NUDITY – Laurie Taylor explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body from the early twentieth century to the present. He talks to Sarah Schrank, Professor of History at California State University, about the unusual eras and locations in which it thrived - from Depression-era collectives to 1950s suburban nudist communities—as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. They’re joined by Barbara Górnicka, Assistant Professor in Sociology at University College, Dublin, who asks why we find exposing bodies shameful and draws on her own participation in a nudist swimming club.
9 February 2020
The New York Review of Books: What Do We Want History to Do to Us?
Public art claiming to represent our collective memory is just as often a work of historical erasure and political manipulation. It is just as often the violent inscription of myth over truth, a form of “over-writing”—one story overlaid and thus obscuring another—modeled in three dimensions. In the United States, we speak of this. Discussions of power and erasure as they relate to monuments are by now well under way. The astonishing, ongoing absence of public markers of the slave trade, for example—of landing sites and auction blocks, of lynchings and massacres—is a matter of frequent public discussion, debate, and (partial) correction, albeit four hundred years after the first enslaved peoples landed on American shores. In the UK, meanwhile, we have to speak not simply of erasure but of something closer to perfect oblivion. It is no exaggeration to say that the only thing I ever learned about slavery during my British education was that “we” ended it. Even more extraordinary to me now is how many second-generation Caribbean kids in the UK grew up, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the bizarre notion that our families were somehow native to “the islands,” had always been there, even as we pored over the history of “American slavery.”2[...]
Take, for example, the Victoria Memorial, that marble white magnificence in front of Buckingham Palace, with which Walker’s latest piece of public art, Fons Americanus, a huge fountain installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, is evidently in discussion. As with so many British monuments, what appears to be an act of public storytelling is as least as much about silence as narrative. The self-conceived values of empire are confidently displayed, in the forms of classical figures embodying Peace, Progress, Manufacture, and Agriculture (represented by a woman in peasant dress with a sickle and a sheaf of corn; more to the point would be a black woman holding a stalk of sugarcane with a kerchief round her head). Cherubs abound, and mermaids and mermen and a hippogriff—symbolizing the nation’s nautical domination—but there is of course no representation of the peoples thus subdued by this famed maritime strength, and no tourist standing before this memorial would have any idea that a portion of the money used to build it was in fact raised by West African tribes, who sent goods to be sold, the proceeds of which went to the memorial’s fund. (The people of New Zealand, who also contributed to the fund, are acknowledged in an inscription upon the base.) [...]
I hope Walker is never ashamed to be the wrong kind of artist/woman/black person, or ever exhausted by our endless projections upon her. Twenty-five years after she exploded into the art world, I hope it continues to be her self-defined job to gather all the ruins of her own, and our, history—everything abject and beautiful, oppressive and freeing, scatalogical and sexual, holy and unholy—into one place, without attempting perfect alignment, without needing to be seen to be good, so that she might make art from it. And thus stand up for the subconscious, for the unsaid and unsayable, for the historically and personally indigestible, for the unprettified, for the autonomy of an imagination that cannot escape history, and—more than anything else—for black freedom of expression itself.
The Outline: Are we all members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement?
Knight also appears to be willing to claim as allies people who remain voluntarily childless as a result of concerns over climate change — although not wanting to have kids because you're worried about your kids’ carbon footprint, or the quality of life they might very well be denied in a rapidly warming world, is not the same as thinking it might be better if the whole human race went extinct. More plausibly, it seems motivated by a concern that the planet should be as liveable as possible for those who do happen to be born. [...]
And into this category of by-fruits-knowners would fall rather a lot of people, especially those people currently in power. Take the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison. Morrison might not explicitly want his country to be reduced to a permanently blazing apocalyptic hell, he might not make speeches openly in favor of bringing death and punishment to Australia. But his actions, and those of his government, are in fact working to make Australia’s complete devastation by climate change a lot more likely. It is a similar situation with Brazil President Jair Bolsanaro, and his enthusiasm for burning down his country’s rainforests. [...]
And perhaps non-existence, in all its finality, has a certain sort of libidinal appeal. Freud, for instance, identified the “death drive” (or “death instincts”) as being one of the fundamental forces shaping our psychic lives — aside from the life instincts (towards survival, sexual pleasure, and so forth), we all share the “urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, i.e. non-existence. In a sense, then, “the aim of all life is death.” Which can be fine, since any living species eventually has older generations die off — but only if the death instincts are properly balanced with their opposites. If the death instincts ever won out completely, there would be no more life left to speak of (interestingly, Freud speaks of the death drive as a fundamentally “conservative” drive, which seems about right). Knight's own essay speaks of his desire for a less cluttered world, where everything beautiful beyond human life could finally thrive — his own life-instincts seem to have been projected onto the non-human.
read the article
And into this category of by-fruits-knowners would fall rather a lot of people, especially those people currently in power. Take the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison. Morrison might not explicitly want his country to be reduced to a permanently blazing apocalyptic hell, he might not make speeches openly in favor of bringing death and punishment to Australia. But his actions, and those of his government, are in fact working to make Australia’s complete devastation by climate change a lot more likely. It is a similar situation with Brazil President Jair Bolsanaro, and his enthusiasm for burning down his country’s rainforests. [...]
