#Rabelaisian

[fuzzysparrow]

The Throne of John Harington

Known in the royal court as Queen Elizabeth I‘s “saucy godson”, John Harington is remembered for his writing, particularly the first description of a flush toilet installed in his house at Kelston. Born in London but baptised in Somerset on 4th August 1560, Harington was the son of poet John Harington of Stepney (d. 1582) and his second wife Isabella Markham (1527-79), a gentlewoman of Elizabeth…

[zzztlk]

so so excited for The Ties That Bind, I love keeping up with it's progress and can't wait until the final product!!! Here's a quick question: Is Rabel pronounced Rah-bell or Ray-bell? I keep pronouncing it Rah-Bell but idk if that's correct. Love ur work and have a good day! :)

Thanks! It's the first one, like scrabble

[sivavakkiyar]

like Crowley is the only figure in that western occult engagement w/ ‘Hindu’ philosophies and practice who will literally just say ‘we employ these ancient practices and will not accept the example of currently existing India as proof against them, because they were created before the Aryans intermixed’. (I’m paraphrasing, he uses more ornate and explicit language). It’s there even in a lot of Theosophical work but Crowley’ll just say it, very useful. Also why he’s useful for practice sometimes: (‘if a dog is going to interrupt your meditation, you should shoot the dog.’ A test, I guess)

[thesinglesjukebox]

KESHA - "JOYRIDE"

We still ride for you, Kesha!

[7.25]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Kesha: unburdened by what has been, living in the context, realizing what can be.  [8]

Katherine St. Asaph: It's hard not to overrate Kesha singles. Like all right-minded pop listeners, I want her to thrive, and I want every song to sound like proof that she is. I initially thought "Raising Hell" was the glorious height of Kesha's hedonism; in retrospect, it was a little perfunctory. Likewise, I really want "Joyride" to be the Rabelaisian outsider carnival everyone says it is, enough to resist the reality that nothing about it is outside the bounds of normie pop. Cowriter Madison Love has a back catalogue spanning years of pop singles with a similar chaos quotient: Lady Gaga's "Sour Candy," Machine Gun Kelly and Camila Cabello's "Bad Things," Ava Max's "Sweet But Psycho"; to contextualize even further, she's written enough for enough B-listers that some of that back catalogue inevitably went through Dr. Luke. (A few antis have tried to turn this fact into a gotcha, as if it's impossible to work with an asshole colleague then want to stop.) The arrangement is less love honk than cruise control, coasting in the lane of its donk. The chorus sounds kinetic, springing out and bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box; it also sounds like "Run the World (Girls)" but slower. The lyrics can't decide whether they're about sex or Regina Georgish camaraderie (I doubt it's both), and while Kesha sounds as depraved as ever, slurring and purring out bars like "label whore, but I'm tired of wearing clothes," none of them outsleaze her Simple Life days, let alone a brat summer. All this said, the song pre-empts every criticism possible: she has, truly, earned the right to be like this. I've written all these objective pans, and my heart is in none of them.  [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I often (perhaps too often?) critique a song by saying it sounds like something out of a movie about a fake pop star. Those songs are worthy of critique, obviously — they’re constructed entirely out of cliches and misremembered fragments of out of date pop hits, with any hooks accrued seemingly by accident. Yet “something out of a movie” is not necessarily the right put down. Case in point: “Joyride,” from its deliriously overcranked accordion hook on down, sounds absolutely like something out of some feverish fictional property. And yet, this absolutely works — the first Kesha single in years to work as both commentary and as a straight ahead banger. [7]

