Often it would seem that both pessimist and perfectibilist agree as to the facts, differing only in their attitudes towards the facts.

The leisured and powerful are justified by their function, while the poor and humble who by their labours maintain them have the consolation of knowing that they ‘maintain the state of the world.’ To each his providentially appointed condition and estate! And if the people should murmur in their hearts², cavil at their lot, question the providential nature of the arrangement, and seek to shake the foundations of authority itself? The in the conservative can appeal direct to his own power and his opponent’s weakness and ignorance.

In Ibsen’s dialogue between the Provost and Brand, it is the mocking castigation of their own inferiority by the Provost that is effective in undermining the people’s will to take up the challenge in the face of their fears.

What can you achieve,

Humble people born in a humble village?

Were you created to shake the world,

To right wrongs, liberate the oppressed?

The taunt strikes at each man’s own sense of personal impotence³ ever to alter the conditions under which he suffers; it reminds him of his customary status with its attendant feelings of deference to those set⁴ in authority over him. It reminds him that he is the subject⁵ [and that others are the rulers]; and it suggests that this dichotomy is eternal⁶ as Nature herself⁷. But is it ? The debate turns on the issue of what is human nature. It is precisely the issue as to who we are that is the most fiercely disputed. Can man^7A by his own understanding and endeavours work out his own salvation⁸.? Or is he irrredeemably a fallen creature, seeing the better but following the worse ? suffering by virtue of his own folly and then wallowing in his own self-pity ?

You grind away God’s image, live like beasts,

Then join the grovelling queue to beg for grace

Often it would seem that both both pessimist and perfectibilist agree as to the facts, differing only in their attitudes towards the facts. The conservative has no difficulty in convincing himself that human nature [‘is what it is‘]. On the contrary [/ au contraire mon fromage\ ma cherie] [ comic insert to text – laugh or die young, team], it is his main stock-in-trade [English Language Students say Year 9 ‘up,’ look up oxymoron.. nh nh there’s the correct term and your writer will get ‘back’ to you on that matter as soon as he rem-embers i t – ‘think‘ comic Australian publication circa 1969 quite possibly by the famed Afferbeck Lauder..]. The progressive radical contemplates the spectacle with anguish, but would often seem to concede that the facts are as Ibsen³‘s^3A Provost and Brand too in the end would have us believe.. [the far less French wooden mechanical Latin term for doubl-entendre gosh my brain hurts an’ i’m just lovin’ it..]. When Edmund Burke attacked the radicals struggling to achieve an extension of the suffrage, he was quick to fasten onto an allusion by Dr Price to the existing^3AA voters as a few thousands of ‘the dregs of the people.’ ‘You will smile here,’ Burke comments, ‘at the consistency of those democratists, who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the [depositories] of all power.’ None struggled more devotedly to enlighten mankind than Denis Diderot [in the face of crushing blows by his enemies]. But even Didwerot, in a mood of despondency as he considered in retospect the malignant opposition which he had to overcome in order to produce the great [Encyclopaedia], was constrained to reflect: ‘The world does not profit from its advance into old age: it does not change. It is possible that the individual perfects himself, but the race becomes neither better nor worse in the mass. The sum of evil passions remains the same, and the enemies of the good and useful remain as numerous as ever ^3AAA.’ Nevertheless.. the good always enjoyed one vital advantage.. ‘The good man is susceptible of an enthusiasm that the wicked man does not know…’

Let me end this essay with RV Sampson’s Ibsen’s Brand..

‘While it may appear that man has only to heave himself to his feet with determination to take up the full weight of [‘]his cross[‘], in life the burden is too great for him. He quails before the magnitude of the effort and despairs, [or rather averts his gaz ..] tautology eep=eep=eep-eep whatever [e and passes by].

All of them have craving in their hearts\ But the sacrifice frightens them.\ Their will is weak; their fear is strong.

When you want a break we have music for you OK. Of the Spheres? Oh for Jesus’ sake Kevin, shut up and listen..

Chopin: Les Sylphides: 4. Mazurka

YouTube·Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra – Topic·Jul 10, 2024

Just a note: Michel Fokine (1880-1942): Russian dancer and choreographer. Primarily he choreographed story ballets, such as Firebird (1909), but his signature work was an abstract ballet, Les Sylphides (1909).

Key binary: explication de text + the “act” of creation⁹ (human learning, creativity & authentic arts).. May we immediately retire every narcissist flaneur, poseur and eminent fiercely “evidence-based” expert science publicist on Earth ?

John Blundell

21st Century Neurolinguistics, Neurocognitive Health, Mentally-healthy Child Development, the authentic 21st C Post-socratic 2-5 set series quantum relations logic, Human liberation from 3,000 year-old Southern European and Eastern Mediterranean barbarism, superstition, female capture and non Islamic Mathematics

¹ https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/news/grim-forecast-for-cost-of-living-crisis/ar-AA1sK8Bg?ocid=socialshare&cvid=578eb18e3ddd497b8bb2512a4f250477&ei=13Story by Becca Monaghan 18h • 2 min read

² This happens during a heart muscle contraction. Systolic murmurs are divided into ejection murmurs (due to blood flow through a narrowed vessel or irregular valve) and regurgitant murmurs (backward blood flow into one of the chambers of the heart)

³ In medicine, refers to the inability to have an erection of the penis adequate for sexual intercourse. Also called erectile dysfunction.

^{3A Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as “the father of realism” and the most influential playwright of the 19th century, as well of one of the most influential playwrights in Western literature more generally. Wikipedia}

^3AA Senior-secondary, undergraduate, Masters Degree, PhD level and all mature-aged cognoscenti bored out of their ‘tiny’ minds and actually driven to frank despair by totalitarian Christo-

What can you achieve,

Humble people born in a humble village?

