IN: Farley was born on February 15, 1964, in Madison, Wisconsin. His father, Thomas John Farley, Sr. (1936-1999), owned an oil company, and his mother, Mary Anne (nee Crosby), was a housewife. He had four siblings: Tom Jr., Kevin, John, and Barbara. His cousin, Jim, is the CEO and Chairman at Ford Motor Company Europe.

During his time on SNL, Farley appeared in the comedy films Wayne's World, Coneheads, Airheads, and uncredited in Billy Madison. He also appeared in the Red Hot Chili Peppers music video for "Soul to Squeeze", which was a song featured on the Coneheads soundtrack.  After Farley and most of his fellow cast members were released from their contracts at Saturday Night Live following the 1994-1995 season, Farley began focusing on his film career. His first two major films co starred his fellow SNL colleague and close friend David Spade. Together, the duo made the films Tommy Boy and Black Sheep. These were a success at the domestic box office, earning around $32 million each and gaining a large cult following on home video.  The two films established Farley as a relatively bankable star and he was given the title role of Beverly Hills Ninja, which finished in first place at the box office on its opening weekend. Drug and alcohol abuse related problems interfered with Farley's film work at this time. Production of his final film, Almost Heroes, was held up several times so Farley could enter rehab. He was known among comedic contemporaries and friends to be sensitive about how his comedy was perceived ("fatty falls down, everybody goes home happy"), and was particularly hurt by harsh critical reactions to Tommy Boy, a film he enjoyed making.  He was particularly dissatisfied with Black Sheep, an attempt by the studio to recapture the chemistry on Tommy Boy and was only 60 pages into the script when the project was green lit. As a result, he relapsed on the night of the premiere, which required further rehab before he could begin work on Beverly Hills Ninja. After his death on December 18, 1997, his final completed films, Almost Heroes and Dirty Work, were released posthumously.

What was his last film?

OUT: Almost Heroes,


IN: Bakhtin was born in Oryol, Russia, to an old family of the nobility. His father was the manager of a bank and worked in several cities. For this reason Bakhtin spent his early childhood years in Oryol, in Vilnius, and then in Odessa, where in 1913 he joined the historical and philological faculty at the local university (the Odessa University). Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist write: "Odessa..., like Vilnius, was an appropriate setting for a chapter in the life of a man who was to become the philosopher of heteroglossia and carnival.

During World War II Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his higher doctorate. Thus, due to its content, Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was not published until 1965, at which time it was given the title Rabelais and His World (Russian: Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i Renessansa, Tvorcestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura srednevekov'ja i Renessansa).  In Rabelais and His World, a classic of Renaissance studies, Bakhtin concerns himself with the openness of Gargantua and Pantagruel; however, the book itself also serves as an example of such openness. Throughout the text, Bakhtin attempts two things: he seeks to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed, and conducts an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body and the material bodily lower stratum.  In his chapter on the history of laughter, Bakhtin advances the notion of its therapeutic and liberating force, arguing that "laughing truth ... degraded power".

Is there anything else very noticeable about the book?

OUT:
The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement,