MagicThought

The German word Fraktur ([fʁaktʊɐ] (help·info)) refers to a specific sub-group of blackletter typefaces. The term derives from the past participle of Latin frangere (”to break”), fractus (”broken”). As opposed to Antiqua (common) typefaces, modelled after antique Roman square capitals and Carolingian minuscule, the blackletter lines are broken up.

Sometimes, all blackletter typefaces are called fraktur.
One difference between the Fraktur and other blackletter scripts is that in the small-letter o, the left part of the bow is broken, but the right part is not.

Besides the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, and the ß (ess-zet) and vowels with umlauts as well, Fraktur typefaces include the ſ (long s), sometimes a variant form of the letter r, and a variety of ligatures once intended to aid the typesetter and which have specialized rules for their use. Most older Fraktur typefaces make no distinction between the majuscules “I” and “J” (where the common shape is more suggestive of a “J”), even though the minuscules “i” and “j” are differentiated.

The first Fraktur typeface was designed when Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (c. 1493–1519) established a series of books and had a new typeface created specifically for this purpose. Fraktur quickly overtook the earlier Schwabacher and Textualis typefaces in popularity, and a wide variety of Fraktur fonts were carved.

Overview of some blackletter typefaces
As opposed to other countries, in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, typesetting in Fraktur was very common still in the early 20th century. Some books from the time used related blackletter fonts such as Schwabacher; however, the predominant typeface was the Normalfraktur (Fig. 1), which came in various slight variations.

Since the late 18th century, Fraktur began to be replaced by antiqua as a symbol of the classicist age and emerging cosmopolitanism. The debate surrounding this move is known as the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute. However, the shift mostly affected scientific writing, while most belletristic literature and newspapers continued to be printed in broken fonts. This radically changed when on January 3, 1941 Martin Bormann issued a circular letter to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited further use. It has been speculated that the régime had realized that Fraktur would inhibit communication in the territories occupied during World War II. Fraktur saw a short resurgence after the War, but quickly disappeared in a Germany keen on modernising its appearance.

Dr. B.

Hi, check out the link below for a Brad Neely production, “Washington, Washington.”

A little more unofficial history– sorry no virgin eating, but he does eat brains in this.

Hope you enjoy, it is 2:24 min.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=PsymvcqVc1s

I did a little search, and here is a spin off. Very similar style to “Washington”, but with Jesus– if you’re interested.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qGTQbkzfBzA

Sam

Along the lines of what we talked about in class today, I just wanted to say that Germany had a big Spelling Reform of 1996 in order to streamline the language and figure out exact rules for special German letters like eszett (a double S) and capitalization.  At least, in German class those were the only parts of it we talked about.  Anyway, it was a big deal signed by the four predominantly German-speaking nations in Europe that even led to court rulings.  And now, Germany for the first time has a female chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was elected about ten years later.

–Brandon

Go figure. The other day, Judy and I were having coffee at Barnes and Noble. At 8:45pm we got bored and reached over at the stack of books on the display table next to us, simply looking for a topic to spark discussion. I grabbed a book titled “Seat of the Soul: A Remarkable Treatment of Thought, Enlightenment, and Reincarnation” by Gary Zukav– thinking this would give us a good laugh. I nonchalantly plopped the book down and let it flop to the middle, I read out loud:

“If a daughter who harbors resentment towards her father, for example, evolves into a deeper understanding of her relationship with him, such as an understanding of the karmic role that he has played in activating within her a major lesson of love or responsibility, and if her intention is to heal herself and her relationship with her father is deep and clear, do not think , even for an instant, that her father is not aware of this, even if she does not speak to him. [...] He is not aware consciously, but his whole being feels what she is doing.  His conscious mind may if through sudden movements of sentimentalism about things that he not had thought about before or may [...] picture of daughter as a child [...] participate in a databank exchange.” 

We burst into a shock of laughter. We then immediately wrote this passage and information down–what else were we supposed to do? So, at 8:50pm, Judy and I were drawn into yet another discussion of parenting and printing.  

Sincerely,

Samantha

I thought I would post this in case some of you didn’t get the e-mail
Dr.B.