Were you created to shake the world,

To right wrongs, liberate the oppressed?

fascist news-, education- & entertainment-media look up Athenian philosopher two millennia ago Aristotle’s usage(s) of the adjective Existing.. DAMN IT don’t use electro-mechanical search – you’re if you do searching nothing and learning nothing, just playing the narcissistic crypto-fascist Smart-arse or Jensen Huang’s or the neurocognitively-broken Billy Gates’s Useful-fool: ‘Do not Pass Go’ but ‘go’ directly to the old boy’s Finding out the existing means of persuasion.

^3AAA Avertissement to Vol. VIII of the Encyclopedie, 1751-65

4 In mathematics, a set is a collection of different[1] things;[2][3][4] these things are called elements or members of the set and are typically mathematical objects of any kind: numbers, symbols, points in space, lines, other geometrical shapes, variables, or even other sets.[5] A set may have a finite number of elements or be an infinite set. There is a unique set with no elements, called the empty set; a set with a single element is a singleton.

^{4A gravitational singularity, spacetime singularity or simply singularity is a condition in which gravity is predicted to be so intense that spacetime itself would break down catastrophically. As such, a singularity is by definition no longer part of the regular spacetime and cannot be determined by “where” or “when”.}

^4AA Students will note there is presently dispute over the useable and Human Project-feasible (Stage 5 of human society) linguistic usages Set and Singularity that essentially liberates in the human imagination Two- to Five-set Series Quantum Relations Logic. It should be noted urgently that there can be no false dialectic, or polarisation motivated by partisan vastly cashed-up political interests of mathematics and logic.. Please note carefully the Diderot remarks by RV Sampson because they ‘go’ directly to the global deskilling or socially-engineered Gates-Huang &c criminally malfeasant Christo-fascist Cabal dumbdown. Historic: Locke’s Essay Towards Human Understanding around 1700 London will help readers with the big-picture or macroeconomic reframe. The micro particularities of the content, the Argumenta – all I ever read – at 17 – also rewarding reading, J

⁵ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/subjects.. a subject is one of the five major elements of clause structure. The other four are: verb, object, complement and adjunct. Subjects are essential in declarative, negative and interrogative clauses. The subject acts as the ‘doer’ or agent of an action. Subjects are typically noun phrases e.g. a noun or pronoun and any dependent words before or after it

⁶  having no beginning and no end: lasting forever. eternal bliss, continuing without interruption.

^{7 /7A} I am not addressing these matters here. ‘Suffice to say’ the pinnacle audio-visual-Production-values rich, fecund, white American woman was right to publicly question human commodification- (HCuP), artificial compartmentalisation- (ACuP) & excessive codification Under Patriarchic Fiscal Elites (ECuP) as per Community Economist Publications international newsletter 1996 (copies unavailable as all were stolen but never recovered along with the entire Blundell Orchards office business records and research library on 17 April 1998, confirmed legally as an SA Government instigated and orchestrated fraud by th Supreme Court of South Australia in1999, but her proposed remedy was deranged and tragically misogynistic.

⁸ preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss..”they try to sell it to us as economic salvation” Similar:lifeline preservation conservation means of escape

⁹ doctrinaire socialist, ‘polymath,’ close associate of the ‘existentialists’ and literati^9A social outsiders with money after post traumatically shocked 9 million dead WWII who killed himself and he’s missus.. er died too

^9A Literati may refer to: Intellectuals or those who love, read, and comment on literature; Intelligentsia, a status class of highly educated people who … (Google Alphabet @NVIDIA iOS Official is it?). May we immediately retire every narcissist flaneur, poseur and eminent fiercely “evidence-based” expert science publicist on Earth ?

There follows one of the two essays i promised my X readers early last week. It’s not third time-round edited nor some of it even checked once. If as some wag wrote this week 30seconds inside the head of any cyborg, psychopath/ sociopath/ NPD/ Bipolar Affective Disorder autocue reader, publicist, professional & high-paid but near-totally physiologically or at least gross motor functioning- deskilled talking 🗣️ is “a long time” then a week is an age if not an aeon.. and what in any name that may be blessed or cursed is this time shit to a Palestinian child, teenager or young parent now?

SO PUBLISH, TIME TO FUCK AROUND WE DO NOT HAVE

There is no micro in human ideation or conversation without a vital, vibrant, ‘screaming-at-us-all’ in a bizarre totally unprecedented world of denial, ruination, agony and hunger to be followed by mass human death some enfeebled or at least clinically dementing minds insist on calling Climate Change because there, in conscientious debate, aeroplane rides and travelogues amongst rich old people is financial bonanza and ‘disaster-capitalist’ (@NaomiAKlein 2009) ‘Windfall’ personal profits yippenoodie macro.

By the same ‘token’ [rotated through ninety degrees qua set and particle study⁴] there cannot be in any geocommunity anywhere on Earth expecting to actually survive in the coming two to three years that operates and manages itself on supply-side calls and decisions without close and conscientious government attention to demand – whjich simply means finding out what the adults of that town or suburb need and require by way of regulation, supervision and householder support to enable them to lead, educate and inspire their youngsters for life.

I tried to look up the White Man trope but other than a snide ethnocentric attribution of it to the French in 16th – 19th century North America lunatic cybersecurity provisions just shut down any further historical enquiry. Your internet working hard for you yeh. It’s something of an aside here but as a professional writer i’ve only today updated my WORKTIME WASTED on-phone navigating through (correcting) machine learnin and regenerative artificial ‘intelligence’ to 8 or 10 seconds every minute.

