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Evil Mimesis
Professor Timo Airaksinen
(This paper is a full, long version of the paper that will appear in Problemos, Lithuania. The journal is open access. This paper contains all the jokes.)
Irony and sarcasm are common linguistic tropes. I briefly characterize their differences: they are both based on falsehoods that the speaker pretends to be truth. A third trope exists that works when the relevant propositions are true - yet the rhetorical effect resembles irony and sarcasm. I will pay attention to what I call mimetic evil: an agent copies another agent so that the result ridicules him in an unacceptable manner. The image is, in a limited way, true of him and it hurts; we all are vulnerable. I provide a systematic framework for understanding this phenomenon: mocking. Finally, I introduce an idea of universal mimesis and discuss René Girard's theory of desire. He argues that desires are copies of a model. This may not be possible, and I suggest a modification to his famous theory. I pay attention to his idea of mimetic desire as a source of hatred, which is obviously related to what I call here mimetic mocking.
Falsehood as a Rhetorical Tool
Irony and sarcasm are two linguistic tropes whose rhetorical force depends on falsehoods in the conventional sense understood in terms of the correspondence or coherence theory of truth.1 This is to say, truth is a property of a declarative sentence or a proposition. A proposition is true when it fits the world: "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Think of the following ironic and sarcastic propositions:
Irony: "Morally it is wicked." But, "for those who did not get killed or hurt, [it was] very jolly." (W. Churchill)2
Sarcasm: Conscience is your first executioner. (La Mettrie; M. de Sade)3
The first proposition states something that looks false, namely, killing local peasants in the colonies is "jolly." The sentence is somehow less than self-consistent or coherent; hence, when a speaker takes it as if seriously its irony is unintentional; the fact that he does not see the point indicates second level situational or embedded irony. The speech act in toto creates a sinister but comic, or jolly, effect. In an intentional case, the intended audience knows the speaker's predispositions and this makes the ironic effect of the speech act possible. This is free or verbal irony.4 I state something everybody knows is false, and I know that the intended audience knows the relevant truth, therefore the stated falsehood does not count as a lie. What happens is, I call what is bad good. This is a simple but drastic transformation, but this it is what irony, or at least one type of irony, achieves.5 Of course, the use of tropes like irony is infinitely varied among different speech situations. We tend to understand the idea of irony in so many ways, yet this simple true/false transformation looks like a key to the understanding of it. Consider the following:
Irony: Murder and death are the greatest of erotic pleasures. (Bataille; Sade)6
Murder is prima facie bad but now we characterize it as a pleasure, and pleasure is prima facie good: What is bad is now said to be good. You may think the proposition is nonsense, but for an ironist it is false and yet worth saying; in this case the speaker ridicules hedonism. Again, this irony may not be intentional, which makes a verbal report a case of situational, not verbal, irony.
What about sarcasm? I suggest sarcasm is based on making what is good look bad; in this way sarcasm is the structural opposite of irony. However, sarcasm is also based on an obvious falsehood, in the following way: conscience is a good thing, we all agree on this, but then it is called an executioner, which is a monstrous role. Here the speaker, Sade, refers to conscience as if it were a good thing, and yet he calls it bad, or an executioner. He rejects the value of conscience in a cynical manner, or he rejects an obvious value and pretends it not to be a value. Therefore, he dismisses the value knowing perfectly well what he is doing. He says what is valuable is not valuable, which is of course a contradiction and paradox. His intended audience knows this is the case but understands and accepts the speech act as a sarcasm. It looks like a clever one to me.
Mimetic Evil
SETA, or "LGBTI Rights in Finland Society," gave their 2015 Honorary-Rat Anti-Prize to Professor T. P.7 This annual prize goes to the most distinguished homophobic public person in Finland; this is what their official announcement says. Such a statement is insulting, because it states that T. P. in fact is the most homophobic public person in Finland, and their idea of anti-prize is deceptive, or it is no real prize at all: They attack and punish a bad person. If SETA said they gave him a prize, the case would have been ironic, simply because what they call a prize is not a prize but an insult. To call it a prize is to state a falsehood, but here the rhetorical effect requires a falsehood:
Irony: You are a prick (true), therefore the Society wants to give you this prize (false).
Now, SETA has missed the whole point of anti-prizes because anti-prizes should be called prizes in the hope that the ironic effect makes the blow more hurtful to the recipient and more pleasant and amusing to the intended audience of the giver. To transform aggression into a joke is a nice idea, because the audience recognizes the paradoxical transformation as an illusion. This trope works like magic.
How is this related to mimesis? An anti-prize simulates true a prize but in a dishonest manner because an anti-prize is not a prize: yet, it utilizes a mimetic relationship. An anti-prize simulates a prize in many ways, for instance, it is announced in the same way as a prize and the recipient may receive a suitable memento, like a medal and diploma. Alternatively, the giver of the anti-prize may refuse to pretend that it indeed is a prize, which is to miss the ironic potential of the case. The narrative now plays with two separate truths: T. P is a prick and the anti-prize is not a prize. Perhaps Seta does not trust its audience's ability to read the case correctly and understand its ironic potential?
Now, call your anti-prize what it really is, and you directly hurt the recipient; it is like slapping his face. In this case the mimetic relationship between prize and anti-prize disappears because we realize that anti-prize has nothing to do with a prize. The mimetic relationship vanishes when we take the difference between these two types of acknowledgements seriously. However, we need not do so. In the ironic case, Professor T. P. gets a prize, but the prize mocks him. It is true that he gets a prize, but it is given in such a manner that it counts as an insult.8 It is an insult because it is not a prize, although it is called a prize. This is how mockery works via mimesis.9 It exists, it is frequent, and it is evil:
President-elect Donald Trump fired back at Meryl Streep Monday morning after the actress denounced his campaign rhetoric during a speech at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday night. Streep ripped Trump for his obvious mockery of a journalist's physical disability in late 2015, and Trump responded by once again denying that he meant to make fun of the reporter's condition.10
This was Streep's commentary:
"But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hook in my heart not because it was good. It was - there was nothing good about it, but it was effective, and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back.
It kind of broke my heart, and I saw it, and I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate when it's modeled [sic] by someone in the public platform by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing."11
Here we find a nasty trope that does not depend on falsehoods. Mr. Trump was mimicking the handicapped journalist, this is true. And he did it from above, that is, his power advantage was undeniable. However, what he did and said was to the point, and that is why it was so bad, just as Ms. Streep said.12 Mr. Trump successfully imitated the handicapped journalist - it is all true.
The relevant trope here has remained, perhaps, hidden and is certainly much less discussed than irony and sarcasm.13 This is unjustifiable, as I try to show. Let us call this trope mocking. Synonyms are derision, disdain, scorn etc., but mocking is especially suitable because it hints at copying, imitation, and mimicking, that is, to the wide world of mimesis, including simulation and emulation14. Mocking is a type of mimetic evil: one imitates a target in a way that, say, humiliates her. This can be done by means of a speech act but also bodily action. Mocking is not only based on spoken language but also on style, and style characterizes the whole range of human existence and agency. However, if mocking occurs in the field of speech and language, it is based on truth; if it does not, it is accurate or truthful in an extended sense of the term. A non-verbal, actionist mocking plays with the notions like accuracy and faithfulness. Such actions create a suitable simulation.
Here are some simple examples of mocking acts:
Non-linguistic Case: My spoken English has a foreign accent. A native speaker starts imitating me without a good reason, as if for fun.
Linguistic Meaning: "No huge crowd here today," when in fact the place is half empty.
In the second example, what is said is true, but we often call this kind of speech act ironic. Of course, what is said is a hyperbola, but regardless of that, the proposition is true:15 it is not a huge crowd - of course a meiotic strategy may work, too. An ironic version would be: "What an enormous crowd you have here," which is a falsehood.16 The first example above can be read as follows: Because we cannot require linguistic truth, we focus on the accuracy of the mimetic action, which makes the mocking act successful; we may call it truthful, that is, to use a suitable analogy for linguistic truth. Suppose mimicking is truthful. What properties make it bad, say, shameful? The full answer may be coming from psychology and hence it does not belong here. Yet, it is obvious that some features of persons and situations should not be truthfully underlined in public. To mention them may be impolite, but willfully to reproduce them, and thus explicate and emphasize them by means of mimicking, is evil.
Obviously, to mimic is potentially dangerous, although it is difficult to specify why and when. To start answering such questions, let us discuss simulation and emulation. First, let us draw a distinction between them at the same time keeping in mind its stipulative nature:
Emulation: when something more complex mimics less complex. The result is emulacrum as replacement.17
Simulation: when something less complex mimics more complex. The result is simulacrum as model.
