Dead Jester A Fool Of Nightmares

Have you ever dreamed of becoming a superhero? Being the one to swoop in and save the day. Sounds amazing, doesn't it? Right up until you grow up, the world kicks you in the gut. My name is Cal, and I was one of those kids growing up. With the real world came real problems like anxiety, depression, and a sense of apathy toward people in general. But life happens fast, and things can change in an instant, I should know. I went to bed one night, ready to die, and wake up built like a freak of nature with the demeanor to match. Now I walk around with a smile on my face and the need to punish evil flooding through my veins. Life is funny like that. Now life is nothing but a deadly joke, and I'm the jester running the court.

A survey of the motif of the revenant, showing how medieval themes and motifs persist today.

A poor innkeeper back from the nightmare of the crusades finds his nightmare is just starting.

This book takes stories of learning relationships from popular films, television programmes and literature, and uses them as a catalyst for beginners and experts alike to reflect critically on their own mentoring and coaching practice. How realistic are our expectations of personal change, and to what extent is the flourishing self-help market responsible for this? What, if any, are the moral responsibilities of executive mentors and coaches, when it comes to global corporate wrongdoing? What should constitute ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ in a world in which ambiguity and doubt can appear more effective weapons of survival? What can Pinocchio, The Matrix, Star Wars or The Sopranos tell us about any of this? Storytelling and metaphor have become of increasing interest in research into leadership and learning. Here is a book which takes the idea of storytelling as a powerful aid to learning and change, and uses it to help practitioners and educators challenge their ideas on mentoring in an entertaining way, by asking themselves some of the difficult questions that these popular stories raise.

Demons! Nightmares with the Bible views demons through two lenses: that of western religion and that of cinema. Sketching out the long fear of demons in western history, including the Bible, Steve A. Wiggins moves on to analyze how popular movies inform our beliefs about demonic forces. Beginning with the idea of possession, he explores the portrayal of demons from ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical world (including in select extra-biblical texts), and then examines the portrayal of demons in popular horror franchises The Conjuring, The Amityville Horror, and Paranormal Activity. In the final chapter, Wiggins looks at movies that followed The Exorcist and offers new perspectives for viewing possession and exorcism. Written in non-technical language, this book is intended for anyone interested in how demons are perceived and how popular culture informs those perceptions.

This book explores the historical contextualization of Nietzsche's thought, focusing on Nietzsche's controversial Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The fourth part of Nietzsche's Zarathustra consists of Zarathustra's encounter with eight 'higher men' whom Zarathustra meets in succession on his path during the day. The prophet then invites each individual to his cave for the evening festivities, culminating in a blasphemous festival in which his guests worship an ass as God. Revealing each guest's specific characteristics and very distinct roles, Santaniello also attempts to discern 'who' these guests are or represent (historically) through glimpsing the characteristics specific to each representative guest (as portrayed by Nietzsche), and through careful textual analysis, comparison with Nietzsche's other works, historical evidence, and previous scholarly research. This unique exploration of Thus Spoke Zarathustra offers students and researchers alike an invaluable new contribution to Nietzsche studies.

This book is based on certain dreams in my life, that is to say, I would have a dream about something that left a mark on me and gave me such emotion to actually create a literal piece. How many times have we had dreams, such as a friend dying or a lover leaving, even though it may or may not have happened? Then a week or so later, fate steps in and takes this person out of our lives? Wow, is that karma or what? Or, when we love someone so much that it hurts us so deep, when we are ignored or all of a sudden cheated on or had our heart broke, all because this person decided that it was best for them to move on and not tell us. Talk about extreme and emotional pain, right? So, how do we handle that? I guess we could just say, forget it and move on, but everyone is not as strong as that. These types of people fret over that or cry and then what do they get in return, but someone who was a friend laughing at them, or someone spreading rumors about them? Paranoid, am I? That is the typical attitude today, that we have to live in a dog eat dog world, get them before they get us, and kick a man when he’s down mentality. So, now is where we get into the “wishes” aspect. All of us whether we are well off or not have one time or another wished that we were someone else or that we were in another situation. Sometimes, we may even wish that special lover back into our lives even though they are married at the present or don’t love us anymore. It doesn’t matter who you are, whether rich, poor, big, or small have all wished to be someone or somewhere else, especially when the going gets tough. I have learned that God (or whatever deity you believe in) knows what’s best for us and will give us our needs, so in essence, we do receive our wishes in due time, according to his will. I am hoping that anyone who reads this book will find something in it to help him or her cope with whatever is on their minds. For instance, if you want a lover back in your life and it will never happen, perhaps you may find something here to put your situation into perspective and realize that life will get better, certainly, it could be a lot worse. Also, I want to reiterate to never give up on your dreams, even though far-fetched or abnormal people make them seem, you can make anything happen for yourself, if you believe in yourself.

Is there a 'history' of laughter? Or isn't laughter an anthropological constant rather and thus beyond history, a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens from cave man and cave woman to us? The contributors to this collection of essays believe that laughter does have a history and try to identify continuities and turning points of this history by studying a series of English texts, both canonical and non-canonical, from Anglosaxon to contemporary. As this is not another book on the history of the comic or of comedy it does not restrict itself to comic genres; some of the essays actually go out of their way to discover laughter at the margins of texts where one would not have expected it all - in Beowulf, or Paradise Lost or the Gothic Novel. Laughter at the margins of texts, which often coincides with laughter from the margins of society and its orthodoxies, is one of the special concerns of this book. This goes together with an interest in 'impure' forms of laughter - in laughter that is not the serene and intellectually or emotionally distanced response to a comic stimulus which is at the heart of many philosophical theories of the comic, but emotionally disturbed and troubled, aggressive and transgressive, satanic and sardonic laughter. We do not ask, then, what is comic, but: who laughs at and with whom where, when, why, and how?