The October Revolution was indeed a great success. Dixon credits thelow price of admission ($1), the convivial atmosphere they had createdat the Cellar in the earlier concerts, and the enthusiastic word-of-mouthendorsements those concerts had garnered. The number of people whoattended the Revolution concerts was generally agreed to have been aboutseven hundred. The festival presented about forty ensembles and solo acts.Building on the earlier innovations of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor,these seventy-five-odd composers were working to extend bebop’s experi-mental ethos by discarding periodic harmonic patterns and the formulaicsplit between soloist and accompaniment, expanding the basic instrumen-tations of bop, and composing new pieces instead of reworking old tunes.Along with European American composers such as John Cage, PaulineOliveros, Morton Feldman, and La Monte Young, these musicians ofwhat came to be called the “New Thing” were developing an aestheticsbased upon spontaneity and sound over more abstract and computationalapproaches to form.With the exceptions of Sun Ra, Paul Bley, and Jimmy Giuff re, everyonetaking part in the festival was relatively unknown; a number of namesfamiliar today were then young performers who had yet to record or playany of the big clubs. 6 Dixon wanted to insure that the musicians on theseries wouldn’t be accused of riding on the coattails of such more estab-lished players as Ayler, Taylor, and Coleman. But in spite of the obscurityof most of the performers, and a location far removed from the lively net-

Francois Rabelais lived an interesting and rather intriguing life that, in many ways, was reflected in his writing. Rabelais began his adult life as a Franciscan friar, but left the Franciscans to become a Benedictine. He ultimately left religion altogether to pursue life as doctor (for a better understanding of what it means to be Benedictine rather than a Franciscan, visit this site on Active and Contemplative orders of monks and friars). He possessed what might be considered a contentious attitude and enjoyed satirizing just about everything, including religion, scholastic education, the power elite, and new scientific and geographical discoveries. His irreverence includes hurling insults at his very own readers. Rabelais’s impertinence led to his writings being repeatedly condemned not only by religious leaders, but also with academics at the prestigious French university, the Sorbonne, who felt Gargantua and Pantagruel was in poor taste—even though we recognize it to be his masterpiece. Bawdiness and satire aside, Rabelais and his writing very much embody the Renaissance’s humanist spirit. He advocates for a healthy lifestyle because a healthy body leads to a healthy mind (later rearticulated in the inverse as “Sick Body, Sick Mind” by the ska band Operation Ivy). Rabelais’s training as a doctor (completed in 1537) allowed him to make the connection between the body and the mind and promote a lifestyle (and style of education) that flew in the face of more traditional approaches to understanding the world. This untraditional approach leads Rabelais to foist ownership of the text onto the reader. In “The Author’s Prologue” of Gargantua, Rabelais at once name drops every classical philosopher and author he can in a short space, tells the reader be like a dog and smell out the best of a book, and ends with “But listen to me, you dunderheads—God rot you!—do not forget to drink my health for the favour, and I’ll return you the toast post-haste.” Rabelais has a sense that once the text leaves his hands, it is the reader’s and only the reader can control what the text means. Think about how you (re)create a text not only in your own mind, but in the way you relate it to others, the way you write about it, the way it penetrates other parts of your day and thinking. Good writing, but particularly good satire and social commentary, stays with you and reshapes the way you see the world. The text features two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, and their adventures. There is ample word play and crudeness, but I want you to focus, as famous literary critic Mikail Bakhtin did, on the intersection of social and the literary (or the carnivalesque and the grotesque, as Bakhtin puts it). Also consider how Rabelais’s past experience as a monk inform, if at all, this text?