Notice that in the examples above, the first one (my broken English) exemplifies emulation. Also, the case of Mr. Trump is emulation, as Ms. Streep's comments make clear: "he outranked [him] in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back." In that sense Trump is a more complex entity in several dimensions, of which only some are relevant here. The third example is more difficult to classify, but perhaps we can call it emulation as well: the more complex "not a big crowd" emulates the simplistic "small crowd." Of course, the distinction between emulation and simulation is not primarily a linguistic one but concerns agents and the outcomes of their actions. We need to pay special attention to action because we are here discussing evil mimesis, and evil resides in actions, including linguistic behavior, or pragmatics.
One can emulate linguistic cases. If I give a philosophy lecture to high school students, I want to emulate their thinking and language, that is, I descend to their level of academic competence, and then I can hope to be successful. I create a suitable emulacrum that works like they work. When you babysit, you need to emulate, in the success sense, baby language and thought, if you hope to do a good job. How to turn this kind of emulation into mockery? For instance, when teaching younger students, my dazzling intelligence shows them how low their level is, I am mocking them; or I as if stay at their level to make it clear it is dismal. I emulate their thought in a way that makes the results humiliating, for instance, they make a mistake and I exaggerate it in a way that they do not want to witness.
The reference to complex and less complex agents must be specified. Complexity functions as a variable: it takes as its value all kinds of positive attributes, or values, like more able, more efficient, of higher functional status, more competent, more complex, and richer in detail. We also can speak of higher and lower status, although is it far from clear how we form such judgements. Despite this, our intuitions seem reasonably clear and stable when we speak about simulation and emulation. I will use the pair more/less complex below, but we must keep on mind that complexity is an umbrella notion. I also speak of value differences between a subject and her target.
Think of a supercomputer emulating a cheap calculator, or artificial intelligence simulating human intelligence, or a president emulating a journalist, or an actor simulating a president. A student simulates the teacher and the teacher may find it useful occasionally to emulate the student. The key point is the variance between a subject and a target in terms of some relevant value. In the first example above, as a non-native speaker, I am a simple target and the mocking agent is a complex subject: this aims at an emulacrum. The result of a mocking act. The subject represents the target via mimicking him. We can call the results jointly as "lacra": all mimetic acts result in lacra, which the target can see in the mirror held by the subject. If the lacra mock the target, if she does not like what she sees, her experience is bound to be painful. The subject is prima facie evil and cruel.
The Power of Simulacra: Girard on Mimesis
René Girard argues that mimesis is a source of serious conflict in social life; that is, all mimesis is problematic in social context regardless of its mocking effects. He does not distinguish between simulation and emulation. He says the subject suffers, when I say the target suffers. Girard may be right, but in the case of mocking the suffering has obvious moral significance, unlike in mimetic behavior simpliciter: the subject suffers independently of the target's intentions. Girard writes, when he describes the subject's attitude towards the target, who is the source of her ideas of desirability and actual desires: 18
The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model - the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred.
Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. The person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by his hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself, he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle [...] Now the mediator is a shrewd and diabolical enemy.19
Girard is hard interpret, and he deserves to be read sympathetically, or not at all. For instance, his "hatred" is a wide umbrella notion, or it names a cluster concept. Alternatively, hatred is used metonymically, or self-hatred is a metaphor.20 The case of a person (target) who somehow prevents another person (subject) from satisfying her desire that is sourced from him, is a special one. Some copied desires are onerous, dangerous, disgusting, perverted, obsession prone, tasteless, criminal etc. I may accuse the mediator of them, and hate him for that.
Girard's idea is that the subject must understand his mediocre status in relation to the target. This sounds strange in the case of emulation, as I use the term, when the subject is, explicitly, better than the target. Perhaps one can suggest the following: The target is worthy of copying, which entails he is stronger, more complex, and more valuable than the subject who must now feel he is somehow reduced in the mimetic process. He becomes a mere simulacrum. Hence, their relationship is not only simulation, but it is also meiotic. The subject now is a mere representation of the target-mediator. The subject's identity is no longer fully his own because a part of it is now borrowed from the other in a diminished form. He is no longer fully himself, or an autonomous person and agent. The subject cannot appreciate the foreign part, or the simulacrum, in himself; he finds it alien to him. Anyway, the simulacrum is a problem for the subject and he may be willing to act violently to the various kinds of threats it represents. If this is so, we may not need an overblown concept of hatred; we can talk about discomfort and anxiety.
Girard has a point, but his approach to the problem may still be incomplete. He only deals with simulation and simulacra, or the situation where the target is more complex than the subject, and thus he fails to see that also the target may feel bad about the mimetic process, or the simulation he stimulates without being able to control it. He may offer himself as a model to be simulated, that is true, but in the role of the target he can never fully control the outcome, or the simulacrum. Anyone who makes himself available for mimicking must recognize her own vulnerability and its associated risks, especially mockery: if the subject hates the target, mockery is an attractive strategy. The target may not like the look of the simulacrum now visible in the subject, and he may even think that his existence is somehow reduced due to the simulacrum; that is, he no longer is a unique individual. He sees his own copies floating around in various positions. Perhaps he is proud of this, this is possible, but he may as well feel reduced and hurt - both cases need their own explanation.
We can combine my theory, which focuses on the suffering of the target, with Girard's theory, which focuses on the subject and her misery. As we may say, mockery is the subject's revenge when he faces the humiliating simulacra resulting from his mimicking the target. Girard claims this is painful and makes the subject hate the target. He cannot truly identify with the simulacrum: he hates himself as a divided personality who now is less than an autonomous agent. Meiosis is painful. His desires are not his own desires; they are representations of the alien other in him - and he knows he cannot correct the situation. What can one do? He can retaliate by mocking the target. The relevant strategy looks obvious: I notice that my person and life contain an alien element and therefore I hate the source of it, that is, the target. I want compensation and therefore I mock him by simulating him in a hyperbolic manner. I believe that this makes him look ridiculous in the eyes of the intended audience, which I hope we share. To achieve this, I mockingly reproduce the alien element in me at the same time making it clear that this displays an image of the target. I make the simulacrum as grotesque as possible, or I use some subtler methods, always depending on what I can afford and what brings about the maximal evil effect. Perhaps a silly representation works well etc. In this way we can, I hope, understand Girard better. If I hate the target, as he says, I must do something about it. Violence is mostly out of the question in modern societies, but many other methods exist, for example mockery, but also irony and sarcasm. Girard, as a Roman Catholic religious thinker and amateur cultural anthropologist, loves the idea of violence.21
The Effects of Mirroring
Girard concentrates on simulation, but we need to study emulation as well. The asymmetric status of the relevant players of the mimetic game influences their reactions to simulacra and emulacra. We can then ask how large this influence is. Let us call the mimetic process of mirroring.22 We should not focus only on intentional and explicit mimesis, which is to say that both the subject and target know what is going on and what they are doing. Tacit mimesis exists as well: I copy a target but she will never know it, or I copy someone as if subconsciously, that is, without recognizing what I am doing. This is what normally happens. Anyway, in the explicit case both parties see themselves and the other as participating in the game of mimesis, perhaps they are unwilling partners but partners they are. The target may offer herself to be copied. Typically, the subject starts the game by initiating mimetic action. If he is not stopped - he can be stopped in various ways - the target is reduced to passivity, indeed, he is the target of the subject's action, say, his gaze. He can then observe his own image in the mirror of the other, an image that is in various ways incomplete and distorted, or perhaps exalted and worthy of glorification.23
Let us investigate simulation first. Here mirroring takes two different forms: the more complex target sees himself in the mirror of the less complex subject who is for her either the other or the Other. To explain: the other is a potentially familiar player and an identifiable agent. He is a person to whom one can relate as a friend, an enemy, or perhaps nobody, yet someone whose description the target knows. The Other is an alien entity, a nebulous object of imagination whose nature and existence one cannot pin down. In some cultures men and women are reciprocal Others, unknowable and unwritten entities who are there but with whom the other party cannot relate in - an ironic sense, some Muslim sects aim at this, and we can find the germs of the idea in Christianity as well.
My fear and subsequent rejection produce the Other whereas attraction diminishes otherness: I focus on her, aim at understanding, and I approach her, which reduces the sense of Otherness until I, if all goes well, meet the Other as another person. Sometimes the Other is a threat, or nightmare, a rejected entity who should not exist, yet the lure of the Other may still be felt.24
An example: if men and women are mutual Others, Drag Culture celebrates this via hyperbolic mimesis in such a way that the differences can be displayed, understood, and manipulated. Say, male Drag Queens mock the womanhood by overdressing and exaggerating the female habitus, as if being female were something bizarre to celebrate. Women can see themselves in mocking light in the mirror Drag Queens hold, yet they may accept all this. It is a show that as if mimics women. I do not attempt to analyze this complex interaction here.