This class is about only one thing: I want you to read
everything we’re doing looking to see if there are underlying
relationships suggested in them between Fatherhood and writing
technologies. If you look at the Ghost scene in Hamlet for example, I want you all to notice perhaps for the first time — even if you’ve read the play in other classes — that when Hamlet talks to his father he starts rambling on for no reason about all kinds of writing technologies.

Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,

You have “Table,” which is the renaissance word for writing tablet, a
piece of wood with a layer of wax, on which a student could record latin lessons, then melt down and re-use again and again.

“Records” is the renaissance word for a chronicle or a document

“Saw” is a bookbinding term, as the Oed indicates: “Bookbinding, to make saw-cuts in (the back of a book).” But the saw is also distinctive in the context of this class, because it is a tool, perhaps the only one, that has “Teeth” on it, as in “Saw-toothed.” Thus my interest in the massive popularity of the “Saw” Franchise of horror films — the promotional poster for the third film, actually just had three “Teeth” on it, i.e. Saw III. The second Saw film, Saw II, which centered on a plot about a father-son relationship and paternal insecurity, used two fingers to represent the number 2. The anatomical word for fingers, “digits,” comes from the same latin root word as “Digital.” We keep seeing teeth everywhere in this class — we’ve read two books, Dracula and the Historian, in which the main character is a patriarchal figure who reproduces himself with his very prominent teeth. In the Saw films, the main character, Jigsaw (a tool with very prominent teeth) is a patriarchal figure who, like Dracula, creates a dynasty for himself without reproduction. When we get to ancient Greece, you’ll begin to understand why teeth are everywhere, but I don’t want you to know all of this stuff up front because I want you to discover things as we go back in history, like an archeologist digging up an ancient ruin.

“Books” — obviously a writing technology.

“forms” — a form is the renaissance printing term for the wooden frame that keeps the letters of a page to be printed in their place. This is where the opposition “Form and content” comes from. The form is what shapes the words on the printed page, the content is what the words say.

“all pressures past”: Pressure is the technical renaissance term for
printing, thus the word, “printing press,” and related terms, such as
impress, impression, etc which in that time all referred to the printing
process, but now have come to be implicated in all kinds of psychological notions from Freud on, such as “Repression, depression, suppression,” and often enough with reference to “repressed” Oedipal desires to kill the father and sleep with the mother. You will be astonished when I show you what a prominent role “Teeth” play in the Oedipus myth — indeed, without “teeth” there would be no Oedipus.

“copied”: to copy, as I’ve told you in class, comes from the same Latin
root — all of this Latin is why we’re reading two versions of Oedipus,
the Latin version by Seneca and the Greek version by Sophocles — as
“copulare,” which means “to copulate.” The technical term for the verb “to be” is “copula,” which comes from the same root. In short, “to Be” is to copy oneself, which is really all we’re supposed “to be” for, to
biologically reproduce ourselves. Thus, the most famous phrase in all of English literature in the most famous piece of English literature, “To be, or not to be,” literally means “to copy or not to copy oneself,” appears after Hamlet talks to his father, and structures his entire reproductive relationship to Ophelia, his supposed wife to be. And, of course, Hamlet, as Freud famously observed, is merely a modern re-write of the Oedipus myth.

“commandment” is a reference to the Ten Commandments, which as I have mentioned in class briefly, but will explore much more carefully later, is the first reference to writing technology in all of the Hebrew Bible, a writing technology that is directly handed to Moses from God the Father on Mount Sinai. Moses, like Oedipus and Frankenstein, is orphaned at birth. That’s why I was so excited by the “Mont Blanc” reference in Frankenstein, which is also the name of the oldest and most famous company that makes expensive “Pens.” Mont Blanc means “White Mountain,” or “Blank Mountain,” both of which describe a sheet of paper or parchment on which one writes. The word “Blank” has a long history of being used as a term for virginity, i.e., a woman who has not been “Penned” on yet, which is why traditionally women wear white wedding dresses, to advertise that no one has “written” on them yet. The ethical/purity stuff, as with all moral systems, comes later and is added on to disguise the fact that the main point is that the woman is advertising that she can guarantee her husband that at least the first child she bears him will be his. She is a white page on which he can copy himself. Before paternity tests, he could have no such guarantee any other way. When a man is impotent, it is said that he “shoots blanks,” i.e., his pen doesn’t write anything on her page: Invisible ink/kin. Paige is always a woman’s name. A page, was a young male Knight in training who the older knights took turns sodomizing. Until a
a page went through puberty and his genitals fully developed, he was written upon by other pens.

“Within the book and volume of my brain.” Obviously two references to
writing technology. So Hamlet’s Father’s “Words” are remembered or copied into the book that is his brain, and guide his destiny from that point on, a destiny that leads to an early grave, 8 deaths, and much suffering.

Then the next thing that happens after this speech is a stage direction
that says merely in the original: “He Writes.” With what? Does he pull
out a pen and paper, or a wax tablet and a stylus, or a piece of slate and chalk? Some editors have suggested that he’s so nervous at this point that he pulls out his “Pen” and urinates his father’s last words, “Adieu, Adieu, Remember me,” in the dust. A character in an earlier play, Titus Andronicus, does something similar around her father after she’s been raped and mutilated. She takes a stick, puts it in her mouth, and writes in the dust.

Books, pens, copies, printing, computers, all writing technologies were
invented to be used as substitutes for human memory. Freud himself admits that his interest in the Oedipus complex can be traced back to a traumatic moment in his childhood when he entered his father’s bedroom, saw him with his new young wife and became so freaked out that he took out his “Pen” and urinated in front of them. His father’s commandment, “This boy shall amount to nothing,” is what spurred him on to greatness, in defiance of the father. No surprise that paternal authority, and overthrowing it, as in the Oedipus complex, in which one longs to kill the father, is so central. Freud actually had his “Eureka” moment about the Oedipus Complex after leaving the theater one night in which had seen a performance of Hamlet.

So as I keep telling you in class, all I want you to do is just read each
book or watch each film looking for links between Fathers and writing
technologies. That’s all! In some sense, no matter how confusing or
unnerving this stuff is, it’s probably the easiest assignment you’ve ever
been given. I’m not asking you to come up with an original thesis, or
compare and contrast anything, or interpret anything. I just want you to
write about the connections you find between writing and fatherhood.

Oh and by the way, the reason why Moses is chosen to be the first person to receive the gift of writing from God the father in the bible: He has a speech impediment and can’t talk well because he burned his lips (the Hebrew word used for burned at that moment is “circumcised” his lips) on the burning “Bush” — the slang term for the hair that covers the genitals, and once was the written symbol for the genitals themselves in ancient pictographic writing systems.

Believe it or not that’s why we’re ending this class by talking about the
Iraq war. Iraq is the modern name for Mesopotamia (thus the terrorist
group in Iraq calls itself Al Queada in Mesopotamia). Mesopotamia is
where the very first writing technology in history, Cuneiform, was
invented. It is also the first culture to introduce a word for “father” in
its language. Mesopotamia is also the first place to introduce the first
written legal system, the law of the father, Hammurabi’s Code. The first major military conflict in the West since the advent of the computer age is in Iraq, and it is the first war in this country’s history that was first fought by a Father, then restarted by his son — the BUSH dynasty.

All of this begins to explain why Hillary Clinton — the wife of the first
president I know of to be impeached for receiving
non-reproductive/non-copying/non-literate (oral vs written) sex in the
OVAL office, which of course is shaped like an EGG — will be the first
woman president in this Count-ry’s history.

As for her name:
Hillary ultimately comes from Proto Indo European sel, meaning “happy” (which is related to sol, “whole”; see savior). Sel became hilaros in Greek, and was borrowed into Latin as hilaris; the nominal form was hilaritas, “happiness”, which is the root of English hilarity and
hilarious.

Hillary refers to the happiness brought by a Savior

Rodham is an ancient family of Northumberland, named after an ancient town there, now unknown. “Ham” is an old worn-down suffix meaning “home” or small town, as in HAMLET.

Rod of course has been a slang term for “Penis” since the Renaissance.