And perhaps non-existence, in all its finality, has a certain sort of libidinal appeal. Freud, for instance, identified the “death drive” (or “death instincts”) as being one of the fundamental forces shaping our psychic lives — aside from the life instincts (towards survival, sexual pleasure, and so forth), we all share the “urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, i.e. non-existence. In a sense, then, “the aim of all life is death.” Which can be fine, since any living species eventually has older generations die off — but only if the death instincts are properly balanced with their opposites. If the death instincts ever won out completely, there would be no more life left to speak of (interestingly, Freud speaks of the death drive as a fundamentally “conservative” drive, which seems about right). Knight's own essay speaks of his desire for a less cluttered world, where everything beautiful beyond human life could finally thrive — his own life-instincts seem to have been projected onto the non-human.
read the article
History Today: Pause and Effect
In classical times there were no punctuation marks or spaces between words. Since punctuation determines sense (‘Let’s eat, Grandpa’ versus ‘Let’s eat Grandpa’), scriptio continua allowed scribes to offer their masters a clean text, waiting to be interpreted by those higher up the social ladder. Writing was merely a recording of, or preparation for, speech: any punctuation that was inserted had oratorical, rather than grammatical, functions, indicating the degree of pauses upon delivery only. There was no such thing as reading at first sight. [...]
Over the following centuries, the existing punctuation marks became increasingly differentiated in order to prevent confusion. At the same time, new marks such as the question mark were born, evidencing a need for further distinction of written language. The 15th century saw a boom of inventive punctuation, including the exclamation mark, the semicolon and brackets (or parentheses). New marks arise when a lack of clarity needs to be redressed, communication controlled and sense disambiguated, an emergency perhaps stemming from greater reliance on written diplomacy as well as the newly fashionable art of letter writing. Brackets, for example, first appeared in the 1399 manuscript De nobilitate legum by the Italian humanist Colluccio Salutati. Salutati’s own additions of the marks around certain sentence elements are visible between the text noted down by his secretary.[...]
By the 18th century, English punctuation trod on the spot, having embraced other early modern inventions such as the dash and ellipses, permitting yet more refined ways of interrupting, hesitating and changing of thought. By the 20th century, punctuation had, again, regained its strong connection to speech, although it did not denote an actual guide to performance, but rather imitated how the voice might look on the page. It also came to inspire modernist writers in their exploration of the human mind and the strange ways consciousness moves. At one end stands Ernest Hemingway, whose numerous full stops cut his prose into repressed chiselled parcels of supposedly objective observations; on the other, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, manipulating the lack of punctuation as a representation of the vagaries of thought. One look at the end of Ulysses suffices to see how Joyce imitates the breathlessness of Molly Bloom’s thought pouring out in masturbation-orgasm as she yes comes on unpunctuated strings yes of words ending yes on yes
CNBC: More Americans went to the library than the movies in 2019
The poll is an update to a 2001 survey. While the overall rankings of the eight activities remained the same between the 2001 and 2019 surveys, movies did decrease. Trips to the movie theater dipped 1.3 average visits. This could be attributed to the rise in streaming networks, where box office hits and niche films are available with monthly subscriptions. [...]
Men and woman reported doing most of activities at about the same rate, Gallup says. However, women reported going to the library twice as frequently as men. Men were more likely than women to visit casinos, attend sporting events and visit national or historical parks.
People between the ages 18 to 29 visit the library much more than the other groups. Gallup says this is probably because people in college frequent the library to study. People between the ages 18 to 29 also visits casinos the most.
RareHistoricalPhotos: The last public execution by guillotine, 1939
Rather then react with solemn observance, the crowd behaved rowdily, using handkerchiefs to dab up Weidmann’s blood as souvenirs. Paris-Soir denounced the crowd as “disgusting”, “unruly”, “jostling, clamoring, whistling”. The unruly crowd delayed the execution beyond the usual twilight hour of dawn, enabling clear photographs and one short film to be taken.
After the event the authorities finally came to believe that “far from serving as a deterrent and having salutary effects on the crowds” the public execution “promoted baser instincts of human nature and encouraged general rowdiness and bad behavior”. The “hysterical behavior” by spectators was so scandalous that French president Albert Lebrun immediately banned all future public executions. [...]
Compared to many forms of capital punishment practiced to this day, the guillotine remains one of the best if we are judging based on pain and “cleanness”. In fact, the guillotine was developed with the idea of creating the most humane way to execute people. The condemned don’t feel pain, death is almost instantaneous and there are very few ways for things to be botched. The head of the victim remains alive for about 10-13 seconds, depending on the glucose and blood levels in his brain at the time. However, the head is believed to be more than likely knocked unconscious by the force of the blow and blood loss.
PBS: Dogs poop in alignment with Earth’s magnetic field, study finds
The study suggests that dogs are sensitive to small variations in Earth’s magnetic field. After examining 70 dogs — made up of 37 breeds — over two years, 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations, researchers found that under “calm magnetic field conditions,” dogs preferred to “excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis,” avoiding east-west altogether. Dogs were observed in a free-roaming environment, meaning they were not leashed and not influenced by walls or roads that would influence linear movement. [...]
Why do the dogs prefer the north-south axis and avoid east-west? That was unclear, according to the study: It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it “consciously” (i.e., whether the magnetic field is sensorial perceived (the dogs “see”, “hear” or “smell” the compass direction or perceive it as a haptic stimulus) or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they “feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable” in a certain direction).
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