Suppose a subject who simulates the target in a situation where the target recognizes the subject as the Other and watches his mimetic behavior as if in a mirror. What he sees may be malevolent; but whether it is amusing, flattering, or neutral, that is another question. Malevolent simulation qualifies as mockery and is humiliating and irritating, which may lead to conflicts. The subject imitates the target's language and ideas in a mocking way suitable for a less complex party. In fact, it is this very fact that the subject is less complex that makes the case humiliating, think of the Saturday Night Live TV show endlessly mocking President Trump: the very fact that the subject is in no way more complex than the President, makes the mockery even more biting. This I called the revenge of the weaker. In general, the less complex subject is tempted to mock the target and his or her idiosyncratic aspects as if they were weaknesses. The target then sees them in the mirror, which reduces his complexity and minimizes self-worth making the process painful to experience. Notice that mocking behavior is occasional and passing, never permanent and foundational. They mock her and then stop. They intentionally and deliberatively create a simulacrum that hurts and then retreat from the scene - it is hit-and-run. The point is to offer a glance, in the mirror, of the target reduced to the minimum; this emphasize his tacit weaknesses. This case is easy to understand. Yet, the game of hurts works in the opposite direction as well. I mock you and want to show your ugly face in my mirror, but by doing so I come emphasize my own weaknesses, that is, my own reduced complexity. I come to admit my weaknesses, which is painful. Mocking simulation hurts and pains both parties, and as such it is a bitter game whose results are ever so ambiguous and inconclusive. It is impossible to nominate the winner.
Next, let us look at emulation where the more complex subject mimics the less complex target. Suppose the mimicking turns out to be mockery. We now return to the case where a native speaker mockingly mimics, or emulates, my clumsy foreign English accent and perhaps even offers his advice after my sorry performance.25 As I said above, simulation is a bitter game, that is, it hurts both sides. Nevertheless, mocking emulation may allow the subject to celebrate his own complexity and forces the target to recognize himself in a reduced form. The emulacrum in the mirror shows him reduced even more, when compared to the originally weak entity. Strong and successful emulation may make the target vanish: the shame and humiliation are overpowering. The trip from weakness to nothingness is sometimes surprisingly short, as stigmatized targets know.26 The subject enjoys his own performance, which he may claim is justified: I gave a lesson to the target; he should be grateful - note the ambiguity between "lesson" as a metaphor and literal term. But perhaps this is only ironic? The point is, the subject can now play around with his mocking act because he is, after all, the more complex agent. His are the key resources, he is better than the target, and thus he can mock in various ways staying in complete control of the game. The context is hyperbolic. The target has no chance of protesting or countering the emulacrum whose victim he now is. His position is hopeless and as such painful: he is forced to see his already reduced self reduced even more until all he can see are his faults presented in unfavorable light. The target will hate the subject.
Think of this: you are weak and now you are forced to see yourself as an even weaker agent. To speak with an accent is humiliating as such, a stigma. You know all the time that the native speakers may play silent mimetic games around you. This makes you suspicious, sometimes paranoid, from the start. Then the subject makes all this explicit by starting to mock you. In some cases, this is an existential hurt that wounds your heart in a way that you will never forget and forgive. This is partly because you have no chance of countering the insult. Your helplessness in the role of a less complex target is an even more serious matter than linguistic incompetence. You say "bridge" instead of "bride" when you mean "bridegroom," then they all mimic the mistake and they laugh ever so benevolently. This qualifies as a sarcasm. You want revenge till you dying days. In mocking emulation, the winner enjoys both his position and performance. The victim suffers because of his reduced complexity and this suffering may have existential overtones.
Now, in emulation games the subject may, or should, experience himself as pulled down to the level of the weak target, which is humiliating, or self-humiliation - what can we say about this argument? It promises some consolation to the target but is it real? My intuition is that it is not, if we mean a law-like connection between a mocking emulacrum and the subject's feeling of shame and self-humiliation. It happens sometimes for sure but as well it may not happen. We also can suggest that, morally speaking, mocking is an evil act, and thus the subject should feel bad because of moral guilt, but that is another matter. Many immoralities are not described de se, and thus the agent is able bypass them. An ideal moral person does not emulate insultingly, that much is certain, but this is all.
Universal Mimesis and the Problem of Adoption
The Universal Mimesis Game has no single subject because all the players are now subjects and targets at the same time. Social life depends on universal mimesis, as it seems. Yet, as individuals, we do not want to be too dependent on simulacra: we abhor the idea of simulation because we feel it will make us clones. As Girard writes, "Imitative desire is always a desire to be Another."27 Of course, we are no clones because no original master target exists in this nebulous social universe of ours. In this sense, we do not copy any given target but we all copy each other: we all are targets. Does this lead to social uniformity? Why are we afraid of it? We are no copies, because we also are copied, but we are all similar. Girard, when he says we copy our desires, claims that a subject mimics the target as if we could draw a line between these two roles. However, he also seems to recognize the implausibility of this idea. He writes: "Every desire that is revealed can arouse or increase a rival's desire; thus, it is necessary to conceal desire in order to gain possession of the object."28 We can see universal mimesis in action here.
The problem is, if agents copy each other, the lacra start looking more and more uniform. Suppose A has properties x, y, z, and B a, b, c. Copying them tit-for-tat does not make much sense, because in that case A and B only combine their characteristic sets of properties: A and B now share all their desires, which is the end of individuality. Suppose B copies A, further suppose it is simulation, then B ends up having the whole set of properties, which makes him like A. But this is impossible: A was supposed to be more complex than B. Therefore, B cannot copy all of A's properties - because of his relative weakness: B is unable fully to benefit from A's complexity. What if A emulates B: in this case A does not change in any essential way; B's properties may not add anything to A, A does not need B. It is safe to say that simulation leads towards uniformity but not as much as one might initially expect.
If B is too weak to benefit from A's properties; B only can mock them, but this does not benefit B in the sense of making her more valuable in relation to A. Emulation is even more conservative: the complex subject cannot benefit from the simple target in the sense of becoming even more complex. Only if A and B are equals do their property sets converge towards uniformity. The rule is: equals tend to be similar. However, we may safely say such equality is rare, or perhaps impossible, in social life. The idea of A and B being stable equals is fiction.
Girard's approach may be problematic because it operates with a simplified and perhaps invalid idea of mimesis. He seems to say that when A emulates or simulates B, A becomes like B, which dismisses the idea of occasional mirroring. When A simulates B, B sees his own image in the mirror held by A, but this may not change A or B. The point is: two types of mimesis exist, namely occasional and adoptive. In the occasional mirroring case, B only realizes what it is like to appear in the mirror hold by A, and then B drops the project. This is an epistemic case: B learns something about herself by peeping at her own image in the mirror held by A. This is like occasional pretending, which applies equally well to simulation and emulation; mocking belongs to this occasional category. The adoptive case is different: one adopts certain properties of the other, or tries to do that. This may change the agent permanently, but as we already saw, restrictions apply. Prima facie, mimesis creates a lacrum that, from now on, characterizes the subject.
To mimic, whether it is simulation or emulation, does not entail adoption. A subject may witness the target's attractive features and behavior that he wants to simulate, or he simulates it without paying attention to what he does. The subject produces a simulacrum, which is his new style of acting on the social stage; however, he must accept and adopt it before it becomes a part of him. If he does not, the subject only is a platform for the simulacrum that appears in the real world. In the case of mocking action this is clear: the subject plays games with simulacra and hopes, say, to hurt the target. But the subject does not become like the target, on the contrary, he makes it clear that this is not the case. To mimic in order to adopt may not be that common, except, as we might think, in the context of learning something. A pupil simulates her teacher's Japanese pronunciation and this generates a simulacrum. But she must not adopt it as such: it is always defective. He must try again and again. One does not learn by adopting a simulacrum. We need to work on it.
Self-Mockery
The subject, when he mimics, normally assumes that the simulacrum is somehow below the par, and hence she should not accept and adopt it. The common method is to pretend adoption, which is a kind of thought experiment. In other words, the subject tries out in her imagination how it feels to possess the simulacrum and then how it influences her. If she does not want the simulacrum, she still may reject it, deny it, or invent an alternative counter-image. In this way, one fights the threatening uniformities when one adopts too many simulacra from too many targets. We may also rebel against some simulacra and that is bound to produces something new. What about emulacra? When a complex subject makes a good copy of a simple thing, he never has a reason to adopt it. Think about a mathematician explaining a simple geometrical problem to pupils; he has no possible reason to even consider adopting his emulacrum. He does not need it.
Finally, let us consider desires, of which Girard says, we copy them from others. As I said, the problem is, mimesis does not entail acceptance and adoption. What we see are, in others, the simulacra of our own adopted desires, according to the principle of universal mimesis. In the same way, we know that such simulacra loom large in the mirror I hold ready to be considered, accepted, and adopted by others. All this presents a grave danger because uncritical, blind acceptance leads to a reduced set of desires and impoverished culture where the action alternatives get scarcer. Another danger is that we adopt simulacra that are mocking us. A schematic illustration: The target considers a mocking simulacrum that represents him, as produced by a subject, and for some obscure reason accepts and adopts it, and in this way becomes a mocking parody of himself. The principle of universal mimesis tells us that this must happen, when I mimic what I see in the other, even if it is mocking me. 29 Every target is at the same time a subject and some subjects mimic the strangest things. Unintentional self-mocking is not rare. Some people are living parodies of themselves - some hate it, some play with it.
