning and his debating victory over his wives that he forgets the point of the whole thing, jumps down into the hen-run—and is seized by a fox. The long disquisition has been an example of Chaucer's mastery of one of the gifts of a great story-teller—that of timing.
The Canterbury Tales were unfinished at Chaucer's death. The greatest long poem he completed was the slightly earlier Troilus and Criseyde, a superb re-working of one of the most popular medieval accretions to the legends of Troy. The framework is superficially a courtly love stroy—of how prince Troilus courts the lovely widow Criseyde, how she is ent to join her father in the Grecian camp, and is there unfaithful to him. But Chaucer's treatment of this simple story is wholly modern in tone, particularly in its treatment of the central characters. Criseyde is the first depiction in depth of a woman in our literature, and still one of the finest. She is a widow, contentedin her solitude and independence:
I am myn owne woman, wll at ease...
Shal noon housbonde seyn to me 'checkmate!'
For whither they ben full of jealousye,
Or masterful, or loven noveltye. (novelty)
Chaucer's sympathy with Criseyde shows itself in the way he meticulously dtails the considerations that drive her into Troilus's arms: since her father's defection to the Greeks she is alone in a hostile city; flattered by the attentions of a Prince, she feels the stars are ordaining that she fall to him; she is pestered by her cousin Pandarus, who acts as pimp for his friend Troilus. From being the prototype of the faithless woman, as she is in much of medieval literature, Chaucer transforms Criseyde into the tragic symbol of war's efffects on human relationships and fates.
The unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, writing at around the same time as Chaucer, seems at first sight more remote from the present-day reader: his alliterative verse-form was old-fashioned even in his own day; his dialect, that of North-West England, is much more difficult for us; and his subject-matter does not immediately call on us to claim kinship with medieval man, as Chaucer's does in his best tales. Sir Gawain is a story of King Arthur's knights, but the courtly romance is married to archetypal folk myths and to religion: the knights are challenged at Christmas by a green knight—who is beheaded, yet speaks on and issues a challenge for the succeeding Christmas. But there is in fact nothing primitive in this stroy-teller's art: behind the odd mixture of the courtly, the Christian and the mythic is a delicate morality about man's duty—as knight, as lover, as Christian. By involving Sir Gawain in a supernatural challenge the author nullifies mny of his attributes as a perfect knight; and when he has him sexually tempted by his host's wife he involves him in delicate questions of conscience concerning his duty as knight and his duty to his host—questions that can be resolved only by marrying courtly and Christian codes. Through both these plot elements he succeeded in relating the idealized world of Arthur with the real world he knew. If Gawain demands more of us, as readers, than Chaucer does, we are ultimately convinced we are in the presence of as great an artist. This feeling is augmented by the other poems probably by him bound into the same single surviving manuscript—particularly Pearl, a lament for the loss of his daughter that goes some way towards negativing Barbara Tuchman's judgment that medieval man was uninterested in children, and that 'emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature'.
The other major work of the age of Chaucer, The Vision of Piers Plowman, is also written in the alliterative verse style of Gawain, but it displays a very different kind of mind. Its author—William Langland—is a name to us only, but he is usually conjectured to be a rural priest, and one agonized by the social abuses of his time. Using the framework of a dream—a favourite medieval device—the poem covers a wide spectrum from social satire to religious allegory, as the author puts foward his notion of what a truly Christian community would be, and how sadly far the England he knows falls short of it. His hatred of pride, greed and ostentation, his almost 'nonconformist' conscience, ally him with later writers in the puritan tradition such as the Milton of Lycidas and John Bunyan. And like Bunyan he retained his popularity with ordinary readers long after his own time—at least until the Elizabethan age.
After his inexplicably rich harvest of literary genius in the fifteeenth century is a sad, barren period. The splendour of Edward's court gave way to popular discontent, factional strife and the desolating futility of the Wars of the Roses, with two factions of noble thugs disputing a crown that increasingly seemed not worth the winning. In England, in spite of the establishment of Caxton's printing press, literary activity was at its lowest ebb—at best imitative, uncertain of aim, fleeing from the disagreable present into nostalgia. Even Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur—a collection and retelling of the early French and English legends of King Arthur—while a superb example of the potential of English prose, nevertheless at times seems enervated and lacking in conviction, as if the knightly ideal the author was celebrating seemed even to himself remote and impossible in a country torn apart by its own nobility.
