This essay contends that reading is nothing less than a validation of our shared humanity. However, the author’s joyful reading is increasingly disturbed by the dearth of reading in society at large. Missing is the focused attention on a single passage, unadorned by images, uninterrupted by alerts, unlit by a screen—simply text on paper. But in a world where celebrities appear shinier and happier than anyone in real life, black letters on a white background look like a failure, even aesthetically: too plain, too severe, too boring. For the author, that simplicity is part of the point: letters that do not call attention to themselves but rather to the ideas they signal. Digital media fractures our attention, while reading requires us to maintain focus on something other than ourselves. Reading thus resists two dominant cultural trends: the solipsism of life online and the impulse to move on to whatever is newer, hotter, or simply more outrageous.
The paper focuses on the political serialized writings of one of the greatest Armenian humorists, Ler Gamsar. These series reflect the dire life of the Armenian nation in the first two decades of the 20th century.
They can be considered as chapters of Armenian history written by Ler Gamsar. The author notes that these series narrate well known stories from a different perspective and stresses that the author's piercing eyes have noticed and cold-bloodedly registered what other authors have missed due to either bias or lack of daring.
Gamsar's healthy criticisms basically touch upon the performance of Armenian national leaders, who held responsibility for the nation's destiny. The character of his series are normal people, party activists, mostly known through history books. In certain cases Gamsar personifies the foreign country and develops a dialogue that enables the reader to better understand and interpret the conditions and the situation of the time.
Metapictures are pictures that reflect on the messages of other pictures. For example, the 1971 anti-war poster I Want Out is based on, and disagrees with, the 1917 recruitment poster I Want You by James Montgomery Flagg. Metapictures deserve special attention in illustration because they reveal public intellectual engagement regarding pictures themselves. This article examines case studies, including the iRaq parody of Apple’s branding and Steff Geissbühler’s Peace to demonstrate resistance to the commodification of the image space, where the illustrator functions as an author responding to other creators through visual means. In “The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments,” J. Anthony Blair identified three significant shortcomings of pictures: a lack of disclosure of opposing views, a tendency not to provide evidence, and a susceptibility to ambiguity or vagueness. However, these critiques typically target pictures that must stand alone. This article’s central question asks: Can illustrations referencing other illustrations address these perceived shortcomings? By premising a visual argument on a pre-existing picture, metapictures are better equipped to disclose multiple sides of an argument and provide evidence for a proposition. Illustrators of metapictures tacitly acknowledge the associations of earlier works, contributing to public debate and opening their own work to critique or parody. In this way, illustrators raise their voice in a conversation of visual materials. The visual mode of caricature is further discussed as a sophisticated form of metapicture that relies on shared mental prototypes.
H. Haddad, Stuart Medley· The International Journal of...· 0 citations
What does it mean for an anthropologist to be wrong? This essay takes the question seriously in two registers at once: the everyday mistakes of fieldwork, from mistranslating a greeting to misreading a shaved head as a sign of mourning, and the deeper entitlement through which our discipline claimed authority over other people's languages and lives. Drawing on three decades of learning Nepali and documenting Thangmi with community partners in Nepal, I show how language work makes error unusually visible, and how correction arrives on the speakers' terms rather than the scholar's. Yet, the freedom to admit a mistake is unevenly distributed by race, gender, and rank, and public confession can itself become a performance that leaves authority untouched. Unlike medicine or aviation, anthropology has built no machinery for metabolizing its errors, and our incentive structures reward the appearance of certainty. Being wrong, I argue, is an institutional and political matter, not merely a personal lapse quietly confessed and generously forgiven. A discipline serious about its own fallibility would have to change what counts as a successful career. The task is to move from being right to doing what is right.
Mark Turin· Anthropology and Humanism· 0 citations
Geri Allen once told an interviewer that music is like water, meaning that it was as essential as a life-giving force. Thus, what can we make of the life-giving character of music? It is something that is not easily discernible from a chart, a transcription, or even a recording. Tammy Kernodle's question of “Where do you go?”—posed metaphorically to the pianist—made me curious about Allen's ideas of space and time. In this article, I pay attention to how her ideas challenge conventions of time in jazz and how they contribute to ongoing liberation struggles in the United States.
This volume is a bold and original meditation on how we interpret art, music, and culture—and what it means to listen, see, and feel differently from others. Drawing on Czech history and aesthetics, the book moves from filmmaker Hugo Haas’s coded tributes to his murdered brother, to the haunting ex libris designs of Josef Váchal, to the deeply personal resonances of Schubert’s chamber music, Dvořák’s cello concerto, and Gideon Klein’s tragic Terezín Trio. Across these vivid case studies, the author asks whether meaning in art can ever be shared—or whether it always belongs to the individual observer.