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kcrabb88 · 4 years ago

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Queer Movies/Books/TV Shows for Pride Month!

Happy Pride everyone!! For your viewing/reading pleasure I have made a (non-exhaustive) list of queer media that I have enjoyed!

Movies/Documentaries

Pride (2014): An old tried and true favorite, which meets at the intersection of queer and workers’ rights. A group of queer activists support the 1985 miners’ strike in Wales (complete with a sing-through of Bread and Roses + Power in a Union)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire: On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman (or, two young lesbians fall in love by the sea, and you cry)

God’s Own Country: Young farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker for lambing season ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path (Seriously this movie is GREAT and doesn’t get enough love, watch it! It’s rough but ends happily)

The Half of It: When smart but cash-strapped teen Ellie Chu agrees to write a love letter for a jock, she doesn't expect to become his friend - or fall for his crush (as in she falls for his crush who is another girl. This movie was so good, and really friendship focused!)

Saving Face: A Chinese-American lesbian and her traditionalist mother are reluctant to go public with secret loves that clash against cultural expectations (this is an oldie and a goodie, with a happy ending!)

Moonlight: A young African-American man grapples with his identity and sexuality while experiencing the everyday struggles of childhood, adolescence, and burgeoning adulthood (featuring gay men of color!)

Carol: An aspiring photographer develops an intimate relationship with an older woman in 1950s New York (everyone’s seen this I think, but I couldn’t not have it here)

Milk: The story of Harvey Milk and his struggles as an American gay activist who fought for gay rights and became California's first openly gay elected official (the speech at the end of this made me cry. Warning, of course, for death, if you don’t know about Harvey Milk)

Pride (Hulu Documentary): A six-part documentary series chronicling the fight for LGBTQ civil rights in America (they go by decade from the 50s-2000s, and there is a lot of great trans inclusion in this)

Paris is Burning (Documentary): A 1990s documentary about the African American and Latinx ballroom scene. Available on Youtube!

A New York Christmas Wedding: As her Christmas Eve wedding draws near, Jennifer is visited by an angel and shown what could have been if she hadn't denied her true feelings for her childhood best friend (this movie is SO CUTE. It’s really only nominally a Christmas movie and easily watched anytime. Features an interracial sapphic couple!)

TV Shows

Love, Victor: Victor is a new student at Creekwood High School on his own journey of self-discovery, facing challenges at home, adjusting to a new city, and struggling with his sexual orientation (this is a spin-off of Love, Simon, and it’s very sweet and well done! Featuring a young gay man of color)

Sex Education: A teenage boy with a sex therapist mother teams up with a high school classmate to set up an underground sex therapy clinic at school (this has multiple queer characters, including a featured young Black gay man and also in season 2 there is a side ace character!)

Black Sails: I mean, do I even need to put a summary here? If you follow me you know that Black Sails is full of queer pirates, just queers everywhere.

Gentleman Jack: A dramatization of the life of LGBTQ+ trailblazer, voracious learner and cryptic diarist Anne Lister, who returns to Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1832, determined to transform the fate of her faded ancestral home Shibden Hall (Period drama lesbians!!! A title sequence that will make you gay just by watching!)

Tales of the City (2019): A middle-aged Mary Ann returns to San Francisco and reunites with the eccentric friends she left behind. "Tales of the City" focuses primarily on the people who live in a boardinghouse turned apartment complex owned by Anna Madrigal at 28 Barbary Lane, all of whom quickly become part of what Maupin coined a "logical family". It's no longer a secret that Mrs. Madrigal is transgender. Instead, she is haunted by something from her past that has long been too painful to share (this is based on a book series and it’s got lots of great inter-generational queer relationships!)

The Haunting of Bly Manor: After an au pair’s tragic death, Henry hires a young American nanny to care for his orphaned niece and nephew who reside at Bly Manor with the chef Owen, groundskeeper Jamie and housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (sweet, tender, wonderful lesbians. A bittersweet ending but this show is so so wonderful)

Sense8: A group of people around the world are suddenly linked mentally, and must find a way to survive being hunted by those who see them as a threat to the world's order (queers just EVERYWHERE in this show, of all kinds)

Books

Loveless by Alice Oseman: Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day. This wise, warm and witty story of identity and self-acceptance sees Alice Oseman on towering form as Georgia and her friends discover that true love isn’t limited to romance (don’t be turned off by this title, it’s tongue-in-cheek. This is a book about an aroace college girl discovering herself and centers the importance and power of platonic relationships! I have it on my TBR and have heard great things)

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters: Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel (again, don’t be thrown off by the title, it too, is tongue-in-cheek. This book was GREAT, and written by a trans women with a queer-and especially trans--audience in mind)

A Tip for the Hangman by Allison Epstein: A gay Christopher Marlowe, at Cambridge and trying to become England’s best new playwright, finds himself wrapped up in royal espionage schemes while also falling in love (this book is by a Twitter friend of mine, and it is a wonderful historical thriller with a gay man at the center).

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer: a very very queer remix of The Picture of Dorian Gray (which was already quite queer), featuring amazing female characters, a gay Basil, and a much happier ending than the original.

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston: The gay prince of England and the bisexual, biracial first son of the president fall in love (think an AU of 2016 where a woman becomes president). Featuring a fantastic discovery of bisexuality, ruminations on grief, and just a truly astonishing book. One of my favorites!

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston: For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures. But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train (This is Casey McQuiston’s brand new novel featuring time-travel, queer women, and I absolutely cannot WAIT to read it)

The Heiress by Molly Greely: Set in the Pride and Prejudice universe, this takes on Anne de Bourg (Lady Catherine’s daughter), and makes her queer!

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters: Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins (Sarah Waters is the queen of historical lesbians. All of her books are good, and they’re all gay! The Paying Guests is another great one)

(On a side note re: queer books, there are MANY, these are just ones I’ve read more recently. Also there are a lot of indie/self-published writers doing great work writing queer books, so definitely support your local indie authors!)

#I am inevitably forgetting things!!!#These are just ones that came to mind #Long post #Pride

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richmond-rex · 5 years ago

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What do you think Henry VII remembers, if anything, of his other uncle Henry VI?

This is such an interesting question and something that I myself have been wondering, so thank you for providing me with the opportunity to expand my thoughts on here 🌹

We know that Henry VII only ever saw his uncle King Henry VI once during his life, when he was 13 years old. However, I’d argue King Henry must have caused quite a great impression on him, and considering Henry Tudor was old enough at that time, also a profoundly lasting one. So far young Henry Earl of Richmond had been living as a ward of his uncle Jasper’s enemies, the Herberts. By 1470 his old guardian, William Herbert, had been executed, and then, as the Earl of Warwick changed sides and brought about Henry VI’s readeption, Henry Tudor was returned to his uncle Jasper who took him to London to meet King Henry VI. That Jasper felt like acquainting his nephew with his brother denotes a special degree of closeness and advocates for his idea of family, in my opinion.

According to André, Henry VII’s court poet and self-styled regius historiographus, on 27 October 1470 Henry VI held ‘a splendid feast with the nobles and best men of the kingdom’ to commemorate his return to the throne. As the king was washing his hands, young Richmond was brought to his presence, and according to André, ‘the king prophesied that someday the boy would undertake the governance of the kingdom and would have all things under his own power.’ Polydore Vergil, a historian that began his service under Henry VII in 1506, wrote in his Three Books that in that 1470 meeting ‘the king... is reported to have said:’

“This truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.”

It seems not even Vergil lends much credence to this tale as expressed by his choice of words: reported to have said. As expected, this myth has largely been viewed as Tudor propaganda and indeed the episode has been immortalised in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part III. In the play, King Henry VI meets a toddler Henry Richmond (then escorted by Somerset), calls him ‘England’s hope’, and says Richmond was ‘Likely in time to bless a regal throne’. Given that King Henry VI had his own son Prince Edward as his heir at the time, it seems unlikely he would ever have said such a thing. However, if anything remotely close to that happened, then I agree with Leanda de Lisle in saying that it must have been King Henry VI taking Henry Tudor to be his own son Edward, who thanks to his imprisonment in the Tower he had not seen for five years (and would not ever see again). It’s absurdly sad to think King Henry VI would confound his nephew with his son but arguably also not out of the realm of possibility. We don’t know if Henry Tudor saw his uncle King Henry again, but it’s also not unlikely that he, his mother and uncle Jasper stayed at court for the feast of All Hallows’ (1 November) and All Souls’ Day (2 November).

If King Henry VI ever made such prophecy, wittingly or not, then it must have greatly impacted on Henry Tudor. Henry VII believed to have been chosen by God to, against all odds, become king of England. He once wrote about ‘the crown which it has pleased God to give us with the victory over our enemy at our first field’. Henry Tudor was reported to be very pious—he made pilgrimages to the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury every Easter, as well as frequent pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and donations to the shrine of St Vincent Ferrer in Brittany. He also founded the cult of the Breton saint St Armel in England and boosted the teachings of St Francis by his patronage of the Franciscan order. He especially favoured the Observants (the Franciscans, also known as the Greyfriars), granting them annuities for the establishment of monasteries in England and abroad. It seems he also favoured staying at religious houses when travelling or going on progress around the kingdom.

Most importantly, Henry VII held a singular devotion to the Virgin Mary and his adoption of the red rose as his personal symbol—aside from dynastic reasons—had everything to do with the religious connotations of that flower. Henry VII could have associated himself with his uncle Henry VI by adopting his antelope badge, for example, but instead, he chose the five-petal flower associated with the Virgin Mary and the Passion of Christ. The Franciscans were noted for their devotion to the Passion, and Henry VII had come in contact with the Observants during his exile in Brittany. The rose had five petals like the five wounds of Christ—St Bernard of Clairvaux once stated: “As many wounds as there are on the Saviour’s body, so many roses are there! Look at His feet and His hands; do you not see roses?”

Forgive me for still going on a tangent about it, but Henry VII’s personal devotion to the Virgin Mary and the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception is exemplified in his Book of Hours, where a miniature shows a figure representing the king kneeling at a prayer desk before a vision of the Virgin as a baby held by her mother, St Anne (or, alternatively, The Virgin and the Child Jesus). His devotion to the Virgin was also highlighted in his rebuilding of the Lady Chapel (now Henry VII’s Chapel) at Westminster Abbey which I will return to in a moment.

I’m not sure but I think it was Vergil who reported Henry VII as having said that religion was his ‘continual refuge’ during exile. His piety has been largely attributed to the influence of his mother Margaret Beaufort, herself also a very pious woman. But given how many years—and formative years those were—they spent apart, I imagine that Henry must have looked up to someone closer to him at the time, namely his uncle Jasper Tudor. We know that after the death of Catherine of Valois Jasper and his brother Edmund were raised by nuns at Barking Abbey, and that then at some point they joined King Henry VI’s court. According to John Blacman, Henry VI’s biographer and chaplain writing in 1485:

[…] and like pains did [Henry VI] apply in the case of his half-brothers, the Lords Jasper and Edmund, in their boyhood and youth; providing for them most strict and safe guardianship, putting them under the care of virtuous and worthy priests, both for teaching and for right living and conversation, lest the untamed practices of youth should grow rank if they lacked any to prune them.

Blacman also claimed that the king personally protected his half-brothers from sexual temptation by keeping ‘careful watch through hidden windows of his chamber’ (yes, I know). Like his uncle King Henry VI, Henry VII would also set a court that ‘maintained the highest standards of sexual behaviour’. Indeed, Retha Warnicke made an extensive compilation of scandals during the first two Tudor reigns and not a single case of sexual misconduct was found to have taken place during Henry VII’s time, marking his court as a decidedly different one than Edward IV’s had been.

Going back to Henry VI’s supposed prophecy, his words surely must have acquired a great weight in Henry Tudor’s mind by 1483 when he made his bid to the English throne. By that time King Henry VI had become a popular saint in England and even though Edward IV had tried to have him modestly—and somewhat obscurely—buried in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey, people had started to flock to his grave. A peasant claimed that Henry VI helped him when he had a bean trapped in his ear, which only popped out after he prayed to the king. Painted images of King Henry VI began showing up in churches around the country, like this one at Barton in Norfolk:

One of King Henry VI’s most ardent devotees was Henry Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort (Jasper’s feelings towards the cult are unknown) who had met her kinsman when she was about nine years old. When King Henry VI allegedly offered her the option of remaining married to Suffolk’s son or be remarried to his brother Edmund, Margaret says St Nicholas came to her in a dream dressed as a bishop, telling her to choose Edmund. Again, if this story is true or not, we may never know, but Margaret told that to her confessor John (bishop, then saint) Fisher—why would a famously pious woman such as Margaret Beaufort lie to her own confessor, thus committing a sin? It might be that the events took a mystical turn in Margaret’s imagination as a young girl, but that she associated divine intervention to hers and her son’s fate, and likewise to King Henry VI’s proposal, is clear.

It seems Richard III tried to control King Henry VI’s ever-growing cult by moving Henry VI’s body from Chertsey Abbey to St George’s Chapel at Windsor, a place where visitors wouldn’t have easy access to the king. Nevertheless, when Henry VII came to the throne he wholeheartedly encouraged pilgrimages to the place. Henry VII launched an official campaign to have his uncle canonised, with several petitions to popes Innocent VIII, Alexander VI and Julius II. Henry also ordered the compilation of a book of miracles worked by his uncle, and a biography of Henry VI was published in 1500 claiming that Henry VI had been ever pious and chaste during his life, towards his queen never behaving ‘unseemly ... but with all conjugal honesty and gravity’. Henry VII planned to have the body of King Henry VI re-interred at the heart of the new Lady Chapel he was planning at Westminster Abbey.

However much Henry VII enjoyed good relations with the papacy, especially Pope Innocent VIII, his campaign to have his uncle King Henry VI canonised never came into fruition. Henry VII decided for him and his wife to be buried at his new Lady Chapel instead, next to the tomb of his grandmother Queen Catherine of Valois. In his will, he stated his wish for his body to be buried:

“in the Chapell where our said graunt Dame laye buried, the which Chapell we have begoune to buylde of newe, in the honour of our blessed Lady.”

That doesn’t mean Henry VII set aside the memory of his uncle King Henry VI. He employed the same man that was overseeing the construction of the Lady Chapel at Westminster, Reginald Bray, to continue the rebuilding of St George’s Chapel at Windsor set in motion by his predecessor Edward IV (it came to be informally known as the Bray Chapel). The modest thirteenth-century chapel of Edward the Confessor was expanded into a vast cathedral-like chapel where, importantly, Henry VI’s body was placed alongside a famous relic, the fragment of the True Cross (a reliquary known as the Cross of Gneth) and the bones of John Schorne (revered for curing gout and toothache).

We may argue that Henry VII’s campaign to have King Henry VI’s canonised was fundamentally political (much like Richard II’s campaign for Edward II) as many historians have done. King Henry VI as a saint, combined with his supposed prophecy, would successfully contribute to the image of Henry VII’s reign as one chosen by God. When we put Henry VII’s religious devotion into perspective, though, his efforts to have ‘the glorious King Henry’ canonised take another dimension—in fact, there’s no doubt that in Henry VII’s eyes God had intervened in his favour. Henry VII’s will also stated his wish for an image of himself to be placed in St Edward’s chapel at Westminster, depicting him returning to God and the Virgin Mary the circlet with which he had been crowned at the Battle of Bosworth.

This is me purely speculating, but I think that even though Henry VII only came in contact with King Henry VI once in his life, his half-uncle might have exercised a great influence on him through his uncle Jasper. Jasper seemed to have been genuinely attached to his brother Henry on a personal level as well as devoted to his political cause. If Henry VI’s saintly qualities had been enough to impress Margaret Beaufort, it is very likely that they might have impressed young Henry of Richmond as well.

#ask #nuingiliath #henry vii #henry vi #sorry for going on a tangent

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pamphletstoinspire · 6 years ago

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Skepticism and Certitude in an Age of Relativism: The Dance of Science and Truth (Part 1)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us….” A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

This is an apt description of the time in which we live.