The richest poetic harvest was late in the century in Scotland. This kingdom, enjoying unusual stability under a succession of talented Stuart kings, produced several poets of consequence, notably Robert Henryson (?1430-?1506) and William Dunbar (?1460-1513). Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a sort of sequel to Chaucer's poem in which the faithless Cressid contracts leprosy. Its dialect (and perhaps its subject) will always prevent its enjoying the wide popularity of Chaucer's poem, yet it can be mentioned in the same breath without bathos, which is more than can be said of most fifteenth-century poems inspired by Chaucer. And Dunbar's famous 'Lament for the Makaris' (or poets), with its haunting, disturbing refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (I am troubled by the fear of death) may be taken as a requiem for a sad, confused, barren century:
The state of man does change and vary
Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary (sorry)
Now dansand merry, now like to die;
Timor mortis conturbat me...
He takis the knichtis in to field
Enarmit under helm and shield,
Victor he is at all mellie (battles)
Timor mortis conturbat me.
—oOo—
(...)
Freedom Has Departed Europe
- Freedom Has Departed Europe
Paul Craig Roberts • September 25, 2021 • 500 Words • Comments
Yesterday the UK Telegraph reported that the UK is on the brink of joining the EU Covid Vaccine passport scheme. Essentially British and European peoples will not be able to leave their homes without the passport. The propagandists for the agenda make the restriction of freedom of movement sound like a great advantage. They say that “the EU Digital Covid Certificate should make traveling in Europe easier and cheaper for British tourists.” “The EU Digital Covid Certificate has quickly become the biggest vaccine passport scheme in the world and coves more than 40 countries, including all 27 EU states and others as far afield as Israel and Panama.” People all over Europe, and especially in France, have been, and are, in the streets protesting this restriction on freedom of movement, but Paul Charles, a travel agent executive, claims the use of the Digital Certificate for entry to restaurants, bars and other venues in France has proved popular with the public. Paul Charles says that “more people have got vaccinated as a result” of the restriction. Consequently the French have seen their infection rates “drop significantly because of this measure.” If this is true, it is contrary to the experience elsewhere....
domingo, 26 de septiembre de 2021
Test de Turing (para robots)
Uh oh... pic.twitter.com/Rdju9nlwlY
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) September 25, 2021
MATANZAS POR SALUD PÚBLICA
Los covidianos son un peligro público. SUS VÍCTIMAS YA SE CUENTAN POR MILES. Sale hasta en El País:
Esta señora ya lo denunció hace meses:
Humanismo. pic.twitter.com/fvKSticFX9
— Bui Vaya (@bui_vaya) September 26, 2021
Me citan en el Congo
En este artículo sobre inferencias y procesamiento narrativo en literatura de ficción y cine:
Munganga, Bonaventure Muzigirwa. "Inference and Narrative Processing in Fiction and Film: (Where) (Does) Narrative Reading Part(s) Ways with its Viewing and Vice-Versa(?)." Cogent: Arts & Humanities 3 (2016): 1252138.*
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2016.1252138
Online at Academia.
https://www.academia.edu/29846747/
2021
—oOo—
sábado, 25 de septiembre de 2021
60 millones de muertos el año de la pandemia: Grandes cifras
El año de la pandemia no murieron cuatro millones de personas. Murieron casi 60 millones, de diversas causas, entre ellas un número indeterminado por Covid-19. Las grandes cifras engañan mucho, y más si están intervenidas y subvencionadas.
Texto completo:
60 millones de muertos el año de la pandemia:
Grandes cifras
http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/wwj0-5642
- Author(s):
- José Angel GARCÍA LANDA (see profile)
- Date:
- 2021
- Group(s):
- Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Historiography
- Subject(s):
- Epidemics, Health policy, Mortality, Propaganda
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Pandemics, covid-19, disinformation
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/wwj0-5642
-
_____. "60 millones de muertos el año de la pandemia." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 13 Aug. 2021.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2021/08/60-millones-de-muertos-el-ano-de-la.html
2021
_____. "60 millones de muertos el año de la pandemia." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 12 Aug. 2021.*
https://www.ibercampus.es/60-millones-de-muertos-el-ano-de-la-pandemia-41417.htm
2021
_____. "60 millones de muertos el año de la pandemia." SSRN 21 Aug. 2021.* (Censored by SSRN).
http://ssrn.com/abstract=3909059.
