Overture

On 24 May 1847, I reached St Petersburg by ship, and since that time have been employed by the Imperial Theatre. Sixty years of service in one place, in one institution, is quite rare, and a destiny not granted to many mortals. 1 MARIUS PETIPA’S DESTINY, it is true, was exceptional, even if he was only one of many French artists and other foreigners who flocked to Russia because their services were in high demand. For more than a century and a half, Russia had been turning its gaze to the West, seeking to acquire the cultural apparatus that would help transform it into a modern world power. When Petipa arrived in St Petersburg he had the promise of a contract and the hope that he would make a career, if not a fortune, although foreign dancers were rewarded with higher pay than native Russians. He was twenty-nine, not so young for a dancer. In his suitcase were three scarves, packed by his anxious mother. ‘She was,’ he wrote, ‘very disturbed about the fate of my nose, which would have to bear the onslaught of frosts so severe that even the bears could hardly stand them.’...

Representing the Erotic Life of Disabled Women: Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach and Anne Finger's A Woman, in Bed

Disabled women in literature seldom have erotic lives. Think of poor, crippled laura wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, waiting passively alongside her anxious mother to be taken up by a man. Or consider Gertie McDowell in James Joyce's Ulysses, the object of Leopold Bloom's voyeuristic fantasies, limping along, herself sexually blank. Even Eva Peace, the one-legged crone goddess in Toni Morrison's Sula, is done with sex. There is something at least untoward and at most perverse about representing disabled women as erotic. In The Sexual Politics of Disability, the sociologist Tom Shakespeare and his coauthors detail a long history of disability as a sexual disqualifier or as an occasion for perversity for both men and women in narrative representation.

Knowing and Learning

In this broadcast and paper, Winnicott discusses what a mother knows and what she learns being a mother. Holding the baby is very important, and the mother does not let other people hold the baby if she feels it means nothing to them. The wise mother does not assume an older sister is necessarily safe with the baby in her arms. In the nightmare the baby is dropped. Some mothers feel the baby seems happier in the cot, but an anxious mother uses the cot as much as possible, or even hands the baby over to the care of a nurse. First, the infant is self-contained, surrounded by space and knowing of nothing; second the infant surprises the world; and third, the world surprises the infant. The baby does not know that the space around him is maintained by the mother.

Aeronautical Research in South Africa

Aeronautical research in South Africa probably dates back to a project which is reputed to have culminated in the successful launching of a glider from a hill in Natal, some twenty years before Otto Lilienthal made his first successful flight in 1895. The glider was constructed by two brothers, Archer and Goodman Houshold, its design having been based on a study of bird flight and its design calculations having been verified by Dr. Colenso, at the time Bishop of Natal. Goodman Houshold was at the controls when the glider made its first and last flight from the hill down to a valley below. Further flights were forbidden by an anxious mother.