As a cultural phenomenon, isolation and loneliness are on the rise as are suicides even among celebrities who have “made” it in terms of material success and fulfillment.

We know more about the universe-from black holes to quantum fields - and about the human mind as cognitive and neuroscience leap forward into new frontiers, but we are still naively shocked by evil: violence perpetrated by gang members, or the casual disregard for the dignity of persons demonstrated by those of any age or socioeconomic class.

We live in an age of “what is true for you might not be true for me” and “Who are you to judge?”. We are warned to be “tolerant”, but who even pretends that this means to be tolerant of a religious perspective or traditional morality?

Where does this leave us? Consider this remark made by Pope Benedict XVI:

We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.

The sad reality is that this dictatorship can destroy a culture and fracture the connectedness for which we are hardwired.

We Really are Hardwired for Connection

The neurological connections which contribute to our social behaviors can be seen as the foundation for building culture. In an informative panel discussion at the World Science Festival in 2017, active research into the “social synapse” was discussed but not until a very general definition of “culture” was agreed upon by the participating scientists which included anthropologists, a biologist, a neuroscientist, and a Paleolithic archaeologist. The loose definition was ‘knowledge and skills learned from others and the ability to build on this shared knowledge.’

Cars as Nutcrackers

Research shows that animals display this kind of sharing and even demonstrate a kind of creativity. One example given was of Japanese crows who have “learned” that cars can be used as tools to crack open their nuts. In another amusing anecdote, it was related how one of Jane Goodall’s chimps had learned to bang two kerosene cans to make a terrific racket. Incorporating this into his dominance display contributed to his meteoric rise as alpha male of the group.

Apparently, however, advances in research have demonstrated quite convincingly that the human species has the capacity to build culture in spades compared to other animals. One difference that contributes to this “ratcheted up” ability is the capacity to use verbal instructions (teaching)-even in very young children who were given a puzzle to solve and who shared insights with others in the group.

Additional Complexity in Humans

Although the capacity for acquiring new behaviors from others appears across species, humans give meaning and symbolism to certain behaviors which are also passed on.

It seems then that we should look for another more complete definition of culture and its attributes. John Paul II observed in Centissimus annus:

Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work, and death.

He continues;

At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. When this question is eliminated, the culture and moral life of nations are corrupted.

What is Truth? The Dance of Science and Truth (Part 2)

We don’t have to be Pontius Pilate to ask this question.

In academic circles and the culture at large, the story is that there is no such thing as “truth.” If there is, most still cling to the idea that truth is what the scientific method can verify, professing this belief dogmatically and definitively.

But even in science there is a creeping doubt about our ability to “know” anything out there.

This fear or doubt is based loosely on a superficial understanding of the “observer effect” on the behaviour of quantum particles: the presence of an observer appears to alter the outcome of a particle’s behavior. This is interpreted to mean that we have no way of knowing what would happen if we hadn’t observed it!

In other words, even what we say scientifically might actually be a false narrative of “reality.”

What really is true?

The unpacking of the word is daunting especially in an age of relativism.

If we listen to St. Thomas Aquinas, the definition he gives can be summed up as “the conformity or equation of the thing and the intellect.” Or if we refer to Anselm of Canterbury, to know is “to comprehend that something could not be otherwise than as it is grasped.”

But don’t these definitions just lead to all kinds of objections, including observer bias, poor sense perception, the world view coloring our perceptions, and the fact that new data requires integration and interpretation? Isn’t this lack of “objectivity” exactly what relativism (truth is relative to time, culture, perspective, and beliefs) is pointing out?

The search for certitude

It could be argued that the search for certitude began in earnest around the time of Descartes. His famous “cogito ergo sum” was meant to be the starting point to a new theory of knowledge that would eliminate doubt and offer a pathway to certitude. His quest never quite succeeded and the question still haunts us: when do we know that we really know something? One Professor wrote an 800 page analysis of this very question.

Bernard Lonergan, SJ wrote Insight: A Study of Human Understanding in the 1950’s in an attempt to examine this question analyzing both the scientific method and the truths derived from philosophy. Although his work goes far beyond the limits of this post, it would be negligent not to mention it.* His insights into insight, however, seem close to Anselm’s definition mentioned above.

In any case, whether or not one is swayed by the philosophical arguments of relativism’s mantra, “There is no such thing as objective truth,” we do not need to look too far to recognize that we predicate much of our existence on the validity of our observations and our experience. For Lonergan this common sense experience can be a valid starting point for true insight.

From creating new medicines and curative therapies, landing satellites on comets, and sending a rocket to the sun, to running airports and trains without collisions, making laws to govern traffic, designing buildings to withstand earthquakes, or monitoring weather patterns to prevent unnecessary death from hurricanes and tornadoes, we are as certain as we can be that we are not trying to capture shadows. We can even examine the nature of our emotions, the effects of trauma and neglect, design activities and interventions that can increase our cognitive abilities, and take quizzes about happiness expecting to learn how to get more of it!

Even the scientific method uses “filters” to glean information.

There is an instructive observation in a post on perspective from the Vatican Observatory:

One of the phrases that is used to describe filtered images is to call them “false images.” Yes, the filtered image can look quite different from the original. Yet, when it comes to the science of using filters for the purpose of gathering data, it isn’t that the data is “false,” but the false image brings forward different essential data that isn’t self-evident in the original image .

The author continues with this gem:

It is the odd irony of science that sometimes you need to have a “false image” to gain true knowledge of what you are studying. The best example of this was a false image from the Pluto flyby that had a rather psychedelic appearance. Everyone knew that this wasn’t what Pluto looked like. However, it was an essential image for scientists to understand different surface feature on this fascinating dwarf planet.

Skepticism and certitude in science

There seems to be any number of ways that certitude and skepticism play key roles in the scientific method. Consider these words by Fr. Coyne, Director Emeritus of the Vatican Observatory. After noting that he himself had not measured the age of the universe, the velocity of light, or the mass of a proton, he said the following:

When I do my science, I accept what is in the books about those [measurements]… you can’t question everything, or you’ll never do anything… The other issue, however, is a very interesting one, and always when I start saying to my class, “You know, most scientists would agree that…,” I look at myself and I say, “the truth is not democratic! The truth is true or not – regardless of how many scientists think it is true.” So there is that element of being skeptical.

A healthy dose of certitude in a relativistic age

The important point to these considerations is that “certitude” is not required, even in science, to make progress, to make “true” observations, and to make decisions based on the best information we have available to us at the time.

This point is an underlying but significant theme to much of Fr. Spitzer’s work on the existence of God, which can be found on the Magis website as well as most thoroughly in his book, New Proofs for the Existence of God.

So when we encounter the dictatorship of relativism, let’s remember the encouraging words of St. John Paul II, echoing the words of the Master Himself: Be not afraid!

Written by: Maggie Ciskanik, M.S.

#the dance of science and truth

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filmstruck · 7 years ago

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Pilgrims’ Progress: A CANTERBURY TALE (’44) By R. Emmet Sweeney

“A CANTERBURY TALE had grown organically in our minds, but it was not understood, or even enjoyed, until some 30-odd years later.” – Michael Powell

A CANTERBURY TALE is a movie-as-walking tour, a fanciful detour through Michael Powell’s hometown of Kent, England. It adapts the perambulations of Chaucer’s classic to modern times, using a wide-eyed American GI as a sincere and open-minded guide. It’s an excuse to wander through the streets of Powell’s youth, spending pleasurable digressions with chatty wheelwrights, plucky widows and a mischievous criminal known only as the “glue man”. What starts as a rotating gallery of rural eccentrics, an offbeat “Why We Fight” homeland confidence booster, accumulates into something of inchoate power as our guide’s accidental tour of Kent turns into an existential quest, a “why we exist” spiritual journey.

Though both are credited, Powell claims the story idea was from partner Emeric Pressburger, and it is a deceptively simple construction that focuses on Sgt. Bob Johnson (played by real life Sgt. John Sweet). Johnson is on a train bound for Canterbury but accidentally gets off a stop early in the fictional town of Chillingbourne. With no trains until the morning, the rather draconian rules of the town require him to check in at City Hall before reserving a room at the inn, so he makes the walk over with British Sgt. Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) and Alison Smith (Sheila Sim) in town to interview for a job with the local magistrate Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman). Since her fiancé died in the war, Alison is desperate for employment. While en route a shadowy figure in a soldier’s uniform runs by and squirts glue in Alison’s hair. They chase the figure all the way to City Hall, but he vanishes into thin air.

It then comes to pass that this “glue man” is a local nuisance, having daubed a number of young women’s hair with the sticky stuff. It is either the actions of a sexually-repressed reprobate or a concerned citizen trying to keep the local girls from consorting with the soldiers at a nearby camp. Bob, Peter and Alison join to form a short-term Scooby-Doo-like gang to investigate these bizarre pranks. The mystery acts as a caesura to their wartime life, a break from all the devastation. They are delaying and killing time before their appointments in Canterbury. Bob has a soldier friend to meet up with, Alison needs to check on a caravan she owned with her late fiancé, and Peter has a mass to attend before his unit’s deployment. So instead they focus on the “glue man”, whose disturbing acts are deployed in a cockeyed pursuit to focus attention on his town’s history and honor.

Powell and Pressburger, along with their DP Erwin Hillier, shot this odd tale with expressionist intensity. The “glue man” is introduced in fog choked chiaroscuro, as if it was a monster emerging from the shadows of Val Lewton film. It is these sequences that came under fire from contemporary critics and perhaps led to the poor box office performance. Powell regretted the production, telling Graham Fuller in 1986 (published in the March-April 1990 issue of FILM COMMENT):

Emeric thought up the glueman. We had some rather important things we wanted to say in A CANTERBURY TALE, so when he proposed this almost sexual idea of a man pursuing girls in the blackout and dropping glue on them, I thought, ‘Oh, Christ, this is going to stop the staid British in their tracks.’ I thought I'd better not tell Emeric, because he might abandon the idea. To try and put over these very serious ideas about England and America and the values we were fighting for might have turned the film into a self-praising documentary, so instead of that I let the glueman ride. I said to myself, 'I think I can get away with it.' But I couldn't.

The Chillingbourne inn is named “The Hand of Glory”, and in an establishing shot the marquee’s iron-wrought hand is raised toward the town. Though it sounds like it may have religious implications, the reference is to that of the occult, a charm made out of the “dried and pickled hand of a man who has been hanged”, per Wikipedia. It had multifarious reported powers, including unlocking any door it came across. For the central trio, all touched by war deaths, this town has the hint of the supernatural, through the “glue man,” but also in the uncanny way the town opens up to them. Bob instantly bonds with the town’s warring children, who agree to act as spies collecting clues against the “glue man.” Alison works as a farmhand for a female landowner named Prudence (Freda Jackson), who lends a sympathetic ear to Alison’s frustrations in her former life as shopgirl. And Bob forms an instant bond with the wheelwright over the right season to chop differing kinds of wood. It is as if a spell has been cast to keep them from Canterbury, slowing their journey down the old medieval Pilgrim’s road.

The magistrate Culpeper is their prime suspect. An autodidact who gives sparsely attended lectures in the town center about that Pilgrim’s Path, he has an outsized belief in the power of history to inform the present, and will clearly stop at nothing to direct the town’s attention to itself, and to attack any distractions. Culpeper is a poetic ideologue, and possibly quite mad, but Alison, Bob, and Peter come to like him in spite of it. Alison’s fiancé was a geologist, and she sees the same kind of naturalist zeal in Culpeper, who spends most of his afternoons lying in fields by the path, staring at the sky. Portman plays Culpeper as a fastidious daydreamer so intense in his own belief even the most outrageous nonsense is believable coming from his lips.

Eventually the barriers to departure fall, and the trio has to make the Pilgrim’s journey to Canterbury, each taking their own path. Alison finds moths in the caravan, only to discover regeneration across the street. Peter, a cynic who worked as a movie theater organist in the pre-war years, finds the hand of glory working for him still in Canterbury. The splenetic cathedral organist opens up once he hears of Peter’s training, and allows him to play the organ during the service for his unit. As his notes are ringing out, Bob stands stunned in the church alcove (reconstructed with mattes since the cathedral had been heavily bombed), thinking of the girl he left back home who finally sent him a letter. Miracles are taking place, and whether it’s due to the work of God or the dismembered hand of a convict, these modern pilgrims are stunned into thankfulness, finally able to think of a world not at war.

#FilmStruck #A Canterbury Tale #Michael Powell #Emeric Pressburger #Criterion Collection #StreamLine Blog #R. Emmet Sweeney

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cathygeha · 5 years ago

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REVIEW

The Disappearance of Timothy Dawson

The Granville Series #1

Tommy Dawson’s father disappeared when he was two years old. At sixteen he wants to know where he went and/or what might have happened to him. With only a few clues in hand he begins to search even though he has been warned off by more than one person. His home life leaves a lot to be desired with an addict for a mother and an older brother keeping their mother company in her vices. Tommy’s saving grace is named Kirsten and she has been his best friend for years. The quest to find his father or what happened to him is the basis of this story. The twists and turns filled with some scary moments and people provided a great read and one that would work equally well for the YA or older crowd.

Did I enjoy this book? Yes

Would I read more by this author? Yes

Thank you to the author and BOTBS for the book ~ This is my honest review.

5 Stars

BLURB

If you were searching for answers about the mysterious disappearance of your father, but were warned that pulling at that thread would put you in grave danger... would you pull at it anyway? A turbulent seaside town holds a dark secret. Terror reigns in the form of drug king pin, Smiler, whose core business is to exploit the vulnerable. Hope is all but non existent. Tommy Dawson has believed for most of his life that his dad, Timothy, ran out on him when he was just two years old, leaving him to grow up in survival mode with his mum and brother, who had become more focussed on their drug habits than his welfare. That's until information comes to light which suggests that his dad's disappearance isn't all it seems. Tommy and his trusted sidekick, Kirsten, embark upon a quest to uncover the truth, taking them to the darkest corners of Granville and uncovering shocking secrets that will reveal the town's disturbing underbelly. The Disappearance of Timothy Dawson is a Young Adult fiction, with dark themes that expose sinister secrets. It takes place in a poor, forgotten seaside town in the north of England, called Granville-upon-sea, a place that was once glorious is now rife with drugs and poverty. The story is a coming of age mystery, following the journey of Tommy, a likeable chap that's been dealt an unfair hand in life. His mum and brother are addicts and he is left for the most part to fend for himself. The mystery of his father's whereabouts hadn't bothered him at all until, bit by bit, information surfaces suggesting maybe his dad didn't just leave them after all. As the story unfurls, the plot takes a dark turn and Tommy, along with his friends, must face evil head on in order to expose the truth. "A gritty mystery that'll knock your socks off! Kept me guessing until the very end." "More twists and turns than a rollercoaster ride, the inherent danger keeps you wanting more!" "Gripping, intense, sinister and mystifying!" *Please note: story contains occasional explicit language and some adult themes with references to drugs and sexual abuse, but is without graphic detail.

AUTHOR BIO

My name is Nathan Parker, a 32-year-old father of one from Blackpool, Lancashire. I’m recently married to my beautiful wife, Nadina, so beautiful in fact, let’s just say it’s a good job I have my sense of humour to rely on. Family has always been central to my universe, but since becoming a dad I feel as though life makes far more sense than it used to. I thoroughly enjoy spending time with Sonny, my son who is 18 months old – watching him develop and learn brings me a joy I never thought was possible. With any luck, one child may become two – or more – as the years go by.

I’m proud of the fact I was born and raised, schooled and now live and work in sunny Blackpool. Despite its perception as a town with challenges – a perception which is accurate on many fronts – in my thirty-two years I have seen and experienced community, resilience, strength and good times in this town.

I am a Youth Worker by trade, graduating from Canterbury Christ Church University with a first-class BA honours degree in Youth Work and Community Learning and Development. For ten plus years I have worked alongside young people experiencing some of life’s toughest challenges and, although now working at a strategic level, I work hard to support and empower the young people of Blackpool and the Fylde Coast to create their own stories, with informed choices, broadening horizons and challenging inequality within the systems young people are bound.

