{"id":111452,"date":"2017-06-02T08:48:46","date_gmt":"2017-06-02T12:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111452"},"modified":"2017-06-02T11:19:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-02T15:19:26","slug":"when-mascots-go-mad-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/02\/when-mascots-go-mad-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"When Mascots Go Mad, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_111461\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/screen-shot-2017-06-02-at-8.44.17-am-1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-111461\" class=\"wp-image-111461 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/screen-shot-2017-06-02-at-8.44.17-am-1.png\" width=\"1000\" height=\"759\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/screen-shot-2017-06-02-at-8.44.17-am-1.png 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/screen-shot-2017-06-02-at-8.44.17-am-1-300x228.png 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/screen-shot-2017-06-02-at-8.44.17-am-1-768x583.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-111461\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sebastian the Ibis in a fit of pique.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Listen well: to be a sports mascot is to wear a hair shirt. These people are flagellating themselves. After a while, donning the costume comes with mental consequences. Trapped within the padded, poorly ventilated headpiece of every mascot is a madman waiting to come alive. The mascot\u2019s dream is to shed his sweaty cocoon and \u201cbe himself,\u201d as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. We saw this most recently in the case of Mr. Met, who this week offered a lewd gesture to a fan. (It wasn\u2019t the \u201cmiddle finger,\u201d apparently; Mr. Met, having an even number of digits, is anatomically incapable of that motion.) But this was hardly the first time a mascot has gone rogue. Victor Mather has assembled a guide to \u201cmascots behaving badly.\u201d My favorite entry belongs to Sebastian the Ibis, who reps the Miami Hurricanes. In attempting a good-natured prank, Sebastian ran afoul of the police, themselves mascots of the state: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/06\/01\/sports\/baseball\/et-tu-mr-met-another-mascot-behaving-badly.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Miami mascot thought it would be funny to wear a firefighter\u2019s outfit and carry a fire extinguisher to a Florida State game in 1989<\/a>. The plan was to make it look as if he was going to put out the flaming spear carried by the Seminoles\u2019 Chief Osceola, though he never planned to actually do it. The Tallahassee police found it less funny and grabbed him on his way in. Less funny still, the extinguisher went off and hit an officer. \u2018At that moment, I realized, uh oh, something is wrong here,\u2019 Sebastian told <em>USA Today<\/em>\u00a0years later. \u2018Within two seconds, there were five of them slamming me up against the fence. One wing was out to one side, the other wing held behind my back. Another guy is pulling my beak and trying to yank my head off, and I had a chin strap underneath so it felt like he was trying to choke me to death.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Jill Lepore reminds us that <em>dystopia<\/em>, a very popular word at present, doesn\u2019t just refer to some terrible future civilization\u2014it must be an inversion of utopia: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2017\/06\/05\/a-golden-age-for-dystopian-fiction\" target=\"_blank\">The word <em>dystopia<\/em>, meaning \u2018an unhappy country,\u2019 was coined in the seventeen-forties, as the historian Gregory Claeys points out in a shrewd new study<\/a>, <em>Dystopia: A Natural History<\/em>. In its modern definition, a dystopia can be apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or neither, but it has to be anti-utopian, a utopia turned upside down, a world in which people tried to build a republic of perfection only to find that they had created a republic of misery \u2026 The dystopian novel emerged in response to the first utopian novels, like Edward Bellamy\u2019s best-selling 1888 fantasy, <em>Looking Backward<\/em>, about a socialist utopia in the year 2000. <em>Looking Backward<\/em> was so successful that it produced a dozen anti-socialist, anti-utopian replies, including <em>Looking Further Backward<\/em> (in which China invades the United States, which has been weakened by its embrace of socialism) and <em>Looking Further Forward<\/em> (in which socialism is so unquestionable that a history professor who refutes it is demoted to the rank of janitor).\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Nadia Khomami reports that a play by Edith Wharton has resurfaced in her archives after lying in wait for seventy years: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2017\/jun\/01\/unseen-edith-wharton-play-found-hidden-in-texas-archive\" target=\"_blank\">About eighty years after Wharton\u2019s death, researchers have found a play titled <em>The Shadow of a Doubt<\/em> in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas<\/a>. Dr. Laura Rattray and Professor Mary Chinery, from Glasgow University and Georgian Court University respectively, found two typescript copies of the play and have also established that it was in production by early 1901 with theatre producer Charles Frohman and Elsie de Wolfe in the leading role \u2026 Set in England, <em>The Shadow of a Doubt<\/em> centres on the character Kate Derwent, a former nurse married to a gentleman. Opening on a scene of social privilege and affluence studded with sharp one-liners, the play takes a dark and controversial turn into a world of extortion, mistrust, deception and assisted dying.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Jacob Mikanowski tells the story of a nineteenth-century French lawyer who said to himself, I should be a Patagonian king, and then made it happen: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/theawl.com\/the-emperor-of-air-8252143a6cbd\" target=\"_blank\">The Kingdom of Araucania-Patagonia \u2026 [began] in the mind of a French lawyer named Or\u00e9lie-Antoine de Tounens<\/a>. Tounens was born in 1825. He was the eighth of nine children born to a prosperous farmer from P\u00e9rigord. He believed his family was descended from Gallic nobility, and all his life, he wanted to better their station. From an early age he dreamed of restoring France\u2019s fortunes in the New World. Napoleon and his nephew, Napoleon III, beckoned Tounens\u2019s mind as examples of self-crowned kings. All he needed to do was to find a suitable kingdom. Reading Voltaire, he stumbled on the poems of a sixteenth-century conquistador named Alonso de Ercilla. This settled his choice: he would go to Chile and make himself king of Araucania \u2026 Dressed in a royal costume he had made for himself out of a finely woven black-and-white poncho, silver belt buckle and spurs and long sword in a sheath inlaid with gold, he met with the Araucanian chiefs during one of their assemblies. Through an interpreter, he promised them weapons and ships with which to fight the Chileans, though he had neither.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Psychoanalysis used to be the toast of the town. What happened? Warren Breckman looks at when and why Freud\u2019s influence in the culture began to wane: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/143027\/fortunes-freud\" target=\"_blank\">The development of new-generation medicines aimed at altering brain chemistry undermined the scientific claims of psychoanalysis by seeming to prove that Freud was tilting at windmills when he focused on the dynamic economy of the psyche instead of going straight to the physical constitution of the brain<\/a> \u2026 The emergence of non-psychoanalytic accounts of sex also threatened the prestige of analysis. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Alfred Kinsey published his studies on human sexual behavior, which showed that ordinary people reported a wider range of sexual activities\u2014including a surprisingly high frequency of homosexual encounters\u2014than had been previously suspected. Psychoanalysts responded with prudish insistence that \u2018normal\u2019 sexual ecstasy depended on love for the other person.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: a brief history of daffy mascots, the discovery of a new Edith Wharton play, the true meaning of \u201cdystopia,\u201d and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[29028,8008,134,18073,12605,7005,865,15291,29027,2535,14130,10883,14432,17144,492,85,29026,4213,16961],"class_list":["post-111452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-araucania","tag-athletics","tag-cartoons","tag-dystopia","tag-dystopian-fiction","tag-edith-wharton","tag-france","tag-insanity","tag-kings","tag-madness","tag-mascots","tag-patagonia","tag-plays","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-sigmund-freud","tag-sports","tag-the-shadow-of-a-doubt","tag-theatre","tag-utopia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>When Mascots Go Mad<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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