Thinking I should publish the below without – and without the TIME OR OPPORTUNITY at THIS MOMENT of outrageous blind rage, crisis, TV studio make-up, ludicrous mindless rhetoric-dripping regenerative artificial ‘intelligence’ (machine-learning) speech worked up by someone’s ‘holy spirit,’ coke-high or other reverie or out of Salt lake City, Utah USA or the Battle of Jericho and apocalyptic meltdown pulsing BY THE DAY by so-called leaders in nearly all countries and hence the dire urgency of getting at least a basic conversation about fear-wracked ‘freeze,’ flight & flight mental school BOYS out there.. with a DRAFT FORMAT essay now a week behind the actual Human Race Clock my personal call is “go.”

AS ALL OF YOU DILIGENT STUDENTS, READERS & LEARNERS HAVE NOW KNOWN FOR 5 YEARS from your 21st century Neurolinguistic Health & Neurocognitive Impairment studies right HERE on Billionaire Monkeys with Olivettis, @wired_we & @greeneconomyact there is no ‘Critical thinking,’ are no Piagetian Formal Mental Operations, and is no socially or environmentally adaptive resilient-in-hardship robust mental health..

Therefore at least for children’s sakes stop symptom-hunting, labelling, diagnosing, patronising, otherising, condescending-to, talking down to, treating like you might a little child, kid, young person, old or neurocognitively-impaired person as you might with your marvellous Red Cross lady or school chaplain interviewing skills, maliciously with phoney affective display or shit-eating smiles depersonalising let alone zombifying with psychotropic drugs anyone deeply distressed by loneliness and BY authority-figures podcasters and politicians who know less than nothing about ‘marauding’ polycrisis -meaning economy culture society education disease nutrition immunity morbidity – rapidly-rising across all species of living creatures – random brutalisation mass killings truly exponential (ABSOLUTELY DONT UNDERSTAND THE WORD EVEN NOW THEN ‘for the love of the Lord Jesus Christ’ and for the children’s and young people’s sakes if not your own RELATIVELY LOOK IT UP – PLEASE mass extinctions of ‘mega-,’ macro-, micro- & nano-organisms and state-run terrorism sweeping the planet – without hesitation (not of the ‘Senior’s-moment’ or delayed or worse permanently blanked demented Recall ‘hesitation,’) or thoughtful reflection – the construction-in-mind of three- to five-set Quantum-relations² series.

ANYWAY, there follows the unedited section. I let it go. There’s No Time. Get on board if you really don’t want to destroy ‘the lot’ but worst – most vile sin of all – deskill for lived experience in a well environment every primary schooler on earth rendering them highly intelligent word- & number-gurgitator for the fun & profit of intelligences like Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Sundararajan Pichai and Geoff Bezos..

Sigmund Freud’s parapraxes, the full specrum of neurocognitively disordered and totally treatable by non pharmacological and non surgical therapies NOW LUGUBRIOUSLY AND LUDICRPUSLY IN TERMS OF PSYCHIATRY & NEUROCOGNITIVE HEALTH KNOWLEDGE & TECHNOLOGY called “neurodiverse” to reversal of cause & effect and the blundering of grown men and women on huge salaries in positions of great if not sacred trust – for ECOLOGICALLY the winding back of “Big Oil” projects surely is a sacred trust AND HAS BEEN NOW FOR FULLY THIRTY YEARS – that’s hard-core fully fledged non public-relations & non neoliberal propaganda #Science these ghouls in political power keep talking about – into calamitously illogical and catastrophically erroneous misreadings of ALL studies that so much as suggest no new gas- or oilfields and insistence on their primary schooler ‘understandings’ of a world governed by speeches, rhetoric, superstition and ancient narrative.

How our children’ and young people’s ways of talking about self. other, community and world are being MALICIOUSLY BOTH CAPTURED AND CORRUPTED FOR THE PROFIT maximisation of internet service providers and the marketers of ludicrous deracinated so-called social media applications which DO NOT CATER to treither context, culture or science.

Ayn Rand’s, Alan Greenspan’s, Nathaniel Branden’s, Edward Bernays’, Paul Samuelson’s, Norman Bourlag’s, Milton Friedman’s, Stuart Holland’s, Michael Porter’s, Australia’s PP Mc Guinness and the appalling John Blundell society-, culture-, and environment-less London GB Institute for Economic Affairs till ten years ago..

As a 13 year-old schoolboy come from country town where every move one made spoke belonging, membership even ownership (mostly benign but catastrophically not to female human beings) to the city of haughty randomly coercive if not violating if not lethal patriarchal authority, timetables & factory whistles where the dominant social AND societal* values were hierarchic, military, and post WWII traumatically-shocked if not crazy, perhaps a Numpty- or Noddy-land of captains of industry with absurd Rolls Royce motorcars and old rural tory clowns like the Valley’s¹ own HH Shannon MLC, a dude who blustered at this six year-old I would be Prime Minister one day – which i still of course think would be pretty 😎 if not quite schmicko at this insane moment in our history where everything’s been broken by primary-school level educated narcissistic mental grubs, now setting to work on childrens and toddlers heads and making terrifyingly rapid ‘progress.’