Our next President, our first Female president, will be the Savior, the
leader who will bring happiness to the home for the penis, i.e. the
Count-ry.

Here is the link to an article from the BBC news that talks about the growing number of athiests in the U.S., and also mentions the numerous books out today that question God and religion. Apparently people are finally noticing this trend and becoming aware that we are in a moment of doubt…they just don’t really seem to know why.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7053157.stm

Kristin K.

Click on the link!
~ Jenny

http://blogs.tamu.edu/shemote/files/2007/10/breast-therapy.jpg

Ok, just when you thought it couldn’t get weirder, here comes a new book, which according to it’s title is a memoir written by a foreskin. Circumcision will become central to our thinking when we read Paul’s Letter to the Romans and sections of the Hebrew bible, as it was the central paternity ritual in ancient cultures for thousands of years, and is still the subject of much debate. Note that the book review I’m pasting below begins by acknowledging the current obssession with books about God that I talked at length about a few weeks ago. This is the first time I’ve seen someone acknowledge this current trend. Also note all the references to fathers — abusive or dead or ancient. And notice the discussion of patrilineal anxiety near the end of the review, and the reviewer’s depiction of the memoirist’s ultimate show of defiance to God the father in the conclusion.
Dr.B.

October 21, 2007
Painfully Religious

By BENJAMIN ANASTAS
FORESKIN’S LAMENT

A Memoir.

By Shalom Auslander.

310 pp. Riverhead Books. $24.95.

It has been another good year for God everywhere but in the bookstores. Whether it is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s emancipation proclamation from Islam in “Infidel” or the historian Mark Lilla’s reckoning with Christianity’s relationship to politics in “The Stillborn God” or Christopher Hitchens’s withering indictment of the Big Three in “God Is Not Great,” the religious impulse so prevalent around the globe has been taking a serious — that is to say high-minded — drubbing. With the exception of Hitchens, who is not above throwing a sucker punch to please a crowd, the current challengers to the Lord’s dominion have been instructive and edifying company on the page, but rarely any fun.

Now Shalom Auslander has entered the ring, flying off the ropes, pro-wrestling style, with his memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament,” a no-holds-barred affront to the G-d whose name is never uttered by the faithful under Jewish law. Auslander, a contributor to “This American Life” and the author of a book of stories called “Beware of God” (2005), grew up in a strict Orthodox community about 30 miles north of Manhattan — “By the time I was 8 years old,” he recalls, “I had already learned 12 different names for God” — and his funny, fierce and subversively heartfelt book is a record of his coming-of-age in captivity and an ode to “the evil inclination” that would set him free from bondage, but not entirely.

“My relationship with God,” Auslander writes in a typically bracing passage, “has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated ‘faith followed by doubt,’ but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please followed by” — well, a series of rebukes that can’t be printed here.

“Foreskin’s Lament” is divided into self-contained episodes that hew neatly to the David Sedaris model (and that all but come with commentary by Ira Glass) while revealing a world and mining a moral outrage that is Auslander’s own. There is the annual Yeshiva of Spring Valley Blessing Bee, when students compete to call out the correct blessing for foods based on the six major categories and the infinite number of combinations outlined in “The Guide to Blessings.” Auslander’s quest to be a talmid chuchum, or wise student, is handicapped by trouble at home: his father gets violent when he hits the kosher wine, leading to bloody noses and compensating gestures from his beleaguered mother (“Who wants the last matzo ball?” my mother asked. “I made extra”). He’s also thwarted by Rabbi Kahn, who fixes the questions to favor Avrumi Gruenembaum, a classmate who has just lost his father. There is the holy ark to house the Torah that Auslander’s father, an accomplished carpenter, builds at the request of Rabbi Blonsky for their synagogue; the honored task brings only public humiliation and more tension to the family dinner table when the doors won’t open during services.

“Rabbi Blonsky was 40 years old,” Auslander remembers, “and he worried a lot about the Jewish people. I was 9 years old, and it was the Jewish people in my house I was worried about. A holy ark wasn’t going to help any of us.”