A real-world example illustrates this.30 Think of the fashions world and the people who follow suite dressing how they are expected to dress, or how they think they are expected to appear. This world is all about desire and its realization in action that follows the norms everyone knows exist but no one can explicate or enforce. This is the world of universal mimesis where subjects copy each other, where everyone simultaneously is a target and subject. But this world is at the same time stratified: some targets are more important than others and they aim at the attention and acceptance of the best subjects, yet everyone is a target, however minor. What is nebulous can at the same time be stratified, the idea is that all borders are fuzzy and all control is tentative and camouflaged behind something they call good taste and class, or if this does not sound attractive, at least one wants to be trendy and cool. Many people refuse to be part of it but only the select few can avoid it altogether.
Now, a given subject mimics something like a target he does not quite identify or comprehend, this is a fuzzy target, sometimes a person but mostly an image - created in one's imagination - of what is fashionable, or good taste and classy just now. Many of us work hard to create the right image and then realize it in action, others adopt it just like that, and some do it unconsciously relying on subliminal cues. Of course, professional pushers recommend individual fictional targets as if they were authoritative and even mandatory, but their influence blends in with the cacophony of voices heard from all kinds of sources. What should an individual subject do when he wants to look classy and trendy? Certainly, he simulates his ideal targets but he also may emulate in the sense of dressing down.
All of this is risky business to an individual subject. She is supposed to mimic something that she cannot know in any definite sense. She is supposed to understand the meaning of small differences between targets in contexts where big differences do not exist. Whatever she does, she mimics targets as models that she can handle in various creative ways - normally this is simulation: the subject is less complex than the models, which look infinitely varied, unstable, and complex. The subject is a person when the target is a set of artificial images in constant flux. What is the simulacrum here? It is the subject's appearance as fashionable and trendy, in which role she becomes an aspect of another target. Certainly, such a simulacrum can mock the subject, although one cannot find any agent who would be responsible for this. The subject does it to himself; this is a kind of self-immolation whose effects sting especially hard when the subject does not realize what is going on - perhaps there is a touch of dramatic irony here. His appearance is all wrong, as the audience knows, but he does not realize it. We all know what this is: the subject mimics something that is not at all suitable for him and thus makes himself look like a mongrel in disguise. This may sound exaggerated but not much. The games we play here are dead serious, especially among the teenagers in the richer countries.
In this way, in the world of universal mimesis, we are unable to identify a subject who mocks the target by means of an insulting simulacrum. In this brave new world, one considers a set of imaginary targets that one simulates, thus creating a simulacrum for other subjects to imagine. They may consider and even adopt it, which entails the original subject's success. The effects may be neutral, but the subject also may create a self-mocking lacrum that puts him to a shameful social position.31
We all copy our neighbors but this activity is risky. Some subjects willingly create lacra that we only can call grotesque: ready for a grand dinner ball but too much plastic surgery, too much silicone on the face, too much Botox, too much makeup, overweight, wrinkled, too glitzy clothes, and too much money spent. We all know how they look. Or look at a usual tourist outfit. In this context, emulacra obviously are the most humiliating: they copy a weak target; alas, to adopt the emulacrum may not look good. Perhaps there is no proper target to mimic, which allows too much individual creativity - to put it ironically. Then the simulacrum implicitly mocks the subject, who may well be unable to figure it out, especially when he lives a life where everybody is dedicated to the idea of the grotesque. Of course, one can play the game of fashions more successfully as well: some gay communities have found the way to the flirt with the categories of the leather machismo, female frill, and the ideas of the explosively colorful rainbow culture. Self-mockery can be a rewarding game, but only if you know what you are doing - and, one may add, if you have nothing to lose.
1 Wayne C. Booth writes: "There is no agreement among critics what irony is, and many would hold to the romantic claim [...] that its very spirit and value are violated by the effort to be clear about it." (A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. ix). This sounds ironic. Cf. Kendall L. Walton, "Meiosis, Hyperbole, Irony," Philosophical Studies 174 (2017), 105-120. In what follows, I argue that sarcasm is different from irony. The terms are not synonyms, or it is not true that sarcasm is biting irony; see Sabina Tabacaru, "When Language Bites," Pragmatics and Cognition 24 (2017), 186-211: "the definitions have often been loose and confusing, integrating it [sarcasm] into the concept of irony" (p. 186). Also, mockery may, falsely, count as a type of irony.
2 See F. Mount, "Nasty, Brutish, and Great," The New York Review of Books Vol. LXVI (2019), No 10, p. 22. We can call it the Lovely War Syndrome. This was in India 1897.
3 Originally used without irony by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in his L'homme machine (1747), and then ironically by Sade; see [removed].
4 See Gregory Bryant, "Verbal Irony in the Wild," Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (2011), 291-309; Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, "Pretense and Echo: Towards an Integrated Account of Verbal Irony," International Review of Pragmatics 6 (2014), 127-168; and Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, "Embedding Irony and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction,"
Inquiry 62 (2019), 674-699. See also [removed].
5 See J. Garmendia, "Irony is Critical," Pragmatics and Cognition 18 (2010), 397-421, p. 397. She discusses this very point.
6 "I am joy before death." G. Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939. Tr. A Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 238. Also, G. Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Tr. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001.
7 (https://seta.fi/?s=rotta). But see also, Maria do Mar Pereira, "Dangerous Laughter: The Mocking of Gender Studies in Academia," published in openDemocracy 50.50 [www.opendemocracy/5050.]
8 Bethany Pickering, Dominic Thompson, and Ruth Filik, "Examining the Emotional Impact of Sarcasm Using a Virtual Environment," Metaphor and Symbol 33 (2018), 185-197.
9 Webster Dictionary: The act of mocking, deriding, and exposing to contempt, by mimicry, by insincere imitation, or by a false show of earnestness; a counterfeit appearance. - As I see it, mockery is simply imitation gone awry.
10 This also can be read as a case of dramatic irony that appears in speeches and drama-like situations and is, paradoxically, grasped by the audience unlike the characters in the play; cf. Trump's denial. About the utilization of this special trope, see W. Scott Clifton, "A Notorious Example of Failed Mindreading: Dramatic Irony and the Moral and Epistemic Value of Art," Journal of Aesthetic Education 50 (2016), 73-90; and Peter Goldie, "Dramatic Irony, Narrative, and the External Perspective," Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 60 (2007), 69-84.
11 Washington Post, 9.1.2017. Concerning the damaging effects of mocking, see Robin S. Dillon, "Self‐forgiveness and Self‐respect," Ethics 112 (2001), 53-83.
12 Power relations are essential here: When a member of a powerful group mockingly mimics the whole underprivileged group, this is unethical; but can an underprivileged member mock the powerful? What is the difference? Think of Al Jolson's blackface in the film "The Jazz Singer" (1927). This cannot be simulated today, we do not tolerate it; see A.E. Galeotti, Tolerations as Recognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
13 Cf. Marta Dynel," No Aggression, Only Teasing: The Pragmatics of Teasing and Banter,"
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4/2 (2008), 241-261
14 See he Machiel Keestra, "Diverging Force of Imitation. Integrating Cognitive Science and Hermeneutics," Review of General Psychology 12 (2008), 127-136.
15 The truth here depends on fuzzy thinking: "X is small" and "X is not that big" are both true at the same time because they define partially overlapping fuzzy sets. See B. Kotsko, Fuzzy Thinking. London: Flamingo, 1994; and D. McNeill and P. Freiberger, Fuzzy Logic. New York: Touchstone, 1994.
16 See Kendall L. Walton, "Meiosis, Hyperbole, Irony," Philosophical Studies 174 (2015), 105-120.
17 The dictionary meaning of emulation refers to desire and endeavor to equal or excel others. This is a process notion. In systems theory we encounter a result or success notion: the creation of an existing, complete copy of its target, or a replacement. Hence, the stipulation that, to achieve the goal, the emulating agent must be more complex and capable than the target. However, as the result is a copy, some of its features must identify it as such, this logically entails a difference; see A. Melberg, Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 1. I utilize a special notion of emulation that is derived from systems theory and computational science. An emulator performs the same functions as its target; in other worlds it creates an emulacrum that can replace the object. I apply this idea to the special case where the emulator is more complex than its object. This makes sense especially when we discuss the success notion, less so in the case of process notion. A simple actor may try to emulate the more complex one but with lesser success than a complex one. The latter may expect full success. The simpler actor only creates a simulacrum, or a model. I do not follow Jean Baudrillard usage (Simulacra and Simulation. Ts. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
18 Desire for Girard is a three place relation: Subject - Mediator/Target - Object, see M. Kirwan, Discovering Girard. Lanham: Cowley, 2005,p p. 21, 26. I (subject) want pink suit (object) because John has one (target). I imitate John. See [removed].