Flatly and absolutely the FIRST lesson ANY policy maker ANYWHERE more than 2 or 3 thousand people come together is there’s no micro without the macro and Thatcher’s Somerville College Oxford 1958 for a women’s magazine ‘No Society’ has now proven LITERALLY apocalyptic: available in full on internet as required by the Randites, by Pichai, Huang, Moret, Fink, Charles Koch, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Paul Theroux, Jordan Peterson, Billy Bragg, the dead John Blundell’s IEA London, The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, known simply as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and clowncar right lobbies and crypto-fascist media around the world, notably Lost-in-Cold War-50s-cum-WWI-1910s Catholics versus Church-of-England (or even Aboriginal People versus Bloated Capitalists, kings, queens, warlords, aristocrats, nasty cyborgs & the 18th century British) referenda.. tried to teach people Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the macro-less micro socio-political & educational collapse and basic1970s functionalist sociology – carefully & thoughtfully so they realise the only identity politics is mythic and foolish and the sort of towering inferno of irrelevancy that might well have grown out of some early 21st C diverse though specialised study group of ‘rich Mom’s Basement kids’ in San Francisco – were well worth a look at least personal Mental-health wise for 55 years, but gave up and have in recent times resorted occasionallly to satire like my best friend I never met yet Arundhati Roy.

Almighty invisible God only Wise at my Church of England school figuratively screamed bloodthirsty psycho-cultural anchorage in lived experience i began my study of the Mental-crossover in unhealthy & harmful child development, so-called family dysfunction – V Satir 1964 for old social workers I think – an erroneous mechanistic usage³ micro relationships broken by ‘lust, greed or mental laziness’ and the rapacious frankly barbaric definition of ‘national interest’ enforced by legitimised flagrant false-equivalence hate-speech – proportionality reworked Goebbels-Riefenstahl style as dischronous, dysphoric dis-proportionality – violence, killing and even mass murder (raison d’etat RV Sampson 1965) not only an ethically deranged national & international-relations posture but a much-vaunted publicly praised go-getter mediaeval Warrior Prince, Explorer, Adventurer, Investigator, Inventor, Theorist & Scholar socially rancid & morally bankrupt Gordon Geckoe 1987 Wall Street individual character!

John Blundell

Sociology, neurocognitive health, authentic post Socratic & post 20th century neoclassical academic post 13th century English ruling class Vernacular versus Hieratic⁵ 2-5 set series quantum relations logic, political theory, post Global-death or Christo-fascist economics, 21st century #Philosophy of #Science and the immediate reform of approximately 25,000 universities

Your servant, team

South Australia

¹ Onkaparinga Valley – I was born at the OV District Hospital, Woodside South Australia

² MEANING simply readable-in-any sequence, a rational comprehensive inclusive immediately practical & applicable, decisive basis-for-action plan typically encompassing Object, Person ( yes you do recall Jo Stalin’s Death Economy dialectics! ), Context, Discussion, Decision; it was loosely based on the Human Resource Development model of Other-empowerment from the ‘Jimmy Carter’ & Children’s Television Workshop era

³ WE ALL HAVE TO URGENTLY MENTALLY SKILL UP to get the Social Darwinist primary-schooler Fight, Feed, F…, Flight, FLUMMOX or Fear, Freeze, Flee, Kill the hell out of every teenager’s language not just our own as self-obsessed consumer society fluid obedient biddable buyable social ‘appendages’ under some three thousand or more years old monistic (“Vengeance is Me”) or !8th Century European ideologically Dualist, Reductionist (Reductio-ad-absurdum as argument)( “Vengeance is Mine,” sayeth some hyper-penis, the Queen of the May or the King of England) religious business, personal development and real-estate acquistion plan = begin right here: their is no micro function(ality) without meso (geo-community level) or macro operations

⁴ my business, home and family smashed by South Australian gangsters & police I fled Adelaide to avoid further false imprisonment (against the terms of the UN covenant on Civil & Political Rights NOT accepted by my country), lethal assault and criminalisation I found refuge in a dusty museum shed 800km distant in1998 where I summed up the isolated professional writer or human services scholar’s experience as Conscientising Everything, Experiencing Nothing and one of my first mental challenges was to identify textual (what may well also be set transformations entirely consistent with Physics’s current knowledge of say 6 sub-atomic particles) micro alterations of form and therefore meaning per inversion, reversal/ mirroring, rotation through 90.. plus maybe one more for simplistic symmetrical Musk- Heisenberg elegange (because it would make 4).. as these meld with human culture’s macro dialectics Interiortity – exteriority, centripetal – centrifugal, in – out, up – down, recto – verso, leftward -rightward.. and so on to the multiplicity of so-called qubits talked about in Quantum-physics by people who are paid 10 to 5,000 times what I do very nicely on, thanks very much Australian Age Pensioner (as fellah kulak peon villein hulot or dutiful Lord’s retainer) who rents of course – to my own fabulous intelligent meso- (community, tribe, region, people) and macro Walbiri and Eastern Arrente 8 skin marriage law 33% more complex and therefore 33% more intergenerational human health-safe (the immunologic defence against inbreeding, and to an extent enviro-toxins and faltering natural life-support systems than the crude Levitical 6 skin law) Right-side – Other-side of ALL HUMAN consciousness.. mental jumping-off point Ernest Becker 1924 – 1974 The Life and Death of Meaning

⁵ you’ve several options there, no doubt: sacramental, self-sacrificial, sociopathic, hysteric & theistic will be on the list. The study of your life is yours not any sacerdotal, priestly, power-over relations ‘pompous ass’ ( my gran’pa ACL Sanders, Methodists 20th century) figure of authority or expertise – which latter is ALWAYS bogus

⁶

I’m not at all incommoded by @Wordpress having whipped $164 and a $5 International Transaction Fee out of my bank last Saturday week the 2nd of March.

I was of course greatly cheered by this kind-hearted gesture.. Let’s face it team: we really are complete dopes who need these folk, along with the estimated 400,000 Chinese-Organised-crime conscientious Call-centre Team-players labouring mightily for us in frontier Thai, Malaysian, Burmese & Cambodian prison camps to organise our spontaneous little shopping centre, Fly-buys and extraordinary 85 North East Road, Collinswood, Adelaide, 5081 +61 8 8343 4000/ +61 8 8343 4000/ 0467 922 891/ 1300 222 891 lives for us OK?