My journey into writing began officially in 2017 when I was tasked with making a creative pledge to myself, to write it down and tell the workshop within which the task was set – which I’ve since learned meant I was 90% more likely to see it through… sneaky devils! The pledge I set myself was to write a short story. Fast forward 12 months and I self-published my first novel; The Disappearance of Timothy Dawson, The First Book in the Granville Series. A fictional ‘anytown’ but certainly shaped from my knowledge of Blackpool.

The book enabled me to tell a story which was burning inside me; a tale inspired by personal and professional experiences told with realism through a world of fiction. My writing style is to take real life adversity, emotion and grit and weave it into stories filled with twists and turns, relatable characters and places which feel familiar to most.

I would say I’ve always loved to read, which wouldn’t be too far from the truth. I began my childhood as an avid reader, although it wasn’t the classics which hooked me in – ten year old Nathan was more of a Goosebumps fan. And I still read now; with a common, nightly routine of a few chapters before bed. My current read is Michael Connelly’s The Poet.

However, there was a huge void in my teens. A black hole within which books, reading and writing didn’t feature. School, Sports, Friendships, Hormones, whatever it was, I stopped reading and it wasn’t until my dad encouraged me to read again in my early twenties to help address a sleeping problem that I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird and fell in love with books all over again.

Truth is, I believe if the stories I write were available to fifteen-year-old me, I never would have stopped reading. I needed real life, I needed danger and I needed topical issues which explained life to me – adversity, relationships, risk and reward. This is what I strive for in my writing. I have been privileged in many ways in my life, but I have also seen and experienced challenges which I seek to harness and weave into my writing, so that one day a young reader may pick up my book and find connection, comfort or hope.

My debut novel The Disappearance of Timothy Dawson was shortlisted for Lancashire Book of the Year 2019, a feat which I am so very proud of. The best part? The book prompted young people – young men in particular – to become passionate about reading. Am I the most qualified, technical writer in the world? Certainly not. But I believe my stories are raw, relatable and real and there is a gap in the young adult fiction market, which needs filling.

I’m currently working on the second book in the series and am enjoying working alongside schools, delivering talks and workshops to students looking at motivating the next generation to pick up a pen, or a book and allow their minds to wander.

Twitter: @parker_book • Instagram: @parker_book

#Nathan Parker #The Granville Series 1 #YA Fiction #BOTBS

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adaralondon · 5 years ago

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What’s the Tea Geoffrey: Was the Canterbury Tale Chaucer’s diary?

Known as the father of English literature Chaucer is a man of many words. Not only that, he was a rule breaker using Middle English Vernacular, the slang of peasants, to present his writings to the upper class who preferred the debonair of the Latin and French languages. This was a bold and controversial move for someone who was a member of parliament. Although he used English as his choice language Chaucer still managed to produce over fourteen widely popular books, but his most notable work is The Canterbury Tales. It contains twenty-four tales told by thirty different pilgrims, but he originally planned for it to include 124 stories in total. Unfortunately, all 124 planned stories were unable to be completed due to his untimely death which left many of the tales he had already started incomplete. The Canterbury Tales however is not only interesting because it contains such a vast amount of tales but also because one man was able to write so many stories that gave each character in their respective tale a different personality. However, upon closer inspection the stories may not be as unique as we originally thought. Many details mirror events that happened in Chaucer’s real life. The Wife of Bath’s Tale mirrors several aspects of his raptus accusations or as we know it as in modern day and age: Rape or kidnapping, from Cecily Champagne. The Franklin’s Tale is famously thought to be a tale about his marriage to the Queen’s lady in waiting, Philippa Roet. His close friend John of Gaunt also makes a few appearances yet they are notoriously negative. John was thought to be a usurper of Chaucer’s marriage as reflected in The Merchant’s Tale. Since we have very limited biographical records when it comes to Chaucer’s life this paper can only be taken as speculation but I will support my claims using the evidence I’ve collected from searching through his writings, the limited biographical records we do have, and numerous scholarly sources. Through my paper I will answer the question: Is it possible that Chaucer used The Canterbury Tales as a method of therapy so he could vent about traumatic experiences without being judged, confined, or imprisoned? I will also provide proof as to why I believe my stance in the argument, that he did use The Canterbury tales as some sort of journal, is not as farfetched as it seems.

Therapy in the 14th century was nothing like the services we are provided now. Today you can book an appointment with a licensed therapist and discuss your problems confidentially. The therapist isn’t going to consider you a nutcase for speaking your mind and the only way you will get sent to the asylum is if you threaten to harm yourself, others, or are an immediate danger. People who lived in the 14th century did not have this luxury. According to several sources (Preceden, Schwartz, and Burton) The first mental health symptoms were identified in 500bce and were listed as mania, melancholia, dementia, hysteria, delusions, and hallucinations. These symptoms are even noted in the bible. In 1 Samuel 16:14:23 there is a verse that states: “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took [a] harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.”(Bible Gateway) showing that these symptoms were not unknown to even the most inspirational of figures.

Although we look at these as signs of mental illness the perception of what is classifies as such has always changed with the century it is identified in. During 500bce scholars like Plato and Socrates considered madness “the gift of heaven, [that] is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings… madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.” Suggesting that most creatively talented people dealt with some sort of mental aliment that benefited their work in ways people who are neurotypical could have not imagined. Not every scholar thought that “madness” was a blessing though. Mental health was typically looked at from two different angles. As aforementioned, it could be thought of as a gift that was received from the Gods as many mental illnesses are known to have inspired some of the best modern artistic talents. Van Gough, Beethoven, and Munch were all known to suffer from some sort of affliction yet are still considered some of our greatest artist. The second view of mental illness was more cynical. It was thought of as a divine punishment, demonic possession, or wildly enough “an imbalance of [the] four bodily fluids or humors”. Since there were not what we considered therapist and psychiatrist in those days’ things thought to be caused by religion were often dealt with by religion. Most of the time the cures that dealt with these afflictions often were based in mysticisms: trepanation where a ‘doctor’ would drill a hole into the skull to release the ‘demon’ or ‘sprit’ inside of one’s being or hydrotherapy which would be akin to a Jesus like baptism and often times included crucifixion in its usage.

It was not until a year after Chaucer’s death in 1401 that next thoughts of where trauma and mental illness spawned from were formed: Christianity. In the 1400s Mental health issues were thought to have come from practicing witchcraft which would make converting to Christianity the lesser evil as opposed to being accused of being a witch and burned alive. Two years later though things had started to move away from religion and towards more ‘realistic’ treatments. The first mental health institution was opened in 1403 but during that time treatment would have still been considered inhumane to modern day people. If diagnosed with an aliment the treatment was little more than being restraint in a strayjacket. (Britannica). However inhumane the treatments were they were still vast improvements to what was available during the 13th century. Unfortunately, these things had only become available after Chaucer’s death meaning that he would never be able to experience the improvements in health care.

During the medieval ages those who did not believe in the church or its teachings did not have much to lean on. Chaucer who was a non-believer and whose life contained multiple exiles, kidnapping, the death of his wife & several of his children, and the loss of his position in the royal court did not have many places he could go to relieve stress. Given his circumstances and the effect they would have had on his mien Chaucer would more than likely have been accused of witchcraft or be admitted to an asylum (had these options been available) but since he did not trust the church enough to use the confessionals which at the time were akin to what we considered a modern-day therapist there was not much hope for him. As a practicing Christian or catholic, citizens were supposed to be able to go to the church and confess anything with it being considered 100% confidential. Yet given the way Chaucer writes his characters that play ‘vital’ church roles the confessional did not seem to be the best choice to entrust secrets to. Since the church was not a source of comfort for Chaucer, he was left with one option albeit one familiar, friendly, and that would never betray him: Writing.

Writing has been a therapeutic source for as long as people have had written language. Many writers subconsciously voice their problems to their audience throughout their work. “Self-1 acts as the main character as well as an involved narrator, while Self-2 acts as the narrator, listener, and counselor, and life narratives usually appear as a dialogue between these two selves. Self-1 and Self-2 merge when an epiphany occur in the author’s writing that allows him or her to make sense of life experiences.” (Yu) I can attest to this personally as a three-time published author when writing each of my books I noticed that a lot of my writing seemed to mirror experiences that had happened to me. I was not intentionally incorporating these events into my writing and I had not noticed that I was doing it. Once I started to proofread, I noticed all the topics I was writing about sounded familiar. It was like I was having a conversation with two versions of myself. One person was explaining the things that happened to them and the other person was listening and acting as a counselor. After I had written these experiences down, I felt immensely better as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. “Studies have found that most people feel happier and healthier after writing about deeply traumatic memories.” (Pennebaker) Proving that writing therapy has healing effects and may even be therapeutic for those who have no where else to turn. Although some people may argue Chaucer did not use The Canterbury Tales as a therapist there is no way to explicitly prove this. No one has a complete biographical record of his life and what we do have is fragmented containing only bits and pieces of his life which leaves a lot to speculation. Many writers would argue that writing therapy is often subconscious, and they are not aware most of the time that the therapy session is taking place. Also, as mentioned previously since a substantial amount of Chaucer’s records are missing from history no one can make a case for either side and claim it as completely true. Upon my close inspection though, I have noticed that there are several events in The Canterbury Tales that mirror Chaucer’s life so I can argue that he did use the book as his own personal confessional.

Perhaps one of the most infamous moments of Chaucer’s life was when he was accused of rape by Cecily Champagne. The exact term used is the Latin word raptus which could mean several things such as to seize or to force sexual acts unto someone. (Glosbe) Like most terms not every word translates directly into modern English; words are known to shift meaning quite frequently so there is not any exact way for us to know which version of the act Chaucer was accused of. Even scholars have debated exactly which usage of the word Chaucer was charged with but since it was known to be a common occurrence in legal documentation scholars have narrowed down the argument a lot. “The nature of the offence is made clear by the use of the two words 'rapuerunt et abduxerunt'. When raptus or forms of the verb rapere are used alone, it seems they must mean rape.” (Pearsall). It is unknown if Chaucer kidnapped Cecily Champagne or sexually forced himself on her but given what we can see from the knight in The Wife of Bath’s Tale its highly possible that Chaucer was accused of what we consider to be modern day sexual assault.

In modern times Rape has become trivialized, children yell out that they are being raped when being playfully touched by their classmates and women are villainized based on what they were wearing, drinking, and or where they were located. Rape has also started to become fetishized as seen by television, film, and pornography where women dream of being forced into sexual situations and the media highlighting rape scenes as a basis for the growth of women into a powerful being. However, in Chaucer’s time this was not the case because rape was treated as an extremely serious crime. The punishment for rape was “castration and blinding, and later [hanging].” (Lee) This is seen in The Wife of Bath’s Tale as King Arthur is ready to put the Knight to death: “that dampned was this knyght for to be deed.” (Chaucer L.891) King Arthur was attempting to carry out his duty in order to appease the woman whose maidenhead was stolen by the Knight, but strangely enough it is the women of the town and the queen that beg him not to punish the Knight. The Queen instead sends the knight on a quest to find out what is it that women truly desire to atone for his grievous sin. The woman who is raped is written out of the story and only mentioned once, not by name, and only in tandem with the Knight. The same way Champagne is written out of history after Chaucer pays her off. Also, the way the knight’s rape case is bartered by the women around him mirrors Chaucer’s friends support of him when he was accused. The rape accusations had no effect on Chaucer’s career as such the rape did not have any effect on the knight’s status as a hero of medieval literature as this is not the only instance of knights committing such heinous crimes. Although what makes the tale so interesting is that Chaucer writes this tale so casually given he has personal experience with being accused of rape. That isn’t to say that he wasn’t affected by the accusation mentally though, even though it had no effect on his career and is written so freely, being accused of rape is something that can ruin a person’s life health wise. “The mental health damage caused to wrongly convicted prisoners is similar to that suffered by veterans of war and torture survivors….A 2003 study conducted by the Life After Exoneration Program of sixty [falsely accused prisoners] found that nearly half were burdened by depression, anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder.” (Hoyle 13) The writing in The Wife of Bath’s Tale mirror the accusation from Cecily Champagne and the way his friends defended his name way too closely to just be coincidental. It is arguable that the accusations did have a substantial effect on his life and mental health especially since he was accused of rape in 1380 and the tales were written in 1400. This would mean he carried that trauma with him for about 20 years before releasing it on paper. In addition to being accused of rape another thing that would have stressed him out was his marriage to Phillipa Roet.

Chaucer’s wife Philippa Roet was of a much higher status then he was. Chaucer was born into a family of vintners meanwhile his wife was a lady in waiting for Elizabeth of Ulster, Queen Philippa, and Constance of Castile. The main characters of The Franklin’s Tale: Dorigen and Arveragus also have differences in class and ranking. Dorigen, like Roet comes from a higher born status and Arveragus must go through a set of tasks to win her love. When he does, they marry, and he agrees with her that they should be equals in private, but he should hold the power when it comes to public appearances. Even though Roet was of higher born status she was still a woman.

Women in the 13th century were thought of as property of their husbands. It is a common thought that women had no rights in their marriages, but this is not true. Women did have “the right to consent to marriage, the right to ask for marital debt or conjugal (sexual) duty, the right to leave a marriage when they either suspected it was invalid or had grounds to sue for separation, and finally the right to choose one's own place of burial, death being the point at which a spouse's ownership of the other spouse's body ceased.” (McDougall). However, these rights did not make them equal to their partners, women were still considered inferior in the eyes of the law and the court. Even if the woman was considered elite according to English law their husbands were still considered above them in terms of martial power. The duty of an upper-class woman was known to be “to obey their spouse, guard their virtue, produce offspring, and to oversee the operation of the household.” (Schaus) So, it is surprising that Arveragus offers Dorigen the opportunity to be equals, although we are not sure what that equality entails, even if it is private. One thing I noticed is that since this tale is perhaps the one that parallels Chaucer’s life the most, it is interesting that he chooses not to have Chaucer the Pilgrim tell this tale. Perhaps it was too painful to use his own character. Perhaps it is to hide that Chaucer’s marriage to Philippa may have been ‘corrupted’ by the foreign suitor: Aurelius who more than likely was based on her partner in adultery, John of Gaunt. This seemed to influence his mental health as his wife betrayed their sacred marriage vows and committed fornication with John of Gaunt who is generally considered to be one of his close friends.

It was not uncommon for John to pursue women as he was known to be quite the womanizer; meaning it would not be unusual for John to have pursued Roet. This tale suggests two things: Chaucer was aware of Gaunt’s pursuit of his wife and she did the honorable thing which would have been to reject his advances out of respect for her husband which in the story Dorigen rejects Aurelius’ pursuit of her. The second thing it suggest is that Chaucer was aware that she did indeed commit this horrible act but asked her to keep it a secret. In the tale there is a scene where Dorigen must make good on her promise to be with Aurelius since he completed his task for her while her husband was a way. Her husband commands her to keep it a secret and makes her keep her promise to Aurelius. “Dorigen can keep her promise to Aurelius, but Arveragus will kill her if she ever lets anyone find out that he has lost sexual control of her. Masculine pride in his public ownership of Dorigen is revealed here as the real bottom line of Arveragus's self-image, known cuckoldry the one outcome he cannot tolerate under any circumstances.” (Davis) Suggesting that Chaucer would not allow his wife’s blunder to influence his career.

There is quite a debate on whether Gaunt slept with Phillipa. Gaunt was married to Roet’s sister and an affair would have been considered incestuous but since public records regarding her infidelity are hard to come by no one can be sure. It is known that Chaucer’s son chose to take his mother’s coat of arms instead of his father’s suggesting that Chaucer may not have been his father at all. In fact, many scholars debate if Chaucer’s son was his own or if he was truly Gaunt’s son. “Given John of Gaunt's reputation for fornication, it is a distinct possibility that ‘the randy prince’ liked to tumble about with both sisters at the same time and that Chaucer's supposed son, Thomas was not the product of the poet's loins but was actually the son of John of Gaunt.” (Dartington Morris Men.) Due to the son wearing his mother’s insignia suggesting that he and Chaucer may not have been close possibly which would be likely if Chaucer was not truly his father.