Leah Isobel: Kesha's 2022 loosie "Rich White Straight Men" introduced a soundscape that was big not in the sense of pop but in the sense of density: it was carnivalesque and menacing, stuffed with cartoonish sound effects, barely making room for her theatrically affected vocal. While Gag Order had an austere musculature that spoke to the effort of keeping hope alive, that song was the sound of despair, garish and hopeless and too much in every respect. Like everything that overflows with sincerity, it was a little alienating, a little cringe. "Joyride" revisits that soundscape, but offers an innovation: by pairing a similarly maniacal accordion loop with the straightforward momentum of her dance-pop side, the song achieves something that I almost want to call Brechtian? It is impossible to listen to a new Kesha song without immediately thinking of her context, her Story, her Narrative; this has made it exceedingly difficult for her to reclaim the joy and delight that was her trademark. But the accordion is so fucking ridiculous, so cringe, that it actually short-circuits all other considerations. The question goes from "is Kesha happy?" to "what is��that?" And then I'm dancing. She fucking did it. [8]

Alex Clifton: Have you ever wanted to go to a lightly demonic monster truck rally run by evil clowns who love to dance? Because that’s exactly the kind of wild party Kesha’s conjuring here, silly and fun and insanely catchy. Initially I was a little over the “I am Mother” line, thinking, “that will date this all to hell,” but maybe this one should absolutely be dated. July 2024: the first month Kesha released new music unshackled from Dr. Luke. The sense of freedom and excitement here is so palpable; Kesha’s clearly having a ball on the recording, hamming up her performance in a way that’s simultaneously goofy and sexy. (The only other singer I can see delivering “beep-beep bitch” this well is Gaga, the established queen of camp.) I’m excited to see where newly-freed Kesha goes next, as she’s bound to show us the best night of our lives.  [9]

Joshua Lu: Hedonistic carnival final boss OST — nobody knows how to make trashy pop music like Kesha. [8]

Jonathan Bradley: I respect the outré ambition here — it's fun to hear Kesha find new paths into the realm of the obtuse — but this song has some very annoying sounds. The accordion is annoying! The brassy high-pitched delivery of the title on the hook is annoying! Declaring yourself to be "mother" more than a year after Meghan Trainor did it is annoying! [3]

Alfred Soto: Immersing himself into the Eurotrash with which she has long flited, Kesha sounds buoyant like she hasn't been all decade. She sounds best when harmonizing with bleeps and bloops and synth gahoozits.  [8]

Ian Mathers: Not the accordions I thought I wanted but, it turns out, the accordions I needed. Hyperpolka? Can that be a thing for a bit? [7]

Taylor Alatorre: It’s an open question why the most prototypically American pop singer to emerge from the Recession Era – sorry, Lana, but you first hit the U.S. top 40 with a Cedric Gervais remix – would want to declare her label independence with a high-density slab of blaring Eurotrash. In freeing herself from one set of constraints, Kesha seems to have placed herself under a not-entirely-new one: a dual mandate of familiarity and novelty, of embracing the garishly extroverted attitude of Animal and Cannibal while running away from their most obvious sonic totems. "Joyride” is too fixated on these matters of branding and self-presentation to truly give off the uninhibited vibe it wants to, though Kesha’s everything-at-the-wall approach does produce at least one undeniable hook: those perfectly timed, perfectly trashy car horns. An appeal to the 5-year-old in all of us, who just wants to hear the big vroom-vroom machine go beep-beep. [5]

Hannah Jocelyn: When someone's trying to make another campy "Padam Padam"-style summer hit, I hear it and I know -- this is a fascinating mix of effortless strangeness and 'omg this is for the gaaayzzz brat summmerrrrr so juuuliiaaaa' pandering. There's a lot of off-putting material here; the chorus melody sounds like that meme where every note in "Fireflies" is tuned to C and the spoken title drop sounds uncannily lifted from an ARTPOP reject (you can't tell me that's not Gaga!). In a lot of ways, this isn't too far from a song like Camila Cabello's "I Luv It", but Kesha is an actual weirdo cramming her weirdness into a pop song, not Cabello retrofitting her normalcy into a would-be weird song. That's why she's much better at calling herself "Mother" than other singers, and why she can get away with an accordion in place of the usual synthesizers. "Joyride" is not trying to be an accidental masterpiece; it's just zaniness for the sake of zaniness. There's nothing wrong with letting her be like that.  [7]