2021 DISCONTINUED 2021
_____. "60 millones de muertos el año de la Pandemia: Grandes cifras." Academia 27 Aug. 2021.*
https://www.academia.edu/51033126/
2021
_____. "60 millones de muertos el año de la Pandemia: Grandes cifras." ResearchGate 15 Sept. 2021.*
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354612349
2021
_____. "60 millones de muertos el año de la Pandemia: Grandes cifras." Humanities Commons 24 Sept. 2021.*
http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/wwj0-5642
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:41557/
2021
_____. "60 millones de muertos el año de la pandemia." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 25 Sept. 2021.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2021/09/60-millones-de-muertos-el-ano-de-la.html
2021
—oOo—
Retropost, 2011: Forever Young
Sigo recordando día a día mis viejos posts de hace años. Algunos fueron a parar, ya hace diez años, a Ibercampus; es el caso de éste:
—oOo—
viernes, 24 de septiembre de 2021
Píldora de Acero#7: NEGACIONISTAS
Más cosas "negacionistas":
Hodgkinson, Neville. "Barricaded from Covid Reality by Government and Media." TCW Defending Freedom 23 Sept. 2021.*
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/barricaded-from-covid-reality-by-government-and-media/
2021
La Clave Cultural. "PROGRAMA 1 | 18 meses de pandemia: Qué ha pasado y qué podemos aprender." Video. YouTube (La Clave Cultural) 18 Sept. 2021.*
2021
—oOo—
Scientists in China were planning to release coronaviruses
The Epoch Times: Scientists in China were planning to release coronaviruses:
https://gettr.com/post/pc1ftsb45d
—oOo—
La educación fracasa
Quintana Paz, Miguel Ángel. "La educación fracasa; pero, ¿y si no fuera un error, sino una característica de nuestro sistema?" The Objective (El Subjetivo) 23 Sept. 2021.*
https://theobjective.com/elsubjetivo/educacion-fracaso-error-caracteristica-sistema
2021
Más (o menos) sobre la muerte de Elia Rodríguez
Se han montado en EsRadio un lío con los antivacunas, a los que su director caricaturiza, y se ven asediados por muchos mensajes de crítica por la política vacunólatra de la cadena—algunos denunciando la muerte de Elia Rodríguez como efecto de las vacunas, un rumor que corre no sé sabe si con base o no, ante el sospechoso silencio de la cadena al respecto.
Ahora, Dieter Brandau insinúa, sin decirlo positivamente, que la muerte de Elia Rodríguez no tuvo nada que ver con las vacunas. Algo es algo, un desmentido, aunque sea sólo insinuado, del cual habrá que fiarse.
Y de paso da por buenos Dieter los despotriques de Jiménez Losantos sobre los "antivacunas" como "negacionistas bebelejías" —y el despido de Fray Josepho (al que sin embargo considera negacionista moderado) como resultado de resistirse por los ataques de la cadena a los "antivacunas." Vamos, a cerrar filas.
Ahora podrían también (si se puede hacer) insinuar también un desmentido sobre el también rumoreado suicidio de la periodista, y vamos centrando el tema a base de desmentidos. No sería mucho ataque a la intimidad y dignidad de la persona, más bien lo contrario, el insinuar que alguien no se ha suicidado para desmentir un rumor al respecto. Pero nadie lo afirma allí, ni lo insinúa, ni eso ni todo lo contrario. Hay consigna de silencio.
O, si prefieren, podrían repetir lo de la caída, que en realidad nadie lo ha dicho nunca desde que "alguien" lo escribió.
________
Es muy triste ver cómo Libertad Digital se ha enredado en un bulo, en la desinformación y las mentiras, ni siquiera se sabe muy bien a cuenta de qué, pero sí desde luego en parte a cuenta de las vacunas. Aquí se lo recrimina Javier García Isac en Decisión Radio:
La libertad entre rejas: https://www.decisionradio.com/en-la-boca-del-lobo/c/0/i/59087717/sonido-n-475
Y Cristina Seguí: Libertad Digital / EsRadio y los "bebelejías" https://www.dederechas.es/noticia/31054/opinion/yo-bebelejias.aspx
Por el camino del engaño y de la ocultación, de la menipulación y la mentira van en este grupo al guano—donde ya hay tantos.
—oOo—