Having to father a son that was not yours would more than likely be a significant cause of stress. It would have caused some tension between all three parties especially since given the events of The Franklin’s Tale Chaucer more than likely forbade his wife from discussing it. Although the law did permit that Chaucer could take revenge against Gaunt at any time: “the killing of a male adulterer by a male cuckold was not outlawed in secular law, leaving scope for lawful revenge-killing.” (Weinstein). Although revenge killing would have been way too risky given that Gaunt was a prince and if Chaucer killed him it would be revealed that his wife was unfaithful. The unfaithfulness of a wife would have shown that Chaucer was unable to maintain control of his ‘property’ causing him immense shame and staining his career. Having to keep a secret is known to influence mental health and one’s sense of self. The inability to do anything regarding his wife’s affair could be what led to the resentment of marriage that is shown in The Merchant’s Tale.

The final tale I would like to reference is The Merchant’s Tale. Since it was commonly thought that his wife was unfaithful and committed adultery with his close friend John of Gaunt. In medieval times men were expected to remain faithful to their wives but it was foolish for a man to expect his wife to be faithful back to him suggesting that Chaucer was aware of the fornication. Several of Chaucer’s tales focus on marriage but there are two that seem to mirror his own marriage closely one being The Franklin’s Tale and the other The Merchant’s Tale.

The prologue of The Merchant’s Tale starts with a negative view of women and marriage. “I have a wyf, the worste that may be/For thogh the feend to hire ycoupled were.” (Chaucer line 1218-1219) The Merchant believes that marriage is an atonement for past sins and belittles both his vows and his wife in front of the other pilgrims. January the character of the tale, is completely different than the one in the Merchant’s prologue, however. The tale itself begins with a favorable attitude regarding marriage as for some mysterious reason this honorable knight who had envied married men had avoided holy matrimony for so long. He describes being a bachelor as a painful thing and calls a wife “the best part of a treasure.” (Chaucer) He also notes that the thought of being married makes his heart swell with pride. With January’s view of marriage in such an opposition to the merchant’s, it is hard to know what side of the fence Chaucer himself stood on. It is thought that Chaucer knew his own wife was unfaithful but went back in forth between feeling as though he was a cuckhold-- ironically enough this exact word is used in the tale in line 1306 and once again in line 2256-- to feelings of anger. This is important because historically we are unsure if Chaucer’s own marriage to Phillipa Roet was content or full of contempt. “Women didn't have a choice as to who they would marry and, most of the time, women didn't even know the man before they wed. However, men were sometimes able to choose their bride. Marriage back then was not based on love; most marriages were political arrangements.” (Medieval Times) Perhaps even the great and humble Chaucer himself saw marriage as something political and not for love as he had a substantial problem with the concepts of oaths. Also, regarding marriage for the purpose of financial and economic gain was not uncommon during the time. Chaucer could have used his marriage to Roet to gain higher status and a larger amount of royalties for his writing since writers were not paid well leading many to have to pick up secondary careers. Although , it may be possible given the way January speaks on marriage and so obviously turns a blind eye to witnessing his wife’s ludicrous act with another man that Chaucer was so in love with Phillipa that he was willing to overlook her infidelity.

In medieval times men were expected to remain faithful to their wives. Adultery was considered a crime under a monarchy that centered its laws around the bible. When laws were broken the court would subject them to a fitting punishment and punishments in the medieval times are nowhere comparable to the lenient jail time criminals can serve today. Depending on what crime was committed a person could be condemned to wear a badge designating what their crime was for their entire life. (Thorpe) or even worse, since torture was a favorite during this time, someone accused of cheating on their spouse would be put into a stock or a pillory and the stock would hold one by their ankles while the pillory was used for heads and wrist. (Medieval Chronicles). Although Chaucer thought it was foolish for a man to expect his wife to be faithful back to him. (Lumiansky) women were not exempt from being punished for adultery. The Leges Henrici Primi decreed that the King should have the executive authority to punish an adulterous man, and that adulterous women should be punished by bishops. (Weinstein). Although, ironically enough in The Manciple’s Tale, Chaucer warns women to be careful of unfaithful men. It is well known that Chaucer’s wife was an adulterer but, it is possible due to his wife being of higher status then him he didn’t have much room for complaint because if they were to be legally separated for any reason Chaucer would lose the higher status he had achieved. It is to be noted that this status was indeed revoked when Philippa, his wife, had passed on. Also, if Chaucer loved Phillipa he would not want her to receive the punishments that were attested to women when they were charged with the crime of adultery. “The codes of Cnut prescribed corporal mutilation for female adulterers—cutting off their nose and ears.” (Klinck).

Being conflicted on whether to turn his spouse over to the higher court and risk her punishment or letting her be free to cheat continuously would have caused Chaucer significant emotional stress. We see that infidelity in marriage is a common theme in almost all the marriage tales Chaucer writes. Furthermore, it is known the when a spouse is unfaithful it can have a significant impact on one’s health, “being the victim of infidelity can have serious consequences for a person's mental and physical health. The situation has been associated with depression, anxiety, and unhealthy coping…. some mental health professionals also believe there can be parallels with post-traumatic stress disorder.” (Millar) It is possible that since Chaucer could not turn her in nor did he believe in going to the church confessional that he internalized a lot of his anger and sadness and instead wrote his feelings into The Canterbury Tales, the safest place for them to be. I would also argue that he could safely express his feelings regarding the church because the tales were written in English and English vernacular, which at time would have been the language of peasants. Anything considerably worth reading at the time would have been presented in Latin and French the languages regarded worthy at the time. This would have allowed his to get away with quite a lot.

By the time Chaucer had started working on The Canterbury Tales he had been exiled from Europe. He was permitted to return years later and lived in the Close of the Collegiate Church of St Peter until his death in 1401. However, during exile he had lost his wife and several of his children died due to diseases that commonly plagued Europe at the time. After his wife died his social status was revoked and he was reduced to little more than a gardener. It is unknown how Chaucer died some say it was natural causes while other say he was murdered by enemies of Richard the second. Despite the chaos of his life I think that Chaucer did not die a miserable man. In his last moments he could speak his mind freely in his book allowing all the troubles he faced while he was alive to be translated onto paper. Many people may ask why a paper like this is important to explore when there are more pressing topics when it comes to Chaucer’s writing such as feminism, sexism, and queer theory. While those are indeed important looking at things from a psychoanalytic lens is equally important. As English majors I think it is important to look at Chaucer's work through a psychoanalytic lens because often we forget the writers exsist outside of their work. Chaucer was a person as much as he was a writer and it is important to acknowledge that he went through a lot in his life if we want to understand his work better. Realizing that authors are human takes them off the god pedestal our society has forced some of English's greatest writers-- such as Shakespeare -- and makes them feel more accessible to students and teachers alike. A topic like this is also important because it discusses the taboo subject of mental health which serves to further humanize English's favorite authors. As readers we like to think that our favorites were untouchable, Great literature makes us believe that these authors did not suffer through real life events and only exsist through their writing. I think that that is dangerous because struggles are what make people who they are. When we separate crucial events from our writers, we start to miss important points and topics that appear in their writing. Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales not only for our entertainment but also to express that he was not invincible. He was a man just like the rest of the world, who suffered just as much as the peasant class did. I can say that he did use his writing as a tool to express the anguish that appeared because there are too many events in The Canterbury Tales that mirror his real life to be coincidental. Scholars may debate this point but upon reading this essay I hope they research Chaucer’s life and see that the tales are more than just a way for him to poke fun at the church and throw a couple of sexual innuendos into a literary classic but also asway for a human man to express human suffering. It is important to realize that these people also had lives just like us so that we can have a better understanding of their works and they do not feel as untouchable as we allow them to now. It is a new phenomenon to include trauma in works of fiction as a way of therapy. Walter Dean Myers another famous writer was often encouraged by his teachers to use his writing to express himself. Van Gough was thought to have used The Scream to paint the storm he felt inside of himself. Chinua Achebe used his writing to express disdain for the British settlement and colonization in his home country of Nigeria. Geoffrey Chaucer was not the first man to use his works as his own personal therapist and he will not be the last.

Works cited:

“BibleGateway.” 1 Samuel 16:14-23 KJV - - Bible Gateway, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%2BSamuel%2B16%3A14-23&version=KJV.

“History of Mental Illness.” Preceden, www.preceden.com/timelines/72367-history-of-mental-illness.

“Medieval Crime & Punishment.” Medieval Crime & Punishment, www.medievalchronicles.com/medieval-torture-devices/medieval-crime-punishment/.

“Medieval Marriage: What Was Marriage Like In The Middle Ages?: Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament.” Medieval Times, www.medievaltimes.com/teachers-students/materials/medieval-era/marriage.html.

“Raptus in English.” Glosbe, glosbe.com/la/en/raptus.

“The Merchant’s Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer, by Geoffrey Chaucer and Larry Dean Benson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987, p. 153.

“The Wife of Bath's Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer, by Geoffrey Chaucer and Larry Dean Benson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987, p. 117.

Burton, Neel. “A Brief History of Psychiatry.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 2 June 2012, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206/brief-history-psychiatry.

Gu, Yue1, [email protected]. “Narrative, Life Writing, and Healing: The Therapeutic Functions of Storytelling.” Neohelicon, vol. 45, no. 2, Dec. 2018, pp. 479–489. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s11059-018-0459-4.

Hoyle, Carolyn. “The Impact of Being Wrongly Accused of Abuse in Occupations of Trust: Victims' Voices.” Oxford Law Faculty, 1 Oct. 2018, www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/impact-being-wrongly-accused-abuse-occupations-trust-victims-voice.

John O'Gaunt and Chaucer. Dartington Morris Men, dartingtonmorrismen.org.uk/john-ogaunt-and-chaucer.

Klinck, A. L. 'Anglo-Saxon Women and the Law', Journal of Medieval History, 8.2 (1982), 107–21 (p. 111); doi:10.1016/0304-4181(82)90043-4

Lee, BS. "Exploitation and Excommunication In 'The Wife of Bath's Tale.'." Philological Quarterly. 74.1 (1995): 17. Web.

McDougall, Sara (2013). "Women and Gender in Canon Law". In Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (eds.). Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 163–178. ISBN 978-0-19-958217-4.

Millar, Abi. “How Cheating Affects Your Health and Sex Life.” Patient.info, 17 Nov. 2017, patient.info/news-and-features/how-an-affair-affects-your-sexual-and-mental-health.

Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1990), Pp, www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/cecily.htm.

R. M. Lumiansky. “Chaucer and the Idea of Unfaithful Men.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 62, no. 8, 1947, p. 560. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/2908623.

Schaus, Margaret C., ed. (2006). Women and gender in medieval Europe: an encyclopedia. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415969444.

Schwartz, Larry, and AlterNet. “8 Horrific 'Cures' for Mental Illness Through the Ages.” Alternet.org, 26 Dec. 2014, www.alternet.org/2014/12/8-horrific-cures-mental-illness-through-ages/.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Bedlam.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 13 Sept. 2013, www.britannica.com/topic/Bedlam.

Thorpe, JR. “9 Bizarre Medieval Punishments.” Bustle, Bustle, 28 May 2015, www.bustle.com/articles/86247-9-bizarre-medieval-punishments-from-wearing-a-bridle-to-suffocating-under-mud.

Weinstein, Jeremy D. 'Adultery, Law, and the State: A History', Hastings Law Journal, 38.1 (1986), 195-238.

Woolston, Chris. “Writing for Therapy Helps Erase Effects of Trauma.” CNN.com - Writing for Therapy Helps Erase Effects of Trauma - March 16, 2000, 16 Mar. 2000, web.archive.org/web/20041120093458/archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/03/16/health.writing.wmd/.

#essay #essay and formal #canterbury tales #writing #formal writing

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goblinfruit · 7 years ago

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End of the year writing reflection 2017

I’m trying out this thing where I gather all of my thoughts about my writing and growth as a writer-person from the past year into one place. This is a long post, fyi. Here goes:

I had two workshop classes this year, one in the spring and one in the fall, and a writing conference during the summer. At the end of all this, right now as I calm down after finals, I feel like I have more self-doubt than I had at the beginning of this year, but I also feel like I’m more okay with that self-doubt. I can live with it more easily now. I might change my mind tomorrow, in a week, in a few months, but this feels like a real change and not a mood.

Before I always had this background noise of “you have to be good. You have to be the best. You have to be amazing. You’re not right now, so you have to work and get there sooner rather than later. You can’t miss any opportunity because it might be the only one.”

Maybe this thought is true in some respect. Maybe I shouldn’t let my guard down. But I wrote some stinkers in my fiction studio in the spring. I felt like my prose was okay but the stories were scattered and too much lived in my head and not on the page. The story I presented to my workshop group in my summer writing conference still deeply embarrasses me. I had written it a year ago, and it was a short story that was trying hard to be a modern folktale, as if the genre made up for the fact that nothing in the story was grounded. No concrete characters, setting, the plot was a thin moral. I love the concept or trope or whatever-it-is of reincarnation in stories but I put it into that Terrible story so now I have this weird heartburn whenever reincarnation comes up in shows or books. I had to re-watch the entire first season of 90s Sailor Moon to lessen it with overexposure (sure, that was totally the only reason I did that). To be fair to myself, I thought that workshop group in particular was a stinker. They made me doubt if I wanted to be a writer or befriend any writers because writers seemed to be, on the whole, a species of pretentious assholes trying to show-off or belittle anyone who makes the mistake of breathing in the same air as them. I’ve gotten over that doubt, partly.

At the end of the summer I just… let go. I tried to stop thinking about possible, future publication while writing every story. I stopped looking up story contests and submission deadlines. In the fall semester fiction studio, I still got righteously angry at some stories and commentary in my workshop because getting righteously angry over minor social interactions is my thing. But way back at the beginning of this year I also started a job as a writing center consultant. I leaned into that training, I started treating workshop pieces as if they were brought to me by some courageous student just trying to do well in their classes.

This was so freeing. It didn’t feel like much, in my mind I thought of it like briefly giving up, a hiatus. I knew that I would try to summon up all of my ambitious feelings again but I needed a break from myself. I needed to shelve the perfectionist within me and go on a mental pilgrimage to just ...think about storytelling as a concept and not specifically about ME and my DREAMS. The fall semester helped. I had to take a required algebra class on top of classes that needed a lot of mental energy. I tried to do NaNoWriMo but got too caught up in everything else. I was too busy to care or feel devastated that I didn’t draft a long manuscript.

I wrote around three short stories for my classes, and all of them were about haunting in some way. Still can’t tell if this is from my mood or if this is my new(-ish) interest. Two of them were throw away stories that were one or two scenes that I’ll either never touch again or will have to completely rework. But one of them, the longest and first of the three, is the ghost garden story, which I’m excited about. This was the first story I felt like I made progress with in the revision assignment for class. I see so much potential in it, I want to explore that world. I want to make it hopeful, bittersweet, and pretty, dammit. I don’t know if this will be a serious project or something I use to make myself a better writer. Technically, the start of this school year is my fourth year as an undergrad, but I have a double major in Brit Lit and in Creative Writing, so I’m going to be here for another year trying to fulfill all of these dumb requirements. Maybe this has also contributed to my change in mood—I’m more relaxed about this now. I have a new project and a new school year ahead of me, and I can settle in and stay put for a while. I’m not going anywhere in a hurry and that’s okay.

Tl;dr: This year I learned to chill out, a little, and this helped me grow as a writer, a little.

Some related but miscellaneous thoughts:

On writer friends: This was true in high school and I guess it’s true in college, too. At least for me, I always feel settled into a school during the last or later years I’m there. I have been at this university for three and now almost four years and just this last semester I finally feel like I’m making friends. Some of them are writers. There are writers around me who are not condescending or pretentious! I’ve found them! Just now, this year. This actually came about, partly, from the summer writing conference. I didn’t make any friends there, but the two other people from my school who were nominated to go are awesome and the summer conference gave me a reason to talk to them. They also complain about the conference, I’m not paranoid or a debby-downer. So thank you, writing conference, for killing my confidence and showing me the friends that were near me all along. No, I kid. Kind of.