19 R. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Tr. Y. Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961, p. 11. Girard writes with flair and romantic passion. His arguments aim at suggestiveness, not clarity of proof. He has a large and varied literary output and many faithful followers. - I only utilize his first and best, or simplest, theory that illustrates what I want to say.
20 See Leonidas Donskis (Forms of Hatred. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), on self-contempt, self-hatred (pp. 240ff.), and self-victimization (pp. 21, 24). Donskis does not recognize any metaphors here, but see p. 3 and odium peccati.
21 For example, René Girard, "Violence in Biblical Narrative," Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999), 387-392. See Ioan Biris, "Religious Violence and the Logic of Weak Thinking: Between R. Girard and G. Vattimo," Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 11 (2012), 171-189.
22 Mind reading is the key term in this context. See Susan L. Hurley, "The Shared Circuits Model. How Control, Mirroring, and Simulation Can Enable Imitation and Mind Reading," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (2008), 1-22
23 Cf. Antonio Valentini, "Ambivalence of the Notion of 'Mimesis': Between the Opening Towards the Other and the Repetition of the Same," Aisthesis. Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell'Estetico 11 (2018), 193-205. Also, Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995: mimesis is always a connecting point of two opposites (p. 1). Mimesis is a crypto-ironic notion.
24 Gabriel Riera, Intrigues: From Being to the Other. Fordham University Press, 2006.
25 Some foreign English accents are widely admired by native speakers, for instance, Georg Henrik von Wright's elegant, aristocratic Finnish-Swedish accent.
26 Ervin Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
27 Girard, 1965, p. 83.
28 Girard, 1965, p. 153.
29 Certainly systematic differences of emulation and simulation play a role here, but this seems like an untraceable problem. See also n. 13 above,
30 An encyclopedic account of real-word copies is H. Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Everything is a copy without an original. Every target I copy already is a copy.
31 Cf. Samir Gandesha, "Nietzsche and the "Self‐mockery of Reason," The European Legacy 3 (1998), 96-108.


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Cultural Controversy, Social Commentary
Rethinking the Black Hero, and Black "His" tory Month
February 25, 2018 by C.
One recurring phrase that dominates much of the discussion surrounding the recently released Black Panther film, is it's function to grant black children an opportunity to "see themselves as super heroes." This assertion is cringeworthy, in part because the movie is birthed from the mind of a racist, and in the overlooked reality that the film comes from a stance that super heroes do not in fact exist.
Black Panther presents viewers with a leader who succeeds his father's throne, rights a persistent wrong, and loves a black woman who possesses an independent commitment to justice. The true hero of the film is Erik Killmonger. Unlike T'Challa he is not given anything, but has seized all that was owed to him. Whichever side you fall on, both men are fictional. The black hero or heroine, however is not.
So my issue with claiming that the film shows us black superheroes, is the implication that life, or the black narrative, has not shown us such heroes. The black trajectory has graced the black collective with countless heroes. Though the tearing of Africans from the womb of Africa, has separated blacks from their pre-enslavement majesty, even the tyranny of enslavement brought us heroes like Nat Turner. Turner, as a name we know, symbolizes the countless other ancestors that were sick and tired, but whose names were too courageous for "his" story. Though nameless, their deeds remain central in a portrait of heroism. Harriet Tubman was a hero. Harriet Tubman is a hero. Ida B. Wells, E. Franklin Fraiser, W.E.B. Dubois, Fanny Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Assata Shakur, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Bobby Hutton, Elaine Brown—the countless black educators and community members who launched and maintain grass root initiatives to advance the black community, are all heroes.
No their clothes are not fancy in the conventional sense, and many of them are far too prodigious to be contained in history books. They do however have superpowers, namely the understated power of courage. They strove not to do the best with what was made available, but to create availability for their people to think outside the permitters of those who thrive in their oppression. They are heroes and sheroes because they opted to color outside the lines of white supremacy for their collective. In relishing in the white man's adaptation of the black hero, the black child is engulfed by white fantasy. The black child is violently nurtured to align a Stan Lee creation with "black panther," not Huey P. Newton, or Bobby Seale. For this reason, the film functions like the beauty industry to the black woman—fictively "providing" the black collective with what they have naturally in a twisted and long-running joke of white supremacy.
A white man's creation has dominated black history month, as an act of terror enabled in the use of the word "his story." Have you every wondered why the SuperBowl, the NBA-All-star game, the grammy's, The Olympics, and President's Day all dominate so called black history month? It is because "his" story will always centralize whiteness. Moreover, blacks are inevitably "foot notes" in "his" or the white man's story— a fact perhaps most evident this year when a white man's creation, made the shortest month of the year even shorter for those of the black collective.
Despite the magnitude of Malcolm X's contribution to the black collective, and this month supposedly being "black history month" Malcolm X was not trending once on February 21st—the 53rd anniversary of his assassination. if you needed any more proof, the media is NOT our friend and has not improved… there it is.
More people have seen Marvel's Black Panther in its first three days, than last year's I am Not Your Negro, a documentary on the late James Baldwin his relationship to the black revolutionary movement of the 50s and 60s. James Baldwin is a hero. His pen was a weapon. His words have saved many, including myself from the ledge of loneliness festered in an anti-black society.
My mentor, a beautiful black queen who educated through scholarship and art, is a shero. She breathed life into the novice ambitions of a diffident young girl, who encouraged me to advance my studies when everyone around me urged me to succumb to mediocrity.
Our heroes are those in our individual and collective communities that do not frequent are wallpapers, or conversations about heroism— illustrating that their is still much work to do in seizing our narrative and self perception, seizing "our" story from "his" tory. Until then, both our factual and fictive portrayals are but a painting within a painting of white fantasy.
Black Power ❤
#blackheroes #blackhistorymonth #race
Black Panther, A Review
Call for Submissions: Resurrecting the "Niggerati" and Wallace Thurman's Fire
6 thoughts on "Rethinking the Black Hero, and Black "His" tory Month"
Benjamin Woolridge says:
Now I see Black Panther in a different light. Your post gives me something think about.
C. C. Saunders says:
I have yet to see the film, but I have heard the same about Killmonger when reading + hearing reviews (from my Black peers). And, from what I've read, the film also illustrates the divide of Africans and African-Americans.
I agree that we need our youth to see and know our real heroes that crawled in the trenches for change. And we definitely need to watch these films with a third eye and understand why they make it onto the big screen in the first place.
Wonderful post! Another CC Classic! I must share on Twitter. Thanks for always providing food fro thought. 🙂
I saw the movie. It's a good movie as far as Marvel movies goes. It wasn't life changing as we know that our history began before Hollywood and there have been so many powerful films that have depicted normal every day people that decided to do something different. That being said, we should encourage our children to know their history and to support all the black films and documentaries that were made – not just Marvel. I LOVED the documentary "I am not your Negro." Baldwin was a badass.
C.C great post!! Our heroes and sheroes are black individuals who answered their calling to counter Racism White Supremacy, these are the true heroes the black males and black females that opposed White Supremacy, that spent their time on planet earth on their assignment to replace the System of Racism White Supremacy with a System of Justice.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The 2018 class of MTC high school interns pose for a final group photo.
Photo: Michael Short Not labeled for reuse. All rights reserved.
The 2018 class of MTC high school interns pose for a final group photo with their professional mentors.
Not labeled for reuse. All rights reserved.
The students worked together over the summer to develop presentations.
The interns created their own team names and logos for their final presentations.
Interns deliver their final presentations at the Bay Area Metro Center.
Brad Paul, MTC Deputy Executive Director, Local Government Services, was the keynote speaker at the event.
MTC celebrated the completion of the 18th year of its summer high school internship program on August 10, 2018, at the Bay Area Metro Center. The students worked in agencies across the Bay Area's nine counties this summer, with placement coordination and funding provided by MTC. This year's class of 34 interns worked in 28 agencies throughout the region.
The internship program was created in 2000 to expose students who would not typically consider careers in the field of transportation—especially women and minorities—to the many types of jobs available in the field. It has become quite prestigious in the 18 years since its inception, with hundreds of applicants competing for the available internship positions.


In this dissertation, we study the control of near-integrable systems. A near-integrable system is one whose phase space has a similar structure to an integrable system during short time periods and for some parameter regime. We begin by studying the control of integrable Hamiltonian systems. The controller targets an exact solution to the integrable system using dissipative and conservative terms. We find that a Takens-Bogdanov bifurcation occurs in the limit of no dissipative control. The presence of a Takens-Bogdanov bifurcation implies that the control is highly susceptible to noise. We illustrate our results using a two- and four-dimensional integrable systems generated by low order truncations of solutions to the nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLS). We then extend our results to a near-integrable system related to the NLS; the Ginzburg-Landau equation. We attempt to control the Ginzburg-Landau equation to a plane wave solution of the NLS. We show that for a certain parameter regime; a Takens-Bogdanov bifurcation occurs in the limit of no dissipative control. Through this example, we show that solutions of integrable systems can be viable control targets for related near-integrable systems.