Will Adams: "I've earned the right to be like this" is one hell of a mission statement (and she's right). "Joyride," like any other successful Kesha single, has an appealing weirdness -- the accordion riff, the octave swoops in the chorus, dramatic-ass choir -- that makes for a fun ride. However, there's some light pandering in the form of "mother" and the Mean Girls quote which stops it just short of being a full Obnoxious Banger (though this self-remix by producer Zhone takes it there). [7]

Jackie Powell: What makes Kesha such an instinctual pop star is how well she knows herself. With “Joyride” she returns to the type of cheekiness and camp that introduced her to the world. Her diction and enunciation on some of the consonants in each verse is what is so unique to Kesha. She knows what words to accent and which ones not to. Not every artist has this awareness. Kesha had to take a bit of an artistic journey to return to her old sound with as much spunk and moxie as “Joyride”, and unlike another artist we know, she did it successfully. Kesha and Madison Love wrote a song that empowers without being too cheesy, frivolous but without being meaningless.  [7]

Kat Stevens: Admittedly I've left it a little late to qualify for Paris 2024, so I must now set my sights on LA 2028. It's true that I'm now older than US swimmer Dara 'Grandma' Torres was when she won three silver medals in Beijing, however legendary Uzbek gymnast Oksana Chusovitina managed an average 14.166 score for her two vaults in Tokyo (aged 46), and still hasn't officially retired. There's hope for me yet! As such I got cracking with my altitude training this morning (running up Crystal Palace hill, elevation above sea level: 112m) and switched up my playlist from French house to a new Los Angeles-themed one, with "Joyride" by Kesha in pride of place at the top. Beep-beep, bitch -- we're going to the Olympics! [9]

Nortey Dowuona: Madison Love woke up in the morning, saying fuck P. Diddy.  [6]

Mark Sinker: Nothing shorthands my favourite year in pop for a long time than responding to whatever anyone now says or does with the word “JOYRIDE” in a Kesha voice.  [10]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[jjanewillow]

flippant

the efforts to manage you have been futile

incompetence sneaking past the locked doors

some things within your follies are just beyond my jurisdiction

do I seem to be your keeper?

Rabelaisian narratives taint my phone line

an inept attempt at presenting mature

not yet a woman, of that, I am sure

you called to tell me you feel sick, guilty even

I will not be the one to comfort you

a little more dull-witted than you used to be

holding vapid conversations

I am afraid you won't understand the complexities I have to share

your asininity baffles me

I am not your mommy

natheless, I will have to act as she

[duomaxwellandducks]

Silly Game Time: What are your adjectives? No, not your pronouns, but descriptive words for your personality.

(For example, mine are Eccentric, Irreverent, and ... Hermetic. I am a dictionary-thesaurus, and have ALL the words.)

i am criminogenic, ecaudate, eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious, insulse (?), rabelaisian, and typically wertfrei.

[aarix]

guy who just learned the word "Rabelaisian": haha it's so Rabelaisian in here

[lafcadiosadventures]

I am still super hyped about that gay knights story balzac wrote. I am going to look into the bad reviews the contes drolatiques got, since those might have corseted balzac into being less sexually explicit in his comédie cycle? Apparently the main argument against the stories was the language, the rabelaisian pastiche he was trying was apparently too obscure for your average reader, but the even more explicit gayness, derisive mockery of nobles, and anticlericalism seem bolder than what he goes for in the comédie as well….

[mariacallous]

Come the warm, ripening days of summer and I imagine that I am closer to a more ancient, basic and healthful style of vegetable and grain eating than in my cold and meaty winters. I am seduced by my garden and neighboring farm stands vivid with color and flavor.

I avoid a lot of hot time in the kitchen. Much is eaten raw or almost: vegetable soups - gazpacho has many names and many recipes - vegetable sauces for rice or pasty and endless salads. I have corn on the cob and other vegetables in every form: grilled, roasted, steamed, stir-fried, puréed and combined in a variety of stews to be eaten hot, cold and at room temperature. Fresh herbs, garlic, onions and imagination sauce the dishes. The first beans from the pod or dried beans, fruit, cheese, bread and wine complete my menus.