To Auslander, who is no longer observant but is still, as he phrases it, “painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious,” the God of the Jews is a great divider, tearing apart families over questions of ritual — some of the book’s most moving material concerns the decision by Auslander and his wife, Orli, made at great personal cost, not to have their son circumcised by a mohel — and turning life into a chessboard ruled by commandments and laws no human being could ever fulfill. Living in New Jersey with Orli (also the product of a religious upbringing) and desperate to see the New York Rangers play in the Stanley Cup finals on Sabbath, the two dress up in their Saturday finest and walk all the way to Madison Square Garden, dodging traffic on the George Washington Bridge and fighting blisters to watch Game 6, being played in Canada, on the Jumbotron. “It felt like synagogue — another place where people cheered for someone who wasn’t there — but with hockey,” Auslander writes. After discovering as a rebellious teenager that a yarmulke and zizits are a license to shoplift, Auslander is shipped off by his parents to a yeshiva for wayward teenagers in Israel, where he meets a girl and even reconnects with God for a time. But first there were more practical lessons: “Israelis sold pot, I was told, and Arabs sold hashish; I didn’t know what hope there could possibly be for the Middle East if they couldn’t even agree on how to get high.” As for his Baba’s failing health back home and the note to God that Auslander writes to shove inside the Wailing Wall, I will leave that for readers to enjoy on their own.

Framing these episodes of faith reprimanded, traif scarfed down in fast-food parking lots and the evil inclination let loose to run wild is the story of Auslander’s excitement and dread as he and Orli prepare to have their first child, a son. Why the dread? Well, for starters, there is the knife. And after that, the Covenant with God that Auslander has spent a lifetime trying to nullify by finding an escape clause. In naming their son Paix — “peace,” a nonreligious play on Shalom — and by having him circumcised in a hospital instead of by a mohel in a religious ceremony, Auslander and his wife take the difficult and undeniably hopeful step of striking out on their own.

“Thousands of years ago,” Auslander writes of the Prophet Jeremiah, “a terrified, half-mad old man genitally mutilated his son, hoping it would buy him some points with the Being he hoped was running the show. … Six thousand years later, a father will not look his grandson in the face, and a mother and sister will defend such behavior, because the child wasn’t mutilated in precisely the right fashion.”

Writing with humor and bitter irony about the most personal subjects, with deep, real-world consequences, is no task for an acolyte, although many have tried. With his middle finger pointed at the heavens and a hand held over his heart, Auslander gives us “Foreskin’s Lament.” Mazel tov to him. And God? Well, he’ll survive.

Benjamin Anastas, the author of “An Underachiever’s Diary” and “The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance,” is at work on his next novel.

As you may recall from The Historian, the historical Dracula was a Knight, a member of an order of Knights. Nearly all scholarship on medieval knighthood makes it clear that it was initially established as a secret paternal society dedicated to the establishment and protection of paternal descent — not an easy thing to do prior to the invention of paternity tests. Thus the much-storied emphasis in tales of knighthood on saving “damsels in distress,” i.e. women being raped, as that complicates questions of a child’s legitimacy and thus the transference of wealth and property from father to son. Why should I leave my castle to a kid who may not be mine?

And so, according to an article in today’s NYT — pasted below — knights are back in a big way, and notice that the first “castle” in America was opened in Florida — flowered, and by extension, de-flowered, as in what happens when a woman’s virginity is taken — in 1983, the early years of the computer revolution. (The whole Highlander craze about Knights, first the Movie than the tv show, started three years later.) Also notice that there are “9″ castles in America, and that although there are references to “wenches,” children, daughters, adolescent girls and, ahem, flowers!!!. There is a king, but he’s with a princess, not a queen, who could presumably bear him children. And there are two male squires, but no female equivalents. Indeed, besides the aforementioned princess, the only women mentioned in the entertainment are wenches, medieval prostitutes who were outside the reproductive order and practiced crude forms of birth control. There are no mothers mentioned. There is a father, however: “The adolescent girls screech when the knights toss them flowers, the drunken college-age guys can’t quite disguise the childish glee under their sarcastic detachment, and the adults — well, one father on a Saturday night could be heard shouting vulgarities at a knight as his young daughter shrank into her seat.” Perhaps he’s angry cause all of this knighthood stuff reminds him that he has a daughter, and not a son. The father shouts, but the girls screech when the knights “toss them flowers.”