On prose versus story: Moving forward, I’m going to try to write cohesive stories. Everything grounded—solid characters, solid settings, solid conflict. I’m still the kind of writer that puts logistics last on my priorities list, but I think I lumped in “development” in with logistics before and that’s not good. I’ve had this goal for a while, but the Terrible summer workshop story has made me even more determined. If this means writing extremely short, simple stories as exercise, so be it! I think that I’ve helped myself by figuring out why my stories haven’t been very grounded so far. I took the creative writing lesson of “your reader is smart, don’t tell us everything, show” too much to heart. My studies in just the last semester helped me realize this and brainstorm ways to work past this.

I had to read several books for a current writers class and I had to read a fiction by an established “master” writer for my senior level fiction studio, and then reflect and write essays about how these works ticked. I ended up writing three to four essays railing against the teaching that makes us hold back on exposition. Each of these writers used exposition effectively in their unique narration style. I think this is the key—I think that I’ve been afraid of using exposition because I’m a fantasy writer. I think that I should be afraid of clumsy, clunky exposition, instead. Showing, not telling, is great but my reliance on this, and not using much exposition, has left my workshop readers confused and slightly angry for each story, so I need to learn moderation.

Books: one of the books I read for the learn-by-reading reflection assignments was Margaret Atwood’s collection of short stories, Good Bones, Simple Murders. I didn’t read all of them because of time, but the many I did read were amazing. Most of the stories are concise, at about two pages long, and are brilliantly written. Beautiful, poetic, evocative, righteous, hilarious. There were also little pen-drawing illustrations by the author which were also amazing and complemented the stories so well. One of the main features in the stories is this close, personal narrative voice. The person is either first or second, or a mix of both, and usually reads like a letter, a diary entry, or a piece that addresses the reader directly. One or two were fake magazine ads. You kind of have to have a bit of exposition when your narrator is so direct, but this was coupled with a vivid voice and poetic language, so it totally worked. My next writing exercise idea is to write a flash fiction that mimics this style.

More books and stuff: I took a Chaucer class, which was fantastic. The Canterbury Tales are great and made me think more deeply about framing devices than I ever have before. The Canterbury Tales also were way more interesting once I had read more of Chaucer’s work first and got a sense of his meta and satirical style. If anyone wants to read The Canterbury Tales, I’d recommend some critical edition or something with a lot of academic notes if you can afford it, because there is so much in academic studies and even in the allusions and themes Chaucer himself uses. It’s a great thing to dig into.

I also took an Arthurian lit class in the spring and this did not make me want to read more Arthurian literature. Instead, I want to read more by Marie de France. We read her lai “Lanval,” and I remembered reading “Bisclavret” (a great werewolf story to check out if you haven’t read it) from Medieval Celtic Lit.

Also, reading her short stories made me want to start reading Margaret Atwood’s work. I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale but that’s it for novels. This last weekend, I binge watched the Netflix series Alias Grace. It felt very Gothic to me, and had a lot about haunting, and since I’ve been obsessed with haunting as a theme, I should probably read the book. Idk what it is about haunting that’s caught me lately. Probably it’s a quick, easy way to evoke the feeling of the uncanny in a story. I mean, what’s more familiar-made-unfamiliar than a haunted house? Liminal spaces, man. They’re the best.

That’s it for this reflection. If you’re a reader and/or follower who has made it this far, kudos to you! No, seriously. I wrote this mostly for myself and I have no idea if any of these thoughts are of interest to anyone else. But I feel like writing is so much an individual, lonely thing that I like to share my thoughts or be as direct with people as I can be, when I’m allowed. This isn’t always a good thing, but despite the crushing embarrassment I feel sometimes, I prefer to be optimistic and put myself out there (sometimes) rather than have no chance to be heard at all.

#in which the envoy uses the word stinker a lot to refer to her own stories for some reason #the envoy speaks #writing #reflection #personal #long post

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shazyloren · 7 years ago

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The Dragon Club: Chapter 2 - Awards and Violins

Summary: Jon Snow is an online blogger who gets an interview with the sort after Daenerys Targaryen, the Editor of Valyrian, a multi-million dollar fashion magazine. He'd heard so much about the silver-haired and silver-tongued woman and he running of her business; he would have to be smart to get anything more than five minutes. Will he be safe walking into the Dragon's lair or will he get thrown to the Lions?

Note: Enjoy Chapter two!

Link: http://archiveofourown.org/works/12018519/chapters/27201402

------

She had her back turned to him; she glancing out of the big bay window as the city buzzed with life below. She seemed in a sort of trance, not even turning her head when he stepped through the door. The office was not large, but it had the same surgical cleanliness that Jon had disliked in the rest of the building. There was a clean white desk which held her computer and a phone; her mobile to the side of it.

There was a violin on a stand in the corner; A Primevera 200 by the looks of it, Brandon had thought about getting it for Jon one Christmas but had ended up getting the Stentor Conservatoire instead. In the opposite corner there was an old record player in a stand with at least 100 vinyls. The room felt the most homey part of the whole building, but there was no coats hung up or mugs of coffee anywhere; no bookshelves with the classics on them. Jon preferred his own office.

All of this went through his head withing a few seconds; and as he turned his gaze back to the woman in front of the window, he could see her reflection in the mirror. A look of tranquillity graced her features. The infamous purple eyes; the puffy yet chiselled cheeks and her full lips. Her infamous silver-blonde locks were in braids and travelled all the way down her arch of her back. She was short, shorter than Jon expected and suddenly as he processed her appearance in his mind, his eyes fell to her garb. An all black pantsuit with a black flowers embroidery with gemstones all over it; a very peculiar thing that on anyone else Jon may have found himself laughing at, but on her it looked good. All previous nerves from sitting outside the office went. She was just a person at the end of the day; and Jon was ready to grill her for his website.

The women who entered with Jon spoke once more, bringing the Editor out of her trance. "Madam, the writer from The Wolf Online is here to speak with you"

"Thank you, Missandei" Daenerys spoke still gazing out the window. Missandei bowed her head in a low nod and exited the room. Instantly Daenerys stood a few inches taller and turned to me Jon's eyes. Jon thought he saw fire in hers, actual purple flames as the lights in the room made her pupils glisten. Jon thought he saw surprise in her face; he didn't know why he would've seen that particular expression on her face or why she would be surprised in his appearance but he still saw it nonetheless.. Jon cleared his mind instantly; he needed to be focused on getting the best interview he possibly could. After all, it was known that she didn't do many. She spoke as if she could read his mind. "Jon, is it?"

"Nice to finally meet you, Miss. Targaryen" Jon spoke politely as she took a seat in her large white desk chair.

"Please take a seat, and if it's fine with you, call me Dany" She held authority when she spoke; she wasn't giving Jon a choice really, he was telling her that was how she wanted to be addressed. It did surprise him though; he'd have thought she'd wish for him to address her as Miss. Targaryen seeing as they didn't know each other and they were conducting a formal interview. "You've come to ask me some questions; I believe"

"Aye, I have" Jon's northern accent purred in the room; it was a burden in situation likes these however; no one took him seriously. They always thought he sounded rough or as if he didn't care about what he was speaking of but he did. He was passionate about the world and passionate about pointing out everything wrong with it; that's why Journalism had such an appeal to him. He could use his voice to raise issues and change the world one blog post at a time. "That's a nice Violin; you play much?"

"From time to time" She leaned back in her chair, her arms resting on the rests. She looked like she was a queen on her throne. A small smirk enveloped her lips. "Not that has anything to do with my business"

"No it doesn't; but it sure will humanise you more when I write my article" Jon could see she wanted the power in the room, it only spurred him on to try and rattle her cage. And he knew he'd done so when the smirk disappeared off of her lips. He decided to start of small. "Let's forget the violin. I've heard many accounts but I want to hear it straight from the Dragon's mouth, how did you come up with the idea of Valyrian magazine?"

"The Dragon's mouth, such nice terminology for someone you've only just met" Dany's eyebrows were raised, a small amount of venom in her mouth.

"I've heard stories" Jon coolly replied.

Daenerys stared at him with almost a mark of respect, an appreciation for his honesty. She was smiling as this random man spoke to her in a way other had dared not to; or at least Jon felt like she was. He'd heard about Journalist been thrown out of this very room after only a few minutes; of a so called list of people banned from the building. He didn't want to be one of them but he still wanted to tread the line very carefully. Before his brain acted; she continued to talk.

"I've always enjoyed fashion; while living at home I often loved to dress up in my mothers vintage pieces. She collected fashion from all over the world and from different time periods. I used to spend hours lost in the fabrics and sequins, lost in dresses and corsets and leather bags and delicate shoes. I always thought to myself 'If my mother catches me in here; I am in trouble' and yet I still never left. I was enraptured with them all. She had two rooms in the house full of vintage pieces; and I can still remember them all"

"My father collected Literature; we had shelves and shelves of first editions of all the classics, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Mary Shelley. It was the smell more than anything that made me want to go into writing, the dusty feel of them" Jon nodded in understanding.

"Chaucer is a favourite of mine" Jon found himself slightly put off as Daenerys didn't take her eyes off of him. "'Who shall give a lover any law?’ Love is a greater law, by my troth, than any law written by mortal man"

"The Canterbury Tales" Jon appreciated the classics, and it looked as if she did too. Jon decided to test her. "In every cloud, in every tree-filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image"

"Wuthering Heights" Dany's paused for a small moment. "Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"

"A Streetcar Named Desire, a little more modern than Chaucer but still a classic play. My sister's did a performance of it when they were 13 and 11 in our garden. Arya is still the best Blanche I've ever seen" Jon laughed. He noted the time by the large metal clock on the wall to the right; he'd been in the interview five minutes; and he'd not been kicked out yet. "Chaucer and the Bronte's and Tennessee Williams and all the rest, were what got me into writing; you say your mother's vintage collection made you compelled to be apart of fashion"

"Indeed; her and my father's complete hatred for it. I've always been a stubborn child and anything my father says I'm not to do I've disobeyed; whether that is going to Nordstrom and buying a Chanel purse or opening my bedroom window and climbing out of the house when I had been grounded. The usual things"

Feeling like things were going semi to plan; he decided to bring out the big question.

"Recently your company has been under fire for some comments a former employee made about your working relationship with your staff; I believe the term 'Evil bitch' was used liberally in the New York Times. Care to comment?" Jon went straight for it; he knew it was a long shot that she'd answer the question but he wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't ask.

"And here I was thinking we were having a good time, Jon" She stood up from her chair and turned her back to him; staring out of the window once again.

"So you don't deny them" He leaned back in his chair; scribbling noted while she continued to ignore him. "It's a funny word, bitch isn't it? When did it become acceptable to use it to defame a woman's self confidence and assurance in the workplace?" He could see her petite frame rigid with anger, the infamous Dragon's fire. He continued as she never spoke. "Now all stories have some form of truth to them; there was quite clearly an issue with the lady in question. A Miss. Doreah Qarth?"

Daenerys snapped.

"Miss. Qarth's decision to part from this company is none of your concern. It is of no one's concern but hers and mine" Jon felt like he'd been smacked in the face by a metaphorical door. She'd closed the conversation on her former employee straight away; but Jon found himself wanting to know more, wanting to find out the ins and outs of her company. "She didn't like the way I worked; we had a disagreement and she went crying to the newspapers. I'm not saying I'm not assertive when the time comes; but if it pleases you, this conversation is now over"

That was it; the interview was done. He'd asked two proper questions and spoke of classic literature. He didn't get a chance to ask about her large donation last month to the WWF or the cover she'd done with his sister Sansa. She didn't look at him again; she just continued to star out of the bay window.

Annoyed that he'd wasted his time; not sure he could make anything out of this small ten minute exchange with her he got up off the seat and shoved his notes into his folder, leaving her with one last scathing line as he walked to he door.

"Thank you for your time, Miss. Targaryen. This is an honest piece I am looking forward to writing"

#jon snow #daenerys targaryen #jon x daenerys #jon x dany #jon x dany fanfic #jonerys #jonerys fanfic #jonerysfanfic #got #game of thrones #modern au #modern setting #the dragon club

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marco42james · 7 years ago

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A Terrible Thing Happened on Awards Day: Here’s What I’m Doing About It with Amber Teaman

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Today Amber Teaman @8amber8 , principal, shares something that happened at her school this year relating to wards day and what she and her team are doing about it. Her transparency, openness and leadership are a great thing to motivate us today!

Sponsor: Owl Eyes

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Below is a transcript modified for your reading pleasure. For information on the guests and items mentioned in this show, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

****

Transcript for Episode 126

A Terrible Thing Happened on Awards Day: Here’s What I’m Doing About It

Shownotes: www.coolcatteacher.com/e126 Monday, August 14, 2017

Vicki: Today we’re talking with Amber Teaman. Amber is a principal, and I have to give a shoutout to my friend Kasey Bell @ShakeUpLearning because she told me about Amber. Today for Motivational Monday, you have a fantastic very transparent story that you told about awards. Would you tell us that story?

Amber: After the end of the school year, you know, you have a couple of weeks “downtime” where you just kind of get to clean out your office and process. My teachers are gone. My kids are gone. So I just highly enjoy this time to purge and reflect, right? And I had a mom e-mail and ask if she could come meet with me to talk about just a couple of different things about her daughter.

Honestly, Vicki, I was like, “OK. Sure. I WOULD love to meet with you.” But of course my head wasn’t there. My heart wasn’t there. But of course I scheduled the meeting. She comes in, and she’s coming to talk about (and really brag on) the teacher that her daughter had had the previous year, and some things that she had done to make her feel good about herself. The student struggled a little bit, had some initial tutoring that she was doing outside of school, and really, the entire meeting was phrased to make me feel proud of my teacher — and hopefully, make sure that her daughter landed in a place in fourth grade with a teacher just as supportive, just as reassuring.

In the context of that conversation, she mentioned to me that… You know, she said, “We struggled this year. Our student celebrations are difficult. My daughter didn’t receive an award the entire year. And that got to be a struggle for our family. And her self-esteem really struggled from that.”

What Amber Did When the Realization Hit

Amber: That wasn’t the point of her conversation. That was just an aside that she mentioned. I had to pause, and I had to ask her, “OK. Wait. What? She didn’t receive an award? The whole year?”

And she said, “No. In fact she actually asked me not to come the last day of awards because she was so embarrassed and so ashamed that she knew she wasn’t going to get to walk up to the front of the cafeteria. She just would rather have not had me there.”

And oh my gosh, I mean, my eyes filled up with tears. I just had to close my notebook, where I was trying to take diligent notes, like a good principal. And I had to apologize to this mama that I had allowed her daughter to have struggled, who had had – ultimately, a very successful year – and that we had just failed to recognize her for anything the entire school year. And it just broke my mama heart. It broke my principal heart. It was a very humbling moment for me.

What were they celebrating at Awards Day?

Vicki: So give us some context. What kinds of things are you recognizing at student celebrations?

Amber: Well, my first year when I came in, I’d just left Chris Wejr, who has written about the impact of awards and how very dangerous they can be. Anyway, so when I came in, I had asked that we change the words from “student awards” to “student celebrations”. So I’m just trying to reframe the context for my people – of what it looks like, of what it could be about, ____ and that kind of thing. So this was last year’s awards.

So we have kind of “saved out” a lot of the awards and we’re trying to focus them more on our character development program. Here at Wiley, we call it the “Wiley Way” and every nine weeks, we focus on some particular character traits like “Have Respect and Responsibility” in celebration.

So third grade – they do A and B Honor Roll, A Honor Roll, a program like an extra math program looking at automaticity in math facts. And that’s really all that they do, and then they’ll do some character awards. In their classrooms. So on one hand, I was so proud of myself because I’ve gotten rid of gratuitous social studies awards, or gratuitous reading awards, that it was just levels of achievement. But I still managed to miss that that still isn’t celebrating everyone.

Vicki: Of course there’s a pushback that – you know, it’s obvious that this child had tenacity. This child had persistence. There’s obviously some character traits that this child has.

Amber: (agrees)

Should kids get awards when they don’t deserve them?