As a global internet reformer and lethal opponent of the Gates-Huang-Bezos-Apple-Feku cabal’s socially engineered dumbdown, or systematic deskilling of my race, which is indeed the only one i’ve got and is plainly not doing well subject to the multiple paroxysms of its neoliberal trade-priorities death economy AND – hats we can handle hats – especially ‘Mortar-boards’ – plasterers of the World unite you’ve nothing to lose but your mental chains, you Galahs¹ – a person with a few hundred dollars of assets for the storage of which he pays $190 per month and an Australian government pension income forced out his rental home by a major Oi-oi Land Political Class real estate corporation Ray White per its shelf-company Ray White Property Management at the end of 2021 and living with a barking-mad rich lady, a rapidly-ageing South Australian business-woman – think the former MHR for Boothby or her @AustralianLabor successor 1950s style Welfare Lady Louise Miller-Frost or the Liberal Independent @AdelaideBook who ran against them both having no idea what government was but displaying a passionate dislike of former federal Attorney General Christian Porter – or the completely postmodern @LSEGreen Cities an’ excellent music an’ social fluidity an’ Doughnut-economics person who ran against all three of them – BUT WITH each lady (or chaplet) 20-40 years older, yeehagghhh, who reckons I’m simple-minded, mentally 9 years old and VERY naughty) as the same country’s three major political parties mounted and launched a national housing affordabilty crisis now hurting 2.4m households and requiring 8m women, men, teenagers & children to skip or skimp meals EXPRESSLY TO HELP RICH PEOPLE & FOREIGN INVESTORS because nobody else would vote them back into office next time. Yee-ha.

Theda Bara

Yep, in 43 languages.

Data, we got data.

From @Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that virtually costs the earth or at the very least of it worldwide human society by 2032²

(i) acultural entertainment industry bullshit which is grossly diseducational and virtually moronising for young people, primary schoolers, little kids and toddlers

(ii) fresh water, and

(iii) vast carbon dioxide + Big Oil extractive, flaring, refining & transport + now almost inconceivably large volumes of Permafrost-melt, eutrophic (bacterially & virally attacked) glacier-melt CH₄ methane gas discharged to the earth’s lower atmosphere

Theda Bara
Born	Theodosia Burr Goodman July 29, 1885 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Died	April 7, 1955 (aged 69) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery
Alma mater	University of Cincinnati
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1908–1926
Spouse	Charles Brabin ​(m. 1921)​

Theda Bara (/ˈθiːdə ˈbærə/ THEE-də BARE-ə;^[1] born Theodosia Burr Goodman; July 29, 1885 – April 7, 1955) was an American silent film and stage actress.

Bara was one of the more popular actresses of the silent era and one of cinema’s early sex symbols. Her femme fatale roles earned her the nickname “The Vamp” (short for vampire, here meaning a seductive woman),^[a] later fueling the rising popularity in “vamp” roles based in exoticism and sexual domination.^[4] The studios promoted a fictitious persona for Bara as an Egyptian-born woman interested in the occult. Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most are now lost, having been destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault fire. After her marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made two more films and then retired from acting in 1926; she never appeared in a sound film.

Early life[edit]

Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885, in Cincinnati, Ohio.^[5] She was named after the daughter of U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr.^[6] Her father was Bernard Goodman (1853–1936),^[7] a prosperous Jewish tailor from Poland. Her mother, Pauline Louise Françoise (née de Coppett; 1861–1957), was born in Switzerland.^[8] Bernard and Pauline married in 1882. Theda had two younger siblings: Marque (1888–1954) and Esther (1897–1965), who went by the nickname “Lori”.^[9][b]

In 1890 the family moved to Avondale, a Cincinnati suburb with a substantial Jewish community.^[12] Bara attended Walnut Hills High School, graduating in 1903.^[13] After attending the University of Cincinnati for two years, she worked mainly in local theater productions, but did explore other projects. After moving to New York City in 1908, she made her Broadway debut the same year in The Devil.^[14]

Career[edit]

Most of Bara’s early films were shot along the East Coast, where the film industry was centered at that time, primarily at Fox Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey.^[15]

Bara lived with her family in New York City during this time. The rise of Hollywood as the center of the American film industry forced her to relocate to Los Angeles to film the epic Cleopatra (1917), which became one of her biggest hits. No complete prints of Cleopatra are known to exist today, but numerous photographs of Bara in costume as Cleopatra have survived. ^[16]

Bara was the Fox studio’s biggest star between 1915 and 1919, but tired of being typecast as a vamp, she allowed her five-year contract with the company to expire. Her final Fox film was The Lure of Ambition (1919). In 1920, she turned briefly to the stage, appearing on Broadway in The Blue Flame. Bara’s fame drew large crowds to the theater, but her acting was savaged by critics.^[17]

Her career suffered without Fox Studios’ support, and she did not make another film until The Unchastened Woman (1925) for Chadwick Pictures. She retired after making only one more film, the short comedy Madame Mystery (1926), directed by Stan Laurel for Hal Roach; in this, Bara parodied her vamp image.^{[citation needed]}

At the height of her fame, Bara earned $4,000 per week (equivalent to $67,500 in 2022). Her better-known roles were as the “vamp”, although she attempted to avoid typecasting by playing wholesome heroines in films such as Under Two Flags and Her Double Life. She appeared as Juliet in a version of Shakespeare‘s Romeo and Juliet. Although Bara took her craft seriously, she was too successful playing exotic wanton women to develop a more versatile career.^{[citation needed]}