Kulp, Christopher W., "Control of integrable Hamiltonian systems and degenerate bifurcations" (2004). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623443.


For the last year or so I've been using an old Linksys WRT54G router running the open-source DD-WRT software. This was particularly useful when it was operating as a wireless repeater, but it hasn't done too well as a stand alone router. The truth is, the "G" has only 8MB of RAM… only half the amount of the more popular WRT54GL. I regularly experienced "drop-outs" and "lock-outs", and rebooting was a nightly, sometimes hourly occurence.
Despite being under $90, the Asus RT-N16 it packs a lot of features. It has 128MB of ram, USB ports, b/g/n, and more. It is supported by DD-WRT, and has an excellent reputation on NewEgg. Here are the details.
Set-up was a breeze. I took it straight from the box and flashed it with the recommended DD-WRT build, which took a little over half an hour following these easy instructions. I then set up the wifi and other settings and swapped it in for the old Linksys. It's already working great! It has had no problem maintaining connections from several devices while streaming Netflix on yet another.
Check out these other shots I snapped during the install!


text:
San Ramon Valley residents protest to defend women's reproductive rights
Jennifer Sheng and Praneetha Bhogi • October 19, 2021
The Mississippi abortion law, followed by the Texas abortion law, threatened women's decisions about their own bodies and led to nationwide protests, one of them being the Women's March held in Danville,...
San Ramon General Plan update outlines the future of the city
Sneha Cheenath, Editor in Chief • May 28, 2021
The San Ramon City Council approved the annual general plan progress report on March 23, which largely showed that the city has made steady progress on its goals. The general plan is a comprehensive...
Conservative students urge for open discussions in the classroom
Lauren Chen, Amrita Himmatraopet, and Drishti Upadhyaya • April 9, 2021
Content Warning: This article contains brief mentions of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments. "After I [opened up about being] conservative, I got doxxed, cyberbullied, and my house got egged four times. I've...
A comprehensive guide to the California State Legislature
Sneha Cheenath, Editor in Chief • March 26, 2021
The California State Legislature is a governing body made up of two chambers: the Senate and the Assembly. The Assembly is the lower chamber, meaning that assembly members generally have fewer constituents. The...
#EndSARS Protests in Nigeria usher in a new era of police accountability
Aditi Praveen • December 8, 2020
On Oct. 3, a video circulated on Twitter, and eventually became viral, of a young Nigerian man being brutally shot by a SARS officer. Over a period of five days, the video amassed 10,000 retweets, with...
Tribune handy guide to ballot propositions
Daniela Wise-Rojas, Aditi Praveen, Aditi Lappathi, Sarah Han, and Boomika Velineni • October 30, 2020
What are ballot propositions? Ballot propositions, also known as ballot measures, are laws, issues or questions that appear on a state or local ballot. In order to change a state constitution,...
RBG leaves behind a legacy of profound dissents in the face of societal injustices
Daniela Wise-Rojas, Social Media Editor • October 29, 2020
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to be appointed to the court, passed on Sept.18, 2020 at her home in Washington D.C. She passed from complications of metastatic pancreatic...
Amy Coney Barrett's record may present a threat to American LGBTQ+ rights
Aditi Praveen • October 26, 2020
Update: This article was written prior to Judge Barrett's confirmation to the United States Supreme Court. On Oct. 26, Judge Barrett was sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas in a White House ceremony after...
India and China border dispute re-ignites after Indian soldiers killed on the Himalayan mountain top
Ananda Mayuri Chakkenchath and Soham Kinhikar • October 26, 2020
Indian Armed Forces and the Chinese People's Liberation Army faced off in deadly clashes in the Himalayan region of Ladakh in June of this year; a continuation of the series of armed standoffs along the...
A snapshot of the unheard experiences and stories of Black students in SRVUSD
Daniela Wise-Rojas and Shereen Ahmed • October 25, 2020
TW: This article contains mentions of rape, sexual assault, and abuse. Racism is a persistent problem all over the country, considering there is no succinct way to address it. As perfect as SRVUSD schools...
Revealing the truth of Trump's tax returns
Megan Dhillon and Sarah Han • October 25, 2020
This September, President Trump's tax returns became publicized after years of keeping it private. After Trump kept his tax records a secret for almost 15 years, the New York Times announced that President...
The Tribune's Guide to the San Ramon Mayoral Candidates
Eva Shen and Aditi Praveen • October 23, 2020
View the full spread here Aparna Madireddi Favorite place to spend time in San Ramon: Forest Home Farms, Bishop Ranch Regional Preserve, Central Park On embracing diversity: Madireddi is a founding...


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text:
Towns, Villages, Hamlets
Hotels, B&Bs, Farms, Cottages
Castles, Beaches, Farms
Abbeys, Churches & Priories
Bridges & TunnelsTrains & RailwaysAbbeys, Churches & PrioriesMonuments & MemorialsCastles & FortificationsWindmills & MillsHouses & HallsHistorical SitesFootball Stadiums
St Mary's Church, Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire
Pinchbeck is a village and civil parish in the South Holland district of the county. It is situated 2 miles (3.2 km) north from the centre of Spalding.
The most impressive Anglican church is dedicated to Saint Mary. It was built during the 11th century and features a wide nave with mid 12th century arches. There is a 15th century single hammer beam roof supported by large gilded angels carrying the heraldic escutcheons of the Pinchbeck family.
One of the highlights of the year is the annual Flower Festival, held on the first weekend in May and running in conjunction with the Spalding Flower Parade. During the event, this fine medieval church is fully decorated with floral displays and welcomes visitors from near and far.
www.glengroup.org.uk
Pinchbeck
PE11 3UA
More information on Pinchbeck
Find places to stay nearby...
Find other things to do nearby...
Lincolnshire Tourism Guide
Resorts & Parks
Lodges & Cabins
Adventure & Leisure
Festivals & Shopping
© 2020 Lincolnshire Tourism Guide
© 2020 Lincolnshire Tourism Guide.


text:
Jory Woodis: Timing Is Everything
Shelly Gallichio
Artist Profiles, Quarter Notes
In October of 2019, we saw Jory Woodis, a young clarinetist at Fritzel's who had a captivating sound and personality. Later we saw him at Palm Court, so I introduced myself and met his wife, Brittney. We saw them several other times during that visit at my favorite places. Then in January, Jory attended the Jazz Education Network conference in New Orleans and we ran into him again several more times and met his mentor, Dr. Steve Call, he of Jazz For Cows fame. He mentioned that he and Brittney were definitely planning to move there and were looking at homes. He was lining up some gigs for March and April, so the clock was ticking.
I sent an email during the beginning of the lockdown and assumed their plans were on "hold" but they were way ahead of me. They had already bought and closed on a home (with a planned rental unit), moved lock, stock, and barrel across the country and while traveling, were informed his gigs had dissolved. Brittney secured a position with Oschner Medical Center and they hoped their month-long delayed belongings would be arriving soon. But he told me "we're facing each challenge with a smile because we're now residents of the Big Easy!"
Shelly Gallichio: Where are you from and how did you get from there to New Orleans?
Jory Woodis: I grew up in Cowley, Wyoming. It is a small farming town comprised of 500 people. It was a wonderful place to grow up. I had terrific friends and had so much fun playing in cornfields, riding bikes all over town with reckless abandon: we knew the town like the back of our hands and basically had the run of it as 7 year olds. We knew all the alleys and yards we could cut through. We knew which houses had people who would trade us candy for interesting rocks that we found, though we often would just collect pieces of gravel for them if we were particularly mischievous. We collected discarded bottle caps from behind the town bar and used them as currency with other kids in the town. It was a fabulous place to grow up, and I had as good of a childhood there as anyone ever has.
Our town was so small (less than one square mile) that we only had one elementary school, grades K-5. We had one teacher per grade, and each grade had less than 15 students. My particular class only had seven other kids in it! My second grade teacher had a piano in her classroom, and nearly every day we would sing songs and she would play. She had a collection of songs that we would use to memorize state capitals, presidents, arithmetic, etc. I always gravitated towards these lessons and would watch her play in fascination and adoration anytime we would sing. We also had a great elementary music program led by Janet Palmer. I loved playing the percussion instruments in her class and singing in the choir.
I was interested in music at an early age because my Grandfather, "Grandpa John" on my mother's side, loved jazz music and would bring over cassette tapes of the Dukes of Dixieland, Glenn Miller, and the Benny Goodman Orchestra. I used to sit and listen to the polyphony of the front line and was absolutely enamored with the blisteringly fast arpeggiations of the clarinet in the Dukes of Dixieland recordings. There was a part of me that knew on some level that was exactly what I wanted to do.