Vicki: But you know, it’s also so harmful to lie, and give somebody and award when they don’t deserve it. I mean, how do you handle this tension here, because there’s an honest, genuine tension with this whole thing.

Amber: Absolutely, and I think that I live and breathe in this academically successful environment that my kids here THRIVE in. And honestly, our culture WANTS that. And so to personally disagree is difficult, and so what I’ve learned (in my two whole years as an experienced principal now) is that and this is bad, right? I can ask questions. And I say, “How are we celebrating each learner? How are we celebrating each student? In what ways can that student be celebrated?” We have kids who struggle. If there’s a math program that is gauging the quickness that you answer a math fact, then if you have any sort of learning disability or a processing (strength), you don’t react as quickly. And so it just doesn’t seem fair sometimes that you also don’t get an opportunity to be celebrated for those things.

But on the flip side, I am not, by all means, the queen of “everyone gets a cookie” and thinking that we should hand out shiny trophies to everyone. Bu again, going back to that mindset, you can’t tell me that that baby girl did not do something, all year long, that she didn’t deserve to be recognized.

How are they working to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

Vicki: So what are you going to do differently with this?

Amber: I already have a meeting with leadership. My teachers come back in just a week and a half, and I have some time set aside for my leadership meeting. Instead, again, of coming down and trying to make it the “Amber Team and Way” and the” Amber Team and School” that reflect the way that I think. I’m just going to tell them the story. I’m going to say, “What can we do? Help me, guys. Help me, you team of leaders on my campus, you veteran and amazing hardworking teachers, who I know do not in any way or intention mean to hurt children. What can we do to help celebrate babies that don’t necessarily perform in this standardized version of what we call education?”

And I’m really hoping that we’re going to (do something). Other schools are doing it. I know that they are. I’ve reached out to Chris Wejr and we’ve kind of gone back and forth on some different things. But looking at ways to genuinely celebrate.

My kinder teams have gone away from awards completely, and they just do a portfolio-based recognition. So the parents just go to the classroom, and they get to sit down with their kid. Their kid’s folder is “I learned my FAT words, and “I counted this high,” and “I did X tasks.” It’s personalized, and they’re still some celebration there. But it’s individual.

So it may be that we move to a portfolio-based system campus wide. I don’t know if we’re ready for that. But it’s definitely a conversation that I want my teachers in. Again, this is not just a random story that I am telling from the internet. This is so-and-so’s kid, in such-and-such’s class. They GO here.

Why is Amber so transparent on this issue?

Vicki: And you know, this is an important conversation. You’re obviously moving forward to a much broader conversation by being transparent. But you know, there are a lot of principals who are listening to you thinking, “I would never admit that I screwed up.” Because, ultimately, right, “Harry Truman: The buck stops here.” Right? You’re shouldering responsibility, and that’s what’s beautiful about this story, because things happen. We can’t control everything. Is it hard for you to admit that this happened?

Amber: Oh my goodness. No. And yes. I am the queen of only making a mistake one time. I will only make the mistakes once. And in my entire first year as a principal, full of missteps and rethinks and wishing I could take situations back. I’m so lucky that I have a graceful staff who loved me through it – and had no problems telling me where I had stepped off the path. I should have rethought some things, and they were very clear in some of that feedback, which I have written about on my blog. But the end result is that I’m much better. I’m stronger. I’m stronger professionally. Our relationships are stronger personally. And that’s the only way that I know how to learn. If I didn’t have amazing people — like Kasey Bell @ShakeUpLearning, like George Couros @gcouros – people that I can call and talk to and say, “Oh my gosh. I messed this up. Help me fix it.” Or “How have you done this? Can you talk me through this?” There’s no manual with my position. There was no, “Here’s How to Be a Great Principal.” You just kind of walk in and hope that you can figure it out. I’m lucky enough to be connected to some incredible people that I can call and say, “Alright. This is what I did this week. Help me figure this out.” But I think that also endears me to my teachers – for them to see, “I’m not perfect. I don’t expect you to be perfect. I make mistakes, and I have bad days. I’m a mom, I’m a wife, I’m a friend. I also have “down” times. I don’t expect you not have those things either.” So, hopefully, that transparency lends itself to that.

Vicki: I think your transparency is just tremendous.

I also am thinking of three “C’s”.

I think that first of all, you’re being Courageous. You are putting yourself out there, and moving the conversation forward, both at your school and broader.

You’re being Coachable. This is a hard one for principals, because you actually have this relationship with your staff where you’re learning from them. And you know there are a lot of principals out there – this would be a whole other show that I wish that I could talk about – that two-way street that really needs to be there when you’re a successful principal. Everybody telling you what to do. The buck does stop with you.

But that listening – just listening – and the Cooperative. I love it that you are not saying, “I have the answers.” What you’re saying is, “I have a great staff, and I know that we’ll figure out the answer together.”

Amber: Absolutely. And again, I do have incredible people who are supportive and who are open to me, too. I don’t come to the table without a skill set. I do have things to offer and things to share. If you are open and willing to listen and learn, then I also am willing to listen and learn. And that’s just how I want the culture on our campus to be, from kids to secretaries to teachers.

Vicki: So, remarkable teachers, this is a Motivating Monday. So get out there and apply what you’ve learned.

Full Bio As Submitted

Amber Teaman

Amber Teamann is the proud principal of Whitt Elementary in Wylie ISD in Wylie, Texas. During her educational career, Amber’s comprehensive understanding of student learning has resulted in a successful blend of technology and teaching.

From a 4th grade teacher at a public school technology center, to her role as a Title I Technology Facilitator responsible for 17 campuses, Amber has helped students and staff navigate their digital abilities and responsibilities. She transformed the way information is shared in one of the largest school districts in Texas by piloting a communication initiative that launched Twitter, and led to 100-percent campus participation.

Through her campus level leadership, she has helped initiate classroom change district wide, empowering teachers at all levels. In addition to blogging for Connected Principals , she is a firm believer in modeling a digital footprint. Her educational philosophy and digital portfolio can be found at Love, Learn, Lead or on twitter, @8amber8.

The post A Terrible Thing Happened on Awards Day: Here’s What I’m Doing About It with Amber Teaman appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e126/

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thatsnotcanonpodcasts · 5 years ago

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Archives, Electronics & Vikings

Welcome back to another awesome episode of Nerd pop culture delivered in a friendly manner by those loose gooses, the Nerds. This week we would like to say that since China hasn’t offered us any money to sell our self-respect or virtue that we support the protestors in Hong Kong. Viva la revolution! Now if we do not have an episode in the near future you know that they took us out like Hillary Clinton helps her opposition to have fatal accidents… Just going to leave this here and see who comes after us first.

Now onto the episode, first up is the Professor with a look at the Australian Video Game Archive. What is this you ask, well it is an amazingly cool idea and we hope it gets sorted out soon. Now if you love playing awesome games, love Australia, and are just a tragic nerd like our boys then you will love this. To know exactly what it is you are going to have to listen in and find out. But let us know on Facebook what game you think should go into the archive.

Next up we have finally achieved printed electronics that you can wear. That’s right, wear. Are you tired of not being able to hold your torch and need an extra hand, but don’t want to wear one of those straps around your head with a light on it? We have the solution for you, tattoo light systems. Want to stand out in the crowd and really be noticed? We can help you shine a light on your darkest corners. Sounds interesting right? Well listen up as this is our second featured topic for the week.

Do you wish that reality television had more things like axe throwing in it? Are you tired of shows like survivor where there is no chance of them dying? Well we have a show that is moving in the right direction, True Viking! The show with the potential to form a crew and going pillaging in a foreign monastery… um, maybe we are getting carried away here, oh well, it sounds better than the sewage from the Kardashians. This is our third topic of the week.

Then we have the games played, shout outs, remembrances, birthdays, and special events. We hope you enjoy the show and that we entertain you and maybe even educate you on some of the topics we discuss. Now, we need to watch out for those Chinese hack…er um, gamers with better computer systems. Take care, stay safe, look out for each other and stay hydrated.

EPISODE NOTES:

Australian Video Game Archive - https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6408217/national-film-and-sound-archive-to-start-collecting-video-games/

Printed Electronics - https://www.scienceandtechnologyresearchnews.com/printed-electronics-open-way-for-electrified-tattoos-and-personalized-biosensors/

True Viking the survival series - https://deadline.com/2019/10/game-of-thrones-star-kristofer-hivju-takes-on-vikings-in-non-scripted-entertainment-co-production-1202753816/

Games currently playing

Buck

– World of Warships - https://worldofwarships.com/

Rating – 4.5/5

Professor

– Creeper World 3 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/280220/Creeper_World_3_Arc_Eternal/

Rating – 9/10

– Magic the Gathering Arena - https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena

Rating - 3.5/5

Other topics discussed

The Good Place (American fantasy comedy television series)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place

Untitled Goose Game available on PC, Mac & Nintendo Switch

- Info - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untitled_Goose_Game

- Game website - https://goose.game/

Blizzard bans Hearthstone player for Hong Kong protest support

- https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/08/blizzard-bans-hearthstone-player-for-hong-kong-protest/

Games added into the Australian video game archive

- Alien Carnage, originally released as Halloween Harry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Carnage

- The Hobbit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)

- Hollow Knight - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight

An Aspie Life (Adventure game that deals with the topic of Asperger's Syndrome)

- https://store.steampowered.com/app/786410/An_Aspie_Life/

Glow in the dark tattoos

- https://authoritytattoo.com/glow-in-the-dark-tattoos/

Tormund Giantsbane (Game of Thrones character)

- https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Tormund

Tormund & Brienne of Tarth : A love story better than twilight

- https://i.imgflip.com/14yqst.jpg

The Island with Bear Grylls (British reality television programme)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_with_Bear_Grylls

The Grand Tour (British motoring television series)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour

The Colony (British reality television program)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colony_(2005_TV_series)

Back in Time For… (British lifestyle television series)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_in_Time_for...

Creeper World 4 alpha gameplay video

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuVp2eF9AaU&feature=youtu.be

Every game company Tencent invested in

- https://www.pcgamer.com/au/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-invested-in/

Death of Edgar Allen Poe

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Edgar_Allan_Poe

Assault of Precinct 13 (2005 French-American action thriller film)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_on_Precinct_13_(2005_film)

My Songs Suck (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/mysongssuckpod

Everybody Wants to be a Cat (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/ewtbacpodcast

Floof and Pupper Podcast (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/floofandpupperpodcast

Shoutouts

5 Oct 2019 – Monty Python turns 50 - "Monty Python’s Flying Circus" first aired on BBC1 – going on to run for four series, spawning four original films, numerous live shows and several albums.

- https://www.montypython.com/news_mp50announce/494

- https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/04/monty-python-at-50-a-half-century-of-silly-walks-edible-props-and-dead-parrots

6 Oct 2019 – R.I.P Ginger Baker – Ginger Baker, English drummer and a co-founder of the rock band Cream with Eric Clapton in 1966. His work in the 1960s and 1970s earned him the reputation of "rock's first superstar drummer", for a style that melded jazz and African rhythms and pioneered both jazz fusion and world music. Baker's drumming is regarded for its style, showmanship, and use of two bass drums instead of the conventional one. Baker was an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Cream, of the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2008, and of the Classic Drummer Hall of Fame in 2016. Baker was noted for his eccentric, often self-destructive lifestyle, and he struggled with heroin addiction for many years. He was married four times and fathered three children. He died from illness on 6 October 2019 at the age of 80, at a hospital in Canterbury. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_Baker

7 Oct 1959 – The Soviet probe Luna 3 transmits the first-ever photographs of the far side of the Moon. To achieve this, the probe was equipped with a dual-lens 35mm camera, one a 200mm, f/5.6 aperture, the other a 500mm, f/9.5. The photo sequencing was automatically triggered when Luna 3's photocell detected the sunlit far side, which occurred when the craft was passing about 40,000 miles above the lunar surface. The radio-controlled Luna 3 was part of the Soviet Union's highly successful lunar program, which completed 20 missions to the moon between January 1959 and October 1970. - https://www.wired.com/2011/10/1007luna-3-photos-dark-side-moon/

Remembrances

2 Oct 2019 - John Kirby, American attorney. He was most notable for his successful defense for Nintendo against Universal City Studios over the copyrightability of the character of Donkey Kong in 1984, from which Nintendo subsequently named the character Kirby to honour him. Kirby was considered to have "saved Nintendo" during its early growth into video games into the American market. In thanks for aiding them, Nintendo gave Kirby a $30,000 sailboat christened the Donkey Kong along with "exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats." He died from myelodysplastic syndrome at the age of 79. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kirby_(attorney)

7 Oct 1849 - Edgar Allan Poe, American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. He is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. Several of his homes are dedicated museums today. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre. He died at the age of 40 in Baltimore, Maryland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe

7 Oct 1939 - Harvey Cushing, American neurosurgeon,pathologist, writer and draftsman. A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of William Osler in three volumes. In the beginning of the 20th century, Dr. Cushing developed many of the basic surgical techniques for operating on the brain. This established him as one of the foremost leaders and experts in the field. Under his influence neurosurgery became a new and autonomous surgical discipline. He was the world's leading teacher of neurosurgeons in the first decades of the 20th century. Arguably, Cushing's greatest contribution came with his introduction to North America of blood pressure measurement. Cushing's name is commonly associated with his most famous discovery, Cushing's disease. In 1912 he reported in a study an endocrinological syndrome caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland which he termed "polyglandular syndrome." He published his findings in 1932 as "The Basophil Adenomas of the Pituitary Body and Their Clinical Manifestations: pituitary Basophilism". Cushing developed many surgical instruments that are in use today, most notably Cushing forceps and the Cushing ventricular cannula. Cushing was also a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, nominated at least 38 times. He died from a heart attack at the age of 70 in New Haven, Connecticut - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Cushing

Famous Birthdays

7 Oct 1943 - Austin Stoker, Trinidadian-American actor known for his role as Lt. Ethan Bishop, the police officer in charge of the besieged Precinct 9, Division 13, in John Carpenter's Howard Hawks-inspired, 1976 film, Assault on Precinct 13. This was one of the few heroic starring roles for a black actor in an action film of the 1970s outside of the blaxploitation genre. Prior to his role as Lt. Bishop, Stoker appeared in several blaxploitation films, often playing police detectives. Among these films were Abby, Combat Cops, and Sheba, Baby, in which he played Pam Grier's love interest. Some of Stoker's other notable acting roles were in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Horror High, Airport 1975, Victory at Entebbe, and the 1977 television mini-seriesRoots. Stoker is known to Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans for his role as Dr. Ken Melrose in the 1982 B-movie,Time Walker, in which he appeared with Darwin Joston, his co-star from Assault on Precinct 13. He was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Stoker

7 Oct 1947 - Lightning Bear, Native American stuntman, stunt coordinator and special effects artist. He performed stunts on Star Trek: The Original Series, as well as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. He did not receive on-screen credit for his work. Lightning Bear did stunt work on several other television programs, including The Green Hornet, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Bonanza. He is perhaps most noted for his stunt work on the three original Star Wars films (A New Hope, 1977; The Empire Strikes Back, 1980; Return of the Jedi, 1983). Among the many other feature film productions, he worked on were Planet of the Apes (1968), Tora! Tora! Tora!, Diamonds Are Forever, The Poseidon Adventure, Saturday Night Fever, Ragtime, Conan the Barbarian, and Rocky IV. Lightning Bear says he has been very lucky in his life as the industry is and always has been his first love. He likes the way it is always changing with new methods and technology, never having the same circumstance or conditions and the ability to travel and see different countries, cultures, people and locations. He was born in Houston, Texas

- https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Lightning_Bear

- https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0510019/

7 Oct 1885 - Niels Henrik David Bohr, Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. The notion of complementarity dominated Bohr's thinking in both science and philosophy. He predicted the existence of a new zirconium-like element, which was named hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was discovered. Later, the element bohrium was named after him. He was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957. He was born in Copenhagen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr

Events of Interest

6 Oct 2009 - The Maze Runner a young adult dystopian science fiction novel written by American author James Dashner was first published. His publisher wanted him to write another book, but he decided he would try for a national book market instead. In November of that year he had an idea when going to be "about a bunch of teenagers living inside an unsolvable Maze full of hideous creatures, in the future, in a dark, dystopian world. It would be an experiment, to study their minds. Terrible things would be done to them – awful things; completely hopeless – until the victims turn everything on its head." Dashner wrote the book from December 2005 to March 2006. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maze_Runner

7 Oct 1856 - Cyrus Chambers Jr patents folding machine that folds book & newspapers

- http://www.mainlinetoday.com/Main-Line-Today/July-2017/Inventor-Cyrus-Chambers-Transformed-the-17th-Century-Milling-Industry/

– Patent (s) - https://patents.google.com/patent/US164904

- https://patents.google.com/patent/US30910

- https://patents.google.com/patent/US104621A/en

- https://patents.google.com/patent/US23445

7 Oct 1988 – A Inupiaq hunter Roy Ahmaogak discovered three gray whales trapped in pack ice in the Beaufort Sea near Point Barrow in the U.S. state of Alaska; the situation becomes a multinational effort to free the whales. The whales' plight generated media attention that led to the collaboration of multiple governments and organizations to free them. The operation was called operation breakthrough. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent a team of whale biologists, and the United States Department of State requested the help of two icebreakers from the Soviet Union, the Vladimir Arseniev and the Admiral Makarov. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Breakthrough

7 Oct 2011 – Sanctuary final season was aired, the fourth season was the 64th most watched cable show in 2011 - https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/sanctuary-season-four-19069/

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamated

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrS

iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094

RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

General Enquiries

Email - [email protected]

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lucyariablog · 6 years ago

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Are You in a Boring, All-the-Same Industry? Your Content Doesn’t Have to Be

You’re a contestant on a Content Marketing Game Show and you see three marked doors.

