Gay urges welled up across Europe during the Romantic era; France, in particular, became a haven, since statutes forbidding sodomy had disappeared from its books during the Revolutionary period, reflecting a distaste for law based on religious belief. The Germans, though, were singularly ready to utter the unspeakable. Schopenhauer took a special interest in the complexities of sexuality; in a commentary added in 1859 to the third edition of “The World as Will and Representation,” he offered a notably mellow view of what he called “pederasty,” saying that it was present in every culture. “It arises in some way from human nature itself,” he said, and there was no point in opposing it. (He cited Horace: “Expel nature with a pitchfork, she still comes back.”) Schopenhauer proceeded to expound the dubious theory that nature promoted homosexuality in older men as a way of discouraging them from continuing to procreate.
Not surprisingly, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs seized on Schopenhauer’s curious piece of advocacy when he began his campaign; he quoted the philosopher in one of his coming-out letters to his relatives. Ulrichs might also have mentioned Wagner, who, in “Die Walküre” and “Tristan und Isolde,” depicted illicit passions that many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals saw as allegories for their own experience. Magnus Hirschfeld, in his 1914 book “The Homosexuality of Men and Women,” noted that the Wagner festival in Bayreuth had become a “favorite meeting place” for homosexuals, and quoted a classified ad, from 1894, in which a young man had sought a handsome companion for a Tyrolean bicycling expedition; it was signed “Numa 77, general delivery, Bayreuth.” Ulrichs had published his early pamphlets under the pseudonym Numa Numantius.
In the epilogue to Laurence Dreyfus’s study of Wagner’s erotics, he writes, “It is clear that Wagner’s devotion to depictions of sexual desire was exceedingly unconventional, indeed unprecedented in the history of art.”2 This is certainly because his belief that the repression of female sexual desire as one of the big ills of society was very unconventional. Eva Rieger called the depiction of female sexual desire via Isolde “all but revolutionary.”3 I have covered all this in the posts I referenced above, but I want to make one clear point: all his female characters exhibited very strong desire, including the “virginal” ones such as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser. This was particularly subversive to the dominant sexual culture.
Women–“respectable women”–flocked to hear Wagner’s works, and were among his strongest, most consistent supporters.4 And, while they didn’t scream à la Beatlemania, there were repeated reports of audience members—mostly women or gay men—fainting, having sobbing fits and other sorts of delirium.5 This outsized reaction to him made his critics react in horror, seeing his work as both a manifestation of illness, and a cause of it. They deemed—with their own brand of hysteria— that Wagner seduced the women (and gay men) to mental disease through his over-wrought music. He was damned as degenerate—just as critics damned rock ’n rollers in the same way. Nonetheless, Wagner won the cultural battle—at least for a time—as a large share of the intelligentsia reacted by embracing him, and Wagnerism was born.
Wagner’s stunning popularity and vast influence (as I wrote about here) opened
the floodgates to much more sexual expressiveness in music and, for that matter, all art. He got away with it, so others now fearlessly followed in his path. In this way, he both directly and indirectly influenced the cultural perception of sexuality. The acceleration of trends towards more open sexuality of the fin de sìecle period, particularly within Germany, France and England, can certainly be traced directly to Wagner.
When Hitler, who was a financial supporter of the Bayreuth Festival, could no longer publicly endorse Lorenz, it was Siegfried’s wife Winifred who used her influence to rescue Bayreuth’s star heldentenor from public disgrace, exile and possible imprisonment over a charge of homosexuality.Well, I didn't know that...
Most historians concede that Hitler and Winnifred (below) carried on an affair after Siegfried’s death in 1930; there were even rumors of a possible marriage. Although Winifred was proud of her association with Hitler, when he visited her at Bayreuth, she took pains to conceal the connection. Hitler would register at the Hotel Bube in nearby Bad Berneck, and Winnifred would send her own car to pick him up, so that Hitler's ostentatious Mercedes would not be seen pulling into the driveway at Wahnfried, the Wagner family's villa built for Richard Wagner by King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
It’s an existential critique of violent machismo that doubles as a celebration of violence.I do usually have a serious problem with that sort of contradictory effect in a movie...
This will be become the standard example of the post-modern essay for first year undergraduate humanities students. It demonstrates all the features required to achieve celebrity pundit status. Firstly make sure you extensively quote many other pundits, trying to avoid scientists and politicians in democracies, both actual text and hearsay, name dropping as much as possible but carefully avoiding having any original thoughts yourself. This will confirm how well read you are but not expose you to the tedious business of having to defend your views. If the quotes come from those getting bungs from the Templeton Foundation, so much the better. Secondly, make sure that what you say will be just this side of bonkers and irrational so you don't come across as actually objecting to physical reality, gravity or such like but don't impugn those whose views encompass denial of historical events, human rights or some of the benefits of modernity. Thirdly, and this is very important, don't come up with any concrete suggestions yourself on how to effect change, manage difference and organise a functioning society but maintain an ethereal detachment from the nitty-gritty of getting elected or promoting tolerance and pluralism without being killed. Lastly, whatever you do don't draw attention to the obvious failures or barbarities of some cultural practices or, if you have to then make it seem as though these are not really related to the culture itself but must be some relic of previous oppression. Once these techniques have been mastered future commissions for filler and click bait are assured.