Dr. B.

Here’s the link if you want to see pictures:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/theater/21robe.html?ref=todayspaper

October 21, 2007
The Life of Gallant Knights, Off Ye Olde Jersey Turnpike

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
LYNDHURST, N.J.

THERE was a time long, long ago — or so the tale begins over the loudspeakers — when a wise king and his stalwart knights stood fast, an enemy army broke, a brother fell in battle and someone was bereft of something. The words are difficult to make out back behind the curtain at Medieval Times, amid the sand and wood shavings and hoofbeats.

But no matter. There sits the wise king himself upon his royal steed. There are the six knights on their chargers. Yon stands Don Javier, master of horse, tanned and thin as a riding whip. And here in the glow of torchlight are two brave young squires. They discuss the Xbox.

For around $53 a ticket ($38 for children under 12), a visitor to Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament, a theme restaurant here, receives a cardboard crown and a meal of chicken and ribs, dished out by a band of wenches and eaten without utensils. Visitors also get a two-hour show involving a king, a princess, some impressive horses and the knights, who joust, fight with swords and generally thwack one another around a sand pit in scripted, physical combat.

As in professional wrestling, there is apparently a plot to the show, but that isn’t what draws the hundreds of spectators to this concrete castle across the parking lot from a Subway sandwich shop. They come instead to cheer the thwacking.

Medieval Times began 34 years ago, as a dinner-theater attraction on the island of Majorca. Javier Romero, a proud son of Córdoba, was there, performing feats of horsemanship for tourists. It has grown to become a theme restaurant empire, with nine castles in North America; horse ranches in Texas, Florida and Maryland; and attendance figures in the tens of millions.

Mr. Romero left in the early years to work on a ranch, then rejoined in the 1990s as Don Javier at the 17-year-old, 1,350-seat Lyndhurst castle, looking after the Andalusians in the stables backstage and training them to perform stunts.

It is difficult to get Mr. Romero, now 53, to talk of anything besides the horses. But he has seen change, because change always comes, even to Medieval Times.

The first castle in America opened in Florida in 1983; for the next couple of decades each new castle was to a degree its own fief. The stalwart knights of Lyndhurst were under the tutelage of a celebrated fight choreographer called, by those who knew him, Tino. Though Tino was the choreographer for the fights at all the castles, Lyndhurst was his seat, and his style held particular sway here.

Things were different then, said Rich Brostowski, 37, the bar manager at Lyndhurst, whose shoulder-length hair and eagerness to demonstrate fighting techniques suggest that he has not completely forgotten his 13-year tenure as a knight. Many of the knights in those early days, he said, read fantasy novels, studied period movies and joined role-playing groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism.

“To me a knight is here,” Mr. Brostowski said, pointing to his head. “This place was never just a job for me. I am a knight. That’s who I am.”

Over the next 10 years the Lyndhurst castle came to have some of the longest-serving knights in the Medieval Times empire. “It was a tight-knit group,” said Stephanie Keil, 23, who has been a serving wench for five years. “They were revered and respected and feared.” (Later, revealing that she is engaged to Mr. Brostowski, Ms. Keil added with a smile: “I’m a lucky wench.”)

Around 2000, in a phase that a Lyndhurst manager referred to as “corporatization,” the company, which is privately held, began tightly standardizing the fight choreography, so one knight could smoothly substitute for one another. (Injuries are not rare.) Personal battle flourishes were curtailed and, under the training of the new corporate head knight, all combat, Tino-style and otherwise, achieved conformity. The knights of Lyndhurst adapted. But eventually discontent arose among the ranks. Two of the castle’s most senior knights, like the disaffected barons of 13th-century England, drew up a list of grievances and began persuading the squires and the other knights to take on the actors’ and stagehands’ unions as their bargaining representatives.

The protests were not primarily about wages (which, for a knight, can run to around $27 an hour) or benefits (there is a health-care plan) or any of those perks mentioned in the signs posted backstage. (“Let it be known that King Alfonso declares that his royal subjects may be eligible to receive or participate in” — tuition reimbursement, 401(k), program, etc., etc.)