Behind each door is a content marketing position. Is your dream job behind one of these doors? Let’s see.

Door No. 1: Apple!

Door No. 2: Acme Accounting!

Door No. 3: ABC Plumbing!

With Door 1, you get to tell customer stories about the Apple Watch, iPhone, and Apple TV. With Door 2, you create content about forensic accounting – a topic that’s boring and complex for most. And with Door 3, you create content marketing for a service that’s undifferentiated.

If I polled 100 people, more than 95 would choose Door No. 1. But guess what? Content marketers can drive meaningful impact with the jobs behind doors 2 and 3 as well.

Jonathan Kranz covered how to make doors 2 and 3 work in his Content Marketing World presentation, Nightmare Marketing: How to Create Content for the Boring, Complex, and Undifferentiated Stuff that Scares the S@#t Out of Everybody Else.

In this article, I cover Jonathan’s tactics for creating content about products that are:

Boring

Complex

Undifferentiated

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Business Story Argument: A Working Framework to Pressure Test Your Story

Boring

Boredom, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Jonathan defines “boring” as “having no qualities that capture your interest or inspire your imagination.”

If there’s a customer need for your product or service, then boredom is relative. While forensic accounting may bore most people, it serves an essential need for customers in the right situation.

If there’s a customer need for your product, then boredom is relative, says @jonkranz.‏ Click To Tweet

While forensic accounting may not inspire the imagination, it can certainly capture interest. Your job is to do just that.

Make the stakes the star

Jonathan tells the story of Viessmann, a company that manufacturers high-end heating systems like these:

A conventional approach is to describe the different models and their capabilities. You list which model is the best fit for particular scenarios.

But what if you raised the stakes?

According to Jonathan, Viessman capitalized on the opportunity “to tell a story that locates the boilers in a context in which the stakes are high.”

Creatively labeled “Canterbury Tales,” Veissman told the story of a garden community called Canterbury Apartments, where a six-person team was responsible for 480 units across 16 buildings.

According to Arthur Johnston, lead maintenance technician at Canterbury Apartments, his team fielded seven to eight hot-water service calls per day. Residents complained about the lack of heat and hot water. The boilers were the original to the community’s 1972 construction.

The boilers ran 24/7, straining the electrical circulators. As a result, the maintenance team had to replace 12 to 15 boilers each season. Each time a boiler is changed, a full system drain is done, which leaves people freezing cold.

The team makes repairs at 2 in the morning as residents lie awake in the freezing cold.

Now, are the stakes high enough for you?

Veissmann swooped in with replacement boilers that were far more reliable. The building obtained a green certification and saved a lot of money. Here’s how the story was presented:

Does raising the stakes work? According to Jonathan, “As a consequence of this one article, they closed two or three additional deals with garden apartment complexes representing over a million dollars each.”

One high-stakes-raising article led to 2 or 3 more million-dollar deals for an HVAC company, says @jonkranz. ‏ Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

Associate your product with well-known events

Pinnacle Strategies is “a global authority on operations and supply chain management.” According to Jonathan, Pinnacle Strategies seemed to have exhausted its opportunities in e-books on supply chain management.

In this case, Jonathan recommends a tactic he calls “news flash” or tying your brand to something (e.g., an event) that people know. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on a prospect operated by BP.

Pinnacle Strategies helped clean up the spill. It created a new e-book, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions, and used this graphic to promote it:

This offer provides a nice one-two punch for Pinnacle Strategies: It associates itself with the cleanup of a well-known spill and helped save $700 million in the process.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 3 Purpose-Marketing Lessons From Innovative Brands

Show empathy to prospective customers

Convercent is an enterprise compliance management solution. According to the company’s marketing material, its product “enables you to manage an increasingly complex ethical and regulatory environment.”

In a tactic Jonathan calls “play up the players,” Convercent shifted the focus away from compliance and toward the people for whom compliance matters. In other words, it made prospective customers the hero of the story.

According to Jonathan, “Make them the hero and it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your empathy, your understanding, and your ability to meet them on the ground. All qualities that matter.”

Jonathan highlights a video produced by Convercent that did all these things:

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Make Your Audience the Hero With a One-Sentence Agile User Story

How to Avoid the Battle of Boring in Your Videos

Complex

As a marketer selling complex products, your job is to break the complicated into simpler parts. As Jonathan says, “Can we find a salient point, a wedge, something smaller, something simpler that will at least get us in the door and start the conversation?”

As a marketer selling complex products, your job is to break the complicated into simpler parts, says @jonkranz. Click To Tweet

“Hitting” prospects with a 400-page e-book on how to rework their network architecture is overkill. It’s better to sell one salient fact or benefit of optimizing their network.

Better case studies: Think “real” and “tangible”

Customer case studies follow a time-tested structure:

Challenge

Solution

Results

While Jonathan agrees with this approach, he notes that a few adjustments are needed for complex products.

Most case studies provide a brief synopsis of the challenge and quickly move to the solution. For Jonathan, case studies must detail why the challenge mattered: “On most case studies, it’s ‘Whoa, I don’t understand yet why the problem mattered.’ And without that, you’re not going to get much drama or interest.”

In the solution section, get into customers’ heads before you get into their wallets. “Your job is to create a word picture so compelling that readers imagine themselves within it unconsciously. Just as you do when you read a precise story, you’re suddenly there, you’re in it,” Jonathan says.

Get in your customers’ heads before you get into their wallets, says @jonkranz. ‏ Click To Tweet

In the results section, use the voice of your customers to tell the story. If you detail the results yourself, it’s self-serving. But if you use customer quotes? It’s much more powerful, Jonathan says.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

How to Get Customers to Participate in a Case Study

9 Strategies for Using Customer Testimonials in Your Content

Plumber’s magnet

How do local plumbers get their feet in the door? With a free magnet stuck to refrigerators.

“A pipe bursts in my home. I don’t have a whole lot of time to go fussing around to find a plumber. If I can just look up at the refrigerator and there’s the phone number, bless you, I’m going to call that number,” Jonathan says.

Once the emergency job is complete, the plumbers can take on the homeowner’s larger projects such as kitchen remodels, new heating systems, etc. See the ROI of that simple magnet?

Jonathan encourages B2B companies with complex products to find their plumber’s magnet. “Create something that represents an easy starting point for engagement so that you don’t have to sell the whole kahuna to them all at once,” he says.

Jonathan gives the example of Executive Benefits Solutions – its plumber’s magnet is free modeling tools to estimate benefits packages.

“The people who might be interested in the services of this company are exactly the kind of people who would find this delightful and useful,” Jonathan says. “Then that becomes the page they bookmark and then you become at the top of the list of authorities they might possibly approach for this complex task.”

Expert interviews

On the one hand, experts may be too deep in the field to be adept at simplifying complex concepts. On the other hand, you can extract the knowledge of these experts and shape it in a way that’s most useful to your audience.

Jonathan does this by interviewing experts. Instead of publishing the literal transcript, however, he curates the material and moves some pieces around. “It’s the authenticity of a real voice and yet you still retain control. This is a fantastic content opportunity,” he says.

Here’s an image of an expert interview that Jonathan created for Collaborative Consulting:

“I ask all kinds of questions during the process. What I did was take the best stuff that this expert had. I put it in what seemed like a logical, reasonable order, and then I inserted questions that would naturally transition to what he had to say,” Jonathan explains.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Get More (and Better) Content From Your Subject Matter Experts

Undifferentiated

In a sea of blue, how do you present your brand as red? Jonathan provides three tactics on how to differentiate products in an undifferentiated or commoditized industry.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Make Your Content Stand Out in a Crowded, Global Marketplace

Process over product

In an undifferentiated market, products are perceived as the same. However, you can be unique in how you create or deliver your product, which, in turn, can be the differentiation.

Jonathan gives the example of Cityspan, which describes itself as “a complete system for recording participant information, tracking enrollment and attendance, and measuring outcomes.” Cityspan has competitors that provide equivalent offerings.

While the products themselves are similar, Cityspan is unique in its delivery. “They promise you that before they deploy software, they’re going to spend lots of time talking to you and digging deep. Better still, they’re not going to give you one prototype. They’re going to give you multiple options for you to choose from,” Jonathan explains.

Once the customer chooses an option, Cityspan goes further. It helps customers sell downstream to their customers’ customers. Its competitors don’t go this far. Cityspan is saying, “We understand your needs better than anyone else. And we’re going to have the most likely, most favorable outcomes.”

Here’s related messaging from Cityspan’s website:

Use surprise to your advantage

Timing can be everything.

New laws or regulations that affect your industry can create differentiation in an undifferentiated market. That was the case for eSignLive, a provider of e-signature solutions. The company is based in Canada, where it also manages data centers.

According to Jonathan, “Canada has different data regulations than the United States. This turned out to be a surprising win for them because they have separate data centers not just in the U.S. and Canada, but also in the U.K. and in Germany.”

The Canada data centers gave eSignLive an advantage in that country — and, the data centers in Europe gave them an advantage when the European Union rolled out the GDPR regulations in 2018.

“eSignLive has an advantage because they’re going to keep all the e-signature data in the country of origin. They have the distributed databases and data centers,” says Jonathan.

eSignLive doubled down on this fortuitous timing with marketing campaigns that emphasized its competitive differentiation.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: GDPR: The Biggest Gift to Content Marketers in a Decade

Zig when they zag

When your industry zags, you stand out by zigging.

When your industry zags, you stand out by zigging, says @dshiao. #contentmarketing Click To Tweet

Several years ago, there was a lot of buzz around the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement – employees were bringing their personal devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops) into the office and using them for work-related activities.

As security technology vendors warned of the dangers of allowing BYOD, Symantec went the other way and embraced it:

Symantec didn’t stop there. Once it attracted attention by zigging, it needed to demonstrate why others should follow its lead.

As seen in the image above, Symantec encourages a “say yes” to BYOD so long as companies have the right tools to implement it properly.

According to Jonathan, “They made a case for why you should do it and how to make it work effectively without compromising your employee’s privacy or threatening the integrity and security of your data.”

By doing so, Symantec was able to stand out among the competition.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Symantec Wins at Content by Responding to Its Audience

Changing mindset, changing perspective

Creating content for boring, complex, and undifferentiated products can be fun after all!

I saw a pattern in Jonathan’s approaches – reframe the scenario and help your audience (e.g., prospects) think differently about you. Whether it’s raising the stakes, focusing on process over product, or being a contrarian, you have the opportunity to shape the narrative for any product, service, or industry.

What boring, complex, or undifferentiated products are you responsible for marketing? And which of Jonathan’s tactics resonated the most with you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Here’s an excerpt from Jonathan’s talk:

youtube

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 B2C Brands Offer Content Marketing Lessons and Inspiration

Catch some of the hundreds of experts speaking at Content Marketing World 2019 this September. Register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Are You in a Boring, All-the-Same Industry? Your Content Doesn’t Have to Be appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/01/boring-industry-content/

0 notes

a-breton · 6 years ago

Text

Are You in a Boring, All-the-Same Industry? Your Content Doesn’t Have to Be

You’re a contestant on a Content Marketing Game Show and you see three marked doors.

Behind each door is a content marketing position. Is your dream job behind one of these doors? Let’s see.

Door No. 1: Apple!

Door No. 2: Acme Accounting!

Door No. 3: ABC Plumbing!

If I polled 100 people, more than 95 would choose Door No. 1. But guess what? Content marketers can drive meaningful impact with the jobs behind doors 2 and 3 as well.

In this article, I cover Jonathan’s tactics for creating content about products that are:

Boring

Complex

Undifferentiated

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Business Story Argument: A Working Framework to Pressure Test Your Story

Boring

Boredom, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Jonathan defines “boring” as “having no qualities that capture your interest or inspire your imagination.”

If there’s a customer need for your product or service, then boredom is relative. While forensic accounting may bore most people, it serves an essential need for customers in the right situation.

If there’s a customer need for your product, then boredom is relative, says @jonkranz.‏ Click To Tweet

While forensic accounting may not inspire the imagination, it can certainly capture interest. Your job is to do just that.

Make the stakes the star

Jonathan tells the story of Viessmann, a company that manufacturers high-end heating systems like these:

A conventional approach is to describe the different models and their capabilities. You list which model is the best fit for particular scenarios.

But what if you raised the stakes?

According to Jonathan, Viessman capitalized on the opportunity “to tell a story that locates the boilers in a context in which the stakes are high.”

Creatively labeled “Canterbury Tales,” Veissman told the story of a garden community called Canterbury Apartments, where a six-person team was responsible for 480 units across 16 buildings.

The team makes repairs at 2 in the morning as residents lie awake in the freezing cold.

Now, are the stakes high enough for you?

Veissmann swooped in with replacement boilers that were far more reliable. The building obtained a green certification and saved a lot of money. Here’s how the story was presented:

One high-stakes-raising article led to 2 or 3 more million-dollar deals for an HVAC company, says @jonkranz. ‏ Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

Associate your product with well-known events

Pinnacle Strategies helped clean up the spill. It created a new e-book, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions, and used this graphic to promote it:

This offer provides a nice one-two punch for Pinnacle Strategies: It associates itself with the cleanup of a well-known spill and helped save $700 million in the process.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 3 Purpose-Marketing Lessons From Innovative Brands

Show empathy to prospective customers

Jonathan highlights a video produced by Convercent that did all these things:

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Make Your Audience the Hero With a One-Sentence Agile User Story

How to Avoid the Battle of Boring in Your Videos

Complex

As a marketer selling complex products, your job is to break the complicated into simpler parts, says @jonkranz. Click To Tweet

“Hitting” prospects with a 400-page e-book on how to rework their network architecture is overkill. It’s better to sell one salient fact or benefit of optimizing their network.

Better case studies: Think “real” and “tangible”

Customer case studies follow a time-tested structure:

Challenge

Solution

Results

While Jonathan agrees with this approach, he notes that a few adjustments are needed for complex products.

Get in your customers’ heads before you get into their wallets, says @jonkranz. ‏ Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

How to Get Customers to Participate in a Case Study

9 Strategies for Using Customer Testimonials in Your Content

Plumber’s magnet

How do local plumbers get their feet in the door? With a free magnet stuck to refrigerators.

Once the emergency job is complete, the plumbers can take on the homeowner’s larger projects such as kitchen remodels, new heating systems, etc. See the ROI of that simple magnet?