Image and name[edit]

The origin of Bara’s stage name is disputed. The Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats says it came from director Frank Powell, who learned Theda had a relative named Baranger, and that Theda was a childhood nickname. In promoting the 1917 film Cleopatra, Fox Studio publicists noted that the name was an anagram of Arab death, and her press agents, to enhance her exotic appeal to moviegoers, falsely promoted the young Ohio native as “the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French woman, born in the Sahara“.^[18][19] In 1917, the Goodman family legally changed its surname to Bara.^[7]

Persona[edit]

Bara was known for wearing very revealing costumes in her films. Such outfits were banned from Hollywood films after the Production Code (a.k.a. the Hays Code) started in 1930 under Will H. Hays and then rigorously enforced beginning in mid-1934 by Joseph Breen. It was popular at that time to promote an actress as mysterious, with an exotic background. The studios promoted Bara with a massive publicity campaign, billing her as the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. They claimed she had spent her early years in the Sahara desert under the shadow of the Sphinx, then moved to France to become a stage actress. (In fact, Bara never had been to Egypt, and her time in France amounted to just a few months.)

A 2016 book by Joan Craig and Beverly F. Stout chronicles many personal, first-hand accounts of the lives of Bara and her husband Charles Brabin.^[20]

Marriage and retirement[edit]

Bara married British-born American film director Charles Brabin in 1921. They honeymooned at The Pines Hotel in Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada, and later purchased a 400-hectare (990-acre) property down the coast from Digby at Harbourville, Nova Scotia, overlooking the Bay of Fundy, eventually building a summer home they called Baranook.^[21] They had no children. Bara resided in a villa-style home in Cincinnati, which served as the “honors villa” at Xavier University. Demolition of the home began in July 2011.^[22]

In 1936, she appeared on Lux Radio Theatre during a broadcast version of The Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy. She did not appear in the play but instead announced her plans to make a movie comeback,^[23][24] which never materialized. She appeared on radio again in 1939 as a guest on Texaco Star Theatre.

In 1949, producer Buddy DeSylva and Columbia Pictures expressed interest in making a movie of Bara’s life, to star Betty Hutton, but the project never materialized.^[25][26]

Death[edit]

On April 7, 1955, after a lengthy stay at California Lutheran Hospital in Los Angeles, Bara died of stomach cancer.^[27] She was survived by her husband, her mother, and her younger sister, Lori.^[27] She was interred as Theda Bara Brabin at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.^[28]

Legacy[edit]

Bara often is cited as the first sex symbol of the film era.^[29][30]

For her contributions to the film industry, Bara received a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. Her star is located at 6307 Hollywood Boulevard.^[31]

Bara never appeared in a sound film, lost or otherwise. A 1937 fire at Fox’s nitrate film storage vaults in New Jersey destroyed most of that studio’s silent films. Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but complete prints of only six still exist: The Stain (1914), A Fool There Was (1915), East Lynne (1916), The Unchastened Woman (1925), and two short comedies for Hal Roach.^{[citation needed]}

In addition to these, a few of her films remain in fragments, including Cleopatra (less than a minute of footage), a clip thought to be from The Soul of Buddha, and a few other unidentified clips featured in the documentary Theda Bara et William Fox (2001). Most of the clips can be seen in the documentary The Woman with the Hungry Eyes (2006). As to vamping, critics stated that her portrayal of calculating, cold-hearted women was morally instructive to men. Bara responded by saying “I will continue doing vampires as long as people sin.”^[32] Additional footage has been found which shows her behind the scenes on a picture.^[33] While the hairstyle has led some to theorize that this may be from The Lure of Ambition, this has not been confirmed. Small fragments from Salomé were discovered in 2021 by an intern at Filmoteca Española.^[34]

In 1994, she was honored with her image on a U.S. postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.^[35] The Fort Lee Film Commission dedicated Main Street and Linwood Avenue in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as “Theda Bara Way” in May 2006 to honor Bara, who made many of her films at the Fox Studio on Linwood and Main.^[36]

Over a period of several years, filmmaker and film historian Phillip Dye reconstructed Cleopatra on video. Titled Lost Cleopatra, the full-length feature was created by editing together production-still picture montages combined with the surviving film clip. The script was based on the original scenario, with modifications derived from research into censorship reports, reviews of the film, and synopses from period magazines.^[37] Dye screened the film at the Hollywood Heritage Museum on February 8, 2017.^[38]

Filmography[edit]