Jory Woodis and his son Benny onstage (photo by Lex B. Anderson)
At the very least, it developed a fascination that stuck with me, same thing with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Benny Goodman. I loved listening to the saxophone section, and constantly listened to the tapes that Grandpa gave me. Grandpa John was a fine ragtime pianist and would come and play stride piano "arrangements" of my favorite Disney songs. As I got older I would sit on the piano bench with him and sing my little heart out.
I started Middle School at Rocky Mountain Middle School in Deaver, Wyoming. By this point, we combined with four other towns and my class had a whopping 37 students. I came from a very musical family, and I knew that I wanted to play in the band. My other grandpa, Bob Rebello, was a very fine pianist and accordion player with perfect pitch and gigged very frequently all over Wyoming. My aunt, Jill Woodis Scanlan, was a trumpet player and a High School music teacher.
I also had a distant cousin (Teddy Deane) who was quite a bit older than me and a wonderful professional saxophonist on the West Coast. I had met him only a few times, but had grown up listening to his recordings at my great grandparents' house. Because of my cousin's influence (he was awesome and that seemed very cool to me), my heart was absolutely set on playing the saxophone. I attended summer music camp and was terrified that I wouldn't get a saxophone. Being a popular instrument, they eventually ran out.
My teacher (the wonderful Christine Olson who I adore so much), sensed my panic/heartbreak and was able to get one from the High School for me, but it didn't have a mouthpiece. These were the days before Amazon, and remember that we were from a very small town so I couldn't just go over to a music store: I had to wait several days for her to come up with one (don't ask me where she got it)! I would sit in band class and finger along with the rest of the band, and I would take it home every day and watch myself "play it" in the mirror. Man, did I look cool.
By the time I got my mouthpiece, I had most of the songs memorized that we were playing in band camp and already knew 4-5 scales. She quickly noticed my explosive interest, and after I had only played for a few weeks and could play all of my scales in under 1 minute with no mistakes (and thereby joining the "Under a Minute Club" which was the highest of honors a young RMMS Grizzly could achieve), she called my parents and encouraged them to sign me up for lessons with her husband, a fantastic teacher, player, and bandleader, Craig Olson.
We were hard up for money and really any amount that it would cost represented a great sacrifice for our little family. My parents were divorced and both worked, and so they enlisted the help of uncles, grandparents, and even other teachers at the Middle School to drive me to my lessons (30 miles away) each week. My teacher, Craig, knowing our financial condition, taught me for something like $5 a lesson.
He was from Southern California and was a very good saxophone player and teacher who happened to have ended up in Powell, Wyoming. I could not have been luckier. What are the odds that such a great player would have ended up there?
I had a cassette tape recorder that I would take to my lessons. My saxophone teacher would play accompaniment on his Fender Rhodes (electric piano) at my lesson, then I would take the tapes home and play along with them, my own homemade play-alongs before I knew about play-alongs. I was always hungry for more, so I also would go to my piano and transcribe his piano playing. To this day I can still play his "parts" from those tapes he recorded. The first song we worked on was "Bessie's Blues" by John Coltrane. We also worked on "There Will Never Be Another You," "Footprints," "Freddie Freeloader," "Up Jumped Spring," and many, many other jazz standards.
I soaked up every minute of my lessons and I practiced every day for hours after school! I got home at 3:30 every day but my Mom didn't get home until 5:30, so I would walk in the door and basically do nothing but play saxophone until my Mom got home.
I had many good experiences as an appendage to my relationship with him. He had a dance orchestra (three saxophones, trumpet, and a rhythm section) that gigged from four to ten nights a month. When I turned 16, the tenor saxophone player he used moved away, and he called me and said that he needed a tenor player. I was an alto player, but I could use his horn for the gigs. He had a great book of 200+ songs: representing everything from Glenn Miller to Billy Joel.
It was an amazing professional experience that I was lucky to get: showing up on time, ironing my shirt (he had to get after me a lot for that one!), sight reading, setting up the band and band fronts, wrapping mic cables, blowing solos on nearly every song, etc. We played in bars, events, conventions, you name it.
Whenever we played in a bar, I'd go in the back door and kind of lay low so as not to draw attention to the 16 year-old playing in the band. The band had great players with several professors from the local community college, local music teachers, etc. I truly had a great time (and got to make $400-1000 a month as a dopey kid playing music on the weekends in Northern Wyoming)!
Somewhere around my eighth grade year, I made some lifelong friends. Matt Tippetts (dr), Alex Nauman (gtr), and Chris Larsen (bs). We all lived in different towns, but we met every week religiously for years in Matt's garage, thanks to his parents, Dean and Teddy. We wrote and arranged songs, burned CD's for each other, rehearsed, and just played.
We got pretty good and started hustling gigs for ourselves: we played at local talent shows, dances, parades, nursing homes, weddings, coffee shops and restaurants. I learned so many tunes with them, and we learned how to go out and make it happen for ourselves. We all had business cards we would hand out at gigs that Matt made for us.
We even recorded an album at the community college. Alex transcribed all of the arrangements from an entire "Brecker Brothers" album and we organized this big show at the Elks lodge where we played a tribute to that album. We even got a film crew and a sound crew to come and video and record it (four cameras!) which Matt edited into a DVD. It was awesome!!! For the record, this band was called "TUCOSMI", which was an acronym: "The Unintentional Culmination of Spontaneous Musical Insights" which we found quite clever and funny!
I also had a great High School Band Director, Todd Rosenberger, who was very cool and very encouraging. He created a lot of opportunities for me. Often I would be the only one from our school attending an event (like All-State Jazz Band for instance) and he would take two to three days off of teaching to drive me in the school suburban across the state so I could participate. I loved jamming with him nearly every day through high school, and working on recording and video projects with him. He gave me a lot of technological instruction that without, I wouldn't have been able to make our Breakfast at Benny's videos.
I eventually went to BYU on a full scholarship. I attended for six years having twice changed majors. I had gotten married to a fellow saxophone player, and I had been dealing with anxiety and depression. I gained a lot of weight and couldn't fit into the seats anymore, and so I eventually dropped out. I was first a music education major, then a classical saxophone performance major. My wife transferred to the University of Utah, and switched from saxophone performance to Nursing.
Long story short, she graduated, we got pregnant. At this point, I couldn't stand up on my own if I was sitting on the ground. I couldn't walk for longer than a block without my chronic back problems flaring up. We were pregnant and it hit me that if I couldn't even stand on my own, how was I going to be a good daddy, and teach him to play catch, throw him in the air, etc.
Jory Woodis with his wife Brittney and son Benny.
So I got my act together and lost 200 pounds and trained for a marathon for a year! With my new lease on life, I returned to school full time and finished my undergraduate degree at Utah Valley University (where I taught as the saxophone professor for four years) in April 2020, a degree that I began in 2004.
While at BYU I had the opportunity to play in the "Jazz Legacy Band," a traditional jazz band led by Dr. Steve Call. He knows more about the history of Jazz than anyone I have ever met, and he re-ignited my interest and passion for traditional jazz. I started playing clarinet again in about 2009/2010 (I hadn't played since high school in 2004). I was so bad at the clarinet, but he let me in the band because I could improvise, with the hopes that the clarinet aspect would come later. I became enraptured by traditional jazz as I studied with a master.
Additionally, as members of the band became so close, we all moved in and lived together for 2 years. We traveled with the band to Sacramento every year to play for the Sacramento State Traditional Jazz Youth Band Festival, where I won the Reeds award every year, as well as the "Most Outstanding Collegiate Musician" award (only one recipient per year) which came with a $500 cash prize. Our band won every category every year we attended under Dr. Call's masterful direction. He taught us dozens of tunes and taught us how to improvise in the style, and to play New Orleans Polyphony. He taught us everything and was amazing. I owe so much to him!
Describe your experiences in moving to the Big Easy and how were you helped in making the decision to move to New Orleans?
I wanted to move to the Big Easy after touring New Orleans with the BYU Jazz Legacy band in 2015. I had an amazing experience, and came home absolutely aglow. Brittney said "I wish I had gone" so we sat down right then (literally the day I got home) and booked plane tickets for ourselves. She also fell in love with the city and suggested that we move there. I didn't dare to dream that she was serious, but she was! So we had it in the back of our minds that one day we would.
In the meantime, I continued my obsession with clarinet and N.O. Jazz. I essentially phased out playing the saxophone, and started getting called for clarinet gigs all over Utah, and sort of became the "New Orleans Guy." I had a N.O. band, and played in a couple of others, and eventually started playing in an absolutely fabulous Gypsy Jazz Band based in Salt Lake City: "Hot House West."
We played mostly Django music, but there is a lot of crossover and we played plenty of New Orleans music too. I became so busy playing traditional jazz clarinet gigs that I couldn't take the saxophone gigs anymore! So I was the adjunct saxophone professor at two universities (Utah Valley University and Snow College) while only playing four or five gigs on saxophone per year, but playing 75 to 100 nights on clarinet!