There is almost no meat and little chicken or fish - an occasional grilling, a stew more vegetable than meat, a slice of cold meat or charcuterie, a boiled egg, a little tuna from the can.

I eat this way for pleasure as well as in a modern quest for a more healthful diet. Those came before us ate this way to take advantage of what they had - often limited. While we tend to see a cornucopia-vision of the past, rich in more seasonal, more natural foods, it is only partly true.

Winter in most climates was short of fresh vegetables, and the world relied on salting, pickling, drying and cold storage for any vegetables at all. The animal protein we are fending off today was in short, expensive supply.

With the best will in the world and without an evil intention, food writers and the natural inclination of all of us to glamorize the past and the far away have been guilty of distorting our view of the way the world eats. By selecting the best, the most festive food of other places or times, we have come to see them as halcyon visions of plenty, filled with meat and seafood, sugar and cream.

It is not sugarplum fairies, but roasts and fries, sausages and sautés, stews and cassoulets that frolic in our Rabelaisian dreams. Southern picnics are enriched with baked hams and fried chicken. Clambakes clutter the shores of a mythical New England. In that world of the imagination, native Africans are awash in chicken and ground-nut stew, native Americans feast on venison and buffalo, Greeks expand over countless dishes of succulent lamb, the Chinese are exquisite in damask while dining on unimaginably choice viands.

The English eat hearty roasts, silken salmon, and mountains of oysters. The French of the mind are various, either robust peasants glorying in rich stews or jeweled aristocrats whose famous chefs set forth succulent sauces. Our Italians live in a world of perpetual holidays, their risotti topped with pungent white truffles.

While not totally untrue - these foods did exist in each of these countries and were eaten by the natives at least upon occasion - such visions falsify the totality of real experience and may contribute to the glut of fat and cholesterol in our lives. We equate these festive foods with good living and think that ,if we can, we should eat this way all the time.

Our ancestors and many peoples all over the world today eat very differently from this skewed perception. Carbohydrate, or stodge, was what really fed and filled up most people. With bread as the staff of life in Europe, scarcity led to bread riots for centuries. Even in the recent past, when the government-fixed price of bread was raised in France, the announcement was carefully scheduled for August when almost all Frenchmen are on vacation.

Certainly, the staple food of the vast majority of the world is still rice, followed by bread and potatoes along with noodles - pasta among them - soy foods, yams, taro, yucca, corn, beans, pulses such as lentils, myriad grains and other starchy foods with names foreign to me. In the past and in much of the present, animal protein, when available, has been primarily a flavoring.

Beasts were not killed promiscuously. They were the cash crops and the providers of the milk and eggs. If a pig was slaughtered in the fall, that was a major event, and a family would hoard the preserved hams for Christmas and Easter, or sliver small amounts for a taste at many meals. A prosciutto bone or other ham bone was an asset to be used and reused in soups until flavorless. Fresh meats were rare; only the overage animal or the single, religiously festive springling was sacrificed.

To envisage a chicken in every pot was to dream of luxury indeed - the most luxurious of Sunday dinners.

if other meats were salted and smoked like bacon, or pickled like corned beef, air-dried like grisson or jerky, or preserved in fat like confit, it was to keep them over the winter and dispense them parsimoniously as special treats.

So when we read recipes for peasant dishes crammed with meat, we should remember we are reading about rare treats, not daily fare. Even fishing nations could have uncertain catches, rough seas and months when it was impossible to put out upon the water. Even plenty might need to be sold. A home-cooked paella was mainly rice, seasonings, oil and vegetables.