No, they were displeased about the lack of job security and about the accelerated — and in their eyes, increasingly risky — knight training of some young squires, who prepare weapons and horses and assist the knights in the show.

Management tried to assuage the pro-union forces, but anticipating the impending battle and the losses that would probably come in its wake, management also began summoning knights from around the country, including Scott (Tweety) Limberg, 24, a diligent and experienced horseman from the castle in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Gabe Tucker, 32, an Iraq war veteran from the Atlanta castle.

More young squires were encouraged to begin knight training, which usually meant learning from scratch how to ride a horse. Others were recruited, like Jesse Schneider, 20, who trained with the Navy Seals and was discovered at Montclair State University. “He is a prodigy,” said Mike Vila, the Lyndhurst castle’s show manager. “One of the best I’ve seen.”

A secret-ballot election took place in September 2006, and though the pro-union forces were convinced they had the votes, the nays narrowly won the day. It would be the last battle for the old knights, several of whom had already moved on to administration posts or jobs at other castles.

One of the two knights leading the unionizing efforts departed. The other was accepted into a management training position. He is now dating a princess.

The new cavalry, for the most part, is young, friendly and irreverent; it is composed of more athletes than role players. Haircuts are now mostly short. Chris Capitani, 22, has asked squires to tape his fights so he can review them later, the way he would if he were still a linebacker at Rutherford High. “For the young guys,” Ms. Keil said, “it’s not as much a lifestyle.”

For them, this is more a really cool job.

“I’m a huge W.W.E. fan,” said the recently knighted Sinan Logan, 24, referring to the pro wrestling circuit. “I figure this is the closest I’ll get to it.”

The new regime is welcome for some of the squires and wenches, who found that the previous men, as one wench put it, could sometimes be a little too Knights of the Realm both in and out of the arena. Attendance figures are higher than ever, a castle spokesman said. The adolescent girls screech when the knights toss them flowers, the drunken college-age guys can’t quite disguise the childish glee under their sarcastic detachment, and the adults — well, one father on a Saturday night could be heard shouting vulgarities at a knight as his young daughter shrank into her seat.

Of the performers in the show only three have been here more than a decade: John Gonzalez, 32, a knight who also owns a gaming store; Bill Ponder, 49, a former door salesman turned master falconer; and Mr. Romero, master of horse. For the past five years Mr. Romero’s nephew, José Velasco, seemed destined to become his heir at the castle, and had the skills and passion for the job. But one must become a slave to the horses, Mr. Romero said.

Which is why, worn down by working a night-and-weekend job and with a wife and child to support, Mr. Velasco quit in August for a well-paying job at a company that makes parts for fire engines.

Fellow Magical Thinkers, I have a friend who monitors the NYC music scene for me, cause he knows I moved to CS from there and can’t go hear stuff like I used to, and he periodically e-mails me about things that are hip and new.

I just received the following e-mail from him telling me about a hot new band called Vampire Weekend. I have heard of them, and frankly think they kinda suck, but it strikes me as interesting that vampire fever is popping up in all cultural areas, including the alternative music scene:

Hey man, here’s the next NY band. The “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah” of 2007, if you will. Have you heard them? If not, check out their site:

http://www.myspace.com/vampireweekend

Vampires, it seems to me, are largely remnants of a patriarchal past when the fantasy of parthenogenesis or creating a dynastic family line wth out the complications of genetic error always made possible by reproductive sex; as such, their return and astonishing popularity now indicates a kind of nostalgia for the good old days, as well as a fantasy of finally making good on the march of history through cloning, etc. Notice that it’s often women who are tasked with the main work of destroying them: Mina, undoes Dracula in the novel, then has a baby; the narrator of the Historian is largely responsible for undoing Dracula, then she can focus on falling in love and getting married; In Underworld, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is mainly in charge of Vampire ass-kicking; and of course Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a woman who has no father and is surrogate fathered by Rupert Giles, the guy with all of the ancient books who runs the library.

Dr.B.