I was attending UVU in 2019-2020. We were considering my doing a Master's degree in New Orleans, and Brittney and I came out in Oct. 2019 during my fall break to tour campuses. We wanted to move to N.O. and had decided to use graduate school as an "excuse" to move here. Anyway, while here, we met up with Kevin Ray Clark, the leader of the DUKES (our BYU band had come and sat in with the DUKES in 2015 and I added him on Facebook), and he invited me to sit in with the DUKES that night. I was shaking, partially because there was a chilly breeze on the boat and partially because I was so nervous!
DUKES of Dixieland leader Kevin Clark with Jory Woodis.
(Courtesy Jory Woodis)
Anyway he liked my playing and I ended up sitting in the whole hour. He invited me to Fritzel's that evening and I played about three hours with him there. Then he invited Brittney and me to breakfast, and we told him all about how we really wanted to move there, and how I had grown up listening to the original Dukes, etc. We hung out with him for two or three hours that morning and I went and played with him again at Fritzels that night. We promised to stay in touch.
About a month later, he called and said that they were forming a "DUKES Sub Band" to play every Wednesday night so the members of the DUKES could have a night off. Would I like to take it? I just about died. I called Brittney and woke her up (she is a night shift nurse) and she was surprised – "Why did you even call me? Call him back and tell him YES!" so I did.
The problem was, I was in school full time until April, and they wanted me to start in March. I approached the head of the UVU music department, Tom Keck (who I adore with my whole heart) and he moved mountains to enable me to graduate six weeks early. Ironically, the pandemic hit on my drive to New Orleans from Utah, and I ended up having to complete all the coursework normally as all of the campus had moved to online classes, so in some cases, I did double the work!
You mentioned some of the musicians in your family, are there others? What do they play and now how many instruments do you play?
Yes! My brother (ten years younger) is a music major at MSU-Billings, (tenor saxophone and piano). My sister studied piano and clarinet as a child. My Mom plays piano and sings harmony with the radio like an angel; I was always blown away by how she could sing harmony to any song she heard!
My Dad does not play anything, but loves listening to music, and has vastly different tastes from me, but there are few things I loved more as a kid than listening to Glen Campbell, the Allman Brothers, The Blues Brothers Soundtracks, Reba McEntire, etc., with my Dad in his car, singing at the top of our lungs. I still love those songs, and I have a playlist called "Dad Music" with all our favorite songs that I still love to listen to.
I play piano, saxophone (mostly alto, but also soprano and tenor), clarinet, and some flute. My wife is an amazing classical saxophonist (she has soloed with the Utah Symphony, has gigged with Hugh Jackman and Bernadette Peters), and a very fine clarinetist and flutist. She also is a high level classical pianist and fills our house with Rachmaninoff, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I adore her musicianship and nothing brings me more joy than to hear her play.
Do you remember the first tune you ever performed in public?
This is a hard question to answer! Short answer is "no." I played some piano recitals and junior high band concerts as a kid, but my first "gig" was sitting in for the night with my teachers dance orchestra when I was in seventh grade at "Cassies Bar and Grill" in Cody, Wyoming.
I remember ordering a 7 Up at the bar and was so proud to not have to pay for it: "I'm with the Band" I said just as cool as I could be. It became a family inside jokes for years to this day because I bounced up to the bar several times with a giant grin on my face, to claim my "free 7 Up" after "free 7 Up" the whole night!
How is the current situation affecting your family and how is Brittney coping at Oschner in view of this turmoil?
The first few weeks here were scary, Brittney was new to the ICU (she was a cardiac nurse in Utah) and so was learning many new skills, while at the same time having to wear nightmare PPE because of the national shortage. I would lie in bed when we moved here and just be filled with dread and toss and turn because I was sure we were all going to get sick and die. It created no end of anxiety in our family to have her there every day.
Describe your delightful Breakfast at Benny's series and how many have you completed—who are some of the special guests and how are you encouraging their participation?
We haven't done this for a while, but I want to start it up again so badly!
It all started when I wanted to practice more (as a full time Daddy with a full time working woman, I didn't have a lot of time to myself!) so I would play for Benny while he ate his meals. He loved it so I started videoing it for my Mom and Dad, and my wife's parents. They encouraged me to post them so I posted a couple. I would get 1000+ views on Facebook so I was like "Hmmmm, maybe I've got something here?" so I invited a friend to come and do it with me. It kind of spiraled from there. Breakfast at Benny's was born.
Jory's delightful videos may be seen at breakfastatbennys.com.
I essentially asked my best friends to play with me, and then I started having people reach out to me and offer to play! Basically, Benny sits in his high chair and eats his breakfast while he is surrounded by great music, lucky kid! We get a lot of views on Facebook (10,000+ on many videos) but I haven't figured out YouTube yet. We get a few hundred to 1000 views on YouTube as of now. You can check it out on Facebook, or at www.breakfastatbennys.com.
What are some of your fondest musical memories: in your home or your neighborhood?
I loved listening to music with my Dad and Mom and playing with my TUCOSMI group as a kid, and loved playing in my little saxophone quartet I had in middle school and high school. I also loved playing with all the BYU groups; while at BYU I was invited to be a featured soloist with nearly every major ensemble. I even was invited to play a five movement concerto with the BYU Chamber Orchestra: I was the first saxophonist to be invited to play a concerto with that group since my Professor Ray Smith had been a student decades before; in fact we even played the same piece.
I also need to mention playing with BYU Synthesis (led by my saxophone teacher, mentor, and dear friend, the great Ray Smith), BYU's amazing Big Band. We were named in 2013 the "Best Collegiate Big Band" by Downbeat magazine. I played lead alto in the group, and met my wife there! She played second alto. We became best friends during the school year, then that summer we went to Brazil for a month and we fell in love on that tour. That's probably my favorite musical memory, falling in love with my now wife while we played in an amazing Big Band together! I have also traveled all over Europe with the BYU Wind Symphony.
Who are some of your favorite musicians and who do you admire?
Favorite saxophonists: I love Cannonball Adderly, Scott Hamilton, and Phil Woods (I could go on and on but those are my absolute favorites). As far as clarinetists go: Benny Goodman by a long shot, I mean, we named our Benny after him!
I also adore Pete Fountain, Evan Christopher, Tim Laughlin, Omer Simeon, and Bob Draga. We just haven't had enough sons to name after them yet! However, after reading this, Brittney wants me to add that we are absolutely NOT naming a son Omer. Sorry Omer, I still love your playing! I also love Tom Fischer's playing! I finally met him on my most recent trip to New Orleans. There are so many fine musicians here!
How are you practicing while under current constraints against personal performances; with others or solo?
I hardly get to play with other people anymore. Kevin Ray Clark does a fabulous live stream every week (though it's now every other week) where we play on his porch. I also got to travel to Crested Butte Colorado to play at the fabulous "Crested Butte Music Festival" for a week in August. Other than that, I am practicing two to four hours a day all by my lonesome (which to be honest has been enjoyable). I would love to be playing with other musicians, but being the "new guy" in New Orleans, I have a lot of homework to do, and am realizing every time I play how much there is to learn.
I am transcribing and learning tunes at a rate that is much faster than I ever have. I am also doing a project (getting ready for a master's degree) where I am attempting to transcribe all of the Benny Goodman Trio/Quartet recordings. I have transcribed and written down somewhere around 20 tracks. I would love to publish a "Complete Benny Goodman Small Group Anthology" one day, but for now, I am focusing on learning the arrangements, and getting ready for things to open up again so I can start playing them! My dream is to play solo sets at Traditional Jazz festivals, so I'm working on developing festival sets made up of those tunes, originals, etc.
Describe your hopes and intentions for the foreseeable future and which local musicians are providing current inspiration?
No recording sessions, but lots and lots of porch concerts! It is so hard being the "new guy" here while everything is shut down. I'm meeting more and more people all the time through these porch concerts, but it's not the same as being in the Quarter sitting in every night! So as things start to roll out and they start playing again, I'm going to have to figure out how to carve out a place for myself, as there are dozens of musicians (maybe hundreds?) that I still need to meet!
I was very impressed the first time I heard Jory play. Within a few minutes I was astounded at his improvisational skills in the immediate settings of the New Orleans venues; no rehearsals, no warm-ups with only "come on up here and play with us" shouts from the band leader. He was phenomenal! That type of talent and enthusiasm amongst the musicians is what I most admire and seek in live jazz—I hope to get back to more experiences with it soon.
After 48-1/2 years, Shelly Gallichio is a retired Real Estate Associate Broker in Tucson, Arizona and despite growing up in Chicago, fell in love with the clarinet and the New Orleans sound at the age of three—she intends to spend the next 48-1/2 years seeking that sound! Reach her at [email protected]


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