The great go-along-withs have been vegetables and fruits, fresh when in season, pickled or preserved for inclement times. A little fat would have come from the possibilities of each region - olive oil, butter and lard. Food was about survival and pleasure when possible. No one got more than nutritionally sound share of meat and fat over the course of a year. It is these daily recipes that are by and large missing or recorded primarily as accompanying dishes in our cookbooks and kitchens.

It is up to us to re-create out of our plenty the sane eating and pleasures that scarcity and invention, herb patch and garden, bestowed on our forebears.

"The Real Past", from The Opinionated Palate: Passions and Peeves on Eating and Food by Barbara Kafka

[senso1954]

And “How dependent on approval!” Forster wrote of himself in his diary. Going unpublished, he tried out his stories on a circle of his friends. How much did they help matters, we wonder? While Lytton Strachey thought “The Life to Come” was good, T.E. Lawrence gave it a laugh. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's disgust at a “Rabelaisian” story was enough to put Forster off his work on “Maurice.” The young William Plomer, allowed to read a story and not caring for it, was never shown another.

— from Eudora Welty's NYT review of The Life To Come, 1973

[transgenderer]

for context, ukuthwasa is a sort of behavioral disease that afflicts one and can only be cured by becoming a diviner, called an izangoma, in nguni society

The symptoms of ukuthwasa and the cult of diviners seems to have been remarkably stable for at least one hundred or more years. The early accounts of Shooter and Callaway sound very much like the recent ones of Barker (1959), Cole (1967), and Lee (1970), and through out this extensive literature we see evidence of the most significant qualities of izangoma. Most frequently men tioned is the domination of the profession by women, particularly young married women (Lee 1970:144, for example). The material also suggests, however, that the great preponderance of female diviners is a relatively-recent phenomenon. In 1857 the Reverend Joseph Shooter described the possessed patients as "prophetsnovitiates" and says only that the potential diviner "maybe" a female (191). The Reverend Canon Callaway, who wrote somewhat later, mentions no predominance of either sex (1870). Nearly every writer of the twentieth century, on the other hand, comments on the great number of women who receive the "call." Furthermore, in Hilda Kuper's book on the Swazi, one of the Nguni societies, she notes that although the number of diviners is increasing, the number of men who become involved is decreasing (1947:165).

The few men who do become diviners through ukuthwasa are generally described as thin, highly strung, neurotic—in other words, men who do not conform to the ideal image of masculine virtues. S. G. Lee elaborates on the apparent pathology of male izangoma. He says that they are generally young, unmarried at the time of their initiation, and have a definite "homosexual bent." They will generally be trained by female diviners, will don female clothing, and speak in "high-pitched tones." Lee also suggests that there is general recognition of the homosexual characteristics of these young men, since the marriage of a male isangoma called for "Rabelaisian comment" in that district (1970:143).

Despite possible mental or emotional pathology, especially in male diviners, izangoma are considered to be among the quickest, most observant, and most intelligent members of the community. That this is, indeed, the case has been stated by both Bantu and Europeans (for example, Callaway 1870:321; Kidd 1904:156; Lee 1970:149).

!

[howifeltabouthim]

But the monster is not always a Rabelaisian wonder of hearty appetites and boundless hilarity. She is often lonely and misunderstood.

Siri Hustvedt, from The Blazing World

[driftlessarearev]

CRITICAL APPRAISALS: JOYCE / BECKETT // ASHBERY /// MAKIN - Part Two

Via JOYCE: POLYSEMIC, POLYMATHIC, POLYMORPHOUS Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) offer a capacious feast. These twin monuments to Joyce’s genius bloat with linguistic excess. Each novel tips the scale with page length, each a Rabelaisian carnival of puns, references, psycho-geography, and formal experimentation. Joyce doesn’t adhere to the philosophy of “less is more,” no, these two…

[blamebrampton]

This post could absolutely have come from the 1930s with Mikhail Bakhtin celebrating the Rabelaisian carnival of Zendaya is Meechee and Alfred Rosenberg denouncing it as degenerate art.

zendaya is meechee

[aratherflykindaguy]

Sunny Rabelaisian from Daydreams!