Riyadh: A scheme to curb marriages within relatives in Saudi Arabia is
being intensified with a compulsory pre-marriage medical tests now
broached to cut the high rate of genetic diseases among the population.
Dr Ayman Al Sulaiman, a genetic researcher and consultant at King
Faisal Hospital in the capital Riyadh, told Saudi TV that a 2004 survey
showed endogamy (marriage between close kin of the first or second
degree or even in the same family) in Saudi Arabia was around 53 per
cent. Now, that figure has climbed to 67 per cent....
In 2014, the head of the Embryology Unit in Al-Ahsa Maternity and
Children Hospital, Dr. Nihad Al-Kashi, blamed endogamy for up to 70
percent of fetal abnormalities in Saudi Arabia's Al-Ahsa region,
according to an Arab News report.
Dr Al Sulaiman said Saudi population faces genetic diseases no other
country has and has one of the highest genetic disease rates in the
world, estimated at one per 1,000. This compares with one per 4,000 in
the United States and one per 8,000 in Japan.
"This means the ratio of genetic diseases in Saudi Arabia is almost eight times that of Japan,” he told Saudi TV.
Winning a camel race may fetch you huge prize money and luxury cars,
“but more than the money, it is the prestige attached to owning the
fastest camels that matters”.
Camels, he said, represent the prestige of a tribe. “We will go to any
extent to retain that honour. We will even die for them. There have been
instances in the past where tribes have fought wars over camels. If
someone from one tribe took away a camel belonging to another, the onus
was on the owner to bring it back, whatever the cost, even if he had to
pay with his life,” Al Ameri said.
The role of rice in supporting population growth in ancient China is explored in some depth. The arrival of short-growth-season rice varieties into Song Dynasty China, for instance, marked the beginnings of a green revolution. Unfortunately, Marton overlooks the regional complexities of the process — the gradual domestication of perennial wetland grasses in the Yangtze valley, and their subsequent adaptation to temperate China and to drier ecologies in the mountains of Southeast Asia2. The story of the wild rices of India is also passed by. The hybridization of these varieties with Chinese rices, potentially around 4,000 years ago, led to an explosive expansion of agriculture and population growth in India. It was the lowland irrigated forms from India that went on to fuel urban expansion in places like Thailand over the past 2,000 years2. While these stories are missed, other aspects of rice's cross cultural journey are highlighted. Each of these translocations led to new recipes, culinary fusion and diversification, as nicely illustrated by 16 recipes selected from historical cook books the world over. As Marton states “Rice is frequently the white canvas on which culinary cultures are painted.”Rice certainly has played an important role in lots of places, then; more broadly than I had realised.
Marton pays particular attention to the establishment of rice in the Americas, starting in the sixteenth century. Here, traditions of cultivating rice can be traced back to west Africa. Whether initially smuggled by enslaved Africans or intentionally brought over by European settlers, the African rice crop made the tropical lands of the Caribbean and the waterlogged soils of the Lower Mississippi productive enough to support dense populations that then turned their attention to the cultivation of non-subsistence crops like sugar and cotton in less waterlogged soils. The demand for sugar and cotton drove demand for more slaves, and more mouths to feed meant more rice had to be planted. Later, rice became an export commodity in its own right. Marton explains how the growing demand for rice in European urban centres like London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to be met increasingly by American colonies; Africans with inherited cultures of growing rice were in high demand at the time to ensure high profits for their masters. Today, the rice-based dish gumbo, that came out of Louisiana in the eighteenth century, serves as a clear example of the history of rice in the region; the dish takes its name from the linguistic root for the vegetable okra in the African Bantu languages, and is a melting pot of African, French, Spanish and Italian culinary influences.
The falsehoods in American Sniper are dangerous because a lot of audiences leave the theater thinking that Chris Kyle was a role model. I’ve actually gotten emails from military vets who were also troubled by the film. A lot of them are even harsher on Kyle than I’m comfortable being, in part because I’ve never served and in part because I was once attacked by Glenn Beck’s online army after poking holes in Lone Survivor. But American Sniper convinces viewers that Chris Kyle is what heroism looks like: a great guy who shoots a lot of people and doesn’t think twice about it. Watching American Sniper, I kept wondering who Kyle himself had been imitating. Sylvester Stallone? John Wayne? Or the ultimate irony, Clint Eastwood himself as Dirty Harry?