Year	Film	Role	Notes
1914	The Stain	Gang moll	Credited as Theodosia Goodman
1915	A Fool There Was	The Vampire
1915	The Kreutzer Sonata	Celia Friedlander	Lost film
1915	The Clemenceau Case	Iza	Lost film
1915	The Devil’s Daughter	Gioconda Dianti	Lost film
1915	Lady Audley’s Secret	Helen Talboys	Lost film
1915	The Two Orphans	Henriette	Lost film
1915	Sin	Rosa	Lost film
1915	Carmen	Carmen	Lost film
1915	The Galley Slave	Francesca Brabaut	Lost film
1915	Destruction	Fernade	Lost film
1916	The Serpent	Vania Lazar	Lost film
1916	Gold and the Woman	Theresa Decordova	Lost film
1916	The Eternal Sapho	Laura Bruffins	Lost film
1916	East Lynne	Lady Isabel Carlisle
1916	Under Two Flags	Cigarette	Lost film
1916	Her Double Life	Mary Doone	Lost film
1916	Romeo and Juliet	Juliet	Lost film
1916	The Vixen	Elsie Drummond	Lost film
1917	The Darling of Paris	Esmeralda	Lost film
1917	The Tiger Woman	Princess Petrovitch	Lost film
1917	Her Greatest Love	Hazel	Lost film
1917	Heart and Soul	Jess	Lost film
1917	Camille	Marguerite Gauthier[39]	Lost film
1917	Cleopatra	Cleopatra	Approximately 1 minute exists
1917	The Rose of Blood	Lisza Tapenka	Lost film
1917	Madame Du Barry	Jeanne Vaubernier	Lost film
1918	The Forbidden Path	Mary Lynde	Lost film
1918	The Soul of Buddha	Priestess	Story, Lost film
1918	Under the Yoke	Maria Valverda	Lost film
1918	Salomé	Salome	About 2 minutes survive; Lost
1918	When a Woman Sins	Lilian Marchard / Poppea	Lost film
1918	The She-Devil	Lorette	Lost film
1919	The Light	Blanchette Dumond, aka Madame Lefresne	Lost film
1919	When Men Desire	Marie Lohr	Lost film
1919	The Siren’s Song	Marie Bernais	Lost film
1919	A Woman There Was	Princess Zara	Lost film
1919	Kathleen Mavourneen	Kathleen Cavanagh	Lost film
1919	La Belle Russe	Fleurett Sackton/La Belle Russe	Lost film
1919	The Lure of Ambition	Olga Dolan	Lost film; 82-second outtake does exist[40]
1925	The Unchastened Woman	Caroline Knollys
1926	Madame Mystery	Madame Mysterieux	Short film
1926	45 Minutes from Hollywood	Herself	Short film

Cultural references[edit]

This article may contain irrelevant references to popular culture. Please remove the content or add citations to reliable and independent sources. (February 2018)

• The short piano suite Silhouettes from the Screen, Op. 55 (1919) by Mortimer Wilson includes a miniature musical portrait of Theda Bara, who is portrayed in an atonal, expressionistic style.^[41]
• Bara is referenced in the 1921 Bert Kalmar/Harry Ruby song “Rebecca Came Back from Mecca“^[42] as well as their 1922 “Sheik From Avenue B,” sung by Fanny Brice.^[43][44]
• Bara was one of three actresses (Pola Negri and Mae Murray were the others) whose eyes were combined to form the Chicago International Film Festival‘s logo, a stark, black and white close up of the composite eyes set as repeated frames in a strip of film.^[45]
• The International Times‘ logo is a black-and-white image of Theda Bara. The founders’ intention had been to use an image of actress Clara Bow, 1920s “It girl“, but a picture of Theda Bara was used by accident, and once deployed, not changed.^[46]
• In June 1996, two biographies of Bara were released: Ron Genini’s Theda Bara: A Biography (McFarland) and Eve Golden‘s Vamp (Emprise).
• In October 2005 TimeLine Films of Culver City premiered the film biography Theda Bara: The Woman with the Hungry Eyes.
• Bara appears as a character in the books Vampyres of Hollywood and Love Bites by Adrienne Barbeau, and in Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story by Clive Barker.
• In May 2016, a memoir titled Theda Bara, My Mentor, Under the Wings of Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale, by Joan Craig with Beverly Stout, was released. Young Joan, in the companionship of Bara during the 1940s and 1950s, includes tales of Bara’s husband, Charles Brabin, friends Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Victor Fleming, and other stars of the past.

Notes[edit]

1. ^ These roles did not portray the undead vampires featured in later horror films. The term “vampire” for a seductive woman was derived from “The Vampire”, an 1897 poem by Rudyard Kipling.^[2][3]
2. ^ Both of Bara’s siblings joined her for a time in the movie business. Marque worked briefly as a director.^[10] After an unsuccessful attempt to establish an acting career, Lori became a screenwriter.^[11]

References[edit]

1. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: “Theda Bara Speaking 1936”. YouTube. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
2. ^ Golden 1996, p. 30.
3. ^ Weinstock, Jeffrey (2012). The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema. London: Wallflower Press. p. 25.
4. ^ Love, Claire; Pollack, Jen; Landsberg, Alison (April 6, 2017). “Silent Film Actresses and Their Most Popular Characters”. National Women’s History Museum. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
5. ^ Liebman 2023, p. 17.
6. ^ Golden 1996, p. 10.
7. ^ Jump up to:^a b “Theda Makes ’em All Baras”. New York Times. Vol. LXVII, no. 21847. November 17, 1917. p. 11. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 20, 2008. Retrieved October 28, 2023.
8. ^ Genini 1996, pp. 1–2.
9. ^ Liebman 2023, p. 18.
10. ^ “Marque Bara, Ex-Director, Brother of Theda, ‘Silent’ Star”. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. April 28, 1954. p. 13 – via Newspapers.com.
11. ^ Golden 1996, pp. 226–227.
12. ^ Golden 1996, pp. 10–12.
13. ^ Liebman 2023, p. 19.
14. ^ “The Devil – Broadway Play – Original”. ibdb.com.
15. ^ Fort Lee: Birthplace of the Motion Picture Industry. Arcadia Publishing. 2006. ISBN 978-0-7385-4501-1.
16. ^ “Library Reports on America’s Endangered Silent-Film Heritage” (Press release). Library Of Congress. December 4, 2013. Retrieved July 28, 2023.
17. ^ Golden 1996, pp. 204–209.
18. ^ Garza, Janiss (2008). “Cleopatra (1917)”. Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 8, 2008. Retrieved May 29, 2011. Film review.
19. ^ “Famous Silent Screen Vamp Theda Bara Dies Of Cancer”. The Montreal Gazette. Associated Press. April 8, 1955. Retrieved May 29, 2011.
20. ^ Craig, Joan; Stout, Beverly F. (2016). Theda Bara, My Mentor: Under the Wing of Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale. McFarland and Company, Inc. ISBN 9781476662831. LCCN 2016009417.
21. ^ Innis, Lorna (February 26, 2012). “Hollywood’s link with province long, varied”. Chronicle Herald. Halifax. Archived from the original on May 17, 2014. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
22. ^ “Early film star’s Cincinnati mansion being torn down”. The Columbus Post Dispatch. July 7, 2011. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
23. ^ “The Thin Man”. Lux Radio Theatre. Internet Archive. Retrieved December 1, 2015. Skip to 50m:50s.
24. ^ “The Lux Radio Theatre”. RadioGOLDINdex. Retrieved December 1, 2015.
25. ^ Brady, Thomas F. (January 21, 1949). “De Sylva Working on Movie of Bara”. The New York Times. p. 25.
26. ^ Brady, Thomas F. (December 2, 1949). “Betty Hutton Set for 2 Metro Films”. The New York Times. p. 36.
27. ^ Jump up to:^a b “Theda Bara, Screen Star, 65”. The New York Times. April 8, 1955. p. 21.
28. ^ Genini 1996, p. 1.
29. ^ “Classic Images – Vol. 250 – April 1996 Issue”. Classicimages.com. Archived from the original on July 16, 2012. Retrieved August 2, 2010.
30. ^ Adinolfi, Francesco (2008). Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation. Translated by Pinkus, Karen; Vivrette, Jason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 25. ISBN 9780822341321. OCLC 179838406.
31. ^ “Theda Bara”. Hollywood Walk of Fame. Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Retrieved September 21, 2017.
32. ^ Panati, Charles (1998). Sexy Origins and Intimate Things: The Rites and Rituals of Straights, Gays, Bi’s, Drags, Trans, Virgins, and Others. Penguin Books. p. 295.
33. ^ Fads and Fashion of 1900 [& Other Newsreels] (film). Fun Film. 1905. 8 minutes in – via Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.
34. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: “REDISCOVERED: THEDA BARA IN “SALOME”, 1918″. YouTube.
35. ^ “Hirschfeld draws silent screen stars stamps”. Stamps. 246 (13): 353. March 26, 1994. ProQuest 220978182.
36. ^ Page, Jeffery (July 9, 2015). “A Star in the Era Before Hollywood”. The Record. Retrieved August 21, 2019 – via Gale Onefile:News.
37. ^ “Lost Cleopatra”. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
38. ^ Ziemba, Christine N. (February 6, 2017). “Twenty Of The Coolest Events Happening in L.A. This Week in Arts & Entertainment”. LAist. Archived from the original on May 1, 2017.
39. ^ “Theda Bara Makes ‘Camille’ Reality”. Hartford Courant. October 30, 1917. Archived from the original on August 31, 2012. Retrieved October 8, 2019. Heralded as one of the screen triumphs of the day, “Camille”, adapted from the Dumas novel, and with Theda Bara the featured player, fulfills the promises of the management of Poli’s Theater, where this film really heads the bill this half of the week. Vaudeville must…
40. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: “Lost Film segment – Theda Bara – 1919 (currently unknown film source)”. YouTube. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
41. ^ Performance of Silhouettes from the Screen by Steve Norquist
42. ^ “What’s a Nice Jewish Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? – Arab Kitsch”.
43. ^ Furia, Philip George; Lasser, Michael L. (2006). America’s Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. Taylor & Francis. pp. 35–. ISBN 978-0-415-97246-8.
44. ^ “The sheik of Avenue B”. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on May 21, 2017.
45. ^ “About: Mission & History Our Logo”. The Chicago International Film Festival. Our Logo. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
46. ^ Miles, Barry (1998). Many Years From Now. Vintage – Random House. p. 232. ISBN 0-7493-8658-4.

Works cited[edit]

• Liebman, Roy (2023). Theda Bara: Her Career, Life and Legend (Kindle ed.). McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-5002-9.
• Genini, Ronald (1996). Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography (Kindle ed.). McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-6918-5.
• Golden, Eve (1996). Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara. Vestal Press. ISBN 978-1-887322-00-3.

Further reading[edit]

• Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse by Judith Buchanan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Chapter 6. ISBN 0-521-87199-9.
• Famous Juliets by Jerome Hart, in Motion Picture Classic, March 1923.
• A Million and One Nights by Terry Ramsaye. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926.
• Fox, Susan (2006). William Fox: A Story of Early Hollywood 1915–1930. Midnight Marquee Press Inc. ISBN 1-887664-62-9.
• DiGrazia, Christopher (2011). The Director’s Cut: A Theda Bara Mystery. 1921 PVG Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9827709-4-8.
• Johnston, Bob (2002). Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi. Dramatist’s Play Service. ISBN 0-8222-1837-2.
• Altman, Diana (2010). In Theda Bara’s Tent. Tapley Cove Press. ISBN 978-0-615-34327-3.

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Theda Bara.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Theda Bara.

• Biography portal
• film portal

• Theda Bara at IMDb
• Theda Bara at AllMovie
• Theda Bara at the TCM Movie Database 
• Theda Bara at the Internet Broadway Database 
• Excerpt from Golden’s biography Vamp
• Biography at monash.edu.au
• Theda Bara photo gallery NY Public Library Billy Rose collection
• “Theda Bara”, entry in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia
• The 1917 review of Tiger Woman starring Theda Bara from The Atlanta Georgian
• The Ex-Vampire by Theda Bara Vanity Fair Magazine, October, 1919

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Categories: 

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• American stage actresses
• Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale)
• Deaths from stomach cancer in California
• University of Cincinnati alumni
• Jewish American actresses
• Walnut Hills High School alumni

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