Jonathan gives the example of Executive Benefits Solutions – its plumber’s magnet is free modeling tools to estimate benefits packages.

Expert interviews

Here’s an image of an expert interview that Jonathan created for Collaborative Consulting:

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Get More (and Better) Content From Your Subject Matter Experts

Undifferentiated

In a sea of blue, how do you present your brand as red? Jonathan provides three tactics on how to differentiate products in an undifferentiated or commoditized industry.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Make Your Content Stand Out in a Crowded, Global Marketplace

Process over product

In an undifferentiated market, products are perceived as the same. However, you can be unique in how you create or deliver your product, which, in turn, can be the differentiation.

Here’s related messaging from Cityspan’s website:

Use surprise to your advantage

Timing can be everything.

The Canada data centers gave eSignLive an advantage in that country — and, the data centers in Europe gave them an advantage when the European Union rolled out the GDPR regulations in 2018.

“eSignLive has an advantage because they’re going to keep all the e-signature data in the country of origin. They have the distributed databases and data centers,” says Jonathan.

eSignLive doubled down on this fortuitous timing with marketing campaigns that emphasized its competitive differentiation.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: GDPR: The Biggest Gift to Content Marketers in a Decade

Zig when they zag

When your industry zags, you stand out by zigging.

When your industry zags, you stand out by zigging, says @dshiao. #contentmarketing Click To Tweet

As security technology vendors warned of the dangers of allowing BYOD, Symantec went the other way and embraced it:

Symantec didn’t stop there. Once it attracted attention by zigging, it needed to demonstrate why others should follow its lead.

As seen in the image above, Symantec encourages a “say yes” to BYOD so long as companies have the right tools to implement it properly.

By doing so, Symantec was able to stand out among the competition.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Symantec Wins at Content by Responding to Its Audience

Changing mindset, changing perspective

Creating content for boring, complex, and undifferentiated products can be fun after all!

What boring, complex, or undifferentiated products are you responsible for marketing? And which of Jonathan’s tactics resonated the most with you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Here’s an excerpt from Jonathan’s talk:

youtube

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 B2C Brands Offer Content Marketing Lessons and Inspiration

Catch some of the hundreds of experts speaking at Content Marketing World 2019 this September. Register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

from http://bit.ly/2HCpTVz

#Online Marketing

0 notes

dulwichdiverter · 6 years ago

Text

Mystery, murder and Marlowe

Words Elizabeth Rust; Photo Cat Arwel

Anna Sayburn Lane is an unlikely thriller writer. She’s nice, open and chatty. She may even come across as a bit of an academic – a university lecturer perhaps – but don’t let that friendly façade fool you. She’s a definite “dark soul”, as she claims, who has written a cracking new murderous page turner full of intrigue and mystery.

Unlawful Things is Anna’s first thriller novel. Set within some of South London’s most iconic spots, it follows the character Helen Oddfellow who is trying to find a lost play by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. We first meet Helen, who is a Southwark and Bankside walking tour guide, being sought by a historian who suggests that Marlowe may have written one last play before he was killed at a boarding house in Deptford.

Intrigued, Helen, who is working on her PhD about Marlowe, joins the historian on the hunt to find the missing manuscript. On her quest she follows clues and deciphers codes, and is tortured along the way, only to learn that other people too are trying to find the play, and that some of those people may not have the purest motives.

Anna first become interested in Christopher Marlowe when she studied him at school, and then met his work again at university where she read history and English. But it wasn’t until she went on a walking holiday with her husband one Easter weekend that she got the creative spark.

The two were retracing the steps of the pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. They started their walk near where the Tabard Inn in Southwark would have stood, which is where the Chaucer pilgrims begin their travels.

At Deptford Green, Anna was intrigued by a skull and crossbones on a wrought iron gate at St Nicholas Church. When she ventured inside the church she realised it was where Christopher Marlowe was buried. She thought this was interesting, but didn’t think much about it again as she and her husband continued on their pilgrimage through Blackheath, Dartford and onto Canterbury, along the way telling each other stories and jokes as Chaucer’s pilgrims would have done, until their journey ended in Canterbury opposite the Marlowe theatre.

That’s when she thought: what secrets may Marlowe have known that he could have taken with him from Canterbury to London? Could he have written a secret play? Anna then pored over Marlowe’s life story, researching his extraordinary life. “He’s a real enigmatic character,” Anna says. “Very little is known about him.”

During Marlowe’s theatrical writing career, he was the chief playwright at the Rose Theatre south of the River Thames. This is where his most famous plays would have been performed, including Doctor Faustus. The best kept records about the Rose Theatre are to be found at Dulwich College.

Edward Alleyn, who was considered to be the George Clooney of his time, and would have played Doctor Faustus, founded Dulwich College in 1619. His father-in-law was Philip Henslowe who owned the Rose Theatre. Henslowe kept incredibly detailed notes about the theatre including everything about ticket sales to how much was paid for the nails to build it.

“I wrote to the archivist at Dulwich College who was extremely helpful,” Anna says. “She invited me along to the librarian’s office. I remember there being a big round table. She then unlocked a heavy metal door and brought out a box of papers and a book box with letterheads between Alleyn and his family.”

Anna incorporates this experience at Dulwich College into the novel Unlawful Things. South London born and bred, her family owned a toy shop in Catford for 100 years, Anna now lives in Dulwich, and draws on many of her own life experiences throughout the novel. A journalist by trade, she started her career in the early 1990s on a South London local paper, the News Shopper, covering Lewisham and Greenwich boroughs.

As a journalist she covered hard news stories, including a string of crimes that included the murder of Stephen Lawrence. After his murder there were many anti-racist demonstrations, some of these turning violent when there were clashes with the British National Party which had its headquarters at Welling in Bromley. Anna covered these demonstrations for the newspaper.

“I got caught up in the middle of one of these violent demonstrations. I saw police in protective gear pulling photographers off fences and beating them with batons. Then I got smacked in the back of the head, possibly with a baton, but I’m not 100 per cent sure, it could have been a brick, and ended up in the back of an ambulance with half a dozen other people.”

Her editor made a complaint to the police. The police sent an officer around to her home. “He said in front of my parents, ‘I don’t think a young lady should have been caught up in that situation’. My father turned around and said: ‘If you lot had been doing your job, this wouldn’t have happened’.”

It’s an experience that still haunts Anna. “I was very young. It was my first job. I wish I was better prepared to investigate that story,” she says. But it’s made a real impact on her life. In the novel she uses this experience to describe how when local journalist Nick is caught up in an anti-Islam demonstration at the opening of a mosque in East Greenwich.

“I’m writing about South London. It would be madness to write about South London and pretend that everyone is white, middle class and Christian. It’s a mixed place. It’s important to reflect all the different types of communities there are here. That’s one of the reasons I love South London: it’s a diverse place. That’s what makes it interesting, but it also means that there are sometimes tensions within the community.”

As a novelist Anna also plays on fears. A woman, especially, she explains, may think about what would happen if they were at the mercy of someone else. In the novel Helen escapes from a villain via the roof of her flat. “I was actually locked out on the roof once. I looked at the drainpipe and thought I could climb down it, but I course I didn’t – I might have killed myself if I’d tried! – but as a novelist it’s about thinking about the worst that could happen and how you might escape.”

It took Anna about a year to write the first draft of the novel. She then wrote another draft while taking a couple of creative writing courses. After that she thought it was ready to shop it to an agent. “I got useful feedback, but basically it was I’m going to have to rewrite it again - so I rewrote it again.”

Anna eventually started working with an editor at a publishing house. He suggested she needed a final twist at the end. But unfortunately, when it came to publishing the book, the sales team decided it wasn’t going to sell at big supermarkets.

“Obviously I was disappointed. I eventually thought: no one ever said it’s not a good enough book to publish. People are telling me it’s a difficult book to publish commercially or they can’t quite see how they’re going to market it. Well the person who has the most interest in marketing and publishing this book is me. At which point I decided to self-publish.”

In March 2018 Anna went to the London book fair. She met many people who were self-publishing and learned that it can be done in a very professional way. She then worked with proof readers, copy editors and cover designers to get the book as good as it possibly could be. “I was editing right up until a week or two before I hit publish,” she says. She published it in October 2018.

“Self-publishing is now a decision you can make. Do you want to publish it yourself or do you want to get it published traditionally? Getting something published traditionally is difficult because you’re at the mercy of other people’s decisions. I just got to the point where I had enough. I wanted to give it a go.”

Anyone who is thinking about self-publishing should be prepared to be their own business manager, Anna explains. Anyone can fairly easily stick a homemade book on Amazon and sell it to their parents, but if you want to do it properly – if you want to sell books – you need to make it your profession.

So what’s next for Anna? She’s currently working on a sequel to Unlawful Things. She’s researching the life of William Blake, uncovering all of the mysteries that might surround him. If Unlawful Things is anything to go by, Anna has a bright career ahead of her as a thriller novelist. The twisty end of the novel will keep readers hooked right up until the last page. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. That’s up for the reader to decide. It’s creative, none the less, and incredibly plausible.

0 notes

emmagreen1220-blog · 6 years ago

Text

New Post has been published on Literary Techniques

New Post has been published on https://literarytechniques.org/caricature/

Caricature

What Is Caricature?

Caricature comes from the Italian verb caricare, which means “to load.” As a technique, caricature is defined by an exaggerated description of a person or thing, very often used in drawing and painting, usually with the aim of creating a comic or satiric effect. For example, in the image below, the caricature of Mr. Bean exaggerates his facial features, such as the eyes, nose, eyebrows, lips, and ears.

In literature, caricature can be used to exaggerate a character’s personality traits as well. For example, Charles Dickens is renown for the creation of uniquely eccentric characters by using this literary technique. Miss Havisham, one of the characters in Great Expectations, shocks the readers through her caricatural appearance, bordering on the grotesque: Imagine a fifty-something-old lady who was left at the altar some twenty years back and is still wearing her wedding dress, keeps the wedding cake on the table, with mice crawling in and out of it, and stopped all the clocks in the house at twenty minutes to nine, the time when she had received her fiance’s letter announcing her that he would not show up. Moreover, Dickens goes beyond physical appearance and uses caricature to define Miss Havisham’s purpose in life, that is, to take revenge on all men and make them suffer, regardless of whether these men happen to be represented by a nine- or ten-year-old boy, Pip.

ExamplesQuizFlashcardsWorksheets

Caricature Examples

Caricature in a Sentence

“His hair was long and encompassing as a cape that would cling to his ankles when the wind became more than a breeze, making him fall flat on his flat nose.” – We can hardly imagine a person whose hair is so long as to trip him over. This exaggeration, with both comic and satiric effects, is known as caricature.

“His bulgy eyes almost jumped out of their sockets when I told him the news. He began sputtering and turned his back on me, leaving trails of saliva behind.” – This caricatural description makes us imagine a man resembling a snail.

“The girl dragged her feet toward the blackboard, as slow as a condemned person might walk his way to the electric chair, her eyes sheepish and as round as saucers, begging for mercy from the teacher and for help from her classmates: ‘I don’t know how to solve the equation.’ ” – The feelings of a school girl are caricatured in this sentence by exaggerating her fear of going to the blackboard and solving a mathematical problem.

Caricature in Poetry

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

“The MILLERE was a stout carl for the nones;

The MILLER was a stout fellow indeed;

Ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones.

He was very strong of muscle, and also of bones….

Ther was no dore that he nolde heve of harre,

There was no door that he would not heave off its hinges,

Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.

Or break it by running at it with his head.

His berd as any sowe or fox was reed,

His beard was red as any sow or fox…

Upon the cop right of his nose he hade

Upon the exact top of his nose he had

A werte, and theron stood a toft of herys,

A wart, and thereon stood a tuft of hairs,

Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys;

Red as the bristles of a sow’s ears;…

His mouth as greet was as a greet forneys.

His mouth was as large as a large furnace.”

The characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are all typologies, as illustrated by the names under which they appear: the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Monk, the Friar, the Host, and so on. The most exaggerated features are those of the peasants. The Miller represents the stereotypical peasant physiognomy the most clearly, being round and ruddy and with a wart on his nose. The Miller appears rough and, thus, suited for hard, simple work. Caricature is evident in Chaucer’s description of the Miller as a man who could take any door out of its hinges or break it with his head and in the comparison of the Miller’s beard with the bristles on a pig.

“Tower” by William Butler Yeats

“An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress…”

In the poem “Tower,” William Butler Yeats uses caricature to describe old age. By referring to old people as worthless “things” and shabby coats on sticks, the poet also makes use of self-caricature since he was in his late years when he wrote the poem.

Caricature in Literature

Caricature was a preferred technique in the comedy of manners, a witty form of dramatic comedy that depicts and satirizes the manners of the society and is, thus, more concerned with whether or not the characters meet certain social standards than with the plot. This type of comedy reached its peak in the English-speaking world during the Restoration period, with playwrights such as Ben Jonson, William Congreve, William Wycherley, Sir George Etherege, Oliver Goldsmith, and later, with Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Philip Barry, and S.N. Behrman.

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson

Jonson’s The Alchemist, for example, features characters whose names contribute to their caricature: the sensualist, Sir Epicure Mammon; the hypocritical Puritan, Tribulation Wholesome; the con men, Subtle and Face; and Abel Drugger, a small-time tobacco dealer ambitious for commercial success. The characters are flat, that is, they are uncomplicated and do not evolve throughout the play. Drugger’s main characteristics, for instance, are stupidity and greed. Thus, he is easily made to believe that he will achieve success if, by following astrology-based advice, he sets the shelves in his shop in a certain way. In act III, Face says about Drugger that “he has no head/ To bear any wine,” which exemplifies that caricature can be realized through other characters’ words as well.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s use of caricature in The Importance of Being Earnest allows readers to view the true essence of the characters. The main character of the play, Lady Bracknell, is representative. Her interview with Jack, who was in love with her daughter Gwendolen, focuses on Jack’s status and material possessions, mainly containing questions such as: “What is your income?” “In land, or in investments?” “A country house! How many bedrooms? … You have a town house, I hope?”

It’s also Lady Bracknell who exclaims, “A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! And in the Funds! Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her.”

Wilde’s use of caricature leaves the readers think that Lady Bracknell, a representative of Victorian society, is overly shallow and materialistic.

“Rain” by Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham reduced his characters to caricatured types and stereotypes in circumstances in which they act in accordance with or against their natural inclinations, treating individuals as typological characters governed by fate functioning within the narrow boundaries of necessity. In the short story “Rain,” Davidson, a zealous missionary, recounts his success in civilizing the tribes of the barbaric South Sea Islands during one of his missions:

“ ‘When we went there they had no sense of sin at all’, he said. ‘They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instill into the natives the sense of sin.…You see, they were so naturally depraved that they couldn’t be brought to see their wickedness. We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions.…I made it a sin for a girl to show her bosom and a sin for a man not to wear trousers.’

‘How?’ asked Dr Macphail, not without surprise.

‘I instituted fines.’ ”

The missionary’s moral authority is backed up by his legal authority, imposing fines and banning the islanders from participating in the coconut oil trade, which “meant something very like starvation,” as Davidson notes with satisfaction. In his self-blinding self-righteousness, the missionary is entirely proud at his economic and legal blackmail of the islanders into accepting customs and morals that are not their own. In this story, by caricaturing the Davidsons, Maugham illustrates his own indignation at the misguided and stubborn authorities who tend to turn people’s natural instincts into crimes and sins.

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

Caricature, however, was not aimed only at societal typologies, in general, but sometimes targeted specific individuals. Robert Shallow is a fictional character who appears in Shakespeare’s plays Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He is a wealthy landowner and justice of the peace, a thin, vain, and often self-deluding individual, whom Falstaff and his comrades victimize by killing his deer, beating his men, and breaking into his lodge. Shallow may have been a caricature of Sir Thomas Lucy, a justice of the peace and member of Parliament from Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare’s birthplace). According to an undocumented account, Sir Lucy prosecuted Shakespeare for stealing a deer from his land.

The picture below illustrates Shallow inviting Falstaff to stay for the night.

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